You’ve heard the Confucius saying, “Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.” But what if you have yet to figure out what it is that makes your heart beat faster — or, an even more common scenario — how to turn what you love doing into a lucrative career path.  But before we explore this, I’d like to acknowledge the flip side of the coin. In one of Chrissy Scivicque’s Bad Career Advice articles, she argues that do-what-you-love career counsel is actually a bit of a fairy tale. “When something you love becomes work, it fundamentally — and unavoidably — changes the way in which you interact with it,” Scivicque asserts. “Instead of focusing on doing what you love so work won’t feel like ‘work,’ take some time to figure out what work means to you. What do you want to get out of…

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My experience is that most people don’t love their work. Many like it, some tolerate it, but it is a minority who find work they love that also supports their lifestyle. Does that mean that everyone else is left to live in frustration, desperately seeking that perfect job they can be passionate about? Not at all. You can and should find enjoyment in your work. Doing so is very valuable to your life in many ways, including greatly increasing your probability of financial success. But you don’t have to love, or even like your overall job to enjoy everyday aspects of it. It is critical to distinguish between the job and the way you do it. This is important because every job has aspects that will be very unpleasant for you. You need to be able to get through them with a smile on your face. Let me give you…

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Perception is reality! Perception is not always reality! Perception is everything! We all have heard these statements, or some variation of them, at one time or another. Does perception play a role in business? If so, what is its role, how is it exercised, what is its impact? Perception is a major and old area of study in the field of Psychology. Perception is how we organize, understand and interpret the world around us: what we see, what we hear, what we feel, what we smell, and what we taste. Dependent upon the business you are in, all five senses may play a role or perhaps just one or two. There is the belief that perception alters and may distort our vision of reality, perhaps masking the truth. If people come to a situation with a preconceived notion of what should be, they might tend to see what they expect,…

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Good leaders do things well. Great leaders teach and inspire others to do things well. If you teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime, right? The same concept applies to leadership: Successful leadership must contain equal amounts doing and holding others accountable. The best-performing companies have leaders that do and teach, who instill confidence in their team and share their vision with others. These CEOs and executives manage at a macro-level, holding their teams and employees accountable while providing guidance and coaching to help them solve problems on their own. So what characteristics do great leaders all possess? They… 1. Face the facts, no matter how brutal they may be. Bad news is part of business. Great leaders don’t just wait for it, they seek it out. Rather than waiting until a task or project is completed, they look for red flags and identify when it’s off-track to…

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It takes a lot of time and effort to develop and maintain a marketing campaign that resonates with your intended audience. As a strategic thinker, however, the development of a marketing campaign takes even more consideration. After all, we’re always searching for ways to gain the oh-so important competitive edge. There are times, though, when we all hit the proverbial wall. If you find yourself in that situation, then you may want to check out these fifteen marketing strategies that will definitely spark your creative energy. 1. Partner with allies. Marketing partnerships have a number of benefits to push a marketing campaign. For starters, when you collaborate with someone else, you tend to deliver better content. On top of that, marketing partnerships are cheaper to create, see success more quickly, and expose your brand to a new audience. For example, prior to being acquired by eBay, Half.com worked the town of…

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There are only so many hours in the day, so making the most of your time is critical. There are two ways increase your output–either put in more hours or work smarter. I don’t know about you, but I prefer the latter. Being more productive at work isn’t rocket science, but it does require being more deliberate about how you manage your time. This post will walk you through 15 simple but effective strategies for increasing your productivity at work. 1. Track and limit how much time you’re spending on tasks. You may think you’re pretty good at gauging how much time you’re spending on various tasks. However, some research suggests only around 17 percent of people are able to accurately estimate the passage of time. A tool like Rescue Time can help by letting you know exactly how much time you spend on daily tasks, including social media, email,…

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Everyone faces a dip in motivation now and then, and consistently maintaining high levels motivation in the workplace can be challenging. That’s why we gathered some great tips from experts to help you keep yourself and your team motivated, day in and day out. These tips aren’t specific to any industry, and most of them are either low, or no-cost. They can be applied in a small, local establishment, a franchise, an early-stage startup, or a Fortune 500 company. Let’s get started; 1. Recognize great work. One of the most important factors in employee motivation is how often their hard work is recognized. If an employee continues to expend discretionary effort to produce exceptional results, and that effort isn’t recognized, don’t expect it to keep happening. It’s not just important to recognize great work — how you go about recognizing your team’s contributions has a significant impact. An annual bonus at…

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ARTICLE BY: FRANK.O.OUMA Suffice to state that the business environment is dynamic. Customers are no longer interested solely on a product or service but also the customer relationship offered by a company. Some business experts claim that customers no longer buy the product but the personality of the company. The mentioned personality can be articulated through the lenses of the concept termed as the WOW effect. The WOW effect is attained by precisely surpassing the customer’s expectation with regards to a given service. They are not just satisfied with your services or the product but they are impressed and most likely feel motivated to share their positive experiences with their friends and family.To avoid extinction, a company needs to design strategies that will hook its customers. It definitely needs to find something that will make it stand out from the rest, something that will make its customer say WOW. The…

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Success is no accident. It is hard work, perseverance, learning, studying, sacrifice and most of all, love what you are doing of learning to do. Sometimes, to become successful and get closer to the person we can become, we don’t need to add more things — we need to give up on some of them. There are certain things that are universal, which will make you successful if you give up on them, even though each one of us could have a different definition of success. 1. Give Up On The Unhealthy Lifestyle Learn to take care of your body. It’s the only place you have to live. If you want to achieve anything in life, everything starts here. First you have to take care of your health, and there are only two things you need to keep in mind: Healthy Diet,Physical Activity. Small steps, but you will thank yourself one day. 2. Give Up…

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SEE original article : www.hbr.org Too many managers avoid giving any kind of feedback, regardless of whether it’s positive or negative. If you work for a boss who doesn’t provide feedback, it’s easy to feel rudderless. It can be especially disorienting if you’re new in the role, new to the company, or a recent graduate new to the workforce. In the absence of specific guidance, is there any way to know what the average boss would want you to work on? While everyone will have different strengths and weaknesses they need to work on, when we examined our database of performance evaluation information for more than 7,000 individual contributors and 5,000 managers, we noticed a reliable pattern. There were five behaviors that managers most often associated with high performance: Delivering results. The strongest, most consistent correlations were skills that focused on achieving results. When individuals were able to achieve goals…

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