You’ve heard it a million times: “You’re not sure about college, huh? Well, you’d better figure it out soon or you’ll be working at McDonald’s for the rest of your life.” (This is invariably how well-meaning people quickly get categorized as small-minded imbeciles, alas.)
But you do whatever you can to remember that it does not matter whether you have a degree or not: what matters most are your skills and practices that set you apart from everyone else out there who wants whatever you are going for – be it position, job, role, target audience, etc.
Penelope Trunk, a multi-business builder and owner, blogger, and homeschool mom, wrote a blog post earlier this year about this set-apart skill: it has two parts, but in today’s compulsory schooling the essential first part is often forgotten:
[There is a] deep focus on execution…. You get an assignment, you get it done. You get a stack of stuff to learn, you learn it. But in the workplace if you need someone to constantly tell you what you should execute then your options are limited to being entry-level or low-level management.
The best education…is teaching kids both to generate a plan and execute a plan. The people who can do both will have the highest feeling of self-worth at work.
Generating and executing. Whether you were homeschooled or unschooled from the get-go or not, this skill must be practiced and honed, both for the sake of the improvement of your self-confidence and productivity, and because it makes you incredibly awesome at every job you do. All of which, by the way, makes you the prime candidate for your dream, whatever it happens to be.
Seriously – when you go a long time without generating and executing plans you can tell when you are out of practice! You get so lazy to the point where you don’t even do your laundry or cook yourself dinner – even popping something in the microwave seems like too much effort.
Generating and executing. It’s imperative to keep up this habit. What are you going to do today?
