TO SUCCEED BY AGE 40: The necessary steps to take if you are still in paid employment
There is a widespread assumption that work in paid employment gets harder after age 40. The responsibilities may be heavier, but after 40 years of age, you should be valued for your experience, know-how and judgment, rather than for the ability to work 18 or more hours every day, all year round. Most of the major rewards of success tend to accumulate after the age of 40-if you do the right things before that watershed birthday.
What are those right things?
1. Do your Homework: Learn everything you need to know about your business or profession before 40. Burning the midnight oil is okay at 20, may be even 30, but it is a terrible hassle having to lose sleep over some new qualifications at 40-plus.
2. Develop your own style: Before you are 40, learn to know what you are comfortable with, whether it is the way you dress or simply the small touches that set you apart. You can experiment in your 20s and 30s but establish your own style firmly by the time you are 40. No one appears more insecure than a man or a woman trying to redesign his or her “look” in mid-career. You like suspenders? Fine! Make them your trademark. You work better with fresh flowers on your desk? Display them every day.
3. Put your emotional life in order, if possible: It’s great help, when climbing towards the higher rugs of the career ladder, to be happy in life, rather than to find yourself mired in emotional crisis. It is hard enough to succeed without taking on personal problems that sap energy and divert your attention. Besides, unhappiness is like a disease-it gradually eclipses interest in everything else. Of course, all difficulties can’t be avoided, and one has to rise above them; but those who have managed to put their emotional lives in order by the time they are 40 are generally in better shape for success than those who haven’t. So if you are going to end a hopeless entanglement, do it before the problems drag on into the fifth decade of your life, when you should be enjoying yourself and watching the investment you have put into your career and into your family.
4. Know your weaknesses: Accept the things you don’t do well, can’t stand, won’t do. If you are not comfortable with numbers, but enjoy creative work, don’t force yourself to sit in a numbers job because it pays or because it is what people expect. Get into the kind of work you enjoy before you are 40 or you are guaranteeing yourself an unhappy decade or two after that age- and probably destroying your chance for real success. You better decide what you are good at, too, and recognize the things you enjoy doing and do it better than anyone else. Whatever your role, knowing who you are and what you are good at is critical for success.
5. Make a start at putting away your “I quit” money:Nothing is so depressing as absolute dependence- the knowledge that you can’t afford to quit your job or take a risk in changing careers- that you are stuck! Put enough away so that you have a safety net. You may never use it, but sometimes you may need to say ‘I quit’- and you’ll hate yourself if you are not in a position to say it.
6. Establish a network: If by 40, you haven’t built a network of friends, or at least, people who rely on you and to whom you can turn to, you are in trouble. These are colleagues for whom you do favors, whose project you support, whose problems you listen to….and they do the same for you. A network is not something you can establish overnight-it takes decades of nurturing. In business as in politics, you need a lot of people, spread out in the right places, who you depend on because they can depend on you.
7. Learn to delegate: Many people don’t do this and are thereby condemned to remain doing subordinate jobs even after they are promoted to higher positions. As a result they miss on the right experiences important for later life. Delegation is half of success; a person who cannot delegate will find himself fatally handicapped. By the time you reach 40, you had better be an expert at it, which means you have to pick the right people and trust them.
8. Learn when to keep your mouth shut: More careers are aborted by careless talk than by anything else. Learn to keep quiet and look wise. People will naturally suppose that you know more than you probably do. Don’t gossip, and don’t talk about your plans. A reputation for keeping secrets far outweighs the easy popularity that retailing gossip may win for you. The further you go in your career, the truer this is. In higher management, secrecy is golden.
9. Be loyal: If you haven’t established a reputation for rock-hard, 100 percent loyalty by the time you are 40, you’ll be haunted by this defect for the rest of your career. A reputation for disloyalty is bound to make you unwelcome anywhere in business. You make your way to the top not by backstabbing but by establishing early on in your career an unshakeable reputation as a true, stand up fellow. Below 40, loyalty has its own reward; after 40, it pays off.
10. Always keep your sense of humor: This side of the universe, nothing lasts forever, not even success.
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