If you would attain what you are not, you must always be displeased by what you are. For where you are pleased with yourself, there you have remained.
Keep adding, keep walking, keep advancing.” ~ Unknown    
 
To get people to care, you need something significant to offer.
 
Do you feel no one cares about you? It’s most likely because you have nothing significant to offer. We all have problems, and we first care about those who promises to solve them.
Therefore, the key to having people care about you is not just being nice, you have to meet specific demands, create specific values, and solve specific problems. Until you become exceptionally good at what you do, and prove your expertise by all standards, you might have no one to care about who you are and what you do.
 
More than ever, the world has got so much information. And the knowledge of what to do to make life easy is on the increase. That’s the reason only the smart, the fast, the accurate and the intelligent gets the job, gets the pay and gets the network. You can’t be average, that era is over. You can’t be amongst the best; you have to take the lead. You can’t know little, it’s unacceptable. You need profuse knowledge to thrive.
 
You either lose it all or take it all
 
Times have changed – the armatures have nothing to sell and no one to care; the pros have it all. The shallow minded have got no place; great thinkers are in charge. The truth is: it takes effort to become projected, stay relevant and be in demand. Here’s the key: engage your thinking, unleash your innovative and competitive power, create supreme values, become highly professional, and take the lead! 
 
You either get it all or lose it all. You’re either the best or one of the rest.  
 
Move out of self-pity; face the fact 
 
No one wants to manage [not to any further extent], no one wants the average [gone are the days], and no one will ever [not anymore] deal with armatures. That explains why not many people get the jobs. To land the deals and become the most preferred, you must beat everyone around.
 
Grow or become useless
 
Years ago, there are people I looked up to, who I no longer meet for counsel. The reason is because, over the years, I have developed myself, grown and have learnt many things, lots of which they know nothing about. Such people no longer meet my needs, as such, they are not relevant to me, not anymore.
 
You can’t utterly depend on experience [things are fast changing], and you cannot take solace in your past glories [they can’t deliver the future]. The world is constantly changing; knowledge is on the rise and if you want to secure your place, stay relevant and be in demand, you have to deliberately control your life.
 
The key to personal development is to cultivate a healthy dissatisfaction with how things are. If you are to improve, you need to have some dissatisfaction with your current abilities. Be careful that your motive here is to improve, not to become frustrated or cynical.
 
Here are great ways to develop yourself:
 
Read a book every day. Books are concentrated sources of wisdom. The more books you read, the more wisdom you expose yourself to. What are some books you can start reading to enrich yourself? Some books I’ve read and found useful are Think and Grow Rich, Who Moved My Cheese, 7 Habits, The Science of Getting Rich and Living the 80/20 Way. I’ve heard positive reviews for The Tipping Point, Outliers and The Difference Maker, so I’ll be checking them out soon.
 
Take up a new course. Is there any new course you can join? Courses are a great way to gain new knowledge and skills. It doesn’t have to be a long-term course – seminars or workshops serve their purpose too. I’ve been to a few workshops and they have helped me gain new insights which I had not considered before.
 
Get out of your comfort zone. Real growth comes with hard work and sweat. Being too comfortable doesn’t help us grow – it makes us stagnate. What is your comfort zone? Do you stay in most of the time? Do you keep your own space when out with other people? Shake your routine up. Do something different. By exposing yourself to a new context, you’re literally growing as you learn to act in new circumstances.
 
Ask for feedback. As much as we try to improve, we will always have blind spots. Asking for feedback gives us an additional perspective. Some people to approach will be friends, family, colleagues, boss, or even acquaintances since they will have no preset bias and can give their feedback objectively.
 
Put someone up to a challenge. Competition is one of the best ways to grow. Set a challenge (weight loss, exercise, a financial challenge, etc.) and compete with an interested friend to see who achieves the target first. Through the process, both of you will gain more than if you were to set off on the target alone.
 
Get a mentor or coach. There’s no faster way to improve than to have someone work with you on your goals. Many of my clients approach me to coach them in their goals and they achieve significantly more results than if they had worked alone. 
 
Start a 30-day challenge. Set a goal and give yourself 30 days to achieve this. Your goal can be to stick with a new habit or something you’ve always wanted to do but have not. 30 days is just enough time to strategize, plan, get into an action, review and nail the goal.
 
Cultivate a new habit. Some good new habits to cultivate include reading books, waking up early, exercising, reading a new personal development article a day and meditating. Is there any other new habit you can cultivate to improve yourself? Add them to the list.
 
Get into an action. The best way to learn and improve is to take action. What is that thing you have been trying to do? How can you take action on it immediately? Waiting doesn’t get anything done. Taking action gives you immediate results to learn from.
 
Question: What are some other things one can do in order to learn, grow, stay relevant and be in demand? Join the discussion, share your thoughts below.

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