A Bulletproof Career

Guerilla Mindset
Provide value
Build relationships
Be resilient
Be patient
Take 100% responsibility for your impact
Be completely professional
Constantly learn and improve
See what is possible and move things forward especially when others won’t
Show courage and determination even in the face of a feat
Be inspired
Have fun
Take a moment to list the top five values you have and expect from any business opportunity, job, business partner, or company. A lengthy list includes: adaptability, accountability, achievement, adventure, agility, amazement, balance, caring, caution, challenge, collegiality, commitment, community, competitiveness, contribution, control, collegiality, commitment, competitiveness, money, peace, power, resect resilience, success, teamwork, winning, wisdom, etc
What values are non-negotiable for you? What negative values will you not tolerate from anyone or the organization?
The more you live with integrity and a core set of values the easier it becomes to find opportunities that fit who you are.
How to attract clients on a regular basis
Be able to solve a problem
Focus on a target market
Develop a marketing message that shows your value and attracts interest
Establish credibility in your target market by getting and staying visible
The next level after being a freelancer or consultant is to open your own firm.
Automate results for clients thru software
Licence your intellectual capital
Gain leverage through clients
Become an expert on experts in your field
Bulletproofcareer.com  use code GMCAREER    for free access
Be authentic
Find balance
Diversify and be agile
Surround yourself with people who are smarter than you
Go diving for answers
Give back
Success requires passion, resilience, relationships, and practical action.

Guerrilla Marketing for a Bulletproof Career

By Jay Conrad Levinson and Andrew Neitlich
2010: Morgan James Publishing, NY
ISBN 978-1-60037-815-7

The Secret to a Six-Figure Income

Want to earn six figures or more every year? The secret is not to find the right work at home, multi-level marketing, no-money down real estate, or day trading scheme.
There is a single, irrefutable law about how to earn six figures or more, and here it is:
To earn six figures or more in your career, each and every year, you have to give people six figures or more in value.
It's that simple, and yet that difficult. Put another way: Help other people make six figures or more, and they will pay you six figures or more.
Examples:
- Increase a company's sales by seven figures, and you can easily justify six figures for yourself.
- Increase a company's bottom line profits and the same logic applies.
- Help a company raise funds (which is how Wall Street bankers make some of their money).
- Help a company be more valuable by adding top talent, processes, and technologies so it runs faster, better, and more productively.
- Launch a new product that has a big impact on a company's sales.
- Start a business and grow it. You can sell lots of low-cost products and services to many people, or a few high-cost products and services to a few people.
The above ideas are ridiculously obvious. But many people are so entitled these days, that they forget the basic premise of how we earn money: Provide value to others, and get value back (in the form of a high income).
If you are in a low-wage job and want to get out, figure out what your skills are and how you can use those skills to bring value to others, whether by finding a career path or starting your own business. It's simple...but you have to shift your mindset from what others owe you (e.g., a wage and flexible hours), to what you are willing to do to help other people make more money and be more successful.
I wish there was some silver bullet I could offer you, like a work at home business opportunity guaranteed to make you six figures with little or no work on your part. But there isn't. Know your skills, and figure out how to use them (or get better skills) in order to bring six figures or more in value to others. That's the only sure fire way to a six-figure income!

The Top Five Unique Ways to REALLY Build Your Network

Everyone talks about the need to build up your network, or power base, of contacts. Few people do it systematically, and even fewer use creativity to do it. Here are 5 unique ways to build up your network:
1. Join, and get active in, an exclusive club. That's what Donald Trump did when he was in his early twenties. He joined one of the most exclusive social clubs in New York City, and got to meet wonderful people as a result. I used the same strategy with a local tennis club, and met an investment banker who has referred work my way worth a half million dollars.
2. Become an instant expert/researcher/blogger. Start a blog about a topic of interest to the types of people you want to meet. Then put out a request to interview people as case studies for your blog. You can make requests via www.helpareporter.com. I just did this for a Chicago-based blog I write, and the responses I got were phenomenal. Over the next few weeks, I get to interview (and meet!) about a dozen really cool entrepreneurs.
3. Play the "one degree of separation" game. Everyone has heard of Six Degrees of Separation, but for your own network, you want to be one -- or at most two -- degrees away from really high-powered people. When I lead seminars, I ask people to raise their hands if they are one call away from the US President, a rock star, a movie star, a billionaire, the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, and so on. It is amazing to see how many people have at least one great connection. But everyone can do better. Get outside your comfort zone. Set a goal to meet the REAL movers and shakers. Figure out a way to meet them -- even if it just a meeting to get their advice (or to interview them, per #2 above). If you can't be one call away from key people who can help you, at least find some people who knows these people and get to be one call from them.
4. Don't just join the Chamber of Commerce (or other networking organizaiton), become an active leader there. Anyone can dabble in service clubs and associations. It's much better to go deep than be broad but shallow. Pick one or two groups and commit to becoming a top mover and shaker there. Do this by offering as much service as you can to them. That way, people say, "Wow! I need to get to know this person."
5. Form, or join, an affinity group. Start a Mastermind Group or Business Club. Meet with 5-6 people at least weekly. If that's not enough, form, or join a few of these. Be open to tough feedback from other members of the group. Look for diverse people and invite them to join. It is amazing what kind of connections you can make. For instance, I just finished an interview with a former CIO of a multi-billion dollar company. Once he retired, he joined, and started up, some affinity groups. As a result, his career has become much more interesting and he is involved in ventures he never dreamed of previously. He is having a ball, and so can you if you open yourself up to meeting new people in an affinity group, and being open to the possibilities that emerge.
There you go. Not one mention of LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter -- just five ways to build an ever more powerful and useful network.

List of Career Assessment Tools

There are amany career assessment tools in the marketplace that you can use to get a better sense of who you are.
Personally, I use the Profiles suite of tools, including the ProfilesXT. It won't tell you what you should do with your life, but it does tell you quite a bit about your thinking and communication styles, your behavioral traits, and your occupational traits. Profiles has a database of millions of people who have taken the profile, and it has the power to compare your profile to those of top performers in specific positions.
There are also some good low cost tools on the market
Some top assessment tools include:
A) Myers-Briggs Type Career Assessment. This is a popular assessment tool that will help you categorize and describe yourself along four orientations: how you take in information or perceive, how you make decisions and judgments, your energy orientation, and your extraverted orientation.
B) Holland Psychological Assessment Resources Trio. Holland classifies jobs into three groups: job categories, interest clusters, and work personality environments. The assessment identifies different work personalities, which in turn can help you identify jobs that are a good fit. Work personalities include: realistic, investigative, artistic, social, enterprising, and conventional (these personalities can be remembered using the acronym RIASEC).
C) The Gallup Organization’s Strengths Assessment. This tool helps you identify your strengths, so that you can build on them and apply them to your career.
D) Edgar Schein’s Career Anchors Assessment. Career Anchors is an industry standard, research-backed program that enables participants to identify their career anchors: perceived areas of competence, motives, and values related to work choices. Developed by MIT Professor Edgar Schein, Career Anchors is an affordable and excellent tool for anyone planning or in the process of a career transition. You can order the program online at www.careeranchorsonline.com and also set yourself up to receive a discount on each profile. Career anchors include: entrepreneurial creativity, autonomy/independence, life style, pure challenge, technical/functional competence, service/dedication to a cause, and security/stability.
E) PDP’s ProScan (www.pdpnet.com). The ProScan survey tells a person what their natural personality is, how they perceive how others see them, and in what ways they need to adapt their natural personality to current situations. This survey is a powerful, highly detailed way for people to know who they are and identify stress points in their lives that may be robbing them of energy and focus.
F) Taylor Protocols (www.taylorprotocols.com). Taylor Protocols finds your innate values based on a set of four core values: power, knowledge, love, and wisdom.
G) The Self-Directed Search (SDS) “Occupations Finder” from Psychological Assessment Resources (www.parinc.com). This tool is a great one for people relatively new to the workforce. The participant fills in a survey and gets a code that reveals occupations that fit their profile.
H) DiSC. DiSC is a widely used (perhaps saturated?) assessment. Created by William Marston, DiSC tells you which of four primary personality drivers best defines you. These drivers include: dominance, influence, steadiness or stability, and compliant, conscientious, or cautious. It is a more basic tool than the ones described above, but is easy and cost-effective to administer.
Other companies to explore include the Center for Creative Leadership (www.ccl.org), Leadership Challenge (www.leadershipchallenge.com), and The Leadership Circle (www.theleadershipcircle.com).

These are notes I made after reading this book. See more book notes

Just to let you know, this page was last updated Tuesday, Mar 19 24