How to Be Successful, According to Tony Robbins: Focus On What You'll Give, Not What You'll Get
Many of us, when we think about a successful career, think about what we’d like to get from it.
Money. Fame. Power. To travel the world, to do something fun, to do something easy.
According to renowned motivational speaker Tony Robbins, that’s the exact wrong approach. In an interview featured on LinkedIn Learning, Robbins said the key to building a successful career is not focusing on what you will get, but instead what you’ll give.
“You've got to decide what do you want to give,” Robbins said. “What are you here to deliver? I think you have to fall in love with the lives you want to touch.”
Tony Robbins, in an interview featured on LinkedIn Learning, shares his advice on how to build a successful career.
It Isn’t All About Passion. Competency and Market Matter, Too
This sounds like more advice on blindly following your passion. Yet Robbins cautioned against that – instead, you need to find the intersection of your passion, your competency and (ideally) the market too.
“A lot of people have passion but no competency,” Robbins said. “And so they'll be struggling a good portion of their life. You got to make sure you match those two but you also have to find a market. Where can I serve a group of people? What's a problem I can solve that's perhaps scalable in size if you want to do something on scale.”
In other words, just because you love something doesn’t necessarily mean you can build a career around it. The best careers are built around something you love and are good at – which, reinforcing his point from before, solves a need for people.
“You can't fall in love with your product or your service today, it's going to change,” Robbins said. “You've got to fall in love with the client. You got to know more about their needs, their wants, their fears, their desires than they do. And you've got to anticipate how to meet those.”
Once That Framework is in Place, It Comes Down to Learning
If you follow Robbins advice, you’ll pinpoint your niche to focus on. Now, it comes down to execution.
And Robbins offers a very simple playbook for execution: learn, learn, learn. In his words, “work harder on yourself than you ever do on your job or your business.”
“The world is more competitive than any time in history; if you're not growing in your skillsets, you're going to fall behind,” Robbins said.
So, in summary: find a need for people you are both passionate about and have the ability to meet. Once you identify that niche, constantly strive to get better at it, so you can meet that need as best as you can.
Do that, and Robbins believes you’ll have a successful career. It’s hard to argue the opposite :).
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Topics: Career success tips
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