Stairway to Success: The Complete Blueprint for Personal and Professional Achievement

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CREATE A NEWBEGINNING

Any time you stop striving to get better, you’re bound to get worse.

—PAT RILEY

Life should be an adventure, to be savored from beginning to end. It is a game of constantly changing odds, constantly developing challenges, constantly opening opportunities. To win it, you have to play it. Sitting on the sidelines won’t do. Even after you’ve achieved all you ever hoped to achieve, it’s no time to stop living. To live, you must have a purpose to guide you.

“Happiness,” observed W. H. Sheldon, “is essentially a state of going somewhere wholeheartedly.” To go somewhere wholeheartedly, you must have your eye fixed on a destination that touches your passions. In the preceding chapter, we touched on the changing social and economic climate, including the changing nature of the job market. To achieve success in this climate, you must regard the changes as challenges instead of threats.

AN ERA OF EXHILARATING OPPORTUNITY

Many people become frightened when they perceive the end of the stable career path that led steadily upward from diploma to gold watch. Yet the future holds for today’s young people exhilarating opportunities that were not there for previous generations. People today have the opportunity to reinvent themselves, over and over, in exciting new roles. Fortune’s Brian O’Reilly described the new relationship between employers and employees and observed, “If the old arrangement sounded like binding nuptial vows, the new one suggests a series of casual, ...