Part IV: Take the Next Step

The next principle of the HUNT is "Take the next step." It's essentially the same whether you work for someone else or have your own business. The main difference when you work for someone else is that your steps are usually incremental and smaller than when you start your own business. Each step is less risk and less reward. With small business owners, one big step can mean the difference between poverty and landing on the cover of Forbes. When you ascend within an organization, the odds are on your side; you aren't risking your life savings when you undertake a new direction—but you're not gambling on launching the next Microsoft, either.

Even if you incorporate the entrepreneurial mindset at a large corporation, you always run the risk that you will stagnate—so taking little steps everyday is crucial! What you're after is maneuvering and carefully stepping from job to job, department to department, and title to title. Chronologically it's a slower climb for the duration of your career—30 or 40 years. Managing your career is a lifelong project.

The HUNT begins with harnessing what you have, underestimating your obstacles, and noticing your network. The last step is the key to the cycle: taking the next step—and always being prepared to take the next step! If you're not acting on the mental work from the initial three steps of the HUNT and making them manifest through real action steps—then you are standing still! Ask yourself, "What was the last material career or life step that I've taken lately?"

Dream

One of the secrets to taking steps is to break them down into doable pieces. For example, say you want to propose that you be put in charge of a new project at work. Visualizing how to do this is a great first step. Bob McDonald in Chapter 14, "Reminisce About Your Future," calls it "reminiscing about your future," and it's extremely powerful. Just be careful your visualizations don't get bogged down in negatives, imagining all the ways you could fail. It's fine to anticipate your boss's objections and come up with good answers. But sometimes the best answer is simple: Express how much you believe in the project and your ability to succeed.

Another way to jumpstart the process is to use your unconscious. Before I go to bed each night, I think about all the different parts of my life: my financial planning career, fatherhood, marriage, my financial radio show, and my relationships with friends and family. I put these ideas in my head so that my mind is open to having dreams about these parts of my life—dreams that may bring light to any current questions or problems that I might be facing—problems that my conscious thoughts have not yet figured out. Try it—it works!

Pen to Paper

Action steps require planning. The kind of planning I'm talking about here is action-oriented—number crunching and proposal writing, that kind of thing. For any project it's important that you do your homework and get a handle on the financial risks versus the rewards. It doesn't have to be too sophisticated, and you may have to pick a few numbers out of the air if you're going after something no one has ever done before. Even if it's full of estimates, there's something about having a proposal written down that makes it look more real when you share it with others.

In a group, having a plan on paper is also essential because there is usually a team of people to convince. If you were founder of a small startup, putting proposals in writing might not be as important because you're only convincing yourself. In a full-fledged company, a proposal also has another purpose: After the convincing is done, a written proposal can double as an action plan. When the plan is on paper, everyone can be on the same page.

Action

Here's the fun part: Do it! Bob McDonald (Chapter 14, "Reminisce About Your Future") got recruiters to chase him in a simple series of steps that consisted of writing articles and volunteering to speak at industry conferences about the kind of insurance coverage he marketed. Mylle Mangum (Chapter 16, "Ask Without Asking") sped up her rate of promotion by asking for the duties of the job above her, foregoing raises to the next pay grade until she proved she could do the job. GK Murthy (Chapter 15, "Nudge the Top Line") became a valuable partner at his company because he thought like an owner and regularly put together proposals for taking his company's software to other industries. When Vicki Gordon (Chapter 17, "Find the Need") hit a dead end in her hotel executive career, she created a proposal for a new position that would solve a company problem and proposed that she take that new position. Randy Brandoff (Chapter 18, "Exercise Your Middle Brain") researched a new way of conducting a newspaper insert ad campaign, carefully marketing to households of a certain income level—a job that helped his employer and his career.

Taking action requires you to take initiative and approach people. Knock on doors, make cold calls, ask your boss for a new opportunity, ask for that raise, do your career push-ups every day. What steps have you taken lately? How are you an object in motion? Have you written an article for an industry journal? Volunteered a proposal to your boss? Solved a customer or company need? We all have contributions to make. Make yours today.

Talk to People

The great thing about taking steps is that one step leads to another. As you go about taking one step, you get the idea for another step. And many times those ideas come because action gets you noticed; it helps you strike up conversations with coworkers or industry colleagues. And those conversations lead to more ideas for more steps forward. Once you get started, the ball just keeps rolling.

Put yourself out there and keep those conversations going. Stagnation is impossible if you are talking to people at lunch meetings, informal get-togethers, and civic groups. There's a whole world that opens up to us when we take action and get noticed.

Measure Your Progress

Keep track of your steps and every now and then measure them. It's great if your company already does quarterly reviews. If not, maybe you could ask your boss to institute them. Still, do your own informal measuring by reflecting back frequently on how far you've come. I heard of a man who every night reflected on his day—what he'd accomplished; what he wished he'd done; what he wished he could take back; and finally what he would do differently tomorrow. What a great idea.

The more action you take on, the smaller your mistakes seem—and the more easily you'll sleep at night. For instance, if you only take one or two new steps in your career this year, you'll be devastated if they don't work out. If you take 100 steps and see that 60 of them ended positively, the misfires and mistakes won't seem so huge. Measuring your progress is a great way to motivate yourself and keep the cycle of the HUNT constantly going and evolving. Get moving—you'll be glad you did.

When all is said and done, more is said than done.

—Lou Holtz