As a corporate-executive-turned-college-professor, I’ve seen the business world from many perspectives. Much of what I impart in these pages reflects my own career. My goal is to provide practical wisdom that will allow you to benefit from the experience of others. I’m honored in these pages to pass on the knowledge, observations, and perspective of many executives and thought leaders, who have generously shared from their own careers (including when they were just starting out), as well as their interactions with young professionals.

They include Jack Bogle, founder of The Vanguard Group; Chicago Cubs pitcher Greg Maddux; Andrea Jung, chairman of Avon Products and #3 on the Wall Street Journal’s list of “The Top 50 Women to Watch,” and Herman Cain, an African-American businessman who rose from humble roots in Georgia to the top ranks of corporate America.

The dozen or so individuals I’ve interviewed have titles such as chairman, CEO, president, and vice president. They have achieved levels of success that many people yearn for throughout their careers. As a college student or a young professional, you may have your sights set on the executive suite some day. Given that ambition, wouldn’t you want to learn from the experiences of those who have already made it? Wouldn’t you want to benefit from their wisdom as well as from their mistakes? Of course you would.

My aim in this book is to help you—whether you’re a college student, recent graduate, graduate student, or young professional in the first five years of your career—shorten your learning curve. The faster you can learn these secrets of success and incorporate them into your professional life, the more quickly you’ll become a highly valued member of your organization.

While each person’s experience is and should be unique, I believe there are important commonalities to success. I see them as a mosaic of behaviors, practices, and attitudes, which will be discussed throughout the book. Therefore, you may want to apply some of these suggestions immediately and implement others later. What’s important for you is to discover what resonates for you right now, see what works, and then add more skills and habits over time.

I remember what it was like, many years ago, to join a corporation with big ideas and high expectations but little practical knowledge of how things really work. A few years later, I learned what it was like to be a manager, hiring new people and coaching and developing internal talent. Later, I became an executive, including chairman and CEO of a New York Stock Exchange-traded company, and was the steward of corporate resources, values, and talent. Now, in my latest role, as a professor at the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science at Northwestern University, I have the day-to-day experience of teaching and advising students who want to be prepared for the future.

Students often ask me, “How do I get started on the job? What should I do the first week? What do I have to know? What should I read?”

You can Google all you want. You can find tips and hints on how to write a dynamite résumé and ace an interview. But you still won’t know how to be successful in your career—from Day One. Thus, when my students ask me to recommend a book on this subject, after much research I decided to write my own, based on observations, anecdotes, surveys, speeches, articles, and readings accumulated over my long career.

Foremost among the lessons in these pages is the importance of making a contribution. As you will learn throughout this book, the best strategy for a young professional, a seasoned manager, or even a top executive is to make the best possible contribution to the company or organization. This may sound counterintuitive, particularly if you’re a college student or a recent graduate who is used to competing with and challenging others. Trust me on this one. Based on my own experience and what I’ve seen in the corporate arena, when you focus on the company’s goals first, you’ll produce a meaningful return in the long run. And you’ll be a success.

True success stems from feeling good about your accomplishments and knowing that you’re making a difference in your company or organization. Ultimately, this will be the legacy you leave behind in every job and in every organization throughout your career. Starting out, however, you may be most concerned about financial rewards, which are certainly important. What too few people understand, particularly as they launch their careers, is that you must make a difference first; then you have a greater chance of achieving financial rewards in the future. The more you contribute, the more challenging positions will be offered to you with bigger salaries and bonuses attached. This payoff over the long term doesn’t mean that you have to wait for great things to happen. From Day One you can reap the satisfaction that comes from making a contribution and establish a firm footing on the path to true success.

At this point, you may be saying, “Okay, okay. I’ll make a contribution. But first, I’ve got to find a job. Where are the hot jobs? What should I be doing?” If those are the questions you’re asking, you’re in good company. I hear them all the time from my students. However, these questions, are not the ones you should be asking.

What I do with my students is turn the questions around. “What do you get excited about? What are your passions? What activities engage you so much that you can hardly believe the time went by?” If you aren’t passionate about what you do, you will feel as if you’re behind the pack. You’re likely to be frustrated, which can damage your relationships with co-workers, associates, and even the people closest to you. You owe it to yourself to identify your passions early and follow them wherever they lead you.

This is a different approach than many students take. They are eager to get out into the working world, or they are acutely aware of the expectations of parents and grandparents who want a return on their emotional and financial investment in four-plus years of college. Believe me, I understand those pressures! But a world of difference exists between “a job” and “the right job.” Your first job and your relationship with your first boss (good or bad) will set the tone for much of your working life. If you have a positive experience, the confidence gained and favorable feedback received will last for many years. If it’s negative, you may feel tainted for as many years.

Maybe you’re still not convinced that you should be spending all this time thinking about your career instead of jumping into job searches and résumé writing. Consider something that happened to me many years ago when I was starting my career. I was a co-op student at Northwestern University, which meant that instead of going to school for four years, I put in five, including a year-and-a-half of work experience over several quarters at S.C. Johnson in Racine, Wis. During my work experience there, I was encouraged to meet with the company’s industrial psychologist, which was a rare experience in those days, particularly for a 19-year-old intern. The psychologist put me through a battery of tests, which he then analyzed. I can still remember his sitting down with me to discuss the results.

“Bill,” he said, “let me tell you the bad news first. You’re really not outstanding in anything. But the good news is, you’re pretty good at a lot of things. From a career standpoint, you should think about being a generalist—a general manager, for example.”

That insight planted a seed and helped me set a goal. Of course, having a goal is one thing; achieving it is quite another. I was helped considerably when I enrolled in the Harvard MBA program in 1961. While there, I became a student of the late Georges Doriot, a legendary professor whose lessons went far beyond the process and philosophy of management. Among the many things he taught was how to get started on our careers and, more importantly, how to think about our careers. His lessons remained with me throughout my professional life, and they still ring true today. Once you were a “Doriot student,” you remained so for life. I am honored to be in this group of esteemed peers.

Lastly, in my career, I’ve been fortunate to hold some interesting job assignments that allowed me not only to manage people but also to teach them. In fact, my style of management is very much that of a coach and teacher. My philosophy always has been that by teaching someone, I could make that individual better at his or her job. Thus, by passing on what I knew, by sharing from my own expertise, I could leverage my skills and knowledge to reap a greater return for the company.

Now it’s your turn to benefit from the wisdom and experience of others and insights into achieving longterm happiness and true success as you begin from Day One.