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What It's About

Fast Growth: A Career Acceleration Strategy shows how every employee can shape a better personal future by building the organization he or she works for. By teaching employees to develop their personal value, both the employee and the company win.

Today's new career model puts you, personally, in charge of creating your job future. This book gives you a breakthrough strategy for career acceleration, competency development, and maximum employability.

Use the 12 high-performance guidelines to achieve job security and career success by:

• Aligning efforts with those of the employer
• Adapting to new challenges
• Adding value by contributing results that count

My Thoughts

If you’re nerdy, you enjoy reading long essays, or reading books…This summary is for you.

I’ve learnt practical tips I’ve applied at my workspace, in my career and personal development and of which I am still applying.

And I’ve certainly seen results of applying them.

It’s a good read. I enjoy reading Price Pritchett’s books and this is certainly a recommended read. There’s something about his words that spurs you into action and helps you commit to growth and being a better person.

One of such books of his I have read is You². I’ve also written a summary on it . You can check that you too.

Enjoy this long summary.

Feel free to share around, someone is bound to learn a lot from this piece.

Most importantly, put what you learn into practice.

Notes

Invest heavily in the now

You only get one chance at using any given time period for performance improvement.

Growth can only occur in the present. So you need to show a high respect for now. Fill it with the right behaviours, and you’ll be rewarded with the right results.

Grow toward the sun

⇒ Growing in ways that will bring an employer the key benefit: new profits.

⇒ Fast growth in the career sense doesn't automatically come from making yourself better. It comes from being able to benefit your employer better.

⇒ Having "talent" is not the issue — the question is, can you deliver as a powerful profit-improver? And it's not enough to be a nice, high-quality person — ask yourself if you're an all-star at adding value.

⇒ Contribute enough,, and you will create high demand for your work

⇒ You’ll be successful at building my career if I always remmeber to grow and sell what the market wants to buy.

⇒ Make sure you know and respect your employer’s needs

Trust in the power of the future pull

⇒ You can grow at a faster clip if you’ll put the future to work for you.

⇒ The key is to let the future know specifically what you want from it

→ Start by coming up with a clear mental picture of your goal.

→ Keep it alive in your mind.

→ Visit often in your imagination.

⇒ The future would start organising events to bring about this thing you want

⇒ Goals somehow help create the conductors needed for their achievement and fulfilment

⇒ Your personal vision of what you want to become instructs the future on how to provide assistance .

⇒ Your mental picture of what you hope to achieve tells tomorrow how to help.

⇒ Just set the goal. Its magnetic power would pull you towards its revelation.

Be sharply pointed rather than well-rounded

⇒ You can’t do everything fast.

⇒ Figure out where speed will count the most

⇒ Decide where your growth can make the biggest difference (Understanding), then drive hard in that direction.

⇒Think few. Concentrate on essentials. Figure out what to ignore.

Instead of scattering yourself, responding freely to the odds and ends that swarm around you, decide what really counts. Downsize your daily activities. Don't blunt your personal development by trying to do too many things at once. Only by sharply focusing yourself can you achieve the critical mass of energy required for real acceleration.

⇒ The fuel for fast growth comes when energy is contained. . .compressed. ..channeled.

⇒ Focus actually frees up time. Rather than consuming a person, it liberates. Instead of stretching you thinner, focus keeps you from overextending myself.

Create White Space Then Innovate

⇒ You can only accelerate your leaning and development so much by simply doing the same old things faster, sooner or later you must start doing different things

⇒ Giving up old habits and thoughts pattern, the unlearning is tough for people to do. But old approaches get in the way of trying out new methods.

⇒ The second step is breakthrough process → experimentation.

⇒ Tryouts

⇒ The big requirement here is the willingness to fail

⇒ Mistakes guide you toward your goal and you won’t get far without making them

⇒ Shoot for fast growth and you give yourself a chance to grin like that again

⇒You must do more than change,You must change the way You change

Learn On The Fly

⇒ MOVE ⇒ TAKE ACTION ⇒ MOBILISE MYSELF → Growth does not get started until I do.

⇒ Operate on the basis of learning as you go

⇒ “Getting ready” often gives a person the feeling of Georges, but it’s usually a delaying tactic that gets in the way of growth. “Getting going” is what puts you further down the road.

⇒ The main growth strategy is willingness to move .

⇒ Action based strategy of learning as you go.

⇒ Active pursuit of your personal development goals provides a steady stream of feedback

Actually doing things and trying out different approaches gives you hard data on what works and what doesn’t

⇒ Forward motion offers the fastest education you can afford.

⇒ The word career comes from the French word ‘carriers’ which **originally meant “a racing course”. As a verb, it means “to move at full speed”.

In today’s world, careering comes down to a race against change. A personal contest to see if you can grow as fast as the challenges you face in your work.

Benchmark

How rapidly would your results improve, if starting today, you did what highest performers do ?

⇒ You can take a lot of the mystery out of personal growth simply by studying people who are great examples

→ Find some folks that you’d call “best in class”.

→ Carefully observe their behaviour , watch what they do…how they do it…how they go about it, the free parts of their approach.

⇒ Once you’ve sorted how they do things differently, you can start copying their approach(put the name of someone you look up too here, in my notes I wrote IDRIS, a developer advocate I’m currently learning from, I learn from others, but at the point of reading this book, I was paying more attention to him)

⇒ Start practicing the moves of people you admire the most and see what happens

⇒ Keep analysing how they operate. Keep comparing the way they go about doing things.

⇒ Benchmarking is about about imitating the best. But it does not mean you lose your own individuality.

⇒ You still have plenty of room for your personality to show . It’ll just shine through more powerfully than before.

“Stretch Out” When Resistance Hits

⇒ Just as you would expect it to feel stiff and sore when you begin a new exercise routine, count on feeling uncomfortable with your beginning effort for fast growth

⇒ Resistance is a great con artist. It tries to make you believe that sticking with your growth plans will be too painful. Too difficult. Not worth the struggle. It wants to sweet talk you into selling out your future for a little immediate comfort.

⇒ But just like stretching out and continuing your physical exercise held you work out soreness, hanging in there with your fast growth program pushes you past the resistance.

⇒ This is psychological warfare at its best, and it will keep your ambitions alive.

Be Gutsy In How You Begin

⇒ Start your growth program with bold strokes

⇒ Courageous acts

⇒ My opening move should be strong enough to overcome inertia, give instant momentum and crate excitement inside .

⇒ Audacious action energises a person . William James said, there are 3 rules to follow if you want to change your life.

(1) Start immediately

(2) Do it flamboyantly

(3) No exceptions

⇒ Putting yourself in position where, more or less you are forced to grow.

⇒ Robert Trey states in Harvard Business Review Article —

“The people who change best and fastest are the ones he I have not choice”

⇒ The way you begin says a lot about how you’ll finish

Leverage Your Big Winner Behaviours

⇒ 80/20 rule: A few critical behaviour will account for most of your fast growth.

⇒ Spend your time, energy , and attention in the high-payoff areas, and you could easily double or triple your speed in personal development

⇒ You won’t get great results simply by staying busy. Or being responsible. Or even by trying hard and putting out pretty good works. It’s not effort or activity that counts , but outcomes .

⇒ You have to examine your productive hours and identify what seems to drive your development the most.

⇒ These are power points. They deserve the lion share of your productive hours and energy, because they’ll bring you the best results.

Build A Power Grid Of Relationships

⇒ The faster you want to grow, the more you’ll need support systems…contacts…key relationships

Other people are in control of opportunities

They can open doors, offer know-how, and help you through rough spots.

⇒ Make a habit of taking the initiate in social situations. First determine whom it makes sense to spend time with, and engineer those encounters.

⇒ The idea is to create a circle of valuable contacts, people who have the potential to constitute to your personal growth.

⇒ Build a reputation for bing a giver, do other end up wanting to reciprocate.

⇒ The idea is to create a positive bank account with peephole , a store of old will, so you’re never in debt if you go asking for favours.

⇒ Make sure others have solid reason for wanting to help you succeed.

Use It Or Lose It

⇒ Work on growing, and the easier it gets to grow.

Develop yourself faster, and you’ll find it increasingly easy to accelerate your development even more

⇒ Your growth rate can be measured as a function of how effectively you are putting your resources to use.

Quotes

Things that mater most must never be at the mercy of things that matter least. — Johan Wolfgang Von Goethe

Somebody knows how to do it better. Get close enough to watch that person in the school room.