We often here the term “thinking outside the box.”  Your boss wants that unique idea, he wants to do something nobody else is doing, so bring him fresh ideas.  Or you may want new ideas for your business or career.  Sure, we all want that, but it isn’t always easy to turn on the brain faucet and have genius spill out.  I have an idea that may help you succeed at that, and help you be even more successful in your career.  This is one of the best things I do.  I have no doubt it will work for you.

Every year, pick four things you really want to learn, or get to know much more about.  Then immerse yourself for the next three months of learning that skill. Then move on to the next, while continuing to improve on the skill you just learned.  In one year, you will be at least proficient in four new skills, in two years eight, you get the math. Look back over the last several years of your life. Time is moving regardless of what we do.  Five years ago was not that long ago for most of us.  Twenty additional skills could have had major influence on your life.  I can give a vague example now.  I am in talks about doing a project that may happen down the road, maybe not.  However, in the course of the conversation, a skillset of which I am knowledgeable came up in the conversation.  The people I was speaking with had a different, more promising project that involved someone that knew and could explain this particular skill.  They had no idea I knew anything about this subject matter, and quickly began to express interest in moving the project to the front burner with my involvement. I would have had no shot at being involved if it was not for me spending months learning about this. This skill has nothing to do with how I have made my living, but it could very well in the future.

I have learned about many things over the years, internet marketing, how to build multiple sources of income, speed reading, trading futures, options, and stocks, and others.  Personally, I like to learn from people who have done what I want to do, and do it successfully.  So I have sought out successful people in the fields I want to learn, and learn from them.  You may want to learn how to build a website, become a gourmet chef,  or speak a foreign language. The knowledge is out there.  You just have to go get it.  Not only will learning new things keep you young and curious, you never know how it will change your life.

I was already planning to blog about this. It seems even more poignant now with the possible heath issues of Steve Jobs, co-founder and CEO of Apple.  He gave an amazing speech to the 2005 Stanford University graduates. It has been re-published many times. You can find it on my website at this link http://www.rockyallen.com/rockys-favorites/ Take a few minutes and read it, it is well worth it.

I urge you to implement this plan in your life.  Take a pottery class, learn how to cook gourmet food, learn how to re-finish old furniture, write software, or write poetry.  There are hundreds of adult education classes. I beg you to never give up the quest for knowledge.  The worst thing that can happen to you is….you get smarter.

You’ve heard the expression hindsight is 20/20.  It is.  Hopefully, you have enough time left in your career to make use of hindsight.  If not, at the very least you hope others can benefit from the value of your hindsight.  I have mentioned my non-theory “3 income theory”, also known as multiple sources of income.  The reasons should be obvious.  First, you provide yourself some financial insurance in case your main source of income suddenly vanishes.  Secondly, the more people and or money you have working for you, the more money in theory you should make.  I think that hard work is a given, smart, hard work is even better.  But  there are things you should do in addition to finding a way to get the multiple sources of income.

One thing you should do is be a people collector.  By that, don’t just meet someone, shake their hand, and move on.  Find out about them.  Get their contact info, and follow up.  Granted, there are people you meet that you realize that you just don’t like.  Make sure you distinguish that from people with which you have nothing in common.  You never know when that kid that interns for you ends up starting a company like Twitter.  Or that socially awkward lawyer you met at your spouses company holiday party becomes a senator.  Everybody wants to be their friend when they get to those positions, but you knew them and helped them when they were “nobody’s”.  What if the intern needed a lawyer for his startup, and you hooked him up with his lawyer now senator?  Your status rises with theirs.  It can never hurt your career when you collect people, and then introduce them to each other.  Be the middleman, and do it just because you know two people that could benefit by knowing each other.  Do it for no other reason than to be a good person, and help people out.  First, it is just a good thing to do to help people out.  Secondly, you just never know how it is going to benefit you.  But if you are positioned as the person that knows everybody, when the time comes that you need a favor, and it will, you will have people falling all over themselves to help you.  You should have multiple sources of income, I believe forever; but a huge Rolodex, or Outlook database, or whatever you use to keep your contacts straight, is a very important tool to have in your arsenal.

For career and financial survival,  work on multiple sources of income, and become a collector of people.  There is more information to come, including things that need to be on your watch list.

I was watching the season finale of “The Closer”, a show my wife and I enjoy watching together.  Kyra Sedgwick just won an Emmy for portraying an assistant police chief who is clearly the best at solving crimes and getting people to confess, certainly within her police department.  The ending of the show brought to mind something I think about often, multiple sources of income.  I have what I call my 3 income theory, even though it is not a theory.  I think it should be every person’s goal to have multiple sources of income their entire working life.  That does not mean having a second job necessarily.  You can start a small business, (I know, that is technically a job), learn to trade so your money is making money, or any way you can legally come up with to have money streams coming in.  I will tell you what The Closer has to do with this in a bit.

I first learned about multiple sources of income when I was a kid.  A friend of Bobby, had a dad who worked for a gun manufacturer, but he also owned a couple of strip malls.  Little did I know the 7-11 I used to frequent was located in one of Bobby’s dads buildings.  That was when I started thinking about how cool it would be to own something and have people give me their money to use what I owned.  it didn’t take me long to figure out that it also protected his dad in case he was ever a victim of a layoff, or got fired.  It is widely reported that Jay Leno has almost always had two jobs.  When he was a kid, he worked as a mechanic, and at McDonald’s.  He used one paycheck to live on, the other he put in the bank. To this day, he still flies out several nights a week to do stand up, and then flies right back to meet his writers to work on the next days Tonight Show.  He claims to have never spent any of his Tonight Show earnings, which at around $30 million a years gives him a very soft cushion to fall back on.  That is the extreme of multiple streams of income.

Brenda Lee Johnson, Kyra Sedgwick’s character in The Closer, was up for Chief of Police.  Among the people we saw as her competition, it was clear she should be the runaway favorite to get the job.  A new character was introduced in that episode, and he ended up getting the job, right after she pulled something off that should have sealed the deal for her. But it didn’t.  Which brings me to two points, one of which will be discussed in my next post.  Her boss, Chief Pope, and Brenda, now may both be looking for a job.  Chief Pope, because often in these situations, when you are a finalist for a job like that, or a CEO type job, if you don’t get it they want you out.  They figure you will be disgruntled, and disruptive, and Brenda, because she may not want to work for this person.  While this could have happened, they didn’t seem prepared for this outcome.  Often in our jobs things happen that we are not prepared to see happen.  With multiple sources of income, we can cushion the blow of suddenly finding ourselves on the outside looking in.