Step It Up

By Tommy Leung on 08/23/2010 in Life

There used to be a time where stepping it up in your career or professional life meant going to and finishing college. Long before that, stepping up meant finishing high school. In most industries, stepping up is no longer about getting more degrees. The time where pieces of paper denoted your worth over others has evaporated.

A pile of degrees look nice hung up individually on a wall. However, the thing people really want to see is what work you’ve done and, more importantly, the work you’re doing. Past glory doesn’t guarantee the future.

Not to belittle all the hard-earned and expensive degrees but, those degrees are nothing compared to actually shipping. Completing something that goes out into the real world. Not the fictitious world of theories and academia. The world of hard, cold reality.

That’s stepping it up.

Those with the skills and the drive are going to be the ones who get ahead. There are not enough resources for the snakes. There isn’t enough abundance for those who don’t add any value to come in and take a little off the top for themselves.

That party is over.

By that same token, you can’t be doing the absolute minimum and expect anything more than a life of absolute minimum. You need to actually have value and be able to show it. Convincing yourself and your friends that you have value over a round of  beers doesn’t cut it.

Look at the real world. Ideas are and have always been a dime a dozen. I can claim that I thought of YouTube before YouTube but, I didn’t ship. In my mind, it wasn’t feasible. And maybe it wasn’t at the time but, someone thought it was and shipped.

See what the best are doing. You need to at least aim to be that good. You might not get there but, it never hurts to aim high; even if you don’t hit the target, you’ll be more likely to have done pretty good.

Therein lies the stuff that separates those who ship and those who don’t. Those who believe it and then do it and those who believe it and then sit on their ass.

Stop talking. Go do it. Step it up.