Think and Grow Rich 7: Build a plan for your job search

A job search requires planning. Maybe that's obvious, but many avoid it. They simply update a resume and post it on Monster or reply to job postings. There's nothing wrong with this approach, as long as you understand it is successful only a small percentage of the time. In addition, the success may be short-lived if the job turns out to be less than ideal because we didn't research it well enough before we threw our proverbial hat in the employment ring.

In "Think and Grow Rich," Napoleon Hill suggests we use imagination to transform desire into a great deal more with planning.

Hill gives directions for building plans in four steps that start with the formation of a Master Mind Group:

1. Decide what benefits and advantages you have to offer members of a group you will form to help you plan and follow through to your career success. This compensation does not have to be monetary, but you will certainly lose members of your group unless they find something in it for them. Would you blame them?

2. Find and ally yourself with a group of as many people as you need to develop your career plan and carry it out. Call them your Master Mind, as Hill does, your board of directors or your cabinet. Make sure that they are people who set and follow through with their own plans.

3. Set up a schedule to meet at least twice weekly with all of your Master Mind group in attendance until you have together planned your career success. It sounds impossible, but it is not. (Remember you have at your disposal technology that Hill had never dreamed of, including Web meetings, teleconferences, Skype, and cell phones.)

4. Maintain perfect harmony among all members of your Master Mind group. They must be entirely focused on your plan, not on rivalries or personalities. You must be willing to un-invite any members who turn out to be a bad fit. If harmony is not possible, neither is your goal.

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Think and Grow Your Career, Part 7 of 10

Over the course of 20 years, Napoleon Hill interviewed and observed many of the richest and most successful people of the early 20th century to find a recipe for success. His research resulted in the best-selling business book of all time, "Think and Grow Rich," in which he offers eight steps to success:

1. Desire
2. Faith
3. Autosuggestion
4. Specialized knowledge
5. Imagination
6. Organized planning
7. Decision
8. Persistence

If after all of this effort, your plan doesn't work, recall your group and come up with a new plan. This is where most people fail. They misunderstand failure, thinking that it means that the expected results didn't happen. Failure actually doesn't occur until you quit.

Hill calls anything but giving up "temporary defeat" and gives examples:
• "Thomas A. Editor 'failed' 10,000 times before he perfected the incandescent electric light bulb - that is, he met with temporary defeat 10,000 times before his efforts were crowned with success.
• "Henry Ford met with temporary defeat, not only at the beginning of his automobile career, but after he had gone far toward the top. He created new plans and went marching on to financial victory."
• "James J. Hill met with temporary defeat when he first endeavored to raise the necessary capital to build a railroad from the East to the West, but he, too, turned defeat into victory through new plans."

Defeat is simply a signal that something is wrong with your plans. Go back to the drawing board and re-imagine them.

Hill is much more blunt than that, saying, "If you give up before your goal has been reached, you are a quitter," and in capital letters spanning the width of the page states,

"A QUITTER NEVER WINS - AND A WINNER NEVER QUITS."

Now, go find a dry erase marker and write that in capital letters on your bathroom mirror. Read it to yourself morning and night.