Taking every opportunity I can find

I recently decided that I was going to consider every single career opportunity that came my way. Even the ones that I knew I couldn't manage would get a closer look, just in case it turned out that there was some way for me to glean some good out of it.

I don't know if it's a case of The Law of Attraction or what, but now that my eyes are open, the opportunities are everywhere.

Granted, they're not all fabulous. In fact, some of them are awfully close to working for free. But each one reminds me that there's more than one way to achieve a goal, more than one path to success, more than just the one shape I thought my career would or should take.

At The 36-Hour Day, I'm sharing what I've learned about looking for opportunities.

I get a lot of pitches from PR people. It was tempting to look at the emails and field the phone calls and think, "I'm too busy to deal with this right now." When I stopped doing that, I started noticing that some of those interruptions were opportunities in disguise.

I talk a lot about the importance of networking, and I decided that I needed to make sure I was walking the walk, too. So I brushed up my LinkedIn profile and sent out some requests for recommendations and made sure I had different versions of my resume ready for targeting different clients. And you know what? It turns out that who you know really does matter as much as (or more than) what you know.

I stopped expecting instant gratification -- at home and at work. It was making me feel unsatisfied and resentful, and I need to be inspired and motivated. I had been thinking, "That'll take too long, it's not worth starting at all." But as one of my favorite bloggers, Mary Alice, points out, perserverence pays off. If you keep reaching, you'll get where you want to go but if you don't, then you definitely won't.

Will Rogers was right: Even if you're on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there.

*Knock Knock*