Career is nothing but your work life. You do a lot of mistakes almost every other day. Committing a mistake is a mere human tendency. But if you learn from your mistakes, nothing like it.
Read a lot of literature and follow success stories. Every success story has to learn in it. This learning is not because of success. Learnings crop up from mistakes. Understand that. Behind every successful personality are a lot of such learnings, the mistakes they arrested, and their approach to gliding up the career.
Your major mistake lies in your mindset when you switch on and off between the development of your skills. Rather engage yourselves towards career development consistently and progressively. There are no shortcuts to reaching the pinnacle. You just have to grow gradually.
You tend to fail when you get into action once when some event triggers you. Triggers in career paths could be failing to reach the expectations of your bosses, not getting a reasonable hike, or not being able to scale up the promotion path despite shredding efforts. But that is not how it is going to be. You have to stay continuously focused and dedicated at work on a daily basis, despite the obstacles that come along.
Generally speaking, your biggest career mistake would be when you fail to ascertain, determine, review, and refine your skillset from time to time.
Have concrete goals in mind. Set milestones at the end of every phase of the journey leading towards the goal. Journalize your tasks. Measure your progress towards goals frequently. Record them for later retrieval. Compare your progress against your records. Refine them depending on the changing circumstances. Review your tasks continuously.
If you want to grab success and reach the acme, ensure to set your ground ready. Don’t wait for others to give you feedback. Review and give feedback to yourself, as if you were giving it to somebody else. Apart from this, it also makes it a point that you seek feedback from others. Invite ideas and criticism from your co-workers, your boss, and your friends and family too. Fine-tune your objectives without altering your ultimate goal. Focus on your career aspirations.
You may be achieving success in every walk of life. You should still make it a point that you review your work, not when something triggers, but naturally as if it were a part of your life.
When you make a mistake and learn from it, you will certainly shine. But when you learn from mistakes made by others, you will succeed in life. You have to be wise enough in not waiting for your mistake to be repeated by yourself in order to arrest it. Be proactive to avoid mistakes taking place at all, by learning from others' experiences. This way you will save years of your life in sitting and analyzing your own mistakes.
You are answerable upon failing to reach your goals. It is therefore necessary and highly important that you review your goals. Doing so increases your abilities and strengths and also accountability towards yourself. Take ownership and responsibility of the work you deliver. Irrespective of whether your approach towards your goal is on track or off track, you still need to pause awhile and ensure to review your work in order to refine your success.
By measuring and reviewing your work, you understand clearly where you stand and whether things are moving as planned or not. You now know what to do and what not. You also get an idea of what other things you should be doing to progress further. You will also be able to estimate how much more journey is left for you to travel to the destined path.
To conclude, to err is human. Mistakes are part of life, be it personal or professional. Only when you commit a mistake will you become more alert in life. Give your best in driving home success, but even if you fail once in a while, it should still be impressive, because that delivers learning to not just self but for others too.
Finally, measuring, reviewing, and refining, all of these are to be given more prominence and you ought to put them in writing. Most goals and tasks work well when put on paper, rather than rehearsing in mind. If possible, also put your goals on display in front of your desk. It is really important that they need to flash in your mind very often, as all your entire gamut of activities have been targeted towards these goals.