“Sometimes it just takes the right attitude and the confidence to know that the old way isn’t necessarily the right way – and the belief that better days are ahead.”

This quote by Maynard Webb, bestselling author of the book *Rebooting Work* is truly inspiring. His book focuses on how work models developed a century ago are out of sync today, and that we should change our old mindsets about work and embrace a mindset that will prepare us for The Age of Entrepreneurship. “The new world of work is about accepting responsibility and taking initiative” says Maynard – in other words – you need to become the CEO of your own destiny.

This is not a new approach per se since for most of history, individuals worked for themselves and were in charge of their career and lives. Their success was dependent on self-direction, self-motivation and self-determination. “The Industrial Revolution,” says Webb “brought opportunities to work outside the home, reversing the entrepreneurial spirit and giving rise to the paternalistic company, but now the Age of Entrepreneurship is bringing it back.”

Muhammad Yunus, Nobel Peace Prize Winner and microfinance pioneer casts this light “All human beings are entrepreneurs. When we were in the caves, we were all self-employed…finding food, feeding ourselves. That’s where human history began. As civilization came, we suppressed it. We became “labor” because they stamped us, “You are labor.” We forgot that we are entrepreneurs.

How does that feel? Can you begin to consider that you were born an entrepreneur?

This doesn’t mean that you need to start a business. Most people who start businesses shouldn’t. There’s this myth that because you’re good or deem yourself expert at something that you should start an enterprise selling your services. There’s the thinking “I’m an excellent cook. Let me start a restaurant business.”

However these are very uncertain times. Nothing is “sure” anymore. Today you’re a senior manager at a firm – tomorrow a bigger better firm buys out the firm you’re working for – new leadership takes position – new vision takes the place of what was ; after a review of staff “acquired” – “they” decide that YOUR SERVICES are no longer required. Or you might be working for a company that’s continuing to lose money and can no longer manage loan repayments just so that they can keep the staff on payroll and without a moment’s notice – you’re on the breadline.

In *The Start Up of You* Reid Hoffman, Co-founder and Chairman of Linkedin says “When you start a company, you make decisions in an information-poor, time-compressed, resource-constrained environment. There are no guarantees or safety nets, so you take a certain amount of risk. The competition is changing; the market is changing. The life-cycle of the company is fairly short. The conditions in which entrepreneurs start and grow companies are the conditions WE ALL now live in when fashioning a career. You never know what’s going to happen next. Information is limited. Resources are tight. Competition is fierce. The world is changing. And the amount of time you spend at any one job is shrinking. This means you need to be adapting ALL THE TIME. And if you FAIL to adapt, no one – not your employer, not the government – is going to catch you when you fall.”

I recently reviewed Srinivas Rao’s book The Art of Being Unmistakable – A Collection of Essays about Making a Dent in the Universe. Here are a couple questions you should contemplate and ideas that I thought were worth sharing as you consider how you’re going to adapt to uncertainty, invest in yourself and transform your career:

1. Are your goals worthy of your life?
2. Are you chasing goals at the expense of your own inner well being?

• Never compromise the integrity of WHO YOU ARE for the metrics that will temporarily inflate your ego
• Nobody is successful because they took someone else’s roadmap and copied it
• Create what you want for yourself from within. When you use a map:
  • You have a tendency to want to memorize
  • You shut yourself off from the possibility of other interesting conclusions
  • You rule out the potential of undiscovered destinations

As the CEO of Your Own Destiny you need to become accountable for your own advancement. You need to stop relying on hope as a strategy; it is about as effective as a method for birth control. Jump into the driver’s seat of your life and start steering in the direction of where you think you should go next.