One of the most important lessons I’ve learned about success, I learned from a fish.

I was recently chatting with a friend about her job at a company at which she’s been employed for many years. I asked how things were going, to which the friend replied that things were fine. “You know, it’s a job.”

She confessed that she really didn’t love the job, but she said, “it’s a good company, I make a decent salary and I know what’s expected of me. It’s comfortable.”

I’ve replayed that conversation to myself a number of times and each time it left me feeling a little sad and concerned. How often do we hear people in our lives say this? Maybe we’ve even said it ourselves over the course of our career.

It made me sad because clearly this person isn’t enthusiastic or engaged by their work. They don’t enjoy it. Yet, they spend most of their waking hours working.  At the same time, her comments concerned me because today more than ever rapid advances in technology are turning every industry upside-down making it imperative that we keep learning and growing professionally. In a nutshell, we need to keep moving. Not just because we’ll be happier and more engaged by doing so, but also because it’s essential if we want to continue to stay relevant, and employed!

It occurred to me that this is something many successful people do quite naturally. In this way they’re kind of like sharks. Some sharks, (white sharks for instance) must keep moving in order to keep breathing. If they stop moving they’ll die.

Successful people also have a tendency to keep moving. They challenge themselves to learn new skills, they take on new responsibilities and have new experiences, and they push themselves to persevere through difficult times.

When we don’t push ourselves we have a tendency to become professionally stagnant. We may be very proficient at our job but we stop learning new skills, we stop challenging ourselves to develop expertise with new technologies or processes that may potentially impact our business. Worse still, unlike the shark we don’t feel any pain by not moving. Rather, we feel “comfortable.” As a result, there’s nothing to alert us to the danger in doing this. Until of course it’s too late.

So you see, if we want to continue to be relevant and marketable, if we want to be successful, it’s really imperative that we push ourselves to be more like the shark.

We need to keep moving.

..This much I know.

-Jeanine