Think about any reasonably successful person and you will see that his or her career path will be plastered with a series of successes and failures. While the media and the outside world may only paint a picture of what his or her successes are, the person will know clearly how the career was a roller coaster ride – up, down, up, up, down and up and so on.

When you plot this typical graph, you will see spikes on both sides of baseline.

However, you can make a difference by consciously working on disproportionately shifting the baseline to your advantage. In simple terms, you can do it by disproportionately investing in yourself over a long-period of time. The components that can disproportionately shift the baseline to your advantage are different for different people. For me (I think) these components are:

* A strong personal brand

* Solid long-term relationships

* High Leverage Thinking

* Access to powerful mentors and teachers

* Continuos learning

* Strong spiritual foundation

Baseline in my definition is the powerbase that a person requires to have to make a  valuable contribution to the marketplace with the current reality. Every year, the person’s capacity increases – shifting the baseline. For example, experience will shift the baseline to the next level – it has to. There is (generally) a difference between what a person with one year experience can produce as compared to what a person with two years of experience can produce. The graph below factors in the “standard shift” in the baseline for a typical person. This means that year over year if you increase your capacity that you are expected to increase anyway, the graph does not show any change in the baseline. That is what is expected of you from the marketplace – so there is no special consideration.

And a few others that are personal to me. I will aggressively disproportionately invest my time, energy, money and other resources in all of the above

For you, they may be different. You and your mentors and teachers can figure out what those are for you and start investing heavily in developing them.

As the baseline shifts, your swing to success and failures won’t matter much as they are operating out of the new baseline that you have created for your own case.

As your baseline deviates from the standard baseline in the marketplace, you start gaining competitive advantage that is hard to beat easily.

Any model that results from careful long-term investment and growth strategy will always have an advantage over the models created based on “short-term” and “fly by night” strategies.

All the best and have a great weekend.

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Note 1: For links to the other 188 entries in the “Distinguish yourself” series, please visit my Squidoo lens on the same topic:
Squidoo Lens: Distinguish yourself

Note 2: The first 25 entries in the series have been packaged in a ChangeThis manifesto that was published on September 07, 2005. You can download that manifesto here:
ChangeThis Manifesto: 25 Ways to Distinguish Yourself

Note 3: My latest manifesto on ChangeThis was published on August 8, 2007. Here is the link:
ChangeThis Manifesto: Making the Most of Your Time: Going Beyond To-Do Lists