Ways to distinguish yourself #144 – Know your escape velocity

posted in Distinguish, General on by

In simple terms, escape velocity is defined as:

Escape velocity is defined to be the minimum velocity an object must have in order to escape the gravitational field of the earth, that is, escape the earth without ever falling back.

Wikipedia Link: Escape Velocity

Can you remember those days when you worked hard, gave it your best shot and got tired at the end of the day with all the activity that was happening. The sad part was that except your age nothing much had changed after a few years. You were back at the same place where you were. Very similar to a satellite revolving around the earth in some sense. The satellite is moving (so there is action) and since it is flying through different regions, there is change (gives a false sense of progress sometimes) but after a while (depending on the speed) the satellite finds itself in the same place where it started. The concept of “escape velocity” is applicable to our personal and professional lives. If your activity level (in the right direction) reaches that critical “velocity” you start to take off.

Jim Rohn said it right – success is measurable progress in reasonable time. If you are not making significant progress in your personal and professional life, one of the reasons may be that you are stuck in a “continuous spiral syndrome”  or you have not achieved escape velocity.

Here are a few symptoms:

a) Working hard but not getting enough results or the results are not proportional to efforts

b) sideways career movement

c) you are the sole income producer. Your have few assets or the current assets are not producing income.

Actually, those of you who have more than about eight years of working experience, you know the symptoms as they are very clear. When you are very young, you don’t notice them as everyone around you are going through the same drill. By seven or eight years into your working life, you see that some people have achieved “escape velocity” and some have not. If you are one who has achieved escape velocity, congratulations. If you are not one among them, you know that you can’t continue to do the same things or worse think that others just got lucky (they were at the right place at the right time.)

I think we are half way into the year and now may be a great time to review whether you are moving fast on all your initiatives and most important to check “is your fast – fast enough?”

Hat tip: Murali Gomatam of Global Equations

Note: For other articles in the same series, please visit my Squidoo lens on the same topic.
Link: Squidoo Lens: Distinguish Yourself