To differentiate yourself, you don’t have to have an especially high IQ. No matter who you are or what your background or current circumstance is, one thing is certain: you can always learn, explore, and experiment in new arenas. You only need to be reasonably intelligent and insatiably curious. You can never know too much; and you can never have too much information and insight.
If you do not train yourself constantly to learn about humanity, business, places, and ideas, you are just asking for defeat. As some CEOs weighed in:
“I can find a lot of ambitious, hardworking people, but I want creativity, and that comes from curiosity. . . . It’s a huge turn-off to me if someone isn’t curious. It’s disorienting.”
“Even if you’re number one, you’d better learn something new, and you’d better keep challenging yourself, or they are going to forget about you.”
“I will fire a person who has no ambition to learn on his or her own.”
D.A. (Debra) Benton has been helping great individuals and organizations get even better for over 20 years. Just as exceptional athletes rely on excellent coaching to hone their skills, Debra's clients rely on her advice to advance their careers. She focuses on what is truly important to convert what you and your organization want to be from a vision into a reality. TopCEOCoaches.com ranks her in the World's Top 10 CEO Coaches noting she is the top female. And as conference keynote speaker she is routinely rated in the top 2%. Her client list reads like a “Who's Who” of executives in companies ranging from Microsoft, McDonald's, Kraft, American Express, Merrill Lynch, United Airlines, and PricewaterhouseCoopers to the Washington Beltway and U.S.Border Patrol. *She is the author of ten award-winning and best-selling business books including The Virtual Executive and CEO Material. She has written for the Harvard Business Review, Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg Businessweek, and Fast Company. She has been featured in USA Today, Fortune, The New York Times, and Time; she has appeared on Today Show, Good Morning America, CNN, and CBS with Diane Sawyer. To learn more Debra advising leaders, coaching, facilitating a workshop, or speaking: www.debrabenton.com
