Steve Jobs ended his famous Stanford commencement address with these words…

“Stay hungry.  Stay Foolish.”

Pretty good career success advice.  I’d like to add another piece of career advice though – stay curious.

Cathy and I visited her mother during the holidays.  When we were there I spent some time in Cathy’s father’s home office.  Roy Blackman passed away a few years ago, but his library is still there.  I began looking at the titles on his bookshelf.  Their diversity amazed me.

In addition to a lot of history books and a great collection of novels, I found these titles…

• Adventures With a Hand Lens
• Hunting With a Microscope
• How to Clean Practically Anything
• Juggling for the Complete Klutz
• Isaac Asimov’s Book of Facts
• The Formula Book: Easy, Safe Instructions for making Hundreds of Personal Care and Household Products
• The World’s 100 Best Short Stories
• The Best of Health
• Insects
• The Way Things Work
• The Indispensable Calvin and Hobbs
• Invest with the Best
• Roget’s Thesaurus
• Sisson’s Word and Expression Locator
• English/Spanish Dictionary
• The Oxford English Dictionary – Cathy’s mother gave me this one to take home

These books show that Roy Blackman was a curious man.  He wanted to know a little bit about a lot of different things.  This type of curiosity can serve you well as you go about creating your life and career success.  Curiosity didn’t kill the cat, it helped her become a life and career success.

I have always been curious.  In my neighborhood in Ambridge PA it was very common for grandparents, parent and lids to share the same house.  My grandparents lived upstairs from us.  The same was true for the Hronas family who lived next door.

Old Mr. Hronas (my friend’s grandfather – or “Papou” as they called him in Greek – was one of my favorites.  He was kind and patient.  But sometimes I could drive crazy with my questions.  I remember him saying to me, “Why, why, why Bud.  All you do as ask why.  You want to know so much.  Doesn’t your brain ever get tired?”  To be truthful, my brain never does get tired.  I always want to understand things.

This curiosity has served me well in my life and career.  When I first joined Marathon Oil about 35 years ago, I found a copy of a book the company had commissioned on its history called Portrait in Oil on a bookshelf in my work area.  I took it home and read it.  It provided some great insight into the company I had just joined and how it came to be what it was.

In those days Marathon was located in a small town in Ohio about 45 miles from the Toledo Airport.  Often, a group of us would make the trip to the airport in a company car.  When I had been with the company for about three months, I had a conversation about the company with a fairly senior executive who was sitting in the back seat with me on one of those trips.

He said, “How long did you say you were with us?”  I said, “Three months.”  He said, “You know more about this company than a lot of people who have worked here for 10 years or more.  How did you learn all this stuff?”

I told him that I read Portrait in Oil and the company’s annual reports for the past five years.  He was impressed.  After he got back from his trip, he invited me to his office.  He became my mentor, helping advance in the company – all because I was curious about the company I joined and took the time to learn more about it.

My sister is like me.  Betty is a CPA who has developed a specialty in Sarbanes Oxley or SOX– the law which set new or enhanced standards for all U.S public company boards, management and public accounting firms. It was a reaction to a number of major corporate accounting scandals at companies like Enron, Tyco, Adelphia, and World com. Basically, the law was passed so senior executives like Ken Lay and Dennis Kozlowski could not say that they were unaware of some shady dealings carried out by the people who worked for them.

Most people considered SOX to be a headache, and more work for accounting and internal audit departments.  Betty saw it as an opportunity.  She delved into the Code of Federal Regulations, curious to learn about the new law and how it applied to her company.  She became and expert and saved her company a couple hundred thousand of dollars in outside accounting fees the first year the law went into effect.  Her curiosity got her a nice bonus and promotion.

There are plenty of opportunities to learn and grow.  All you have to do is look around you.  Be curious.  Learn everything you can and you’ll be on the road to the life and career success you deserve.

The career success coach point here is simple common sense.  Curiosity didn’t kill the cat it helped her create the life and career success she deserves.  Successful people are curious.  They want to learn everything they can about the important things that affect their life and career success.  Be curious.  Learn something new as often as you can.  Put these learnings to work in your life and career and you’ll succeed.  I guarantee it – after all it’s only common sense.

That’s my career advice on curiosity.  What do you think?  Please take a minute to share your thoughts with us in a comment.  Better yet, please share a situation in which your curiosity paid off for you in your life and career.  As always, thanks for reading my daily thoughts on life and career success.  I value you and I appreciate you.

Bud

PS: If you haven’t already done so, please download a free copy of my popular career advice book Success Tweets and its companion piece Success Tweets Explained.  The first gives you 140 bits of career success advice tweet style — in 140 characters or less.  The second is a whopping 390 + pages of career advice explaining each of the common sense tweets in Success Tweets in detail.  Go to http://budurl.com/STExp to claim your free copy.  You’ll also start receiving my daily life and career success quotes.

PPS: I opened a membership site last September.  It’s called My Corporate Climb and is devoted to helping people create career success inside large corporations.  You can find out about the membership site by going to http://www.mycorporateclimb.

Competence is one of the four common sense coach keys to career success that I discuss in my new book Success Tweets: 140 Bits of Common Sense Career Success Advice, All in 140 Characters or Less.  You can purchase a copy of Success Tweets on Amazon.com or at your local bookstore, or better yet, you can download it for free at www.SuccessTweets.com.

If you want to create the life and career success you want and deserve, you need to develop four basic but important competencies: 1) creating positive personal impact; 2) becoming a consistently high performer; 3) communication skills; and 4) relationship building.

You create positive personal impact in three ways.  1) Developing and nurturing your unique personal brand.  2) Being impeccable in your presentation of self – in person and on line.  3) Knowing and following the basic rules of etiquette.

Today’s career advice on personal branding comes from Tweet 62 in Success Tweets…

Your personal brand should be uniquely you, but built on integrity.  Integrity is doing the right thing when no one is looking.

There are two common sense steps for developing and nurturing your personal brand.

• Figure out how you want people to think of you.
• Consistently and constantly act in a manner that will lead them to think of you that way.

While your brand should reflect you and your uniqueness, it has to be built on integrity.  According to Wikipedia, “Integrity is consistency of actions, values, methods, measures and principles.”  Integrity and consistency are intertwined.  People who are consistent in their actions are seen as people with a high degree of integrity.

Oprah says, “Real integrity is doing the right thing, knowing that nobody’s going to know whether you did it or not.”  This is true.  If you practice situational ethics – doing the right thing only when you’re in the public eye — you aren’t really a person of high integrity, you’re just pretending to be one.

Besides, it’s hard to act one way in public, and another in private.  So to be safe, resolve to act like Oprah.  Do the right thing because it’s the right thing to do – not because you’ll get credit, or avoid getting into trouble.

John Maxwell is a well known business author.  One of his books sends the same message.  It’s called There’s No Such Thing As Business Ethics: There’s Only One Rule for Making Decisions.  According to John, that rule is the Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”  In other words, do the right thing.

There’s a practical side to this too.  Mark Twain once said, “If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.”  In other words, if you’re always a person of high integrity, it’s easy to be a person of high integrity; there are no complicating factors – like remembering what you did or said in a given situation.

Polonius gave similar advice to Hamlet.  “To thine own self be true, and it must follow as the day the night, thou canst be false to no man.”  Roy Blackman, my father in law, passed away a few years ago.  This quote was his epitaph.  It was on the program handed out at his funeral.  Roy embodied it in how he lived his life.  It was the only piece of advice he gave his grandson, Matt, as he went off to college.

Oprah, John Maxwell, Mark Twain and Shakespeare are all in agreement on one common sense piece of career advice.  If you want to become known as a person of high integrity – and integrity is the cornerstone of any personal brand – act as a person of high integrity all the times – not just when it suits you, or when someone might notice.

Here’s a story to illustrate this point.  Cathy, my wife, was a flight attendant for 36 years.  Seniority is a very important thing in the airline industry.  It governs how you bid for trips, positions on the airplane and vacations – almost anything important to a flight attendant’s quality of work life.

Cathy was very active in her union.  And seniority was one of the union’s most sacred principles.  A few years before she retired, Cathy’s airline made a big push into the international market.  International flights were plum assignments, they went to people with high seniority. 

However, the airline realized that it would be to their advantage to have some flight attendants who spoke the language of the country to which they were flying on these international flights.  Most flight attendants in her airline spoke English only.  The airline proposed putting two “language speakers” on each international flight.  Many people, including Cathy, were upset with this arrangement as they felt it violated the seniority concept.

Cathy used to fly from the US to London.  One day I said to her, “This whole language speaker issue doesn’t really affect you.  You fly to London, there are no language speakers on those flights.  Why do you care so much?”  She said, “I believe in the concept of seniority.  It doesn’t matter if I’m affected by language speakers.  It’s the principal of the thing.”  That’s consistency – and integrity — in action.

On the other hand, there’s Tiger Woods.  Tiger had one of the best personal brands in the world.  He earned close to $100 million in 2009 on it.  He will earn a lot less in 2010.  If you were following the news in late 2009 and early 2010, (how could you miss it) you know that the Tiger brand is in serious jeopardy because of some of his indiscretions which have come to light. 

Sadly for Tiger, his integrity is now in question – and that’s being kind.  His wife has left him, taking the kids.  Several sponsors have dropped him.  And, his golf game is suffering.  I’m not writing this post to pass judgment on Tiger – enough people have done that already.  I am writing it however, to reinforce my point of building your personal brand on integrity.

The common sense career success coach point here is simple.  Creating positive personal impact is one of the competencies all successful people possess.  You create positive personal impact by developing and nurturing your unique personal brand, being impeccable in your presentation of self, and knowing and following the basic rules of etiquette.  Your personal brand should be uniquely you, but it should be built on integrity.  Follow the career advice in Tweet 62 in Success Tweets.  “Your personal brand should be uniquely you, but built on integrity.  Integrity is doing the right thing when no one is looking.  As Tiger Woods’s case demonstrates, a lack of integrity can lead to serious consequences for a carefully crafted brand.  Now, everyone is looking at Tiger and most people aren’t liking what they’re seeing.  So take a lesson from Tiger – one he’s learning the hard way — build your personal brand on integrity.

That’s my take on the career advice in Tweet 62 in Success Tweets.  What’s yours?  Please leave a comment sharing your thoughts with us.  As always, thanks for reading.

Bud