Because She Said So! Mom's Advice for Your Career

CareerBuilder.com

Whether you're fresh out of college or the president of a Fortune 500 company, we all need advice from time to time. Consultants, attorneys and advisers are ready to offer advice at every turn. But some of the most important career advice you will likely ever receive didn't come from a mentor or boss, it came from your mother.

Tried and true, mom's wisdom and advice is the kind you can take to the bank. Here are 11 things mom taught you:

On Education:
If you get a good education, you'll always have something to fall back on. Like your mother, the U.S. Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics says that education is essential in getting a high-paying job. In fact, for all but one of the 50 highest paying occupations, a college degree or higher is the most significant source of education or training. The labor market favors college graduates: They earn more and experience lower unemployment rates than workers without a degree do. Whether or not you use what you learned in school, without that degree you might not get past the first screening.

On Work Ethic:
If something is worth doing, it's worth doing right. What separates the winners from the runners-up is the effort and precision a person puts into meeting and often exceeding expectations, doing a job well and without error.

On Experience:
Practice makes perfect. Whether it was playing the piano or doing a pirouette, mom always knew that repetition and frequency led to a consistent and ideal performance. The more often you do something, the more opportunities you have to learn from your mistakes and perfect your performance.

On the Company You Keep:
Surround yourself with good people. If you supervise others, the very best thing you can do is hire the very best employees. Not only will they do their job well, they'll make your workload easier and will help you and your entire department look good. As an employee, surrounding yourself with upbeat, positive and supportive friends and co-workers will help you succeed.

On Your Decisions:
Trust your instincts. Many successful executives will talk about following their gut when it came down to big decisions about people or business strategy. Legendary CEOs like Herb Kelleher of Southwest Airlines and GE's Jack Welch attribute much of their business and management skill to simple gut instinct.

On the Future:
Don't be "now" oriented; you need to focus on the future. While it used to drive one daughter crazy as a teenager, she followed her mom's advice as an adult: When she made choices, she considered the short- and long-term consequences of her actions and decisions. Today she's a successful sales manager at a global company.

On Finance:
Save for a rainy day. Chances are, your mother was your first financial adviser. She reminded you to save for a rainy day when you got our allowance and wanted to blow it on a new skateboard or the latest album. She knew someday you'd want to buy a car, have your own TV or need a deposit for your first apartment.

On Maintaining Focus:
Always walk with a purpose. Every step you take in life leads you somewhere. If you walk in the direction of your goal with a lively step and focused mind, you're likely to get there faster.

On Determination:
If you set your mind to it, you can do anything. No one ever believed in you more than mom. Through 8th grade algebra tests, SATs and ACTs, your senior thesis and first job, mother always encouraged you to believe in yourself. It's this positive attitude and big thinking that gave entrepreneurs like Starbucks' chairman and founder Howard Shultz and JetBlue's CEO and founder David Neeleman the courage to pursue their ideas and create successful and growing businesses.

On Monotony:
If you do what you've always done, you'll get what you've always gotten. Going to work every day with the "same thing, different day" attitude is exactly what your mother warned you about. If you want your life to be different, you have to do something different. That could mean taking the steps to look for a new and more challenging job, gaining a new skill that advances your career, or looking for a way to do your job better or differently. As Albert Einstein put it, "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."

On Having a Dream:
Forget that you ever heard anyone say you can't have your cake and eat it too. Many moms convinced us that the world was our oyster. Today as you struggle to balance career and a family, work towards your first million or dream about retiring while you're still young enough to enjoy it, focus on these five simple words: You can have it all.