Many of us mistake the fantasies we have about the careers we aspire to with the way things really are. 

We're drawn to the glamor of what's portrayed in the movies, but real life is in many ways the opposite of that.

Film director Alfred Hitchcock famously said that, "Drama is life with the dull parts cut out”. 

The process of designing your career is about the dull, dogged, step-by-step work you need to do in order to build a strong foundation.

By this point you should have a clearer idea of your vision, mission and values, and you should be raring to go. This is the foundation of your career.

The next step now is to become an industry expert, so that you can begin positioning yourself as a specialised consultant within a specific industry.

Becoming an expert is the process of researching a specific topic for a long enough period of time until that topic becomes fully embedded into your mind.

Think about learning to drive a car for example. There are so many different things to comprehend when you’re starting out, and it can all be quite overwhelming.

Most driving instructors will typically advise that it will take you at least 40 hours of professional tuition before you’re ready to pass your test.

However, once you do pass your test and become a car owner, the difficulties you were once experiencing during your driving lessons now seem to magically disappear.

Driving eventually becomes effortless, and now seems to require very little brain power.

That’s because through the many hours of practice and repetition during your driving lessons your conscious mind has now managed to re-programme your subconscious mind so the activity of driving now seems effortless.

You therefore become an expert driver.

The same thing applies in your career and business. 

Research is the next level of your career development, after your vision, mission and values, in which you must spend a considerable amount of time and focus into becoming an expert in your chosen niche.

The mistake that most people make when developing their careers or business, is that they don’t give this ‘research phase’ the focus and private study time it deserves. 

This part of the course is hugely important to your success, in which you’ll learn how to focus your research.

There are four areas where you want to be focusing your research: 

• Product development
• Competitor research
• Industry research
• And customer research

We’ll be looking at each of these in more detail in the next few lessons.