Advice Written on the Back of a Business Card: Leaders Share Their Most Valued Words of Wisdom, Intuition, and Guidance

By Roger D Smith

Step confidently into your professional journey with a pocket-sized compass of wisdom, Advice Written on the Back of a Business Card. This indispensable guide distills the collective genius of over 250 seasoned professionals across various industries, offering a mosaic of insights you can carry on your ascent to success

• Language: English
• Publisher: Modelbenders LLC
• Release date: Jun 1, 2023
• ISBN: 9781938590184

Roger D Smith

Roger Smith, Ph.D., has over 30 years of experience creating leading-edge software applications in healthcare, defense, and education. He served as an executive Chief Technology Officer for AdventHealth Systems; U.S. Army Simulation, Training and Instrumentation (PEO-STRI); and the Titan Division of L3Harris Corp. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science, a Doctorate in Management, an MBA, an M.S. in Statistics, and a B.S. in Applied Mathematics. He has received service awards from the US Army, Association for Computing Machinery, Society for Computer Simulation, and AFCEA.

Book preview

Introduction

What advice would you write on the back of your business card?

Leaders and successful people in every industry and profession are eager and willing to share their advice on success, effectiveness, and moral principles with the generation that is coming after them. They remember all of the mistakes that they made in their careers. They have learned a number of valuable principles that would have been very helpful to them in the early years of their careers.

This book is a collection of over 200 pieces of advice from the people that do the hiring, firing, and promoting in hundreds of organizations. If you want to know what it takes to get ahead or where your priorities should be at work and in life, then you need to read this book carefully and put these words of advice to work.

Each of these leaders was presented with the question:

Imagine that you are about to give your business card to a young person entering your profession. But first, you turn that card over and write a short piece of advice to help them get started in their career. What would you write on the back of your own business card to help them?

Their answers are short, quick, and to the point. These are the words that each of them would willingly associate with their name and position by penning it to the back of their own business card. Some leaders chose to quote from famous sources. Some expressed their own unique moral, social, and business principles.

How to Use This Advice

All of this advice is true, useful, and effective … for different people, at different times, and in different situations. Some of the entries are contradictory, but that does not make any of them less true or less useful. These leaders spent 20, 30, or 40 years learning these lessons in real situations. Some learned by their own trial and error. Some learned from the experience of people who went before them. Some learned from a book just like this one. But all of them offered these as the most important single thing they would share with a young person entering their field.

You can learn many of these lessons yourself by reading this book rather than through your own personal trial and error. But this book is not a novel or a how-to guide. No one can read straight through over 200 unique pieces of advice and say, there, I understand all of them and am ready to use them in my life. You cannot digest the life experiences of 200 people who each have at least 20 years of experience. That is over 4,000 years of human life filled with different challenges, mistakes, and triumphs. After reading 200 of these gems you will remember a few and will find an immediate opportunity to use fewer still.

To really benefit from all that this book has to offer you need to consult it many times. As you find yourself in situations calling for help and guidance in each of the areas, you can dip into the advice and find that the words mean much more when you are dealing with a similar challenge.

You can also jump randomly from page to page sampling different ideas and stumbling over some that are meaningful to you right now, but which did not make an impression the first time you read them. This kind of situational meaning is common with all lessons in morals, philosophy, psychology, and theology.

Your goal in buying this book is not to read it completely or to read it quickly. Your goal is to benefit from the advice of experienced people who have been through the same situations that you face. The value you get from applying one idea is much greater than the value of having read all of them quickly.

There are over 200 experienced leaders waiting in the following pages. Each of them offers their best words of advice to you. They are here to make you more successful and effective in your career and your life. Now it is your turn to make the most of this opportunity to learn from them.

Chapter 1

ACTIONS

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Bill is an incredibly diverse executive and technologist. But even he realizes that people have a limited amount of time and energy. We all have the talent to do anything we want, but none of us has the time and energy to do everything we can think of. Choose your most precious anything and do not let the ocean of everything overwhelm you.

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Brett has learned a lesson that goes back to Biblical times, "Give, and it will be given to you. A good measure,