• What Is OWN?
    Watch the preview!
    GO
  • Get Happy!
    Discover your joy in our Spirit newsletter
    GO
  • New Video
    Stories of Africa through children's eyes
    GO

How to Be a Star at Work: 7 Rules for a Really Big Career

By Cathie Black

Rule 2: The worst-case scenario is rarely as bad as you think.


Wrong.

Within three months of moving to San Francisco, having hauled all my furniture out there and signed a year's lease on an apartment, I could tell the magazine wasn't going to survive. In fact, five months into it, I was so sure the magazine was collapsing that I resigned and went on a skiing vacation. Sure enough, while I was away a colleague called to tell me the magazine had been shut down, with only a note posted at the entrance telling employees that the last issue had been printed and they didn't have jobs anymore.

Talk about a worst-case scenario. Here I was in California with no job, and no real job prospects. It would have been easy to sink into frustration at this turn of events. Instead, I started making calls to reestablish my contacts in New York and to tell people I was on my way back. And as luck would have it, I was able to convince the publisher of Ms. to create a position that would broaden my responsibilities beyond ad sales.

A couple of years later, I had a conversation with Rupert Murdoch. At the time, Murdoch owned just a handful of U.S. media properties, though now he's perhaps the world's biggest media baron. He wanted to know about my decision to go to California. "Would you say that's the biggest mistake you ever made?" he asked.

"No," I told him. "I don't think it was a mistake at all." Murdoch looked at me with surprise. But I really didn't think so—not then and not now. As easy as it would have been to berate myself for pursuing a venture that ultimately failed, I still got a lot out of the experience. I scratched an itch I'd had to move out West and try something new, I made some valuable contacts, and I really enjoyed my six months in San Francisco.

So don't handicap yourself by focusing on the aspects of a gamble you took that didn't work out. Focus instead on what you learned from the things that went wrong, and how you can use that knowledge to your advantage.



Adapted from Basic Black: The Essential Guide for Getting Ahead at Work (and in Life), by Cathie Black. Copyright © 2007 Cathleen Black. Published by Crown Business, a division of Random House.