Note: This is a guest post by Scot Herrick from Cube Rules.

A career is a long time. It is a marathon, not a sprint. To continue a fulfilling career requires reviewing what work you enjoy as your life changes over time. While periodically reviewing your work and your interests make sense, of course, the review does nothing to create the engine that drives a fulfilling career.

That engine needs to be working every day. The marathon completes one step at a time. In a career, the engine that drives your fulfillment is a simple formula:

Skills + Performance = Opportunities

While simple, the formula is a powerful method of driving your career.

Your Job Skills Are the Foundation

At the most fundamental level, hiring managers want you to work for them because you have the skills to do the work needed. Without the baseline skills for a job, there can be no fulfilling career.

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Time moves fast and now we have only four months left in 2008. I don’t know about you, but for me it’s a wake-up call reminding me that 2008 will soon pass. If you have goals you want to achieve this year, it’s time to evaluate where you currently are and to use the time left as good as possible.

The theme for this month is Fulfilling Career. Here we will discuss topics such as career planning, how to find and follow our calling, and how to get the most out of our work.

Let’s look back at what happened in August.

Best Posts

There were 13 posts published in August nine of which were related to the monthly theme of Relationships. The most visited posts were:

• How Personal Growth Can Uncover a Toxic Relationship
• How to Manage a Long Distance Relationship
• 7 Characteristics of Good Relationships

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Since I’m in the business of creating ideas (mainly for this blog), I’m always interested in books about idea creation. Recently I found a book on this topic entitled The Medici Effect: What Elephants and Epidemics Can Teach Us About Innovation by Frans Johansson.

Medici Effect is the name given by the author for the explosion of remarkable innovations at the place where different fields meet. The place itself is called the Intersection. Here is the main idea of the book:

The idea behind this book is simple: When you step into an intersection of fields, disciplines, or cultures, you can combine existing concepts into a large number of extraordinary new ideas.

It’s definitely something that interests me. Let’s dig deeper into the book.

Inside The Medici Effect

The book is divided into three parts with a total of fifteen chapters.

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Note: This is a guest post by Alaia Williams from One Organized Life

Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive.
Anäis Nin

Friendships are incredibly important. At certain stages in our lives, friendships are everything to us – the most important thing in our lives. Friendships help define us. Our friends can influence our choices – where we live, what we eat, what we buy.  Friendships grow and change as people come and grow. There is old proverb that says, “friends are flowers in the garden of life.”  Friendships need their own kind of water and soil to grow healthy and strong.  The following are 25 things to keep in mind to facilitate building stronger friendships.

1. Choose friends wisely. You do not have to be everyone’s friend. Choose to be friends with people who build you up, not tear you down. Choose friends who inspire you and welcome you, not alienate and insult you. You can’t choose the family you are born into, but you can choose your friends. Read the complete article »

The only way to have a friend is to be one.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

We all want to have true friends, but the quality of our friends depend on us. If you want to have true friends, you should be a true friend yourself. By being a true friend, people will love to be around you and many of them will eventually become your true friends.

In addition, being a true friend is a good way to solve relationship problems. It’s difficult to change other people, but you can always change yourself. You can then solve the otherwise unsolved problems in relationships.

Here I’d like to share 17 tips to become a true friend. It may take years to learn to apply them but they are essential to boost your relationships.

Here they are:

1. Befriend yourself

Friendship with oneself is all important, because without it one cannot be friends with anyone else in the world.
Eleanor Roosevelt

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Do you want to live your life to the fullest? If your answer is yes, then relationships are essential part of it. In fact, relationships should be your top priority. That’s why we all need to learn how to build good relationships. Good relationships not only help us meet our needs but also make our life more fulfilling.

One way to build good relationships is by learning their characteristics. By understanding their characteristics, we will be better equipped to build good relationships in our lives.

Here I use the term “relationships” in its broad meaning. Why? Because the principles of good relationships are universal. They apply not only to romantic relationships, but also to friendship and business relationships.

If you look at the points below, you will see an underlying characteristic of good relationships. Good relationships involve “both sides”. While one side can take initiative, it still requires the other side to make the relationship a good one. Only by working together can a relationship reach its full potential.

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