Five bad career advices you need to unlearn to succeed

Advices can be found aplenty, mainly because everyone is free to give it. Few of them carry any real weight, though. The rest are all clichés. These five career advices are perhaps the worst pieces of advices you may have heard, and should probably choose to ignore, for your own good.

1. Find Your Passion As A Job

Urban India is obsessed with the idea that the best jobs are the ones that fuel our "passion" and make us happy and successful. But there's a problem: It's a sucky piece of advice! First, let's start by defining what exactly is passion? Passion is found by first building a rare and valuable talent and using it to take control of your career path. In other words, be so good and work so hard that no one can ignore you.

Telling people to follow their passions (without any other advice or guidance) simply sends them on a dream chase which may prove to be harmful to their careers in the long-run. Passion is a great thing to have, but must be accompanied by determination, creativity, talent, and strategy in order to help someone establish a suitable career path.

2. Have A Career Plan

This is one archaic piece of advice you shouldn't even bother looking at. The outdated word here is 'plan'. Today you need career paths or career strategies but not a plan; neither a short term nor a long term plan, but evolving and adaptive trajectories. You never know if the next big opportunity of your life might come at a bar, and you might turn it down thinking it is not part of the 'plan'. Our word of advice: just keep swimming and keep a lookout for all possible opportunities. They won't come in bubble wraps!

3. Be Competent And Confident And It Will All Come To You

That ship sailed a long time back. Had it been the 1980s, it would have been enough but now being competent and confident doesn't even guarantee a decent pay packet, let alone make you successful. Then what is the current mantra? Whatever you choose to do, be ravishingly good at it!

4. Stop Goofing Around With Your Friends So You Can Study For Your Exam

Most academically strong institutions like Harvard inculcate the strongest of interpersonal relationships. Basically, networking and having warm relationships has a high correlation to living a long, happy, successful life. And guess what? It does not interfere with your raw intelligence, unless you choose to. So while we would not suggest bunking classes, we would recommend doubling up on the relationship-building. Go to that party, make that lunch date, and introduce yourself to strangers.

5. Work Hard And You Will Be Successful

Sorry fellas, but working hard to be successful is so passé. Many people work 16 hours a day and still struggle having to feed their family.
Consider a small time shopkeeper in Chandni Chowk, New Delhi who sells garments all day long. Working hard won't help him compete with his multi-million dollar competitors. Today, time is a limited commodity. An entrepreneur can work 24 hours a day and 7 days a week (the most amount of time anyone can work, really), but his or her competitor can always spend more money, build a bigger team and spend a lot more time on the same project. But some small startups have accomplished things that larger corporations couldn't? Facebook bought Instagram, a 13-employee company for a billion dollars. Snapchat, a young startup with 30 employees is turning down offers from tech giants Facebook and Google. Is their success based on hard work purely, or efficiency? You choose!