Making Yourself Successful

I’ve always been a firm believer that “luck” is something you create. I’m not necessarily talking about making your own “luck” by winning the lottery. Winning a drawling doesn’t require much luck at all it’s a random selection where as making your own “luck” is doing everything in your power to make your self successful.

When I decided to try and find a career that interested me I didn’t have to look very far. Sports were my passion and I knew I was extremely knowledgeable about that profession.

I thought to myself “What separates me from these guys on ESPN, CBS, Fox Sports, or even the local beat writer for the minor league hockey team?” I knew just as much about the topics they were talking about, the plays they were breaking down, the teams they were analyzing. Why did they have such positions of power? How could I try and duplicate what they were doing only being a Florida Gulf Coast University student?

I quickly reached out to the Florida Everblades, a minor league hockey team near my university and became the right hand man to the broadcaster and public relations manager.

I learned a great deal of things while I was apart of the Everblades and took pride in the work I completed while I was with the organization. One thing was clear to me after my experience in the sports industry. That was it wasn’t something I wanted to be apart of. As a kid I remember watching the movie “Jerry Maguire” and the famous line “show me the money.” I soon learned sport was only about one thing… the money.

After that experience, I learned that I enjoyed writing and reporting about games, players, and teams a lot more than being the guy working the in’s and out’s of a franchise. But I thought to myself “Why the heck are people going to want to read my evaluation over professionally written and published work?”

I was unsure what to do until a friend of mine told me “Jeff, why don’t you start a blog? It would be great for your portfolio.”

Eureka! Why didn’t I think of that in the first place! Some downsides to that were, I knew very little about blogging, social media, and advertising. But never the less I gave it a whirl.

The day everything changed. My Public Relations Strategies class was having a guest presenter about social media. He owned his own company that managed other company’s websites, showed them how to increase traffic, and to be able to easily update statuses on facebook, twitter, linkedin, blogger.com, and many more with one click of the mouse. I was hooked and quickly began to search for more knowledge on this topic.