The bigger we dream and the more splendid our vision, the more opportunities come our way. These opportunities could be academic research or scholarship possibilities, career opportunities, or even the creation of magnificent things with our own hands; no external help is required, although teams make brilliant things naturally.
I won a scholarship, and I’ll tell you how I won that scholarship so that you can win that scholarship, too, and how I’m using that same strategy to ideally get a six-figure salary career, which I want you to earn, too, if it’s your goal. For that scholarship, I laid out my ten-year, detailed, meticulous education plan, with certificates I intend to earn and complete within time frames that would take me to the big vision: a CMO role at a big public company. And I won the scholarship. We can all win awards for anything we focus on, and for some of those certificates, setting our sights to the pinnacle of success, along with a carefully mapped ten-year goal, can catapult us to an award.
However, yesterday, I heard that Chipotle Grill’s CEO, who is gifted with marketing skills, moved to Starbucks, where its stock added about twenty billion in market cap. That means the guy rocks and his marketing skills make for a great CEO. My goal is to move one day from CMO to CEO of a public company. However, we’d likely need an engineering degree to be the CEO of an oil and gas firm. To be a CMO in oil and gas, at the very least, we’ll need to learn futures trading for oil and gas commodities. Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) has free courses that can teach this futures-trading skill. However, growth is in climate policy, nuclear (to fuel AI data centers), and Software as a Service, especially AI. These are all significant areas to focus on, as they hold great opportunities. The power of being good at what we do is critical.
Today, I was shortlisted for a job paying between $100,000 and $150,000 a year. I need to create a video response to the interview questions. So, my goal is to nail it. How do we nail something like this? One way is to take a vision for the company that ideally is to be “the best” or the company vision statement and let that guide the magnificence. I’ve also been studying a project management textbook, giving me a giant edge in how I relay corporate strategy. And the book is fun to read, too. I recommend reading the textbook if we’re gunning for a managerial role: An Introduction to Project Management, Seventh Edition: Predictive, Agile, and Hybrid Approaches by Kathy Schwalbe.
So, I created a video for my interview submission and added music and a cinematic color effect. I’ve got this nailed if the HR department or corporate owner likes a soft-spoken, strategic smiling female. If they want a rugged male with a penchant for alcohol, as it’s a male-dominated rough and tumble industry, I don’t stand a chance. We all face an element of luck when striving for the top, but much of it is in our control, especially when we’re committed to constant education and growth.
Later that night, we watched a movie (to see the video ad we made for the theatre pre-show). The movie MaXXXine is about a highly ambitious actress, and although I found the movie disturbing, I liked when she said to “never give up, work hard, and do whatever it takes,” and when she said her daddy’s phrase, “I will not accept a life I do not deserve.” In other words, we all deserve the gold and shouldn’t accept anything less. She also tells the women auditioning for her role, “You all might as well go home because I just [bleep] nailed it,” and then she says, “I’m a [beep] movie star.”
So, I’m saying to myself, “I’m a [pause] CMO.” I think the movie set me backward miles spiritually and was unsettling, but it had some great positive self-talk in terms of ambitions. And the star did nail it with her performance. However, the R rating of the movie is problematic for me. That’s because the magnificent, incredibly spiritual, enlightened Reverend Howard Storm, who died and alleges he temporarily went into hell and then heaven, warned that the demons sexualized him, eventually penetrating every orifice in his body, including his eye sockets, literally tearing him apart. That’s where I fear immoral sexuality may lead the human soul. That’s not the goal.
