Now or never

Opportunities for success are within reach for all those who develop these 3 essential skills for the 21st-century professional: constant learning, building a network of collaborators, and perseverance.

Would you join a project that excites you and rewards you with prestige and money, at the cost of sacrificing a large part of your time and freedom? The "yes" requires a personal sacrifice; the "no" means letting a train pass that you don't know if it will ever return. It's a difficult decision, as the alternatives are not equivalent.

The success of a professional career is the result of an accumulation of professional and personal dilemmas in which we choose using intelligence and probability calculation. There are excellent decisions and others that could be improved; mediocre decisions and bad decisions. But all are difficult, and you always learn. And do you know which is the worst? The one that is not made. It's also the one you regret the most. Because when we decide, we take control of our own lives; we get emotionally involved and can feel joy, love, pain, and anger. To feel is to live. To participate is to live. To decide is to live.

Surely on some occasion you have had a premonition that you were facing a good opportunity, but you didn't go for it. But now is not the time for lamentations, you still have many opportunities ahead.

This book talks about mistakes as learning opportunities and learning as great steps towards success. And it explains hundreds of stories of people who, like any of us, experience daily successes and failures, and how they repeatedly created quality opportunities to take advantage of the trains that then passed; people who were heroes when they needed to be, because they knew it was their "Now."

Based on her extensive professional experience as a head-hunter and personal branding specialist, and with the revealing testimony of many people who have been able to give a new impulse to their careers, Arancha Ruiz offers the keys to successfully seize opportunities and overcome obstacles and adversaries.