What do your business cards say about you?

Having just returned from a string of recent conferences, I now have a stack of business cards to follow-up on. But this recent rush of business cards also got me thinking —

What are the origins behind this most compulsory business practice? Wikipedia says:

Business cards evolved from a fusion of traditional trade cards and visiting cards.

Visiting cards (also known as calling cards) first appeared in China in the 15th century, and in Europe in the 17th century. The footmen of aristocrats and of royalty would deliver these first European visiting cards to the servants of their prospective hosts solemnly introducing their arrival.

Visiting cards became an indispensable tool of etiquette, with sophisticated rules governing their use. The aristocracies of North America and the rest of Europe adopted the practice from French and English etiquette.

What are the top 5 things you should think about for your business card?

My suggestions:

1. It should be professional in its design. The card should show you mean business. Does your card say “I am a professional”?

2. Be creative, but don’t go nuts. I suggest you use a non-shiny finish. There is nothing more terrible than trying to scribble some notes on the card only to have your comments smudged.

3. Skip the pictures. Unless you are magazine model material. While it can help people remember your face, it can also be used to discriminate against you.  The odds are equal it could go both ways.

4. Does it have all of you key information? Email address, website, work telephone, cell number and address are a given. You would be surprised how many don’t.

5. Not sure printing your info vertically or using unusual cut cards gains you anything. Ok, it does stand out for the first minute, but after that it can almost be annoying.

If at first you don’t succeed, you’re not the first

We all want to be successful at whatever we do.  But the reality is there is only first place trophy.  Hence, a key element in any career development is the ability to accept failure, analysis the core drivers behind that failure, adjust, and move on.

If you are recently had a stumble in your career, take heart that you’re in some very good company.  For example:

• Thomas Edison is believed to have gone through over 1,000 tries before inventing the light bulb, this after being fired from his first two jobs for being “non-productive.”
• Dr. Seuss suffer through 27 rejections on his childrens book concept.
• J. K. Rowling’s – Harry Potter book concept was rejected by 12 publishers before a small London house took a gamble and picked it up
• Michael Jordan was cut from his high-school varsity basketball team
• Winston Churchill failed the sixth grade. His record in politics wasn’t much better as he was defeated in every election for public office until he became Prime Minister at the age of 62.
• Decca Records turned down a potential contract with the Beatles because they “don’t like their sound”.
• Henry Ford failed and went broke five times before he finally succeeded.
• Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak’s concept that was to become the Apple computer was rejected by both Atari and Hewlett-Packard.
• R. H. Macy failed seven times before his store in New York City became a success.
• Julie Andrews was told at 12 she was “not photogenic enough for film.”
• F. W. Woolworth, in his early days working in a dry goods store wasn’t allowed to wait on customers because, his boss said, “he didn’t have enough sense.”
• Of all the famous people who succeeded through failures, Walt Disney may get the silver medal. He was fired by a newspaper editor because “he lacked imagination and had no good ideas.” He went bankrupt several times before he built Disneyland. The original proposal for the first amusement park was rejected by the city of Anaheim on the grounds that it would only attract “riffraff”.
• But the gold medal goes to Abraham Lincoln. He started his military career as a captain and ended as a private. As a lawyer in Springfield, he was considered too impractical and temperamental to achieve any success. Upon turning to politics, he was defeated in his first try for the legislature, lost his first attempt to be nominated for congress, lost in a bid to become commissioner of the General Land Office, was defeated in the senatorial election of 1854, was rejected in his efforts to be vice-presidency in 1856, and defeated a second time in the senatorial election of 1858. Among one of his most famous quotes contained in a letter to a friend, “I am now the most miserable man living. If what I feel were equally distributed to the whole human family, there would not be one cheerful face on the earth.”

And here is a link to a long list of those who succeeded despite early failure (click here).  If there was one common trait you see across all of these people — each of them seems to have had a persistent, unshakable belief that helped them keep going and beat the odds.

If there is a checklist on how to understand failure and learn from it, it might look like this:

• Don’t assume you’ll never get another job/chance to win the club championship/have a new boyfriend/etc just because the last effort didn’t work out
• Objectively assess what caused the lack of success, which factors are under your control, which weren’t
• Calculate whether more training, hard work, some coaching, or just plain old perseverance will be enough for you to succeed next time
• Figure out how much it’s worth to you to succeed.  Only you can decide if the price is too high.
• Accept that failure is part of the journey to success…

and then, dust yourself off, and get back in there Champ…