All is Fair in Job Searches & War

Over the past 30 years, the job market has changed radically. Your parents often would stay at one job for a lifetime, but you have been forced to accommodate yourself to a world of great instability.

Over the course of your life, you will inevitably find yourself switching from job to job, sometimes making sharp turns in your career path. With the increase in mobility, however, comes great danger.

More than ever, people - particularly those in their 30s and 40s - end up in careers they never intended to follow, hitting dead-ends or working in places that are unsuited to their talents.

Because the job market has changed, you must change how you think about it. You must become more strategic, reassessing where you are and where you are headed, resisting the tide that causes you to drift. In my book "The 33 Strategies of War," I make the case that war is a chaotic and unpredictable environment and that it is only through disciplined strategic thinking that a commander can gain control and respond rationally to events instead of being at their mercy. Think of yourself as a kind of commander of your energies and destiny. Here are key strategies featured in the book that can help you gain control over your career path:

Use grand strategy to guide your choices: In war, the highest form of planning and operating is known as grand strategy. It involves thinking in terms of a campaign toward important goals. What matters is winning the overall war, not individual battles that lead nowhere.

This is how you must approach your life.

First, you must take a step back from your current career situation and think deeply about your particular talents and energies - what you believe you were destined to achieve in life. You must imagine where you want to be in 10 or 20 years. Focusing intensely on the future, you can work backward and evaluate the present.

For instance, the job you are in now might seem comfortable or lucrative, but where will it leave you in five years? Seen in this light, jobs that might offer more money or a friendly environment can be turned down because they do not mesh with your long-term goals. Having a much clearer sense of where you want to be in the future will allow you to make more rational career decisions in the present.

Concentrate your forces: A common mistake people make in reaction to the chaos of the present is to split their talents and energies in many directions, hoping to make it somewhere, to widen connections and to make the situation less boring.

It is the career equivalent of multitasking.

This can work when you are in your 20s, but it must be jettisoned as you get older. You are wasting valuable time and energy.

It is far better to find one place and one person to attach yourself to, and allow yourself to widen your connections from within, like a tree laying deep roots. One of those four jobs you're juggling has the potential for something greater than all of them combined.

It is often necessary to take a cut in pay that such a move entails. Look at people who have had success in life. Either by accident or by design, they hit upon one brilliant opportunity and mined it all the way, instead of flitting about from one idea to the next.

Do not fight the last war: These scenarios are extremely common these days: A successful salesman in a brokerage firm suddenly finds himself promoted to upper management. A lawyer changes careers and ends up in an executive position.

In these examples, the people will tend to bring the talents and skills they had developed earlier - being a smooth salesman, being a hard-nosed lawyer - to their new positions and fail miserably because they are not at all suitable to the new environment. This is a lesson for you: The past is your greatest barrier in life.

People tend to learn something well in their 20s and keep repeating it. You must broaden your skills and keep your mind attuned to your current circumstances. Similarly, you must be aware of the latest trends in your particular line of work and not remain tied to the past.

To keep up with the chaotic times, you must be as fluid and mobile in your thinking as possible.

You must constantly challenge your own assumptions. You may have won the last battle, but there's still a war to be won.

Know your enemy: The better a commander understands his enemy and the circumstances of the war at hand, the better he can make rational, effective decisions.

What elevated Napoleon Bonaparte above other generals was the degree of research and preparation he put into all of his campaigns. This must be your modus operandi as well.

The world and the job market is your enemy. It resists and fights you. It is a constant source of instability. In pondering which career path to take and which jobs to aim for or avoid, you must research and prepare thoroughly before making any decisions.

The more you know about company A and B, the better able you are to see what they can offer you in the long run and how you can impress them in the interview process with incisive answers.

Your goal is to always know more than others about the job market, the company you want to work for and your colleagues and bosses.

You must make this a lifelong habit.

Robert Greene is the author of "The 48 Laws of Power" and "The Art of Seduction."