Here’s tip that I wish somebody had told me years ago:
Right now, go into Google Docs and create a new document. Title it “[your name] – status.”
And from now on, whenever any even marginally impressive thing happens in your career, put it into this document.
You might be entirely at the beginning of your career. You might think you have zero status in your industry, and that nothing even marginally impressive has happened to you. But I promise you:
If you create this “status” document, and if you add every tiny little status-building thing to it right when it happens, you will soon start to be impressed by your own resume. Any time a client or customer expresses interest in what you’ve got… any time you interact with somebody a little bit famous or influential… any time you get any kind of positive feedback or encouragement from anybody out there.
For example, here are a few impressive-sounding things that happened to me over the course of a few days back in 2021:
* I got invited to appear on a podcast where Russell Brunson, Mark Manson, and Robert Kiyosaki previously appeared
* A former client — a well-known and very successful direct marketer — got in touch and asked whether I might have some time on my schedule for him
* A founder of an architectural firm from NYC (one of the Architectural Digest 100) wrote to see if I would do a consult to evaluate their messaging
The fact is, at the time, nothing had come from any of these things, and it wasn’t clear that anything would come of them. The client and I exchanged a few emails and he said he would get back to me. The podcast might or might not have happened. And I ended up turning down that architectural firm — it’s not a good fit for what I do.
But still, all three of these news items sound good. They help build my status. And that’s why I introduced them into an email back in 2021, and I wrote about them as simple facts, without trying to make them into more or less than they were.
You can do the same — if you start your status document right now, and if you update it every day, every week, every time something even marginally impressive happens to you.