You may have heard this before but it is essential to your career graph plan of why you want a job and what job at that. Every morning every gazelle in Africa gets up knowing it has to run faster than the slowest lion. And every lion gets up knowing it has to run faster than the slowest gazelle. It doesn’t matter whether you are a lion or a gazelle, when you get up in the morning you had better be running.

Parade ground stuff. You had better be running. You don’t run you don’t get anywhere fast.

If you are looking to change a job or get moving because you are feeling stale and dispirited remember what I always say, the world doesn’t owe you a living. Get out there and push.

That is a mistake many of us make believing the world will come good on its own.

You read the Appointments page because it gives you signposting but the rest is entirely your problem.

All too often we don’t want to leave the confines of the familiar because it is comfortable.

We do three things either in themselves or in combination to self-destruct.

We lack the skills and the stamina but are so busy refusing to accept our limitations that we exhaust energy instead of consolidating the strong areas and doing the best with them.

We look for extraneous reasons for our failure including conspiracies, individual and collective, link them to creed and racism and the clique concept, anything to deflect introspection and an honest appraisal of ourselves.

Finally, we take the wrong road like an arts student taking up science because her grandfather wants her to be a doctor. The rest of our working lives we are on the wrong road going nowhere in a hurry.

Is it a lack of stamina or ambition or skill or is it that we just don’t train for the bad times. The army has a clever little line. When the going gets tough the tough get going. Great stuff. But how many of us can actually say we will do that.

I think that’s the scariest form of failure is to be mired in mediocrity. When even the lion sneers and doesn’t want you, when your presence is as good as your absence and no one knows you have gone. The few who do sight you, sigh in secret relief when you disappear because you were slowing the pack down.

Whatsisname has gone.

Really, when did he go, never noticed it.

So, watch out when you apply for a job. Make sure you are doing it for right reasons and it suits you. You will be surprised what a large chunk of the working population is in the wrong job.

Ask yourself, now that you are ten years into the profession, is this where you thought you would be at this time in your life? Nowhere near it, right.

The very fact that you are looking at these pages means there is still some drive inside you, some leftover energy that wants to break away and make a better deal for yourself.

Don’t feel guilt, feel exulted, you are alive and you want to do better, there is no wrong in that.

But before the big leap into the unknown be sure the risk is worth taking. There is no going back. Do your homework then stand by yourself. Sure, we all make little compromises in life, it is like flying a plane, mini-corrections all the time to stay on route but we do not use those compromises as excuses for failure. Bills, commitments, expenses, family obligations, everyone has them, you are not special. Don’t hide behind them because then your courage is made of sawdust.