Career Fertilizer: The 17 Essential Nutrients for Career Growth and Expansion

CAREER FERTILIZER

The 17 Essential Nutrients for Career Growth and Expansion

EUGENE PARTRIDGE III, MBA

Copyright © 2019 Eugene Partridge, III

All rights reserved.

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ISBN: 9781090662705

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Dedication

This book is dedicated to my loving mother, Arlyne Renee Partridge. Your stalwart career as a corporate leader in information technology inspired me to pursue my career in business. Your kind and consistent treatment of employees at all levels of the company has left a legacy that I intend to carry forward in my career.

Thank you for being the embodiment of work ethic, the example of consistency, and the epitome of selflessness.

Your children are blessed because of your example.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Chapter 1 - Vision

Chapter 2 - Confidence

Chapter 3 - Focus

Chapter 4 - Branding

Chapter 5 - Results

Chapter 6 - Education

Chapter 7 - Communication

Chapter 8 - Networking

Chapter 9 - Emotional Intelligence

Chapter 10 - Negotiation

Chapter 11 - Passion

Chapter 12 - Strengths

Chapter 13 - Balance

Chapter 14 - Financial Literacy

Chapter 15 - Charity

Chapter 16 - Charity

Chapter 17 - Mentorship

About the Author

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

First of all, I would like to thank my lovely wife, La’Keisha, and my three beautiful daughters, Sanei, Audrey, and Tori, for your patience, love, and support. Thank you for allowing me to pursue my dreams and embark upon this journey with you. I am beyond blessed to have you all in my life.

I would like to extend a very special thank you to my mentor, Carol Wade, for your love and support throughout my career. Your guidance, encouragement, and sharing of knowledge have both accelerated and catapulted my career.

Special thanks to the Partridge, Mitchell, Jones, Trimble, and Lear families for your continued love and support of all my endeavors. Your encouragement has helped grow me into the man I am today.

I must express my gratitude to my editing service, Global English Editing. A very special thank you to my proofreaders and strategists, Renee Partridge, Carol Wade, and Ashley Brewster. Special thanks to Kiki Smith for photography, and Ophelia Harper for graphic design.

I would also like to thank all members of the exclusive brotherhood. You know who you are. Thank you for being a continued source of strength and inspiration.

I would like to thank my spiritual fathers Bishop Mark A. Moore, Bishop LaVelton J. Daniel, and the late Bishop Paul A. Bowers for your insight, prayers, and encouragement over the years. Thank you for your labor of love.

Lastly, in loving memory to my father, Eugene Howard Partridge Jr., and my father-in-love, Pastor Bruce C. Mitchell, I would like to thank you for the wisdom you instilled in me. It is still my intention to make you proud.

INTRODUCTION

600 Percent Growth in a Decade

Finally, you’re here! There’s a good chance we haven’t met, but I have been waiting to chat with you about your career. You may be wondering who I am. Well, I happen to wear many hats. But for this book, I am the guy who grew his income at the same rate as Apple’s stock price (nearly 600%) over the past decade. If you’re a skeptic, I’m sure you went straight to Bloomberg to research Apple’s stock trends to check my work. How about I save you time and explain what I mean?

According to MarketWatch, Apple’s stock price was $23.90 in May 2008 and $166.55 in March 2018. This signifies a growth rate of nearly 596 percent in just over a decade! These timestamps are also significant in my career, as they signify the beginning and endpoints of my comparable income growth. To my readers that are investors, you’re aware that the average annual rate of return in the S&P 500 from 1950 to 2009 was 7 percent (adjusted for inflation). If you’ve spent any time in the workforce, you know the average annual raise nationwide is only 3 percent, which is slightly below the annual inflation rate of 3.22 percent.

To illustrate the point, let’s consider the average entry-level salary of $32,543. Let’s say you worked diligently every year for a decade to meet your expectations. Your manager thanks you for your service annually and slides a 3 percent merit increase across the table. In 10 years, your $32,543 annual salary would grow to $43,735; a 34 percent growth rate. Not the growth you expected when you set out to take over the world. That 600 percent growth rate I mentioned earlier is starting to sound a little more interesting, isn’t it? Do I have your attention?

What if I told you I was able to accomplish this feat during a period of wage stagnation? What if I told you this happened during the greatest financial crisis and economic recovery America has seen since the Great Depression? What if I told you I did this as a minority? What if I told you I graduated from college with a C-average GPA? Would you consider me a credible voice? Would you be interested in the principles I was forced to apply because if I didn’t, success wasn’t possible? Would you want to understand how I pulled myself up from the bottom to achieve a respectable career? To ease your skepticism, let me give you a view into my personal life to show why someone like me needed more than a degree to grow a career.

42 Days

If you read my previous book, Daughters and Daddies: The Investment That Matters, you may remember me referencing a particular tragedy in my life in great depth. I will recount the story here briefly. ’May 2004 - I was 20 years old, a sophomore at Bowling Green State University. I was struggling through school trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life. I’ll talk more about my carousel of majors in subsequent chapters. My parents were dealing with severe health challenges at the same time. My mother was diagnosed with Stage 2 breast cancer, my father was diagnosed with Stage 4 kidney disease, and my grandmother was placed in hospice care. My parents shared this information with my sisters and me all in one sitting. As you can imagine, this was a very difficult time for our family.

My father’s illness took a turn for the worse, and the doctors decided that he needed a kidney transplant to survive. Being young, brave, ambitious, and full of love for my father, I volunteered to give him a kidney. I felt it was the very least I could do in return for all he had done for me.

On August 3, 2004, we had the surgery. Everything went well, and the future looked bright. I went back to school feeling on top of the world for being able to help save my father’s life and was excited to take the world by storm. Forty-two days later, I received a phone call at 5:15 AM from my mother with devastating, heart-wrenching news. My dear father had passed away in the night due to blood clots that traveled to his lungs. I was stunned. My world was shattered, and my dreams dashed. My father passed on a Tuesday, we buried him on a Saturday, and I was back in class on Monday as if returning from vacation. I obviously was in shock and still grieving. I wasn’t ready to return to business as usual. I was functioning outwardly after taking a significant hit to the body and heart, while figuratively bleeding internally. However, I was driven by my interpretation of my father’s constant motivational phrase while I was in college. When I would call home in frustration, all he would say is, Just finish. I interpreted that as just finish…on time. So that’s what I did. Years later, after I became a father, I realized that what he really wanted for me was to just finish…strong! I should have slowed down a bit to heal. But I did not do that. I pressed on.

His passing that September happened to be the most critical semester in my quest toward my degree. This was the semester dedicated to my pre-core classes for business school. I needed to meet a certain GPA that semester if I wanted to be admitted to the college of business. As you can imagine, due to grief, my grades suffered. I received straight C’s and received word that I would not be admitted. I wrote letters to the school and talked to anyone who would listen to see if they would grant me an exception based on the situation. No one would help me, and I was denied entry. My father was gone, and my dream of becoming a businessman seemed to be fading as well. Determined not to quit, I changed my major to Communications. I wish I could tell you that this story ended with me graduating magna cum laude or summa cum laude. But it does not. In fact, while I was in college, I didn’t even know what those distinctions meant. I graduated with a C-average GPA. I knew I could do better, but my current reality did not reflect what I knew was in me.

After graduation, I started my career from the bottom up as a logistics coordinator making a below average entry-level salary that was below average. I was thankful for the job. But I knew I needed to do something different to change the trajectory of my career. Through hard work, faith, and the application of what I call the "17 essential nutrients to career growth," I have been blessed to grow my income by nearly 600 percent in a decade, while holding leadership positions at Global Fortune 100, Fortune 500, and rapidly growing companies. I fundamentally believe that utilizing these nutrients can help you take your career to the next level as well.

I Hated Science

Shall we begin with a little random self-disclosure? I hated science growing up! Did you hear what I said? I hated it (insert clap emojis for emphasis)! Well, maybe I shouldn’t use the word hate. How about I strongly disliked any subject having anything to remotely do with science. I’ve always been a numbers guy, so most subjects ending in ology, ics, or stry didn’t peak my interest. I wasn’t too thrilled about dissecting frogs in biology. I feared electrocution while working with circuits in physics. My younger sister, Alexa, provided enough chemistry classes at home due to the endless number of potions and concoctions she made in her room. So, it is a miracle that, after all these years, I am writing a book examining career growth and expansion using chemistry as the basic metaphor to build my case. Who knew?

My least favorite subject in the history of school was chemistry by a mile. Chemistry, oh how I loathe thee. You reign supreme as one of the most difficult subjects to understand for students across this great land. With all of your substances, matter, properties, and periodic tables, you bring even the Rhodes scholar to his or her knees. Chemistry, you’re the science that examines the composition, structure, and properties of substances and their transformations. You are the science that investigates these properties in intricate detail to discover the way they interact, combine, and change. But chemistry, along with your cousin's biology and physics, you give us the perfect analogy to illustrate how our careers can either grow or stagnate.

The Seed vs. the Orchard

Have you ever wondered what causes a small seed deposited into the soil to blossom into a fruitful tree? Seed germination is often used as an analogy in growth discussions, but many of us only have a basic understanding of this process. It’s a common punch line by motivational speakers to liken a dream to a seed and the dream’s manifestation as its fruit. We plant seeds in our yards to grow flourishing vegetation that provides oxygen for breathing, food for nourishment, and beautification for our world.

I read that there are over 900,000 different edible plant seeds stored in what is referred to as the Svalbard ‘Doomsday‘ Global Seed Vault. These seeds are frozen in the side of a mountain on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen, only 1,300 kilometers from the North Pole. This $9 million vault was created in 2008 to store the many different edible seeds around the world in case of a nuclear war or a catastrophic natural disaster. At present, these seeds are not in the right conditions to reproduce. However, given the right environment with the right essential nutrients, the seeds will produce their yield.

Your career is likened unto a seed. Each seed is packed with so much potential, so much possibility. Let’s refer to our little seed from the beginning of this section. Each seed planted and germinated can be the beginning of a fruitful orchard that feeds countless individuals for ages. But that same seed could remain frozen in place for good, never yielding the crop it was intended to produce because it was not placed in the right environment or given the right nourishment. I don’t know about you, but I refuse to wait for a catastrophic event to occur in my life for me to get unfrozen. I want to produce, and I want to produce now!

Grass Class

I consider myself a residential groundskeeping enthusiast. In other words, I like to cut and primp my grass with meticulous detail. After a long day in the office, I can be found spending an additional 2-3 hours outside curating my relatively new yard. I’m sure my neighbors think I’m crazy due to the amount of time I spend on my grass and the amount of water and fertilizer it receives. I guess you can say I get it from my father. When I was young, I feel like all I did was cut grass when I wasn’t at basketball or football practice.

My wife and I had the pleasure of selling our condo and building our home from the ground up in mid-2016. What a glorious occasion it was. But there was one problem when we closed on the home. We had nothing but dirt in our yard. No grass seed had been spread. No sod had been laid. It was just dirt. Lots and lots of dirt and scrap material. When the landscaping company finally made their way to install our yard, it was late July. For any of my fellow lawn care enthusiasts, you know that the middle of the summer is the absolute worst time of the year to spread grass seed and lay sod. Needless to say, my lawn needed help! I started to research how to help my lawn survive the summer. I dug deep into how to grow my lawn into a lush, green masterpiece.

As I began to study the right watering frequencies and cutting lengths, my research led me to the topic of fertilization. During walks around the neighborhood, I would survey my neighbors’ lawns. If I saw a plush lawn, I would ask the owners what they were doing. The answer always led back to fertilization. My neighbors understood that you can’t just put a seed in the ground and expect it to grow. There’s more to it. I didn’t ask advice from neighbors whose lawns resembled the local landfill. They didn’t have the lawn I wanted. I knew it wasn’t enough to just plant grass seed and water it. Fertilization enables high-yield results. As I researched fertilization and began to apply golf course-level fertilizer to my lawn, the results produced were so amazing that I was inspired to understand plant growth from a deeper perspective.

The Science of Plant Growth

’’Allow me to channel my inner Bill Nye the Science Guy for just a moment. Nutritionists have discovered that there are 17 nutrients that are essential for plant health and growth. Without these nutrients in proper supply, optimal yields cannot be produced. In other words, the plant cannot produce at its full potential.

According to the law of the minimum, if just one or more of these nutrients are insufficient in the soil, crop yields will be reduced. This will occur even if the rest of the nutrients are present in their proper supply. These nutrients are broken down into four categories:

1. Primary Macronutrients

2. Secondary Macronutrients

3. Micronutrients

4. Non-Mineral Nutrients

It dawned on me that to maintain optimal yields, or, in corporate speak, the best results in one’s career, we cannot just leave it to chance. We must use the right fertilizers. Allow me to define each category to make the connection between each essential career nutrient and each plant nutrient.

Primary Macronutrients

Primary macronutrients are required by plants in larger quantities than other nutrients. The primary nutrients include nitrogen (N), phosphorous (P), and potassium (K). It is generally understood that focusing on the primary macronutrients is an adequate fertility strategy. We will consider vision (Vi), confidence (Co), and focus (Fo) our primary macronutrients for career growth. Anyone can adequately grow their career with these three. However, we are not interested in adequate yields. We are looking for optimal yields!

Secondary Macronutrients

Secondary macronutrients are nutrients that slightly limit plant growth and are moderately required by plants. These nutrients are sulfur (S), magnesium (Mg), and calcium (Ca). We will consider branding (Br), results (Re), and Education (Ed) our secondary macronutrients. Secondary nutrients are as significant as primary nutrients in plants, but they are needed in smaller quantities.

Micronutrients

Micronutrients are nutrients that are needed in minuscule amounts for the growth and health of a plant. These nutrients are manganese (Mn), zinc (Zn), nickel (Ni), boron (B), molybdenum (Mo), iron (Fe), chlorine (Cl), and copper (Cu). We will consider communication (Cm), networking (Ne), emotional intelligence (Ei), negotiation (Ng), passion (Pa), strengths (Sg), balance (Ba), and financial literacy (Fl) our micronutrients. Although micronutrients are only needed in small amounts, if they are missing, they can create great deficiencies in the plant, even causing death.

Non-Mineral Nutrients

Non-mineral nutrients are nutrients that are available from air and water and therefore in plentiful supply. These nutrients are oxygen (O), hydrogen (H), and carbon (C). We will consider environment (En), charity (Ch), and mentorship (Me) as our non-mineral nutrients. Although they are available in plentiful supply, their absence will stifle the health and growth of the plant.

I’m sure you get it now, right? Career Fertilizer is an exhaustive study of 17 essential nutrients that, if applied in the right measurements, will help you grow and expand your career. Whether you are an individual contributor, physician, executive, educator, pastor, lawyer, developer, accountant, police officer, politician, coach, laborer, engineer, or entrepreneur, this book will help you produce hypergrowth in your career.

Start Where You Are

If I was a betting man - and I am not - I would venture to say that you fit into one of the following categories of those reading this book. You may be one of the individuals who purchased this book by impulse because of the eye-catching book cover. Thank you for your purchase! Yes, branding matters. We’ll talk about that more in depth later. You may be a frequent follower of my content on social media. If so, thank you for your support! You may be in the camp of individuals who heard me speak at a recent session or conference, and you decided to grab some product on the way out. If you’re really fancy, you are the type of individual who consistently invests in yourself, reading books with a good message even without knowing the author. You thought the title and the concept were cool, so you decided to add this