You will greatly benefit your career by helping and promoting your company’s expansion. A common belief is that expansion is fundamentally positive, and a lack of expansion is fundamentally negative. You must be on the side of expansion rather than contraction in every area of your life. All employers seek people who will help them expand, and the more your ability to contribute to this expansion will provide you increased job security and a greater likelihood of being hired.

Your environment ultimately shapes who you are, so you need to seek out environments that will help shape you into the person you wish to be. People choose their jobs based on all sorts of factors, but often overlook the environment itself. The environment and people that surround you every day, however, ultimately determine your happiness and shape your future.

In this article Harrison discusses the importance of putting your efforts in the right direction. The most important decision you can make is deciding where you are going to put your effort. If you choose the right field for your efforts, you will frequently be richly rewarded (even if you do not have a lot of skill in the field). When you identify something that the market wants, and provide it, then you can frequently do quite well—even if you are not particularly skilled. It is just a question of being at the right place at the right time and taking action. In your career, very little is more important than where you choose to focus your effort. Nothing is more important than working somewhere with opportunity and where you are being carried away by the wind of a positive economic current.

In this article, Harrison explains how the company you keep will inevitably be a major cause of success or failure in your career and life. Wrong associations can be harmful and although you cannot really avoid it all the time, you need to distance yourself from it. Unethical people can repeatedly injure your progress and you need to be aware of and understand the people you deal with, to protect yourself from those who could taint you and drag you down.