You’re never too old to learn, and approaching your life and career with curiosity and a desire to learn will give you energy that will propel you forward. Commit yourself to pursuing what is new and novel and to exploring new opportunities. Your openness to both unexpected and planned opportunities that arise in your path, combined with a passion for learning and your skills and interests, will help you define and reach your goals.

Embracing opportunities to advance your career will also enable you to make an impact and add value while growing and diversifying your skills and experience. Gauche transitioned from a large corporation to the small and growing National Oilwell Varco, and although some would consider it a risky career move, Gauche’s curiosity and eagerness to pursue something new helped him to see the change as an opportunity with enormous potential and possibility.

Maximize Your Performance and Your Career Potential

Success in any career, according to Gauche and countless career experts, is less about education than about your attitude and work ethic. You will get out of your career what you put into it. Maximizing your skills will enable you to contribute to the success of your organization and help you advance your career. It will also give you a sense of personal accomplishment and empowerment. As you advance on your learning curve you achieve more compelling results. All organizations want to attract, retain and develop talented individuals who are committed to producing results and who have impacted an organization’s bottom line.

You may not end up where you had initially planned when you embarked on your career, but trusting and following your passions and embracing new opportunities can lead to remarkable career possibilities and opportunities to make a difference. You can take control of your career each day by the choices you make, by the commitment with which you learn and work and by the contributions you make along the way.

Listen to the entire show.

This interview was conducted on the Total Career Success radio show via VoiceAmerica Radio with Ken and Sheryl Dawson, principals of Total Career Success, Inc. (www.betterjobbetterlife.com) and co-authors of Job Search: The Total System.

Sheryl Dawson is CEO of Dawson Consulting Group, a talent management firm in Houston, TX, and COO of Total Career Success, Inc., a job search and career development firm offering products and services to the retail, college and university career center and professional association markets. She is co-author of Job Search: The Total System, 3rd edition available at www.betterjobbetterlife.com. She co-hosts “Total Career Success,” an internet radio show on VoiceAmerica and World Net Radio.

Because keeping life organized almost always revolves around time in the form of appointments, schedules and deadlines, we’ll start with the most fundamental of organizational tools: the calendar.

We’ve come a long way since the Roman calendar—dating to about 753 BC—first carved up a year into 10 months. Any one of numerous online calendars can help; I’ve chosen Google Calendar because it’s free, contains powerful features and add-ons, is available when you’re offline, and is supported by an enormous blogging community.

Getting started is as easy as going to http://calendar.google.com and creating a Google account if you don’t have one already. Be sure to take the tour. Here are features I rely on every day:

• Multiple, color-coded calendars. You have one life, right? To organize it, maintain a single, master calendar incorporating work, family and extracurricular interests. In one example, I use a calendar with gold-colored events to ensure I never miss critical duties as caregiver for my wife, such as a doctor’s appointment. If you have a separate calendar at work, using Microsoft Outlook, for example, you can synchronize with that, too.

•Mobile access and SMS event reminders. The pop-up reminders that come standard with most electronic calendars are great when you’re near your PC. But what happens when you’re in a meeting or at the grocery—and you don’t pack a PDA? Google Calendar lets you send reminders by text message to your cell phone, and to set multiple reminders for the same event.

• Search! Of course, this calendar is as searchable—fast—as anything on Google. When did I last see my eye doctor? For me, that’s as easy as searching “Dr. Key.”

• Share calendars with colleagues and family.

• Invite others to meetings & events and track who has said they will attend.

• Integrate task lists and the weather. The many easy-to-install plug-ins available include ones that will put the day’s weather forecast for any Zip Code at the top of your calendar, and let you manage a list of the day’s tasks—without leaving the calendar. More on task list tools will follow in another post.

My own life hasn’t become any less full since I began using Google Calendar. But it certainly has become easier to keep up with ever-shifting plans for the day, the week and beyond. No printed calendars for me, even though I could do that, too.

–Jay Kraker