Relatively speaking, I’m a young PR professional, but I’ve been in the business long enough to understand that you’re never going to learn everything you need to know to make perfect decisions all the time. Also, if you love the public relations profession enough to devote your life to it, then this advice will come easy: never stop absorbing information about it.
A friend was at my apartment a few weeks ago and saw a copy of Marketing Lessons From The Grateful Dead lying on my dining room table. She laughed and remarked that even my pleasure reading has to do with my professional life. It’s true, and I bet it is for a lot of PR pros who really love what they do.
After finishing Marketing Lessons From The Grateful Dead a month ago (and blogging about it), I read the same author’s World Wide Rave, and this morning, over coffee and CBS Sunday Morning’s segment on corduroy, I finished a 2008 book by publicist David Carriere called 7 Steps to Publicize Just About Anything.
Then while walking five miles today at the gym, I loaded up my iPod with free podcasts and got to listen to a 21-minute interview with an Australian PR firm owner and a fabulous 36-minute segment about managing employee social media celebrities.
And here I am writing and thinking about it. Why? Because I love my chosen career path, and I want to be the best at it. I’m a free webinar, podcast, whitepaper, latest-book-on-marketing junkie. All PR professionals should be.
Brian Tracy, in his book Be A Sales Superstar, says, “You become what you think about most of the time.” Your outer world, he says, eventually corresponds with your inner world.
Sure, I’ll never be able to pass a billboard without criticizing it or watching a press conference without wishing I was a part of it, and I know other PR pros who’ll agree. But our self-education will make us better professionals, which always leads to more personal happiness.
abbymalikPR 
You touched nicely on the constant need for improvement, for success in any endeavor is not a goal, but a process. Things change. Relationships grow, wither, and die. Circumstances are not always clear; ambiguity rules. You will make mistakes. You will learn from them. Only after three strikes will you be called out.
Choose your venue carefully. You become what surrounds you. “If you hang around with fools, you become a fool.” My experience is that three years in any static arena is long enough. In three years, you will learn 90% of what that position can teach you. The remaining 10% may take many years. And it’s not worth hanging around for the last iota. Get thee to another venue where you can again be the low man on the totem pole, learning and absorbing all you can, and slowly, but assuredly, climbing the totem pole to top position!
Thanks for the comment and the read, John Henry! I like and agree with your advice. And I don’t always 🙂
I couldn’t hear a better comment than “I don’t always (agree)”. It is important, I think, to evaluate every bit of information or instruction to assure yourself of its validity. And to determine how it can be integrated into your personality. We can only process so much cognitive dissonance.
I’m always learning too, especially from those who are creating the ideas that I write about in my books. Glad that you’ve made use of my work and thanks for talking it up.
Hi David – thank you for the read and the comment, as always! I appreciate that you take the time to not just read when you’ve been written about but also to comment.
You might enjoy one of the podcasts I listened to yesterday: it’s from Atkinson Public Relations (iTunes) in Nashville (great city!). It’s an interview with Andy Bailey of Nationlink Wireless. They’ve created a strategy around one of your main strategies: make useful tools available for free to establish trust and credibility and sales will follow.