_Below is an extract from the Forbes article, " This One Leadership Quality Will Make or Break You".  From the perspective of managing your career, this message resonates as well. Too often, we expect that all good things will come to us out of a expectation of deservedness.

These traditional axioms have embedded in them an expectation of deserving or being entitled: if we study hard, get good grades, work hard, meet our goals and objectives, dot the "i's" and cross the "t's"  then great opportunities and career success will come to us. 

It is difficult to believe that there is an expectation of entitlement in those  beliefs until for some reason they are not fulfilled. The shock of realization arrives when we find that exemplary performance is simply insufficient. Nowadays that can often be the case.

In Lewis Carroll's children's story, "Through the Looking-Glass", when Alice was running with the White Knight through the woods, she asked him why they were running. His puzzling reply was that running was done to stay in the same place and to get anywhere they needed to run twice as fast.

The essence of pursuit is to not expect that benefits will come to us if we do the right things. They don't anymore. There is too much competition for job openings, promotions, and opportunities. We need to be in active aggressive and continuous pursuit of our dreams and desires. We need to do it purposefully, with focused intent, and clear deliverables in mind.

It is an interesting article:

One of the most often overlooked aspects of leadership is the need for pursuit. Great leaders are never satisfied with traditional practice, static thinking, conventional wisdom, or common performance. In fact, the best leaders are simply uncomfortable with anything that embraces the status quo. Leadership is pursuit – pursuit of excellence, of elegance, of truth, of what’s next, of what if, of change, of value, of results, of relationships, of service, of knowledge, and of something bigger than themselves.
Smart leaders understand it’s not just enough to pursue, but pursuit must be intentional, focused, consistent, aggressive, and unyielding. You must pursue the right things, for the right reasons, and at the right times. Perhaps most of all, the best forms of pursuit enlist others in the chase. Pursuit in its purest form is highly collaborative, very inclusive and easily transferable. Pursuit operates at greatest strength when it leverages velocity and scale.
Read more at Forbes.com