Treating Your Career Like A Small Business

What You Will Learn You need to understand that you are a product in your career and that like a product, you need to be marketable and have a personal brand that is in demand. You need to follow certain business rules so that the ‘product’ (that is ‘you’), sells effectively. You must understand that everything you are doing or are not doing has a major impact on your brand – you shape your brand by the choices you make. Be yourself and also be aware of what the particular employer wants – market your product and brand for maximum possible success.

No one seems to take the time to consider that their careers are businesses. Your career is no different than any small business. You have a product (you) that you are selling to your audience (your employer). You need to run your career exactly like a business person runs a business. There is no greater skill to have with your career than to run it like a business. As a business, your goal is survival and to sell your product for as much money as possible. So too it is with your career.

Be a good business person and your career may go far, ignore the business realities and you are likely to run into trouble. I have been a recruiter for several years and have seen countless attorneys “go out of business” because they did not run their careers well. In fact, this is something I see on a daily basis while reviewing resumes of out of work attorneys. Just as companies make bad decisions that result in them going out of business, people also make bad decisions with their careers that result in them going out of business and finding themselves unemployed.

• They may choose to concentrate on a profession that becomes obsolete–They are trying to sell a product no longer in demand.
• They may have resumes that do not serve them well–They are not presenting/”packaging” their products correctly.
• They may choose to work in an area where there are no jobs–They are trying to sell a product in a geographic area where there is no demand.
• They may have done something bad that makes people not want to hire them–They have a bad “brand”.
• They may be too old to get a job–People are “tired” of their product.
• They apply to only a few jobs and do not get a job–They are not marketing their brands to a large enough demographic.

Your career is a business and you are a product. You need to understand that using simple business principles to market yourself is something that can be of massive benefit to you.

Before I go further, there are a couple of other things I would like to cover. First, I believe that working for other people is an incredibly smart thing. When you think about your career and working for other people as a business, you will quickly realize that there are few businesses that offer higher pay for less risk, the ability to shut off work when you are not there, the ability to leverage others’ assets as your own, the ability to be part of a social network and the ability to concentrate your efforts on one thing.

Working for other people has a tremendous number of rewards and these rewards are both psychological, financial and otherwise. When you are working for someone else you are in business for yourself but allowing your employer to take most of the risk. Another secret of working for other people is that you can take advantage of economies of scale and inefficiency. If you go to work for a large enough company, the company will hopefully be throwing off huge amounts of money with thousands of workers and you can claim your desired share of this as your compensation. For some strange reason, however, when I meet people at various public functions (and elsewhere) they all start telling me how they want to start their own businesses. Whether they are doctors, accountants or lawyers, everyone seemingly wants to start their own business. I do not understand this.

When you meet people who have little education and start hugely successful businesses and become fabulously wealthy, they rarely want their children to follow in their footsteps. They want them to go to school and become professionals and work for other people. There are a lot of reasons for this–the respect, the stress, predictability, the ability to be involved with large groups of people, the ability to be part of society and more. The point I am trying to make to you is that working for other people is something that the most successful people in the world want for others. It is good to work for other people.

Many Americans seem to have a belief that it is much better to work for themselves and stay fixated on this idea throughout their careers. The truth is when you are working for someone else you are actually already in business. Working for others is a very smart and shrewd choice for many people and if you were a business person it would be advisable in most instances to work for others rather than yourself. Someone who makes a $100,000 a year working for a company is no different than someone with a $1,000,000 a year at a company who is clearing a 10% profit margin. This is an impressive profit margin and something that not many people could accomplish, but being able to step into a job where you are guaranteed this profit margin is extremely smart. When you work for others there is often less risk; other people are risking capital and not you. And if you choose the company right, you may have a lot of security.

A few years ago I was meeting with a lawyer friend of mine who had a salary of $200,000 a year, who was (like many people I spend time with) telling me in detail how interested he was in starting a business. The more I thought about it, the more incredible I realized making a salary like this is. He was sitting there talking about how he wanted to start one business after another. One business he wanted to start was a winery. Another business was a dry cleaners. The list of businesses he was interested in went and on.

“What sort of profit margins are you interested in making?” I asked him.

“At least 10%” he said.

“Well, in order to make $200,000 a year you are going to have to bring in at least $2,000,000 a year. If a bottle of wine sells for $5 wholesale that means you are going to have to make and bottle over 400,000 wine bottles to generate the $2,000,000 needed to make your profit margin.”

He gave this idea some thought and is still practicing law today. There are many people who dream of starting businesses when they would be far better off not dealing with the idea of a business at all.

Running businesses is hard. Most businesses fail.

How hard is it running a business?

A couple of years ago I hired a now world famous executive consultant to come and look at my companies. At the time the companies I was running were generating several millions of dollars a month and had over 700 employees. The coach sat me down and for a full day (and $40,000) lectured me about everything that was wrong with the companies I was running.

“You would be a good CEO,” I said. “If you know so much about this why don’t you try going to work for a company,” I said.

There was a pause and then the guy said something I will never forget.

“I could never run a real business. I have never been able to fire people. I just cannot do it.”

It occurred to me that here I was paying someone thousands of dollars an hour and he did not even have the nuts to be able to fire people. Running a business involves all sorts of things like this. You must be willing to take the unpopular position for the benefit of the company and consistently do this regardless of the consequences to your psyche. And then there are budgets, payroll and all sorts of other things that most people do not even think about. The stress of running a business is incredible. There are a million small things like this that come up when you run a business as a business owner. When you limit your business exposure to your career and what you are doing on a day-to-day basis, you are much better off.

Just understand that when you are working for someone else you still need to run your career like a business. I would like you to consider the following business realities of your career.

First, that your career, like any business, needs to have a marketable product. This means that you need to be in a profession that is marketable in the geographic area you are in. There are countless professions that are marketable in some geographic areas and not others. For example, it would not be profitable to be a cowboy in New York City, but this would work in rural Wyoming. It would not be profitable to be a financial analyst in rural Wyoming, but it would be profitable to do this in New York City. Furthermore, the profession you are in can be under attack from various forces (including the economy) at various points in time. If you were a computer programmer 15 years ago you had a very bright future. In today’s economy, however, this is not necessarily the case. Many of these jobs have been outsourced to India, Romania and other locations where they can be done more cheaply. At all points in time you need to be asking yourself whether or not you have a marketable product.

Second, you need to understand the importance of your “brand” to marketing your product. Everything you do in your career will have an impact on your ultimate brand. The better your brand is, the more in demand your product will be. The best brands typically work in the most competitive markets. The worst brands typically work in the least competitive markets. For example, if you go to Harvard Business School you are going to have a better chance of getting a job with a top bank in New York City than you would if you went to University of Phoenix at night for an executive MBA. This is not to be insulting to this school, it is just to point out a reality that you need to consider when you market yourself.

Third, you need to know how to market your product for the maximum possible success. When you market yourself you need to put your brand before the largest possible market to make the most “sales”–i.e., to get the most interviews and job offers. You need to know how to position yourself and your resume. You need to understand what to say in order to impress the employer in the correct way.

A. Your Career, Like Any Business, Needs a Marketable Product

Every business needs to have a marketable product in order to succeed. While businesses can sell all sorts of things, your business is selling yourself and what you do. This is something that will need to be carefully managed throughout your career. It is important to realize that when we are in the workforce we are all like small business people. We are selling a product (which is ourselves) and need to follow certain rules in order to sell this product effectively.

The first thing you need to consider is that your product needs to be marketable. A lot of my family is from Toledo, Ohio. They are house painters and do other sorts of blue collar jobs. From the time I was around 10 until I was around 17 or 18 they kept telling me I should be a machinist. The told me about how they knew various machinists and how well they did as machinists. One machinist had his own boat, another machinist just redid his home. Being a machinist was a very good profession 20+ years ago in the Midwest. You could work for auto companies and other companies that were doing work that required the skills of a machinist. Today, it is almost impossible to find jobs as machinist in the Midwest. If I had chosen that career path I would be “out of business.”

What do most machinists do when they lose a job? They try and find another job as a machinist. If you are working in an area where auto companies are closing and there are no opportunities for machinists (like Toledo, Ohio) you might have to wait a very long time indeed before you get a job. The problem with finding a job is not you–it is that you do not have a marketable product. Lots of people do not have marketable products and yet continue to look for jobs when their product is not marketable.

When people lose a job the path they follow is often ass backward. They do not think about themselves as a product in need of a market. You can only sell what people are buying. You need to have something that is in demand. You can never cling to something that once was. I have seen so many careers ruined by this very idea.

I know someone who, 12 months ago, was in a field that was very much in demand. It no longer is. He was making upwards of $70,000 a year at this profession. Now the most he can make if he continues doing this for a living is $12 to $14 an hour. He goes into every interview and tells people he expects to make $70,000 a year. The market for what he is doing around his geographic area has gone away, and to the extent it has, he can no longer sell himself for that amount. This is just the way it is.

If I was a machinist in the Midwest I might try looking for a job in other areas around the country where the skills of machinists are in demand. I would get the hell out of Toledo, Ohio if I realized there were no opportunities. If there were not opportunities for machinists around the United States, I might consider another career. Or, I might consider how to package myself differently.

Since I am in the legal career industry, I have recently witnessed something quite remarkable that I think you can learn from. During the real estate boom in the United States, a ton of small real estate firms became overwhelmed with real estate work. Companies and others were purchasing an incredible amount of real estate and this generated a lot of work for these real estate firms. About 18 months ago this work started dramatically slowing down to the extent that most of these firms started aggressively letting go of real estate attorneys. Things got so bad I was under the impression that most of these real estate firms would start going out of business. The crisis they were facing was incredible and beyond anything that had happened in the past. I was not sure what was going to happen. Recently, something incredible has happened with many of these real estate law firms. They have started representing to their clients (real estate companies) that they have great skill in bankruptcy involving property. Now, many of these bankruptcy law firms are thriving again and doing well. They are actively hiring. This is a remarkable reversal of fortune and something I certainly did not expect to see. This is because these law firms have figured out how to have a marketable product.

As a business person and operator of a small business you are going to be faced with countless decisions as to how you operate your own business. You need to remember that every decision you make will determine your marketability.

Everyone has a myriad of choices about how they operate their businesses. They may brand themselves as a big company employee, small company employee, government employee, you name it. Whether you are working on your own or for a large firm, you are always in charge of your career.

There are aspects of your product that will never change. Wherever you are in your career right now, you simply cannot change the things you have done in the past. This includes your education to date, performance in school, the first company you worked at (or second, or third), your current skills and any variety of things that you have done in your career. However, if you look around, there are literally thousands of small businesses operating. The pedigree of these businesses does not matter so much as whether they are in business and how well they are operating.

You need to look at the field you are in like the business world as well. Whatever type of business you are running, it must have a marketable product. If you are a computer programmer who programs in PERL, you have a product. You will be able to sell your product in certain areas and with certain audiences better than others. For example, your programming skills will be more valuable in Silicon Valley, most likely, than rural Nebraska. The list goes on and on. Everything is about having a marketable product throughout your career in the area that you are working in.

The point of any business is to survive and, for many businesses, to grow. You need to consider the market for your skills and run your business accordingly. One of the most important aspects of running your business involves the type of work you do. If you are a sales person of premium automobiles, you help companies sell expensive cars. If you are an accountant, you will help people deal with tax issues. Whatever you do, it is important to understand that your product likely has more appeal (to the market) in some areas and points in time than others. Your objective is to get business and the decisions you make in this regard are important.

There are certain jobs that may be bad business to choose. For example, railroad law used to be a popular practice area for attorneys, but you would have a difficult time running a small business now that focused on such an antiquated type of law. Several years ago, corporate work was enormously in demand. Later, however, this market was doing horribly and corporate attorneys from top 10 law schools who performed well both in school and in high profile firms were, in some cases, looking for work for more than a year. Years later, corporate work was again available. For many small businesses/attorneys, corporate law would have been a bad choice for them to get into because there is no demand for that product. In this current economic climate, bankruptcy would be a more prudent venture for the business-minded attorney.

The list goes on an on. The point is that you need a marketable product.

Likewise, the geographic area you are in, the stability of your current employer and your opportunity for advancement at your current firm are all factors to keep in mind in operating your small business. These are all things that will have a bearing on whether or not your business will succeed.

Far too many people fail because they fail to adapt their business to the current economic climate. This is why most businesses out there end up failing. They simply fail to adapt.

B. The Importance of Your “Brand” to Marketing Your Product

When you are working in any profession, you need to have a good personal brand. The quality of your brand will determine a great deal about what happens to you. The quality of the work you do, your interpersonal relationships and a variety of other factors will determine the strength of your brand. The point is that all brands have certain attributes and over time you will develop a certain brand.

Companies spend an inordinate amount of money both protecting and developing their brands. There are certain things that come to mind when you think of any brand. For example, think of BMW or Chevy. Likewise, RC Cola creates a different thought than Coke. A brand is developed over time. The places you work, your practice area and all of the aforementioned factors will have a bearing on the quality of your brand.

Generally, better brands can charge more and have more interest directed towards them than poor brands. All of the rules of the business world apply to managing your own brand. You always need to be cognizant of how you want your brand to be viewed by the outside world and potential employers. Think through what type of brand you want carefully, and ensure that you manage that brand the best you can.

You are shaping your brand in so many ways, both by the things that you do and do not do. Your brand is shaped by the type of companies you have worked for, how long you have worked at these companies, the promotions or the demotions you have received, the awards you have received, the articles you have written and the general enthusiasm you have demonstrated for your job.

There are numerous things that shape your personal “brand,” which is the general perception employers have of you. You need to be conscious that everything you do is reflecting on this brand. Something I have seen a ton of in my career are employees who move around a lot–they move every one, two, or three years. Once you have done this enough times you and your brand will start getting a reputation as someone who cannot be trusted to work with the same employer for a long time. If you do the opposite, you will also get the reputation as someone who can be trusted and will remain with the same employer for a long length of time.

If you start out working for small, non-prestigious companies and gradually over the course of several years rise into more and more prominent positions and companies, you will get the impression as someone who is improving. Similarly, you will get the same reputation if you are consistently rising to higher and better positions with your employer over several years.

It is important to understand that everything you are doing has a major impact on your brand. You shape your brand by the choices you make. The reason your brand is so important is due to the fact that it will impact your ultimate marketability.

C. How to Market Your Product and Brand for Maximum Possible Success

As an attorney, consider hypothetically that your salary is $100,000 per year. Also consider that you are being billed out at approximately $200 per hour and expected to bill 2,000 hours a year in the law firm you are working in. This means that your small business is generating $400,000 per year and out of that amount you are “netting” $100,000. This is not bad from a business standpoint.

As a legal recruiter, I am not surprised that most attorneys want to go to the law firms that pay the most money and have the most prestige associated with them. These are all business decisions. If you are an attorney, over time you presumably would like the amount of money you make to increase. You would also like the percentage of the money you collect from your billings to increase. For example, if you generate $400,000 from your work, you would rather make $200,000 than $100,000, as in the prior example. You want to become a partner and earn more. The business game continues.

Everything that happens to your career is the result of selling your product on the marketplace. The amount of money you receive as your salary (i.e., the amount of money the market will pay) will be influenced by the type of brand you have. Hypothetically, you could have no education and start out as a clerk in a small firm. This is something thousands of people do each year. Then, several years later, you could be earning in excess of a million dollars per year leading the same company you started out in. To many people this may seem like an aberration. Nevertheless, this is not an aberration and it happens all the time. The reason this happens is because of how people ultimately (1) brand themselves and (2) market their brand.

Marketing is the single most important thing you can do for yourself and your career. Marketing is about how you package yourself, the things you say and the value the market perceives that you offer.

The point of this essay is not to act as a diatribe on marketing; however, a few comments on marketing should make a helpful point. When you market a product, you need to appeal to people on both an emotional and rational (cost) level. When marketing personal services-which your specific skills are-people tend to want to deal with people like themselves. It is for that reason that large companies typically prefer a certain type of employee, small law firms prefer a certain type of employee and certain types of clients (rich, poor and in between) prefer dealing with a certain type of employee. We have a tendency to want to deal with people like ourselves. Thus, your product is likely to be well accepted in some areas and not others.

I remember one thing when I was clerking for a federal judge and I had the opportunity to see different trial lawyers come into court and conduct trials. I also spent a year trying to write a book about personal injury attorneys several years ago and once again I made a similar observation. The one thing I noticed about the most effective personal injury attorneys was that they were nothing like big firm attorneys and almost never had big firm experience or top law school credentials. What they did know how to do was market themselves and their clients’ grievances to like-minded jurors. They also tended to be quite flamboyant in their marketing efforts, but that is another story.

In small towns all across America, there are very successful attorneys. In most cases, these attorneys grew up in the area and are similar to the people they do work for. What is most significant about the attorneys who are most successful in small towns, from those who are not, is their marketing ability. They fraternize in local clubs and bar associations. Stories circulate about their successes. All of this is marketing.

The same thing occurs in large law firms in big cities. Here, the marketing is confined to the law firm and getting clients to hire you as you advance in seniority. What is most significant, though, is that the marketing component and what the individual’s brand represents are always at the forefront.

The issue then is how you market yourself and advance your own career. While this may not be obvious, a large part of a recruiter’s job is helping people market themselves to employers. They know what the employers want to hear and how the attorney should say it. Virtually every week at our recruiting firms we get attorneys jobs at firms that I know they could not have gotten on their own. That is because we “packaged” the person to the employer in a certain way and told him/her what to say in order to portray the particular brand the firm is interested in.

What is so interesting about the work exceptional recruiters do is that none of what we do is dishonest. In fact, it is just knowing the market, the particular brand of the firm and what makes a person marketable to them. People need to be themselves, but also be aware of what the particular employer wants.

If you are looking for a position you need to keep the idea of marketing at the forefront of what you do and how you think about everything. You have a product to sell and in order to sell your product you must brand it and package it in the right way. In order to sell your product, and get the highest price for it, you also need to have the largest possible market. Everything I have done in my career is geared towards helping people market and package themselves. One service I recommend that anyone look at is Legal Authority (www.EmploymentAuthority.com), which can assist you in marketing yourself to the largest potential demographic of employers possible. It helps you professionally package yourself and get the highest price for your product. Two other companies I recommend are Hound.com and EmploymentCrossing.com, which can help you see the most openings.

You need to know what the market is for your product.

EmploymentCrossing is an exceptional way to learn about the market. Here, you can be aware of the market at all times and know exactly what is going on and who is hiring. EmploymentCrossing is your personal barometer of the market and shows you where you can market your product. The benefit of knowing this information at all times cannot be overemphasized. Think of your career like a product. You have invested a tremendous amount of time and expense creating your product. You may have spent upwards of $100,000 on your education to get to where you are today. (If you are not educated, you have likely spent years of your life learning a given skill.) If you had that much money in the stock market, my guess is that you would want to watch what is going on in the market at all times. Your career should not be any different. Do not lose your investment. Do not allow yourself to go out of business. Know where your product is marketable.

D. Conclusions

You are a product. Your career is a small business. Run it like a small business and realize the importance of your brand. Most importantly, realize you always need to have a market for your product. If you remember this, you will be well served throughout your career.

Your Beliefs About Yourself are Controlling Your Destiny

What You Will Learn Go deep and understand what is that which is controlling how you experience the world. Everything that has happened, is happening, or will happen to you is directly related to the beliefs adopted by you. Condition yourself to believe that you are successful, happy and doing well. Manage your mind and take control of your destiny.

When you go down any street in virtually any major urban environment in the world you will see people living on the street.  I have lived in Europe, Asia and all over the United States and wherever I have gone I have seen people living on the street in various parts of these cities.  The only place I can honestly say I have not seen this is in rural Ohio, where several members of my family live surrounded by miles of corn fields.  Perhaps homeless people live in the corn fields there, I do not know.

Who are these millions of homeless people and why are they homeless?  These people are literally everywhere. There are certainly many sociological explanations for their extreme poverty and other problems.  We can blame the government, we can blame the economy and we can blame others.  Notwithstanding, there are tons of people out there who somehow manage to do exceptionally well in spite of everything.  They do not have educations but are the richest people in the world.  They may have had their face burned off in a fire and end up marrying a model.  They may have a low IQ but have managed to do incredible things with their lives.

For every story about someone who is poorly off, there is a story about someone who is doing well.  You need to understand that there are vast differences in the world about how people experience and react to the world.  What makes this central idea so exciting is that what happens to us is entirely within our control, if we are willing to “go deep” and understand what it is inside of us that is controlling how we experience the world. What I am concerned about specifically is your beliefs.  Your beliefs control how you experience and interact with the world.  Due to our early life experiences, almost all of us develop beliefs about who we are and our relationship to the world.

The significance of these beliefs is that our beliefs end up creating our experience of life and the world around us.  The experiences we have of life, the circumstances we find ourselves in and the results we achieve are all related to the beliefs that we adopt about ourselves.  The reason this occurs is because we all do what we need to in order to create consistency between our lives and what happens to us and our beliefs.  This is a profoundly important statement and something that if you really grasp it can change your life, your career and your destiny forever.

One of the most powerful needs people have is for their experience of the world to be consistent with what they believe.  The drive for this is so incredibly strong that people will do almost everything to be right about their beliefs and will do this even when being right means they will suffer, be unhappy or experience failure.

We all have beliefs and these beliefs are about a variety of different things.  These beliefs could be such things as:

• Every time we apply ourselves we are likely to fail.
• Every time we get close to people they will disappoint us.
• We will only be loved when we need something or are sick
• Success is for other people and not for us.
• We are not important.
• We do not fit in.

There are a ton of potential beliefs out there that we may have about ourselves that we potentially could have adopted about ourselves based on our early experiences.  In almost every case, we do not choose the beliefs we have about the world but instead we have adopted these beliefs based upon our early life experiences and feedback from the world (especially with and from our parents).  These beliefs end up controlling how we evaluate ourselves in relation to the world.

One of the beliefs that I have had to work on is that I cannot trust people.  One of the reasons I think that I adopted this belief was because I learned very early on that I could not trust my parents in certain circumstances.  Both of my parents lied to me on several occasions when I was younger.  While in and of itself this was not a horrible thing, this engendered a tremendous amount of distrust in me at a later age.  When I got into business situations as an adult I started having my trust violated over and over again–by employees and others.  Invariably, someone I would allow myself to get close to would violate my trust.  Until I was in my early 30s, virtually every woman I dated (or married in one case) violated the trust I had in her.  If she did not violate my trust (or I did not think she would) I was messed up enough at the time that I would push her away and end the relationship.  I was only attracted to “bad girls” due to my belief that no one could be trusted.  I wanted to ensure that my beliefs about the way the world worked were confirmed by the women I chose to spend my time with.  The same thing occurred with many friends and employees of mine.  I chose to associate with people I knew deep down were not trustworthy because this supported my belief in the world that people were not trustworthy.

This is entirely messed up, I know.  However, we all have beliefs like this that are acting out in our life.  Our beliefs about ourselves and the world are one reason that many people end up attracting the like-minded people into their lives. I knew one women quite well who went to Harvard Law School and associated with the highest class people you can imagine. This women dated a succession of at least 3 or 4 men over the course of a few years who literally beat the shit out of her.  She would show up in arguably the most prestigious law firm in Los Angeles with black eyes and bruises all over her body. This is someone who was incredibly intelligent.  Why do you think she was attracting and choosing to date a succession of men like this?  I have not even ever personally known a man who beats up women and would not even know how to go about finding one.  Notwithstanding, this woman somehow was able to attract these sorts of men and vice versa.  The men she dated were bankers, doctors and other professionals who would fly off into rages and kick and punch her.

What is going on in a situation like this?  When you get deeply into it, what was going on, I think, was not a case of “bad luck”.  The woman was consciously and subconsciously attracting people who confirmed a belief that she had about herself, and the world, that led her to consistently being beat up.  The more I think about this particular woman, the stranger the whole thing seems to me.  The last I checked, several years ago, she was working in a battered women’s shelter. I am not saying that women who are battered deserve this sort of treatment.  What I am saying, however, is that a lot of it comes about because of certain peoples’ beliefs about themselves and the world.

I entered into a marriage several years ago with someone I was 100% confident on a conscious and subconscious level would cheat on me.  I absolutely knew it.  It was the most messed up and crazy thing imaginable.  I got divorced because of it. It all happened, however, because of my beliefs about the world and the way it was.

You have beliefs like this that are controlling how you see the world as well.

The person living on the street who believes he is worthless and will always be poor has attracted this life as well.  Whatever you believe will end up causing people and situations that will make you right about your belief. This is just how it works.

People attract the sorts of situations and create the sorts of lives that make them right about their beliefs. You are doing the same thing right now with your life and your career.

What is even more interesting is how we end up distorting reality to ensure that we make a belief seem true even if it is not.  Several years ago when I was around 24, I was dating a woman whose dad was an incredible womanizer. It was really out of control and he was such a bad womanizer and had been throughout his marriage that his wife had finally left him on a trial separation basis.  He was 60 odd years old and had recently started dating a 24 year old girl.  Since my girlfriend’s parents were not divorced yet and she really hoped they would reconcile, she was very angry about this. One evening we were going out for the evening and she said to him, “She better not be here when I get back!!”

Her father smiled and did not say anything.  We got back around 11:00p.m. and walked into the family room.  To my astonishment her father’s girlfriend was not there and he had somehow brought home two other girls who could not have been more than 30.  He had his arms around them both with his feet up and was smoking a cigarette.  He appeared to be having a great time.

“See she’s not here!” he said.  “But now I’ve got two others!”  He was laughing and flashed me a smile.  It was too much and my girlfriend ran to her room crying.

“He’s such a womanizer!!” I remember her crying.  “I cannot stand it.”

A couple of weeks later I was out at bar with my girlfriend and her brother.  A girl I had known in elementary school came up and started speaking with me. I had not seen her in at least 10 years and was very excited to catch up with her.  We spent about 30 minutes talking and caught up. Then she gave me her number to call her so she could give me the contact information of a few other people from elementary school that I had lost contact with, but she was still in touch with.

My girlfriend absolutely flew off the handle.  She told me I was a womanizer.  From that point on everything I did was about womanizing. If I bought a new couch it was because I wanted to have women over when she was not there.  If I got a haircut it was because I wanted to look good for other women.  Her entire view of me was about how I was a huge womanizer–even though I never have been and was not.  What she was doing was distorting reality so that it matched her belief of the world that men were all womanizers (like her father), even if this was not the truth.  Our relationship fell apart shortly thereafter, and I am confident she probably started dating a man who really was an womanizer. This was her view of reality and the world.

She put so much pressure on me that I was a womanizer that I almost felt like I should be.  She was literally almost conditioning myself and my view of the world so that I saw myself as a womanizer even though I am not.  This was due primarily, I believe, due to her deep-seated desire to confirm her beliefs about people.  It was almost as if she was acting in a certain way so that I complied with what she believed about men and the world and the way she was worried I would act.  She believed all men were womanizers and this belief caused her to act in such a way that maybe I would have ended up one eventually.  This is no different than what we do to ourselves in other areas of our lives, however.  For example:

• We believe we will get fired from a certain job so we act in such a way that eventually we do get fired
• We believe that all men are womanizers so we act in such a way that the people we get close to become womanizers
• We believe we will not succeed so we act in such a way that we do not succeed
• We believe we are worthless so we become bums

We actually make our worst fears come true by perceiving people and the world in such a way that these things do come true. The point is that we manipulate our surroundings and unconsciously shape the events occurring around us so that we get to be right about what we believe about the world. We want to create consistency between our beliefs about the world and our lives.  Almost everyone out there wants nothing more than to be right and will do whatever is necessary to make sure their beliefs coordinate with what is happening to them.

When you get into the family life of most bums and other people living on the street you will often find some of the most depressing stories.  You will see people who had parents who were incredibly cold and unloving.  This has likely shaped the beliefs of the people living on the street that the world is a cold and unloving place and “poof” there the people are on the street.  One of my favorite television shows used to be Intervention which I watched for a few years before it finally got too depressing to handle.  What the show is about is a drug addict, alcoholic, bulimic, or other “addict” of some sort who gets completely out of control and needs an intervention.  What always interested me most about this show was the most severe cases and the family dynamic at work.  What I have always looked for with a great deal of curiosity is the sort of family the people have whose lives get completely out of control and have the worst issues. In almost all cases there is a stoic, unsympathetic mother or parent in the background.  The person who is addicted and whose life is spinning out of control does not feel any love in the world and has absorbed beliefs about how there is pain in the world and that his/her life cannot be fixed.  The show usually goes into some early detail about the person’s life and provides a background of the person’s early beliefs about the world and how they got these beliefs.  These beliefs usually are something that play themselves out in the peoples’ subsequent addiction.

Most of us are acting and going through life largely unconscious to what we believe about ourselves.  Whether it is therapy, meditation, biofeedback, or something else, it is incredibly important that we understand why we act the way we do and what makes us whom we are.  Our lives are incredibly affected by our beliefs about ourselves.

Most people in the world are literally operating on auto pilot, based on beliefs about themselves they do not even know that they have.   Everyone has an internal map of reality and this map is creating life and experiences. These beliefs are affecting us on a daily basis whether we want them to or not.  We all have internal maps of reality and these maps operate primarily unconsciously and on automatic.  We hold many beliefs to be true that end up creating our experience of life.  Something that can change your entire life and career is when you realize the following:

You are the creator of whatever happens to you.  Whatever happens to you is coming from inside of you.  Everything that is happening to you is being generated inside of yourself–even if you cannot see this.  The key to a successful career and life is to stop resisting what is happening to you and start choosing what to believe about the world to create the life you want.

Once you understand this statement your life as you know it and your ability to control what happens to you in your life will change.  Understanding this statement and working with this statement is something the most successful people in the world are able to do and the least successful people in the world are not.  In effect, the most successful people in the world choose what to believe about themselves and the world.  I would estimate that less than 1 in 1,000 people understand this.  Even fewer people are able to make this work for there own benefit.

I was about 18 when I first started realizing that I needed to choose my own beliefs about myself.  This process was transformative on so many levels.  I went from being a good student to being an extraordinary student.  I got more popular.  I earned more money.  I became president of the organizations I joined.  There were other incredible things that happened to me as well but it was all really based on the fact that I realized I had to choose what to believe.  I was almost blackballed from a fraternity I was joining (that I would later become president of) because I had conditioned my mind so strongly.

As part of joining most fraternities the group will do everything within its power through certain rituals to make you feel worthless.  For example, they will call you names and get you to say bad things about yourself.  You will be threatened with violence and expulsion from your class. You will be told you are worthless in many, many ways.  The point of all of these exercises is to make you break down and feel like as an individual you are worthless but as a part of the group you have value.  Our fraternity was unusually severe in its approach to this and on at least one or two occasions I saw people have psychotic type breaks when they were undergoing this ritual hazing.  Many organizations such as the Marines and others do this sort of hazing in one form or another and it is part of human nature.  The idea is to shake your beliefs about yourself to the core so you rely on the group.  This serves a useful purpose from the standpoint of determining the long term viability of groups.  Many people undergoing this process would break down and cry and other stuff when confronted with the pressure of the hazing.

The problem I had when I was undergoing all this was that it did not work. I was stoic in many respects and not acting like I should.  From the time I was around 18 until the present day, I have been someone who actively meditates and I try and do this at least once a day.  The reason I do this is primarily to influence my subconscious mind and train myself to believe various things about myself, often regardless of whether or not they are true.  When I was around 18 I became very interested in the mind and how it influences who we are.  Specifically, what interested me most and what interests me to this day is how our beliefs about ourselves have such a serious impact on what ends up happening to us.   I would meditate and do self hypnosis about topics like “self confidence,” for example.

In my days of being hazed, as a “pledge” in my fraternity, being threatened with expulsion and told I was worthless and so forth I did not have the desired effect on the people whose job it was to harass me.

“What do you think about the fact that we all hate you and do not think you have what it takes to be part of our group?!!” one of them might be shouting at me after having dumped a giant 5 gallon pail of ice water over me as I was standing with my hands tied behind my back.

“Well, in all honesty I know I am a valuable person. I have value for the world.  I am a self-confident person …” I might reply to the astonishment of my tormentors.  This would piss them off and the abuse would pick up but I would never be thrown off course. I was not consciously resisting any of this, I just could not bring myself to honestly believe negative things about myself and be influenced by them.

These beliefs and statements would be coming directly from various self-affirmation tapes I had listened to.  Different people reacted in different ways, but throughout my life as one person after another has tried to knock me down a post or two for whatever reason, the beliefs I have conditioned myself to believe have kept me on course, happy and doing well.

Several years ago I was on an airplane traveling back from a business trip from our company’s office India.  Inside the cabin I was sitting in there were a bunch of British magazines.  Since the batteries to my Nintendo Gameboy were not charged I was spending a lot of time reading these magazines.  At some point I started reading an upper crust type magazine and there was a long article about a self help program called the Hoffman Process.  Apparently, in various high society circles of London a ton of people were going to this program and the program was supposed to bring about some sort of profound transformation in people and how they viewed the world.  What was even more encouraging to me was that all of these people from England were traveling to California to do the Hoffman Process.  Since it was not to far from me, I found it very interesting that a self help program in California had gotten an apparent following among British aristocracy.

The program sounded terribly interesting because the testimonials people had from the program were in many cases quite profound.  (In fact, to this day many of the people I personally know who have gone to this program have reported incredible changes.  One guy I knew lost 80 pounds.  Another person quit a horrible addiction a week after going. Other people I know report being happier than they have ever been.  There is a “cult” of sorts of people who have gone to this program and reported some of the most incredible changes they have ever had in their lives.  For others, there has been really no effect.  The point is, there is something to what they do there which has a profound impact on many people

I arrived at the Hoffman Process, at their compound in White Sulfur Spring, California (in Napa Valley), around three years ago on a Friday afternoon.  For 8 days I did various exercises with the participants and went deep into myself, discovering how much of my life has been dictated by beliefs about myself I picked up when I was younger from my environment.  This information was extremely useful for me to know.  During the week I saw several people completely break down and have incredible experiences.  I saw one person who realized at the age of 35 or so that she was actually gay.  I can imagine the results this must have had on her and her family.  I saw years come off of some people’s faces as they seemingly got rid of emotional baggage they had been holding for some time.

The program is not something that was founded by a psychologist.  It is a program that was founded by a tailor in New York, Bob Hoffman, who used to run it out of the back of his tailoring shop.  It involves stuff like shouting at yourself, beating pillows with bats, guided imaging and other stuff that ends up having an effect on making us understand whom we are and where we got many of our beliefs from.  The foundations of the program are not based on an understanding of complex psychology.  Instead, they are based on the ability for people to understand how their need for their parents’ love and approval from an early age had had a tremendous and profound impact on their life and their beliefs about the world.  I enjoyed the program. I also sent my wife to attend the program and she enjoyed it as well. I also sent my father. I have also sent people who work for me.  I have recommended the program to many people.

Essentially, what the program does is it enables people to understand that a lot of their actions and emotions in the world are occurring due to beliefs and behaviors they have adopted from their parents.  The idea is that once you have freed yourself from being someone reacting to things your parents have done and said to you in the past, the more your own decisions are likely to be guided by what you choose to believe.

When I was younger I used to stop and chat with the homeless people on the street at length. In many cases they have severe substance abuse problems and in other cases they have severe psychological issues such as schizophrenia.  Nevertheless, a good portion of these people have nothing wrong with them biochemically.  Many also do not have any serious substance abuse problems.  Instead, their issue appear to be how they think about themselves.  Their beliefs about themselves are controlling their destinies.

This has always been the issue with them.  They feel worthless, they believe they are incapable of good, they believe they are incapable of being loved, they have beliefs about money that disempower them.  When you pass these unfortunate people standing on the side of the road, know that most of the problems they have are caused by deeply held beliefs that they have used to consistently disempower themselves.

This is the same reason you are not reaching your full potential.  Your beliefs about yourself are controlling what is happening to you.

Regardless of who you are, this problem affects all of us–it is just in different degrees.  On a personal level, I have spent that past 20+ years of my life uncovering and exploring my beliefs about myself and seeing if these beliefs empower me or hold me back.  I would like to challenge you to do the same thing today.  You need to manage your mind and understand how your beliefs about yourself, the world and the people around you are contolling your destiny.

The Importance of Planting Seeds: My Experience With the Scientologists

“And when much people were gathered together, and were come to him out of every city, he spake by a parable: a sower went out to sow his seed: and as he sowed, some fell by the way side; and it was trodden down, and the fowls of the air devoured it. And some fell upon a rock; and as soon as it was sprung up, it withered away, because it lacked moisture. And some fell among thorns; and the thorns sprang up with it, and choked it. And other fell on good ground, and sprang up, and bore fruit a hundredfold. And when he had said these things, he cried, He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.”—Luke 8:4-8.

What You Will Learn You need to plant seeds and make sure that the people around you are aware of what you have to offer. You can do this in numerous ways to insure that you are always there for the people who are your potential employers. Top of mind awareness is huge. The world is huge and you need to do everything within your power to stick out.

For several years I underwent a ritual throughout various suburbs of Detroit that year after year resulted in my dramatically increasing my income and customer base in the asphalt business. This ritual became effective year after year due to the power of “planting seeds” in my prospects’ minds. I have continued to use the power of “planting seeds” throughout my career to start businesses and expand various businesses year after year. When you plant seeds in prospects’ minds, they are far more likely to think of you when a need comes up in the future than if you do not. An extremely effective secret to getting a job, getting a raise and more is based on planting seeds in your prospects’ minds. In this case, your prospects should be the potential employers you would like to work for as well as your current employer if you are seeking more money or responsibility.

So few people understand the power of planting seeds, however. The inability to plant seeds is one of the biggest weaknesses of most people in the world–whether they are businesses, or individuals seeking a job or advancement. So many people out there are simply so short term in their focus that they are only looking for instant gratification. If someone or something cannot provide them instant gratification they are not interested. This movement between one form of instant gratification to the other is something that hurts businesses and people.

Yesterday I walked into a store called “Chrome Hearts” in the Malibu Country Mart in Malibu. I have been looking for a money clip for the past few years because my current money clip is getting near the end of its life. When I walked into the store a beautiful woman walked up to me and asked if she could help me. I told her I was interested in looking at money clips. She told me they had two sizes “small and large” and I told her I was interested in seeing the small.

“It’s $825,” she said.

“$825! Wow that’s expensive,” I said. There was no way in hell I was going to spend $825 for a money clip; however, I thought it might be something I could ask my wife for when we had our anniversary in a few years, for example.

“I guess not,” she said rudely. She then disappeared and completely lost interest in helping me and turned around and left me standing there. I was still interested in seeing the money clip but was extremely turned off by her attitude. I will never go into the store again. Had the sales person showed me the money clip, let me touch it and been nice to me I would have likely found my wife and brought her back and suggested to her this might make a good anniversary gift for me one day. Instead, I was completely turned off and turned away.

In my asphalt business, I had a tradition that I would always leave a brochure with every single house in the neighborhoods I worked in once a year. It did not matter if the owner was home or not, I always left a brochure. When they answered the door I also went through the same routine each year.

“I can help your driveway,” I’d tell them, my teeth gleaming in the sunlight, my khaki pants and white oxford shirt fresh from the dry cleaners (heavy starch), my hair slicked back smelling like mangos. In front of their house I would have my Chevy Suburban with its emergency yellow roof beacon twirling. This was real urgent. Sometimes people would rush outside and grab their children and hustle them inside.

“Is there a gas leak in the neighborhood!?” people would sometimes shout from their porches in alarm.

“No, but if you don’t do something about your driveway…”

I would always hand the homeowners a copy of my brochure. The cover to the brochure warned:

Less than 48 hours from now it will be too late to seal coat your driveway. We only come by once a year! Less than three months from now, the Michigan winter may kill your driveway.Call 1-800-SEAL-NOW and your driveway will be sealed in the next 48 hours. Guaranteed. Don’t let ignorance let you make a decision you’ll forever regret!

In addition to the brochure, I always included some helpful information about asphalt that I had written that year. It might be something about how to take care of your asphalt, tips about how to hire someone like me and more. For years I left this information at thousands of peoples’ homes regardless of whether or not they were at home. Easy year for almost a decade I performed the same ritual with the same brochure. In the first year of doing this ritual a lot of people had me do their driveways. After several years of doing this people actually would rush up to my truck like it was an ice cream truck to make sure that I did their driveways. They felt like they already knew me because I had been giving them information and dropping hints to them about doing there asphalt for years. I had been dropping seeds. By the time I stopped doing this business I had people practically throwing money at me begging me to do the work.

The secret I had been following was planting seeds. None of my competitors ever planted seeds like I did. Their seed may have consisted of a small advertisement in the Yellow Pages. By giving people useful information I was consistently planting seeds and by following a ritual I made sure that my potential clients also knew how to act.

I have managed and run a legal recruiting firm for almost a decade. During that time, the substantial majority of people who have become recruiters in the company are the same people I have placed. While I hate to say this, these hires have for the most part come from my ability to also plant seeds. On the few occasions when one of the attorneys I have been working with has shown promise to be an exceptional legal recruiter I have said something like:

“You should consider legal recruiting in the future. I think you would be really good at it.” Invariably, one or two years later most of the people I have said this to in the past have called me and told me they want to be legal recruiters. Some of them are subsequently then hired. This is all the result of planting seeds.

Another thing about the exercise of planting seeds is that by the time these recruiters come to me to discuss being recruiters they have already spent the past couple of years thinking about being legal recruiters. Consequently, they generally hit the ground running and are far more effective than the average recruiter because they have been thinking about working for our company for the past couple of years. In addition, they are more committed and better at their jobs.

Think about the times you have planted seeds in peoples’ minds and the results this has had. Think about the times that people have planted seeds for you.

Several years ago I was on bar on the Detroit River speaking with the older sister of a good friend of mine. She was depressed and talking about how she could not find a good boyfriend, how she had been through one bad relationship after another and other things. The girl was quite attractive and also very intelligent. At the time I would guess she was around 28 and I was around 18. I had no interest in her and she was already well into a full blown career and life. I knew that the problem she was having was how she was visualizing herself and that if she started seeing herself differently everything could change for her. I thought of the most effective thing I could say to turn her around and then I said:

“You do not deserve the life you are having. You deserve a life of country clubs, international travel, big houses, fancy cars and to be treated like a princess.” My thought was that this statement would change how she viewed herself and make her take advantage of her full potential. Unfortunately, however, this seed I planted ended up having an unexpected side effect. She started calling me and hinting she wanted to date me. She got drunk one evening and was hanging all over me telling me she wanted to marry me. Other stuff happened too and it got pretty out of control. I am still uncomfortable about the after effects that remark had to this day. The point is, however, that the remark worked and it inspired her.

When I am working with a candidate seeking a legal job I believe one of my greatest skills is planting seeds. When very good recruiters are deep into their work, they have a very good sense of where their candidates are likely to get interviewed and hired. I will start saying things to my candidates like this:

• “If you can get a job at this firm you will really have done something special.”
• “You would really fit in well at this firm.”
• “I think you are going to do the best you have ever done in an interview when you interview with this firm.”
• “They are really going to like you at this firm.”

This almost always works. The candidate I am dealing with ends up going to the firm I am promoting in their candidate’s interest. This is in all cases the result of planting seeds.

When I was 16 years old there were a bunch of advertisements running on television showing volcanoes (representing breakthroughs) and saying stuff like “Increase your IQ by 30 points–page 124!” The promise was that if you read a book called Dianetics by L. Ron Hubbard all sorts of miraculous things would happen to you. At the time I was incredibly motivated and worried about being able to get into Harvard College. This was beginning to look like all but an impossibility given my performance in chemistry, for one. To this day I do not know how I passed that class. In any event, I picked up Dianetics and read it. None of the promised changes happened and the book did not make a tremendous amount of sense to me. At the time I knew nothing about Scientology but was very interested in anything that could help me pass high school chemistry and get into Harvard College.

I am not proud to admit that I used to purchase clothes at Goodwill when I was in high school. One day I was in Royal Oak, Michigan after school and wandered out of the Goodwill with a sweater or something I had purchased for a few dollars. I came across a little Scientology store front that had a sign out front that stated “Free Personality Test!!” This was too much to pass up. Since I had also tried to decipher some L. Ron Hubbard recently in the book with the volcano on front, I decided to take the test. I went inside and took the personality test. As I was waiting for the test to be graded, I was taken into a basement, seated on a plastic fold out chair and shown a film about the evils of psychiatry. There appeared to be a family living in the basement and several children scurried out of the room as they prepared an old projector for me to watch the film. The film scarred the shit out of me. I still do not remember much about it to this day; however, I do remember something about a football player getting horribly injured and people saying stuff like “he’ll never walk again!” when the football player was unconscious. Sure enough, the guy never walked again after being treated by a succession of evil psychiatrists but did walk after being introduced to Scientology.

After some time the guy who had given me the test came down to speak with me and bring me up to his office. “Are you sure you read Dianetics?” he asked me.

“Yeah, I read it,” I said matter of factly.

“Well your test is among the worst we have ever seen. Your graphs are alarming. I will go over them with you right now.”

He sat me down and explained to me that I needed an emergency Scientology intervention because a bunch of psychological things were wrong with me. It must have taken him an hour to tell me how messed up he thought I was. Then he started asking me if I could somehow come up with $2,000. I needed something called “auditing” and a few courses immediately or I was going to crash and burn. He asked me what my parents did and if they would be interested in paying for all of the services I needed.

“How much is all this going to cost to fix these issues?” I asked him.

“Well $2,000 to just get you functioning normally and at least $30,000 to effectively address the issues.”

He showed me a couple of tin cans hooked up to something called an “E-meter” that they planned on using on me (if I came up with $2,000).

Given the fact that I was in the position of shopping for school clothes at Goodwill, I knew there was absolutely no way my parents were going to give me $2,000 to give to the Scientologists. Since I could not afford the services, I became interested in learning about the guy I was speaking with. I found it fascinating that he was living in a store with what appeared to be a couple of other families and was telling me I was screwed up. He told me he had read Dianetics while on a ship in the navy and this had changed his life. He volunteered to work for the Scientologists after this great read. Between periodically telling me about himself, he encouraged me to investigate other options for coming up with $2,000, such as selling my car. That was a nonstarter. While I was understandably upset with the results of the personality test, I knew there was absolutely nothing I could do.

I had nothing to give.

A week or so after this I received my first correspondence from the Church of Scientology. It was a brochure or a book or something. This was 1986. Over the past 22 years I have moved at least 15 times (more times than I can count). I have moved to numerous different states, lived in dorms in various schools, lived in various apartments and homes. Within a few weeks of arriving at these addresses correspondence from the Church of Scientology suddenly appears. They send me voluminous amounts of information and it just keeps coming–in 2000-2007 I received information from them almost every single day. While the information has slowed down recently, I am confident that they have communicated with me via mail thousands and thousands of times. They send me magazines, brochures, offers, pictures of L. Ron Hubbard and just about every piece of mail they probably ever printed.

At least three or four or my assistants have tried to cancel the mail from the Church of Scientology but they cannot. My ex-wife got so upset with all the mail she wrote them several letters and was at one point asking me to sue them when I was practicing law.

I do not have opinions about the Scientologists one way or another. I have actually known some who were good people and I am sure they do a lot of good for some people. What is so astonishing to me, however, is how aggressively they have been “planting seeds” with me for over two decades. This is an example of being extremely proactive. The more proactive you are and the more seeds you plant, the better you are likely to do in the long run.

What were the Scientologists attempting to accomplish with all this mail? While you would have to ask them, to me it appeared as if they were doing everything within their power to convince me that if I ever had a problem, or needed a new religion, I should think of them. They wanted top of mind awareness. They have succeeded in getting top of mind awareness with me. I am writing about them right now.

How is this relevant to you and your career? You need to plant seeds and make sure that the people around you are aware of what you have to offer. You can do this in a ton of ways. You can send people copies of articles you have written or read, that are applicable to them and many more things. The point is you want to insure that you are always there for the people who are your potential employers. Top of mind awareness is huge.

One example of something that can be very effective is after you interview with someone and find out something the person may be interested in, you can cut out a small article and send it to the person with a note that you thought of him or her while reading it. This sends a message that you care. Planting seeds is extremely effective and is something that helps people remember you. Remember, the world is huge and you need to do everything within your power to stick out.

Do Not Be a Victim

What You Will Learn Do not have a victim mentality. You need to believe no one owes you anything. Make the most of your life and your time in it by trying your very best every single day, and do not expect a free ride. Rise above feeling like you are a victim and become a crusader for what you are capable of achieving. Give life and your career everything you possibly can.

When I was growing up, my mother was an investigator with the Michigan Department of Civil Rights.  Essentially, her job involved listening to various peoples’ complaints alleging they were discriminated against by an employer due to their race, sex, sexual orientation and so forth. Then, she would investigate if any discrimination really occurred.  Typically, she would interview the employer and the people in a given place of business, as well as the person alleging discrimination.  Once she’d done this, she would send a report to civil rights lawyers. They would determine whether or not to pursue action against the employer based on the information she provided.

She did this for a long time. She got the job through an African American state senator with whom we were friends.  He was a very nice person and wrote me recommendations for colleges and so forth when I got older.  My mother worked for him for several years before working for the Department of Civil Rights.  He was the Pro Tempor of the Michigan State Senate for at least a decade and, despite our color differences, he was incredibly gracious in sharing with me the incredible level of frustration African Americans had with the white establishment in Detroit throughout the 70s, 80s and 90s.  This insight was invaluable and drove a lot of my early interest in helping people who had not been given a fair break in the job market for various reasons.  I could not believe so many talented people were trapped in their lives and circumstances due to their race, class and other factors.  The lessons I learned from the Senator and watching my mother fight for the rights of African Americans and other disadvantaged people has been a major motivating force in my life.

I’ve governed my life using the lessons he taught me. There is a tremendous amount of discrimination that exists.  Growing up, I witnessed a great deal of this.  What this taught me is many people do not have the tools or the knowledge to help themselves and are really kept down by society.  When I was growing up, society had a pattern of keeping people down through a lack of access to information.  For example, people might learn about top jobs on the golf course rather than the paper.  People would exchange information among their peers about jobs and this often kept certain people in one place and never gave them opportunity.  I saw this when I started practicing law to some extent. I gradually came to believe the very best thing to do was to ensure people received information about various opportunities.  I believed this lack of information was something holding many people back.  People can only take advantage of opportunities if they are presented to them.  Many people relish opportunity and do everything within their power to make the most of themselves.

What makes me really angry, however, is there are so many people who do not take advantage of the opportunities they are given.  Instead, they look upon the few opportunities they have as a way to game the system and take the most they can from an employer.  This way of thinking is somewhat prevalent in the United States, and it’s always had disastrous consequences for those who involved in it. 

Forty to fifty years ago in the United States, our country was very isolated politically and economically.  After World War II, countries in Europe and Asia were busy rebuilding themselves and the United States became an extremely powerful economic force.  We were sending our goods and services all over the country and an incredible amount of wealth and opportunity was flowing into our country.  This was something that was tremendously beneficial for us and was resulting in the creation of great wealth and other opportunities in the United States.

This massive growth in the United States also resulted in unions and other organizations gaining tremendous power.  Incredible inefficiencies were allowed to occur in numerous organizations.  Many of these inefficiencies are still working themselves out today in companies such as General Motors.  More importantly, the wealth created resulted in a massive level of entitlement whereby those working expected massive rewards from the company regardless of the effectiveness of their work.  People started suing their current and former employers for every trivial thing and eventually word spread you could make a lot of money holding employers accountable even when the employer had often done nothing wrong.

My mother used to come home with numerous cases she was investigating each day and leave them on the dining room table.  I would read all about the people who lost their jobs.  In fact, for several years I found this information far more interesting than anything that was going on in school.  I would say up to 95% of the reports I read were people who had filed complaints in circumstances where there actually was no discrimination.  The people would just make up reasons for the alleged discrimination.  My mother is extremely liberal and had spent her entire career trying to help people she believed had been discriminated against, and she became exasperated by much of what she saw.  Numerous people so much wanted to be “victims” and get something for nothing, they did everything in their power to bring down their employer.  This was upsetting to my mother, and she did not understand it.  It was as if most of the people she met were genuinely evil in some respects.

The other 5% of the people had truly been discriminated against, and there were many horrible stories.  When my mother did find actual discrimination, she would spend all night working on cases.  She would loan money to people and bring them blankets and food if they had no money.  She would fight like hell for the real cases of wrong in the world she saw.  This was the only thing she liked about the job.  This was something that really motivated her, and I am proud of the hard work she did.  My mother was fascinating to watch at these times when something bad really had occurred and she felt like she could make a difference in someone’s life and bring them justice.

From an intellectual standpoint, it was the 95% where no discrimination occurred that was the most interesting to me. I could not understand why people would lie and want to be victims when nothing had happened to them.  The people who were alleging discrimination where none existed included women alleging sexual discrimination, people alleging age discrimination, people from Europe alleging discrimination due to their accents, people who were gay alleging discrimination, Jews alleging discrimination, Catholics alleging discrimination against them by Protestants and others, and blue collar workers alleging class discrimination against them by white collar workers.  What all of these people had in common, however, was they’d been fired from their jobs.

One of the things I noticed most about these cases, after years of reading them, was a lot of people simply do not do good work, nor do they even want to work.  Most of these cases involved people who were basically doing all they could to not play by the rules and get work done.  They spent most of their time not working and not contributing to their organization.  Their was to look for reasons not to get certain things done as opposed to getting things done.  They were on the outside.

To this day, my mother has an incredibly annoying habit of asking for chronological information such as, “and then what happened … and then what happened…”  This is how her reports read as well.  The report would typically delve into the typical day of the fired worker.  This was incredibly interesting and informative.  Most of the people had rituals and other things that made them consistently late for work.  When they got to work they generally did close to nothing.  I generally noticed the following about these fired workers:

1. They were frequently late
2. They frequently missed a lot of work
3. They frequently had many problems outside of work that resulted in them bringing these problems to work with them
4. They frequently did not contribute as much as they could to the organization
5. The frequently had habits and other rituals that isolated them at work

Incredibly, the people filing these discrimination claims were almost always let go because of certain negative patterns and other things they did to upset their employer.  They were more motivated by a sense of entitlement and anger towards employers, in general, more so than simply getting the work done.  To me, this was very surprising and, as a young person, I began to realize there was a massive attitude of entitlement that existed.  These were also people who often refused to take responsibility for their lives.

There are a lot of people who refuse to take responsibility for their lives.  Several years ago, I was home from school on college break. My mother had made friends with the mother of a kid I’d known growing up.  The kid was absolutely hilarious and had been smoking pot several times a day since he was 13.  He came over and told me about how he was currently living in the Caribbean on a small island with a bunch of other guys who had also gotten big workers’ compensation settlements.  Apparently, he and a group of guys had figured out a way to go to work for an employer and fake various on-the-job injuries and extract giant settlements from their companies.  He had been smoking pot in the Caribbean for the past several years on a beach due to a workers’ compensation settlement and had several friends who were doing the same.

As I listened to this, I was not envious, but realized there is really something seriously wrong with the world and many of the people in it.  In fact, there are so many people  who are not interested in being contributors, it’s difficult to believe.

What I would encourage you to do is to not have a victim mentality.  You need to believe no one owes you anything and move on.  Make the most of your life and your time in it by trying your very hardest every single day. Do not expect a free ride.  Prisons are full of people who expected free rides, and there is no such thing.  Rise above feeling like you are a victim and become a crusader for what you are capable of achieving.  Give life and your career your all.

If My Boss Gets Mad at Me or I Get a Poor Review, Does This Mean I Should Look for a New Job?

What You Will Learn The people who can improve in response to criticism are the strongest people of all and the ones to whom great things happen. Those who confront their weaknesses are the ones who achieve great things. Having your weaknesses pointed out to you gives you an opportunity to be pushed to higher levels of performance. You are lucky to have bosses and others who care enough to motivate you to improve yourself.

Fortunate are the people who find themselves in situations where their bosses are demanding of them.  I say this in all seriousness and for several reasons.  At the outset, I want to caution you this article is not for the faint of heart. It’s for individuals who take their careers and lives seriously.  You have chosen to be part of the working world and put the futures of individuals and companies on the line based on the quality of your skills.  So it is time you faced some cold, hard truths.

When I was younger, I attended a very demanding private high school.  I also took the hardest classes I could.  Most of my former classmates are quite successful today, leading in the professions of law, medicine, and other pursuits.  I remember when I was in high school working almost every school night until 12:30 or 1:00 a.m. on homework.  I also remember being just an above average student and getting tons of criticism from my teachers. My writing was good but could be better. I needed to be more punctual about arriving for practice. When I did math problems, I needed to spell out the proofs of each problem much more carefully. I needed to do this. I did that poorly. I should spend more time reviewing the punctuation before turning in my Spanish homework.

In retrospect, I know all of these criticisms were about things that were true.  At the time, I think what I did is something we all do.  Instead of making sure I was accountable for every error, I found fault with the teachers and coaches who criticized me, even looking for reasons to find fault with them personally.  I even complained about my school and teachers to other students, trying to make them see these criticisms of me were totally unjustified.  When we do not like what we hear, we often attack the messenger, don’t we?  This is perfectly normal.

When I went to college, I was still somewhat angry with my high school but took everything in stride.  I did not change anything I was doing in terms of studying and continued working hard in all my classes.  A mere three years after graduating from high school, I remember being informed by my college (a top-ten college) that I had been nominated by the school for a Rhodes Scholarship because my grades were so good.  I remember being very surprised when the school told me they had only nominated four or five students for this award–I still thought of myself as an average student.  College had been much easier for me than high school.

What I realized then, and understand now is when the bar is raised for people, those who try to jump over it get stronger.  You often become so strong you do not even know it until you are competing in another field.  The high school I went to was training its students to “go to the Olympics,” both academically and in life.  I simply did not know it at the time.

Up until a few years ago, I used to stop at a gas station to get some coffee each morning on my way to work.  The gas station was near a public high school in Los Angeles, and the owner spent a lot of time defending his gas station against kids trying to steal this or that from his store.  In addition, kids were always loitering outside the gas station, smoking cigarettes, passing unseen items between their hands, and making lots of noise.  If I happened to drive by that gas station later in the day, kids from the high school were still horsing around and up to no good, when they probably should’ve been in class.

I do not need to wonder–because I already know the answer–if the teachers of these students were always waiting in the wings with one criticism or another of their student’s work.  I would venture to say the teachers probably never went so far as to hover over these students and make sure they were doing their best.  I doubt any of these students went to top colleges, and I am pretty confident none of them will ever be nominated for Rhodes Scholarships.

I am also 100-percent confident that each of those students, if placed in the right environment, would be capable of great things.  The right environment would encourage these students and would also raise expectations of them.  What we believe we can do is very important.  What I am willing to bet, though, is that no one had much hope for these high school students hanging out in front of the gas station.  Because no one had any hope for them, I knew nothing good would happen to them.

What would have happened to these students if someone had set goals for them and made them accountable?

There are very few people in our lives who will believe in us.  For most people, taking the time to give someone honest appraisal is not a fun thing to do.  People simply do not enjoy being criticized, and criticizing others is not a great way to make friends.  There are also very few people who are willing to work hard to better themselves and overcome criticism.  The people who can improve in response to criticism are the strongest people of all. 

Certainly no one is perfect right out of law school, and anyone who disagrees is mistaken. I remember when I was a summer associate in a New York law firm and the firm gave me a stinging review that scared the pants off me.  I could not believe it.  I also remember speaking with the associates in the firm about their reviews at a big dinner.  While I did not speak with all of them, roughly half said they had received good reviews, and the other half willingly admitted their reviews were poor.  At the end of the summer, the strangest thing happened:  the people who had supposedly gotten good reviews did not get offers, and the ones who had received the poor reviews did.  This was in the mid-1990s, when the legal economy was in shambles!

When a class of associates joins a law firm, it is likely only one or two of them will still be there when it comes time to make partners.  This could be one or two people out of a class of 75.  The truth is that the 73 or 74 out of 75 people who are no longer there:

“ not because they have been fired,
“ not because the firm is a horrible place,
“ not because one partner is unfair,
“ not because the firm does not have opportunities available,
“ not because working in-house is better,
“ not because they have always dreamed of doing other things outside the law, and
“ not because the work is boring.

The reason most of these people leave is they do not want to–or cannot–change in response to criticism.  It is very difficult for most people to confront their weaknesses.  Most people choose to go through life not confronting their weaknesses, and this is fine.  However, those who do are the ones who achieve great things.

One of the biggest problems law firms encounter when hiring new attorneys is that most new attorneys believe they are special.  Having attended law school and been admitted to the bar, many of these attorneys expect their first employers to do a lot of ego-stroking, telling them what good attorneys they are and how unique they are, for example.  I have seen this happen on more occasions than I can count.

There is nothing wrong with this attitude.  It only becomes a problem when the attorney or law student is not strong enough to accept criticism.  Unfortunately, law schools, colleges, and others do not prepare budding attorneys for the criticism they will eventually face, and they often cannot handle it.  Yet taking criticism is a perfectly normal part of becoming a functioning attorney.

When I was practicing law, I often had opportunities to go up against more experienced attorneys, several of whom had been practicing 30 or more years longer than I.  I never lost a case against one of these attorneys. However, because I was young and just starting out, the cases were never that complex and my opponents not all that formidable.  In these cases, I went up against attorneys from small law firms that did not have particularly good reputations.  The difference between the work I did and the work these attorneys did was profound.  Their work would typically be littered with typos.  Their legal arguments would often be poorly thought-out and just plain wrong.  I knew in almost all cases the work these attorneys produced would not even come close to getting out the door at the law firms where I practiced.

When you consider this example, you should realize it does not differ from the example of my high school and their established standards.  Contrast a first-rate, demanding high school with a poor one.  Contrast a good law firm with a poor one.  The difference between first-rate organizations and poor ones–and the people they produce–often comes down to two concepts:

ACCOUNTABILITY AND STANDARDS OF PERFORMANCE

The levels of accountability and standards of performance an organization has for its people make a huge difference in the final quality of what is produced by that organization.  The more accountable the organization holds the people in it, the better the organization.  The better the organization, the higher the work standards of its employees and the better they will do, no matter where they find themselves.

I recently read the biography of Jack Welch, former Chief Executive Officer of General Electric.  In this book, Welch spends a lot of time talking about when a company decides to elect a new CEO, there are usually five or six people who are top contenders for the job.  The ones who do not get the position typically leave and go on to immediately assume CEO positions in other leading companies in the world.  For example, the CEO of Home Depot, Bob Nardelli, is someone who did not make CEO at General Electric and then left to take his current position.

When I first read Welch’s biography, I was struck that the people who lost the fight to become CEO of General Electric left were welcomed as the CEOs of competing companies. It was almost as if failing was a good thing.  How could someone who failed in one situation be such a superstar performer elsewhere?

I thought about this for some time, and I realized what it was all about.  General Electric is a world-class organization that sets high hurdles for all of its employees.  In fact, I have heard that the hurdles that General Electric sets are so high that it simply asks the bottom 10 percent of its performers to leave each year.  When people come from a world-class organization that sets high standards, the world knows the organization has molded those people into world-class performers.  Again, the situation is no different than it was at my old high school.  Because of the demands made on me, I went on to become as good as I was capable of being.

This brings me to the answer to the question, “If my boss gets mad at me or I get a poor review, does this mean I should look for a new job?”  In my opinion, the answer is simple:  absolutely, positively not.  Instead, you should consider yourself blessed.  How many of us have opportunities to be pushed to higher levels of performance?  How many of us are lucky enough to have bosses and others who care enough to get us to improve ourselves?

The natural reaction to any sort of criticism is to lash out at the person or the organization criticizing you.  I think this is a huge mistake.  People in the know will pay tens of thousands of dollars for this sort of guidance and to be pushed beyond their current levels of performance.  CEOs of many companies will hire coaches for more than $5,000 an hour to criticize them and push them.  Olympic athletes of every sort generally have coaches behind them, pushing them every second of the day.

Is your organization competing in the Olympics?  Do you want to be in an organization competing at the highest level?  Are you willing to compete at the highest level?

The next time an employer gives you criticism or pushes you along remember you have a choice.  You can find a group of people who will never find fault with you, like the kids at the substandard Los Angeles public school.  You can also choose to practice law with a lousy firm and get beaten by 25-year-old kids when you are a 55-year-old attorney because you never decided to jump over the bar when it was held high for you and never took the advice of those trying to help you.

I would encourage you to compete in the Olympics, and the next time someone pushes you to improve yourself, smile, put your head down, and follow his or her advice. The next time you look up, you may find yourself on top.  If you are like me, you will find the whole experience quite enlightening, and if you have character, you will realize you can never be more indebted to anyone than to the people who challenged you to be the great person you are.

The Magic Asphalt Sealer Tank

What You Will Learn Have faith in your work and in your own abilities. Invest in what you are good at and take chances. Pick yourself up when bad things happen and fix them. Invest in your gains and keeping going when things get bad. Constantly make the most of the tools you have at your disposal. Continue to improve and move forward and always remember where you came from.

When I was in college my girlfriend had the annoying habit of periodically declaring that the dorms were too noisy for her to sleep in and then would demand I take her to a hotel to spend the weekend watching television and ordering room service.

Her obsession with hotels was so profound that when her mother came to stay in Chicago one year my girlfriend stole her key and used it for years to go hang out in a hotel room for free.  It was for the old Blackstone Hotel and the key was on a giant brass thing that she lugged around in her purse.  She seemed pretty proud that she could go stay in the hotel anytime she wanted to.  I went there with her once but told her that this whole thing was too much for me.

“This is probably a felony,” I related to her as she sat there munching cashews from the mini bar she had no intention of paying for.  When, she said she had no intention of paying for the hotel room either I said, “This is intolerable and I am leaving.”

We had some different values.  Were it up to her we would have moved right into that hotel room.  She really considered me uptight because I did not like staying in hotel rooms for free. I can just imagine what would have happened if someone had tried to check into that hotel room.

When my girlfriend declared the dorms were too loud for her to sleep, what this really meant to me was that she had decided it was time for me to drive her to an industrial part of town so we could spend the night at a Holiday Inn Express, or a similar hotel.  Once we got to the hotel we would watch HBO on television and go out to eat at Denny’s.  Since she never really studied much–or at all, the event would invariably result in an argument of sorts when I would demand she turn down the television in the cramped hotel room while I tried to make sense of some Greek guy pontificating about the meaning of everything.  At some point during the weekend she would generally tell me she also had “writers block” and ask me to write a term paper for her or something while she went shopping for make up at the local mall.

These were not nice hotels.  They were frequently right next to freeways and the rooms were rarely much quieter than the dorms.  There were often semi trucks sitting with their diesels purring in the parking lot all night long.  Nevertheless, this need she had to stay in lousy hotels was something I tolerated and were it not for the industrial areas these hotels were located in I would probably have found myself refusing to go on these short excursions.

The best thing about the areas where we stayed in was not that the hotel rooms were cheap.  It was that they were in areas where contractors all over Chicago kept a lot of their equipment.  There was a little ritual about our frequent trips outside of campus.  We would leave on a Saturday morning and we would invariably stop along side the road and look at dump trucks, generators and other stuff that had for sale signs on it.  Since many of these pieces of equipment were parked in front of homes I would have the privilege of speaking with the owners of the equipment.  My girlfriend would generally be sitting in my truck while I looked at these various pieces of equipment and chatted with their owners.  Once back in the truck, I would explain to her about what various pieces of equipment did and how it was my dream to have my own bulldozer.  She would look very bored by these sorts of conversations and I think she must have wondered to herself what she was doing with me.  Nevertheless, she would tolerate it knowing I was also going along with her interest in staying in bad hotel rooms.

On one of our visits to a working class suburb in Chicago I could not believe my eyes.  Parked in front of a ranch house was a giant red asphalt sealer tank.  It would be one of the most remarkable and transformative relationships I would ever have with a piece of machinery.  The owner of the home had a the same color Chevy Suburban I was driving parked in front of his house and I believe that this was some sort of sign.  I pulled over and sat in my truck for a few minutes telling my girlfriend what a wonderful piece of machinery the tank appeared to be.  Eventually, I decided to go to the door of the home and ask the man if he wanted to sell it.

The man who answered the door was a short European-looking man with dark skin and he was wearing a wife beater tee shirt.  The outside of his entire house was very dirty.  There were a lot of toxic chemicals around this area–open paint cans and so forth.  Inside the house I could see a bunch of little kids running around in white undershirts that appeared to not have been changed in days. The kid’s faces appeared to be partially covered in chocolate and other stuff they had eaten recently.  Inside the family appeared to be speaking another language.

I asked the man, “What language are you speaking?”

“The Cant.” he stated matter of factly.

I had no idea what he was talking about.  I had never heard of this language and only later would I learn after asking him what language he was speaking for the fifth or six time that it was a genuine “Gypsy” or “traveler” language.

I proceeded to ask the man several questions about this asphalt sealer tank.  I was so excited I could not believe it.  Spring was breaking and soon I would be able to resume doing asphalt sealing around Detroit.  I had to make a deal and get this asphalt tank.  The tank looked so run down that I was very confident I might be able to afford it.  Back at my fraternity house I had a 15 year old Audi car that I was looking forward to selling. It had gold rims and was painted with all these strange gold stripes.  It looked like it belonged in a 70’s German hip hop video.  I remember the President of the University of Chicago at the time, Hanna Grey, had walked by me on one occasion while I was parking and appeared to be cracking up.  She looked like Barbara Bush.

“Hello!” I told her happy to be meeting such an important person.

“That’s quite a car!” she said in a patrician tone.

“Thanks!” I replied.

The man could not believe that a kid was directly in front of his house trying to negotiate to purchase an asphalt tank.  I could not really believe it either.  The tank was quite run down.  It looked very cheaply made and even the tires were quite cheap.  It had a very cheap pump attached to it that one could use to spray asphalt sealer on driveways and more.  To me this appeared to be too good to be true.

“Will you take four thousand for this?” I finally asked the man after we had spoken back and forth for at least 30 minutes.

“Of course!” he said.

After I made the offer I got the feeling he would have taken four hundred.  I was incredibly enthusiastic about this tank, however, because I knew what it could accomplish.  With this piece of machinery I figured I was well on my way to making a great living as an asphalt sealer contractor.

A few days later I sold my Audi to a guy who thought he was a rap star from the South Side of Chicago and had the money for the tank.  I called the man and told him he could bring the tank by.  He was at the front door my fraternity house within the next hour.  There were children all over the inside of his Suburban.  There must have been ten kids.  I told him to park the tank directly in front of my fraternity house which was directly in front of the entrance to the quadrangles of the University of Chicago.  There were still a few weeks left of school at this point so I was driving around campus for my remaining weeks of school in a giant suburban with a 15 foot long tank attached to the back of the truck.  It must have been quite a site.

When school ended for the year I packed up all of my belongings and put them in the Suburban and started driving home to Michigan.  I left at around 10:00 pm.  It is about a 5 hour drive to Detroit from Chicago.  It was a very strange trip home.  About two hours outside of Chicago I got a flat tire.  When I pulled over I realized that I still had a gas pump nozzle sticking out of the Suburban’s fuel tank.  Incredibly, I must have brought that with me when I left the last gas station.  A man pulled over to assist me in a giant semi truck.  He was very nice; however, there was also something about him that seemed very dangerous.

“What are you hauling?” I remember asking him.

“Cartilage,” he said.

I have no idea what a guy was doing in a giant semi truck at 12:00 am hauling thousands of pounds of animal cartilage but it frightened me.  I was very fearful that I might be added to his next load of cartilage.  I finally got back on the road and rolled into the City of Detroit around 3:30 am.  What a sorry sight this must have been with me and my tank.  Around that time I had been doing a lot of writing and research at the University of Chicago about the City of Detroit.  I was actually very interested in the sociopolitical aspects of the site, and how African-Americans had been negatively affected by historical discrimination and other factors.  As part of my research, I was planning on spending the summer living in one of the worst areas of Detroit.  It proved to be one of the best summers of my life.

At the time there was a new terror tactic going around the City of Detroit that I had been reading about in the local papers.  Apparently, a group of gangsters would drive around in Chevy Caprice’s with the lights off and when someone would flash their lights at the car the people in the car would all open fire on the car killing the driver and the people in the car.  That night as I drove into Detroit I saw a low riding Chevy Caprice drive right past me with all of its lights off.  I came very close to flashing my lights at it but stopped at the last second when I realized this would be a death sentence.  Detroit is so cool in the middle of the night.

As the summer progressed my red tank and I made a tremendous amount of progress together.  For seven days a week we spread asphalt cheer throughout all of Detroit and worked very hard.  I started employing numerous people throughout the scary neighborhood I had moved into and actually started feeling like I was becoming part of the community.  One thing I can say is that these were some of the nicest people I have ever met.  Drug dealers and others spent their time shooting each other.  However, around all of this insanity there are many people who are very happy and in no danger whatsoever.  If you keep to yourself and do not associate with the wrong people living in a bad neighborhood is generally not really any different from living anywhere else.

That summer I hired Rodger who is one of my favorite people I have ever met.  Rodger was a former crack addict and weighed about 300 pounds.  He had been doing everything he could to stay out of trouble and deep down was a very good person.  He was also very skilled, which came in really handy.  One day I lost the keys to a pick up truck we were using and he hot wired it for me.  He had a huge family and they all lived in a run down house not too far from where I was living.  He also had around 10 kids and was only 30 years old at the time.  One of the most remarkable things about living in this part of Detroit was that the women he had kids with had no intention of marrying him.  One day I was waiting for Rodger in front of his house to start work and a couple of very attractive young girls came up to me.

“I want to have Rodger’s baby!” one told me.

“Are you serious?”  I asked.

Rodger later explained to me that some of the women he had babies with simply declared they were going to have his child and then had proceeded to have his children.  I can imagine that Rodger must have been a very good father but it must have been difficult to have so many mothers to keep track of.

Rodger’s finest moment came one summer day when we were planning on sealing numerous very large driveways and a few parking lots. I had filled the tank up to its absolute maximum of 550 gallons and the weight of this was extreme.  Sparks were flying every time the tank when down a large curb.

We would typically pick up the sealer about an hour outside of Detroit and then drive into the suburbs of Grosse Pointe and other areas to do our work.  On that day as we were on the freeway with our full load, cars kept driving up alongside me and honking and pointing at me and the truck.  The people looked panicked.  Without going into much detail, for various psychological reasons I thought the people were making fun of me and my operation.  In posh suburbs kids used to drive up to me and point and make fun of me, call me white trash and various other sorts of things.  On this particular day the honking and pointing was really too much.  I started flipping all of the people off who were doing this.  It happened several times that day and I remember telling Rodger:

“I am so sick of these people making fun of us and this tar operation.  These motherfuckers need to start working for a living!”

“Yeah, I hear that!” Rodger would say back.

Rodger had won $5000 in the lottery about six months previously and one of the requirements he had of working for me was that I took him to a party store each day to “do the numbers”.  I would advance him the day’s pay and he would proceed to purchase all sorts of lottery tickets based on events that had happened that day.

“Was that exit 241?” he might ask me when we were getting off an exit in some location.

“Yeah,” I would tell him.

Rodger would then proceed to take out a small notebook and write down the exit number with a bunch of other numbers that struck him as significant from that day.

When we got to our first driveway in Grosse Pointe Rodger came up to me.

“You’ve got a bad arc weld on one of the joints on the trailer,” he told me.

“This trailer?  It’s fine! This thing is built like a German brick shit house.”

I was in the middle of operating a flame thrower to burn grass off of the edges of a lawn.  I did not want to hear it.

I think Rodger said something to me at least once more.  For some reason, however, it simply was not registering.  What he was telling me was that a major part of the trailer that was securing it to the Chevy Suburban, a giant piece of steel, was about to break off.  If this happened the results would be disastrous.  What this meant was that the tank would completely detach from the truck and all 500+ gallons of sealant would continue up the road completely on their own.

We stopped at a gas station in downtown Grosse Pointe City around 5:00 pm to get some Gatorade and some gas for our blowers and other equipment.  I never liked stopping in downtown Grosse Pointe because it was quite embarrassing.  There would be people in golf shirts walking around and everyone always seemed very excited about being so middle class.  I would generally see kids I knew as well as their parents who were supporting them over the summer.  They spent their time in country clubs and so forth and drove around in expensive cars.  Seeing girls I knew was generally not a lot of fun either.  It was not considered a cool thing to be doing such blue collar work but I was actually quite proud of myself.

Rodger and I were very tired and still had several more hours of asphalt work before the sun went down.  Generally, what would happen when we pulled out of any gas station is that we would hear a giant “bang” as part of the trailer would bottom out and a bunch of sparks would go flying.  This was a sound I had been accustomed to all summer.  As we exited the gas station I did not hear any bang.  At first I was pleasantly surprised by the lack of a giant bang and then I looked over at Rodger.  Roger was looking out the passenger side window of the Suburban.  Directly to his right was the tank which had broken off to the truck and was now barreling towards and Banana Republic and Ann Taylor store.

“I told you that trailer had a bad arc weld,” Rodger said.

Hundreds of gallons of sealer covered the front of both businesses and a couple of windows shattered. I could not believe my eyes.  The tank weighed thousands of pounds.  It snapped a light pole in half and went charging into the window of a Banana Republic store.  A large blower that was on the trailer went flying through the window of the Ann Taylor store.

There were at least 10 police cars on the scene within a couple of minutes.  At least 50 spectators wearing penny loafers, khaki shorts and polo shirts gathered around.  I was covered in tar from head to toe as was Rodger.  Rodger was very frightened.

“I’m not going back to prison,” he told me.

“Prison?” I asked. I knew nothing about Rodger ever being in prison.

The police asked for my identification and Rodger’s as well.  A few moments later a series of interesting announcements came over a radio loud enough for everyone gathered around in this spectacle to hear.

“Drug possession with intent to distribute … Jackson State Prison 3/14/85-5/5/87.  Arrested for robbing a convenience store with a deadly weapon … Jackson State Prison 7/1/87-9/1/89…”

The best part about these announcements was seeing the faces of the white bread people gathered around enjoying their ice creams.  I loved hearing their hushed whispers.  I never said anything to Rodger about any of this or asked him about the time he had spent in prison.  As a matter of fact, I pretended I did not hear a thing.  What I understood at that point after having spent so much time with Rodger is that you cannot judge people all the time based on their past.  Also, Rodger had experienced a different life than I had, and if I were to have shared his experiences I too might be living a life similar to his.  You can never judge a person until you have been in their shoes.

The tank had lashed out at these stores and did over $30,000 in damage.  Despite an incessant disorganization, I had been organized enough that summer to have insurance and the entire thing was covered. I am very fortunate that no one was injured in this ridiculous incident.

I had been storing the tank at night at a steel processing facility run by a German man.  The tank was currently in a police impound lot.  A couple of days after the tank accident the German man called me wondering where the tank was.  I think he was nervous that I might have run off without paying rent.  He then explained to me that he could fix the tank and trailer because he had skilled welders on his staff.  I had the tank towed there and a couple of days later it was as good as new.

Over the next several years I used this tank every summer and it was something that enabled me to support myself through school.  I loved this tank and it brought me such good luck and fortune it is hard to describe.  Everything I invested in the tank I ended up getting more out of it.

After I graduated from law school I moved my tank up to Bay City, Michigan where I was working for a federal district judge. I was excited about all of the work I could do with my magic tank on the weekends.  The tank had been incredibly good to me for years and years and had brought luck and magic to my life.

I decided that I was going to give the asphalt tank a complete overhaul up in Bay City.  I found a shop that built trailers and I ordered a massive overhaul.  I made numerous changes to improve the quality of the tank. I built special ramps to load my equipment on and more.  I was planning on turning the tank into a profound piece of machinery that could support me for the rest of my life.  I sketched out changes to the tank and spent weeks thinking about how to design the tank of my dreams.

As luck would have it, I ended up quitting my job in Bay City and flew out to California to interview with law firms while my tank was still being worked on.  There were some fishy things going on with the welder before I left.  I stopped by there often and heard them fighting about money issues and other things.  It was a family business.  I knew things were not going well there.  They had also agreed to do the work for a very cheap price which was suspicious.

I was sitting in the Hilton Hotel in Pasadena one evening when the phone rang.  It was the owner of the welding shop.  He told me that there had been a traumatic fire and that his entire building had burned down.  He hinted to me that he had started it for insurance money.  I was 100% confident he did.  He told me that my trailer had been in the garage and had survived the fire but would need a complete rebuild. He told me that the insurance company would be responsible.

To my astonishment, the insurance company took my trailer and did a massive rebuild on it and made it into the most incredible piece of machinery I have ever seen.  Moreover, they made it up to Department of Transportation standards and did all sorts of incredible work to it.  It must have cost them over $20,000.  They also did the work very quickly and gave it back to me within days because they were worried I would file a claim for “lost wages.”  When I got the trailer back I literally could not believe my eyes.  That summer I took the trailer out and it looked so impressive people would pay basically anything I asked for my services. I looked like a hardcore incredible operation.  I was making so much money that I bought a Porsche.  Life was good and it was all because of the magic trailer.

I was planning on moving to Los Angeles to start work in a law firm and was about a week from leaving.  I had no idea what I was going to do with the magic trailer.  One day I was behind the True Value hardware store in downtown Grosse Pointe purchasing some supplies to finish a job.  A man came up to me and said he was at a fair down the street with his family but could not help but notice my beautiful trailer.

He explained that he owned a small nut factory that processed peanuts by adding delicious toppings to them  and was interested in the asphalt sealing business.  He asked me if I would be interested in selling the trailer.  I told him I, of course, was.

A few days later I stopped by his nut factory with the trailer and he gave me a bag filled with $15,000 in hundred dollar bills. I had never seen so much money in my life.  The tank is still giving to this day:

1. When I moved to Los Angeles I purchased a small house for $180,000 and used the $15,000 for a down payment.  A year later I sold the same house for $250,000.
2. I purchased a $350,000 house with the proceeds from that sale.  Two years later I sold that house for $550,000.
3. I purchased a $950,000 house from the proceeds from that sale.  Two years later I sold that house for $2,000,000.
4. I used the proceeds from that sale to purchase a $5,000,000 house.  One year later I sold the house for $5,800,000.

Today the tank is still giving to me and I live on a beach in Malibu, California because of the power of this asphalt tank and what it has given me.  I consider myself blessed by the power of this asphalt sealer tank.

What does this asphalt sealer tank represent and how is it relevant to you?  It is relevant because it represents having faith in your work and your own abilities.  It is about investing in what you are good at and taking chances.  It is about looking for opportunity no matter where you are.  It is about picking yourself up when bad things happen and fixing them.  It is about investing your gains and keeping going when things get bad.  It is about using your skills to provide opportunities for others.  It is about the power of what you are capable of.  Because of that tank I am a different person today.  I get up and look at the waves and walk on the beach when I want to.  The lingering power of the tank allows me to breathe fresh air each day.  The tank is something that changed my life.

The tank may have been magical but it is also a symbol.  You never want to give up.  You want to constantly make the most of the tools you have at your disposal.  You want to continue improving and moving forward and you always, and I mean always, want to remember where you came from.

Setting Goals is Their Attainment

What You Will Learn There is a level of understanding about goals that transcends what we believe is possible. The only limitation in achieving your goal is that which you set up in your own mind. You need to know where you are going and set goals that assist you in getting there. Powerful forces come to the aid of people who set goals and start moving towards them. You need to set goals and believe you can attain them.

Every year in January, I do all sorts of goal setting.  I set goals for what I am going to do over the next year. I do this in a lot of ways, but sometimes I dig out old tapes and CD programs I have accumulated throughout the years and listen to them to get fired up.  I have been setting goals since the first of January and it is unlikely I’ll be done before the end of January, and these goals are just covering the year 2009.  I figure I am going to spend at least 10% of 2009 setting goals.  The thing about in-depth goal setting is that it really works.  I hate to be mysterious, but there is a level of understanding about goals that transcends what we believe is possible.  Time and again I have accomplished things that formerly seemed impossible to me.  This happened because I wrote the goals down.  I have set goals for numerous things and written them down and these things have then proceeded to happen.  Sometimes they did not happen at the exact time I had hoped they would, but they eventually did.

Last night, I was listening to some tapes about a goal setting work shop Anthony Robbins held.  In one of these workshops, one woman set a goal she would have $100,000 in less than eight weeks.  At the time she was making something like $30,000 a year.  Tony remembered thinking this was impossible, but let her try anyway.  A few days before her eight week deadline expired she miraculously won the lottery and $100,000.  The woman came back to one of Tony’s workshops and decided to set another goal of $150,000 this time.  She gave herself six months to achieve this.  A few days before the six months expired she won $150,000 in the lottery again!

Apparently, Tony traveled around the country telling this incredible story and he told the story in Detroit.  A couple decided they might as well set a giant goal and so they decided to try and make a million dollars in a period of several months.  They also did something that Tony recommended in order to achieve the goal: They started acting as if they already had the money in their possession.  When they got back from the seminar they started telling people they had recently made $1,000,000.  A few weeks before the deadline expired they actually won $1,000,000 in the lottery.

I have actually met Tony Robbins and if I had not spent time with him I would tell you that these stories sound untrue.  But they did happen and they have something to do with the power of goal setting.  There is an unseen force that comes to the aid of people who set goals and believe they can accomplish them. This story from Think and Grow Rich really makes this point:

This story proves the truth of that old saying, ‘where there’s a will, there’s a way’. It was told to me by that beloved educator and clergyman, the late Frank W. Gunsaulus, who began his preaching career in the stockyards region of South Chicago.

While Dr. Gunsaulus was going through college, he observed many defects in our educational system, defects which he believed he could correct, if he were the head of a college. His deepest desire was to become the directing head of an educational institution in which young men and women would be taught to “learn by doing.”

He made up his mind to organize a new college in which he could carry out his ideas, without being handicapped by orthodox methods of education.

He needed a million dollars to put the project across! Where was he to lay his hands on so large a sum of money? That was the question that absorbed most of this ambitious young preacher’s thought.

But he couldn’t seem to make any progress.   Every night he took that thought to bed with him. He got up with it in the morning. He took it with him everywhere he went. He turned it over and over in his mind until it became a consuming obsession  with him. A million dollars is a lot of money. He recognized that fact, but he also recognized the truth that the only limitation is that which one sets up in one’s own mind.

Being a philosopher as well as a preacher, Dr. Gunsaulus recognized, as do all who succeed in life, that DEFINITENESS OF PURPOSE is the starting point from which one must begin. He recognized, too, that definiteness of purpose takes on animation, life, and power when backed by a BURNING DESIRE to translate that purpose into its material equivalent.

He knew all these great truths, yet he did not know where, or how to lay his hands on a million dollars. The natural procedure would have been to give up and quit, by saying, “Ah well, my idea is a good one, but I cannot do anything with it, because I never can procure the necessary million dollars.” That is exactly what the majority of people would have said, but it is not what Dr. Gunsaulus said. What he said, and what he did are so important that I now introduce him, and let him speak for himself.

“One Saturday afternoon I sat in my room thinking of ways and means of raising the money to carry out my plans. For nearly two years, I had been thinking, but I had done nothing but think!

“The time had come for ACTION!”

“I made up my mind, then and there, that I would get the necessary million dollars within a week. How? I was not concerned about that. The main thing of importance was the decision  to get the money within a specified time, and I want to tell you that the moment I reached a definite decision to get the money within a specified time, a strange feeling of assurance came over me, such as I had never before experienced. Something inside me seemed to say, `Why didn’t you reach that decision a long time ago? The money was waiting for you all the time!’

“Things began to happen in a hurry. I called the newspapers and announced I would preach a sermon the following morning, entitled, `What I would do if I had a Million Dollars.’

“I went to work on the sermon immediately, but I must tell you, frankly, the task was not difficult, because I had been preparing that sermon for almost two years. The spirit back of it was a part of me!

“Long before midnight I had finished writing the sermon. I went to bed and slept with a feeling of confidence, for I could see myself already in. possession of the million dollars.

“Next morning I arose early, went into the bathroom, read the sermon, then knelt on my knees and asked that my sermon might come to the attention of someone who would supply the needed money.

“While I was praying I again had that feeling of assurance that the money would be forthcoming. In my excitement, I walked out without my sermon, and did not discover the oversight until I was in my pulpit and about ready to begin delivering it.

“It was too late to go back for my notes, and what a blessing that I couldn’t go back! Instead, my own subconscious mind yielded the material I needed. When I arose to begin my sermon, I closed my eyes, and spoke with all my heart and soul of my dreams. I not only talked to my audience, but I fancy I talked also to God. I told what I would do with a million dollars if that amount were placed in my hands. I described the plan I had in mind for organizing a great educational institution, where young people would learn to do practical things, and at the same time develop their minds.

“When I had finished and sat down, a man slowly arose from his seat, about three rows from the rear, and made his way toward the pulpit. I wondered what he was going to do. He came into the pulpit, extended his hand, and said, `Reverend, I liked your sermon. I believe you can do everything you said you would, if you had a million dollars. To prove that I believe in you and your sermon, if you will come to my office tomorrow morning, I will give you the million dollars. My name is Phillip D. Armour.”‘

Young Gunsaulus went to Mr. Armour’s office and the million dollars was presented to him. With the money, he founded the Armour Institute of Technology.

That is more money than the majority of preachers ever see in an entire lifetime, yet the thought impulse to back the money was created in the young preacher’s mind in a fraction of a minute. The necessary million dollars came as a result of an idea. Behind the idea was a DESIRE which young Gunsaulus had been nursing in his mind for almost two years.

Observe this important fact… HE GOT THE MONEY WITHIN THIRTY-SIX HOURS AFTER HE REACHED A DEFINITE DECISION IN HIS OWN MIND TO GET IT, AND DECIDED UPON A DEFINITE PLAN FOR GETTING IT!

There was nothing new or unique about young Gunsaulus’ vague thinking about a million dollars, and weakly hoping for it. Others before him, and many since his time, have had similar thoughts. But there was something very unique and different about the decision he reached on that memorable Saturday, when he put vagueness into the background, and definitely said, “I WILL get that money within a week!”

God seems to throw Himself on the side of the man who knows exactly what he wants, if he is determined to get JUST THAT! Moreover, the principle through which Dr. Gunsaulus got his million dollars is still alive! It is available to you! This universal law is as workable today as it was when the young preacher made use of it so successfully. This book describes, step by step, the thirteen elements of this great law, and suggests how they may be put to use.  Observe that Asa Candler and Dr. Frank Gunsaulus had one characteristic in common. Both knew the astounding truth that IDEAS CAN BE TRANSMUTED INTO CASH THROUGH THE POWER OF DEFINITE PURPOSE, PLUS DEFINITE PLANS.

If you are one of those who believe that hard work and honesty, alone, will bring riches, perish the thought! It is not true!

Riches, when they come in huge quantities, are never the result of HARD work! Riches come, if they come at all, in response to definite demands, based upon the application of definite principles, and not by chance or luck. Generally speaking, an idea is an impulse of thought that impels action, by an appeal to the imagination. All master salesmen know that ideas can be sold where merchandise cannot. Ordinary salesmen do not know this-that is why they are “ordinary”.

I have heard stories like this many times throughout the years about the power of people who set goals and who then proceed to follow through with them.  The power of setting goals in this matter is remarkable.  Once you tell yourself you can do something everything else in the world begins to fall into place for you.  You need to know where you are going and set goals that assist you in getting there.  Powerful forces come to the aid of people who set goals and start moving towards them.  You need to set goals and believe you can attain them.

Find an Employer With Similar Values

What You Will Learn It is very important you share values with your employer and co-workers. You need to work in an environment where people like you and you fit in culturally. You need to insure you are working for an employer who shares your outlook and values. A good environment makes all the difference. It not only supports your values but also reinforces who you are and nurtures you.

In 1997 I was working for a federal judge in Bay City, Michigan.  It was cold and I was working in a rural area that left a lot to be desired.  Even the judge I worked for got the hell out of there when he could to another part of Michigan.  While the judge I worked for was a very nice person, the atmosphere had a certain inescapable formality.  The way I was required to dress for work each day and other rituals that permeated the work reflected this.  There were also some cultural differences that made it clear to me I did not exactly fit in.  For example, there was another person who did the same job as me, and he and the judge shared a lot of the same values.  They were very conservative politically and both came out of solid upper middle class backgrounds. On the weekends, the people in the office would do things like listen to Lake Wobegoden tapes, while I would eat chicken wings at Hooters and go bar hopping.

It’s very important you share values with your employer and co-workers.  The people you are spending the day with should be quite similar to you culturally and value wise.  I hate to say this but it is true.  People get into trouble in their jobs when they do not share the same values with their co-workers. 

When I worked as a garbage man, I really tried to fit in. I did not have the same pressures and did not see life the same way, however.  The people I was working with had been picking up garbage for several decades and I was a kid getting ready to go to college.  Despite my best efforts, the people I worked with were never very nice to me. One even threatened to “cut me up” with a knife at one point.  Working there was like being in a prison.  I never told on the person who’d threatened me with death because being a “snitch” in this environment was not acceptable.

I was very disappointed I did not fit in with the other garbage men.  They knew I was getting ready to leave and despite that fact they were earning a lot more money than me, they knew I was not going to spend the rest of my life on garbage trucks like they were.  Culturally, and in many other ways they shared values that were much different from mine.  One of the reasons the garbage men did not like me was because I worked so hard.  I would run between the houses tossing the garbage bags in the truck and always manage to get the work completed very quickly.  One man would drive the truck and I ride in back throwing in the bags.  I worked really fast and got into amazing shape doing this.  But this isn’t what the person driving the truck wanted.  They were paid by the hour and if I was on your truck that meant you would make a lot less that day.  I think the other garbage men also started to become resentful because management wondered why I could get routes done so quickly when others seemingly could not.

One day I was riding on a truck and puzzling over why one of the garbage men had called me a few names when speaking with the driver.

“You belong in an office,” he told me.  “You have no business working here.”

This really hurt my feelings.  Nevertheless, this is how they perceived me.  This perception was cultural and value based.  Essentially, what I was being told was I did not fit in.  One day after work the manager came up to me and said, “I need to speak with you.”

He fired me.

“You can’t fire me,” I said.  “I have not done anything wrong. I am one of the best workers here.”

“I know, but the drivers do not like working with you.  I have to be concerned about them.”

I proceeded to lecture the manager for a few minutes about why he was making a mistake and he ended up letting me keep my job.  A couple of weeks later he tried firing me again. This time my mother called him.  She was a civil rights investigator for the State of Michigan and had spent her career helping people who had been discriminated against in the workplace.  Thirty years of working at that job gave her some incredible skills.  After that phone call they left me alone.  Sitting alone at lunch and not being liked is not fun, however.  Neither is being an outsider.

The fact of the matter is you need to work in an environment where people like you.  You need to fit in culturally and you need to be liked.  This is the only possible way you can succeed in your job.  If you are not liked at work and you do not fit in culturally there are almost always going to be problems.  This is just how it works.  You may have problems at work that will have nothing whatsoever to do with your work performance. Conflicting values with your co-workers will cause these problems.

Without getting into a lot of detail, I would say I felt stifled in the environment working for the judge.  I am very grateful the judge gave me the job he did and the training he provided me was fantastic.  The judge is also a very good person. The environment I was in was not necessarily to my liking. Also, culturual fit was so poor I soon realized I was very likely to get fired if I remained.  In fact, one day the judge and I were having a discussion about my performance that I thought could lead to my being fired. At that moment I resigned from the job.  The discussion was ostensibly about my performance, but my performance was actually excellent.  The real reason the judge wanted me to leave had to do with the fact there was too much of a conflict between our values.  We were different people and thought in different ways.

If your values are in conflict with your employer’s it does not matter how good your performance is.  Your employer will not be comfortable with you.  You need to be working in environments where you are comfortable with the people with whom you’re working, and vice versa.

After resigning with the judge, I needed to find a job immediately. My original plan had been to work in a law firm where I’d worked during the summer after my second year of law school in New York.  However, the problem was I was expected to start in one year–not now.  My job with the federal judge had originally been scheduled to last for two years. I had suddenly resigned about 11 months into it and I thought I would have a very tough time explaining to the law firm in New York why I was planning on showing up for work one year early.  In addition, the law firm in New York felt a little stifling too.

The absolute worst thing about New York, however, was I had to spend all of my time with my girlfriend’s aunt and uncle.  Every single night we would sit in their apartment doing nothing.  They would play board games and watch reruns of soap operas and I would sit there doing absolutely nothing. It got really boring for me because I had nothing in common with them.  In retrospect, I had nothing in common with my girlfriend at the time either, but that’s a different story. 

Hanging out with her aunt and uncle if I moved to New York was definitely not an option. I decided the smartest thing to do was to find a job on the opposite side of the country, in Los Angeles.

In order to find a job in Los Angeles I did a mass mailing.  I spent several days researching hiring contacts, spent hundreds of dollars on paper at Staples and then I mailed my resume to every single law firm I could find in Los Angeles.  This worked incredibly well.  In fact, the phone practically rang off the hook with calls from various law firms. 

To this day I believe the best way to get a job is to do a targeted mailing.  I say this from experience because it worked for me.  I used targeted mailing to escape Bay City, Michigan and my girlfriend’s family in New York.  Today I operate two companies, EmploymentAuthority.com and LegalAuthority.com (for attorneys), that help people do targeted mailings to find jobs.  These services work incredibly well for most of the people who use them.

A targeted mailing is an outstanding way to get a job for many reasons, the biggest being it allows you to instantly parade your candidacy in front of every single employer you could possibly work for at one time and get the most interviews and offers.  When a mailing is professionally initiated it can really get incredible results.

When I flew out to Los Angeles I went to the law firm of Quinn Emanuel and was immediately love struck. It was an incredible firm and the people had all gone to the best law schools and also worked in large New York law firms.  It was as if they were escaping the stifling environment of New York and creating their own culture.  They had no dress code and people were wearing sandals and Hawaiian tee-shirts.  The people in the law firm also seemed quite happy.

I knew I definitely was going to work there when one of the men interviewing me was chewing tobacco.  He offered me some and I willingly accepted.  For the next 3 years I would not stop chewing tobacco.  I could not believe you could work in a law firm where you would sit in meetings spitting in a cup and flying high on a tobacco buzz.  In one of my interviews I learned an incredible story.  Apparently, the firm had recently made a young attorney there partner after three years – a record.  What made the story so unusual was apparently what happened the weekend before he made partner. I was told he had been out golfing early in the morning with a bunch of Germans who were clients of the firm.  They were all apparently drinking straight vodka and ice out of giant plastic tumblers and having a riot of a time.  At some point he blacked out and didn’t remember what happened.  He woke up behind a Target in a giant dumpster filled with cardboard, naked, with a $20 taped to his forehead.  After learning about this episode two days later, the law firm made him partner.

“That was when we knew he was ready,” one of the partners related to me.  The partners and others I interviewed with in the law firm seemed to take this story as a sign of a good lawyer and looked upon it with approval.  I could not believe my luck in finding a law firm like this.  I received an offer right in the interview.

When I called my girlfriend to tell her about this her uncle answered the phone.  She had taken a trip to Martha’s Vineyard with her aunt and uncle and a friend of theirs who was around 20 years older than both my girlfriend and I.  I’d just received my offer and was sitting in the hotel room enjoying some stale chewing tobacco.  My girlfriend’s uncle told me she was playing tennis with this older man.  For the next several days whenever I called my girlfriend I heard a new story about where she was with this guy.  One day it was tennis and the other it was taking a walk on the beach.

“We’re great friends!” she would tell me when I managed to get through to her.  It seemed unusual to me she was so close with a man 20 years older than her.

Within a short time I found out she was having a full blown affair with this guy that had developed presumably when I was interviewing with law firms in Los Angeles.  When I finally arrived back in Bay City, Michigan she had packed all of her bags and was moving to New York.  She also told me the wedding we’d planned, and sent invitations for just days before I left for Los Angeles was off.

She had very little to say about why all this was happening. I did not know what was going on. I started chewing tobacco from the moment I got up until I went to sleep.  I was so shaken up by all this I would continue my tobacco use for the next couple of years.  For some stupid reason my fiance’ had been using my cell phone to call her new boyfriend. She led me right to him.

“When you get your cell phone bill DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES open it.  Just give it to me to pay.  I made a few calls,” she told me one day when I was on the phone with her, still puzzling over why she had suddenly broken up with me and moved out and cancelled our wedding.  She had taken my cell phone with her on her trip to Martha’s Vineyard.

I had the unusual experience of calling numerous friends and telling them the wedding was off, and I did not really know why she had disappeared.  Many of them had a difficult time understanding me because I was still learning how to talk with chewing tobacco in my mouth.

When the phone bill arrived I did what anyone would do.  I opened it.  There were hundreds of dollars worth of calls to one number.  I called the number and the guy she had been hanging out with in Martha’s Vineyard answered.  When I explained who I was he freaked out and slammed down the phone.  So much for being discrete.  When confronted with this evidence my now ex-fiance broke down.  At first she tried to explain that he had been stalking her and it was so bad the aunt had to go to therapy over it.

“My aunt is really shook up by this guy!  He is a complete stalker!” She told me.  I still to this day do not understand how 3 hour conversations on the phone initiatied by my then fiance between 11:00 pm and 2:00 am amounted to him stalking her.  It must have been some really weird stalking.

When I got to the new law firm in Los Angeles I absolutely loved it.  I loved the people and I loved the work.  While I certainly did not share all of the values with the people inside this law firm, the point is I felt comfortable.  I had ditched a different life and come to Los Angeles to work in a different place.  I made numerous friends there I still stay in contact with to this day.  The time I spent inside the law firm was some of the best time I have ever spent in my life.  This all happened because I found people who shared my values.  The people I worked with inside the law firm appeared to like me as well and I received a lot of positive reinforcement about the quality of my work.

This was a far different experience than I had with the judge.  What this taught me is you need to be in an environment that supports your values and reinforces who you are. A good environment makes all the difference.

When I was in eighth grade I was kicked out of a private school called Liggett in Grosse Pointe, Michigan.  It was a conservative environment that required coats and ties and I did not share the values of the teachers or kids.  When I was kicked out the teachers and others said I should go to a special school for learning disabled kids and they told my parents I would be lucky if I ever went to college.  Two years later I was attending a private school that was considered even better than Liggett called Cranbrook-Kingswood.  The school loved me and told me I was “gifted.” What’s more, I ended up going to one of the top colleges in the United States and did exceptionally well.  I was the same person at Liggett as I was at the Cranbrook school.  What changed was the environment.  One environment supported me and nurtured me, and the other pushed me down and disapproved of me.

Every organization and every person has a different set of values.  Everyone and every group values and nurtures different things at different levels of intensity.  Different organizations value different sorts of things.  For example, some organizations may value creativity over conformity.  Others may value being adventurous over being cautious.  Others may value supporting the worker over the corporation.  People are the exact same way – they have a hierarchy of values they either support or do not support.

You need to understand the priorities of the organization for which you’re working, or are considering working.  The priorities of a given organization are something that will make a giant difference in your success or failure.  People tend to group together with others who share similar values.  This is why Republicans group together and Democrats group together.  If you tried to put a Democrat with a Republican the chances are the results would not mix well.  Their values are simply too different.

The worst thing that can happen is when you do not know who you are dealing with and your values come into conflict.  You need to stand for something and ideally whatever you stand for will be reflected in the employer for whom you’re working. When these values are in conflict nothing works the way it should.  People and organizations have different rules for what success means and for the proper sort of behavior.  You need to insure you are working for an employer who shares your outlook and values.

I cannot emphasize to you enough the benefits of working with a group of people who share your values.  When you are with people who share your values everything changes.  Your contribution and your work is more appreciated.  Most of the reasons behind people losing jobs have to do with a values conflict.  Most of the reasons for people excelling in jobs have to do with a values match.  You want to be in an environment that matches your values.

When I speak with people who appear to be in work environments that support them, I counsel them to remain in their jobs – even if I stand to profit from them moving. Your happiness in life is about finding an environment and a group of people whose values match your own.  This is something crucial that permeates the world.

One of the oldest religions in the world is Judaism.  It has survived for over 4,000 years and Jews have undergone an incredible amount of persecution due to their religion.  You really understand the true power of this religion when you are a non-Jew who gets romantically involved with a Jew.  In college the love of my life was a Jewish girl.  After about two months of dating she was given an ultimatum by her parents not to date me any more because I was not Jewish.  I experienced something similar when I got out of college and dated another Jewish girl.  This sort of insularity is not common to all Jews, however, but it is very common.  It is something that’s enabled the group to survive for thousands of years.  I think the Jewish people believe things will generally only work out between people if they share similar values and beliefs.

In India it is very common for marriages to be arranged between people of similar social groups and castes.  It has been done this way for thousands of years.  Things are done this way because they believe if people share similar values they will be more compatible.  This is just how the world works.

Work for an employer who possesses values similar to your own.  This will change your career and life.

Cheap Is Expensive: A Marine Disaster

What You Will Learn If something looks like too good of a deal, it probably is! You pay much more after the actual purchase for something cheap. Never get lured by cheap things or unbelievable incentives or schemes. Be smart while making a deal.

One thing I’ve learned in my lifetime is if something seems too good to be true, it probably is.  Every day so many of us are glued to televisions and see people becoming rich overnight on game shows.  Grwiong up, kids receive a lot of messages that you can become rich and famous without an education.  Throughout America, there is a belief you can get something for nothing.  One of the most successful men I ever met, a man who owned numerous auto dealerships in Detroit, once told me that “Nothing is free and there are never any deals.”  This is surely true.

Several years ago I bought a mobile home on the beach in Malibu, and the story behind it is very strange.  At the time I was pretty involved in giving speeches at various law schools around the United States and considered myself a national expert in advising law students on how to get a job.  I was enthusiastic when my fiancé invited me to go a Pepperdine Law School party with her friend who was in her last year of law school.  When I got to the party, I was surprised no one recognized me from my various law school lectures.  However, no one there seemed very interested in a job search.  There was a lot of liquor and craziness going on at the party.

I introduced myself, and started recommending various job search strategies to the students I met.  The evening didn’t go well. People would excuse themselves after a few minutes when I would pause in my conversation to reflect on one job search strategy or another.  I was sipping a Diet Coke and feeling very fortunate to have this “street level” experience of meeting law students first hand. I had been a law professor five years ago and was now “in the trenches” with a group of law students, finding out first hand what their lives were like.

These kids seemed more interested in partying, however, than speaking with me.

About an hour into the party, I realized things seemed to be thinning out and I could not find my fiancé anywhere.  I looked around and saw a lot of people going into a bedroom.  I walked in and saw my finacé’s friend taking a huge hit from a bong.  Other people were standing around also waiting to enjoy the marijuana.

In front of a group of stunned students, I walked up to my fiancé and said, “This is outrageous!! I am getting out of this party now!  I cannot believe you are allowing yourself to be in the same room with this!”

The people in the room all laughed, including my fiancé.  I was horrified this episode might get around to law schools and somehow destroy my reputation.  I have never done drugs in my life and the fact my fiancé was associated with it was even more shocking. 

“I am a major figure in the national law student job search scene!! I am leaving!  There is no way I can be associated with this sort of stuff and you should not be either!”  I told her in front of the group. I was acting as if I was the President of the United States and she was my wife carousing with people doing drugs.  People were laughing at me and I realized I must have looked ridiculous.  I stormed out of the party and realized my fiancé was nowhere to be found.  I got in my car and drove home.

The next morning my fiancé called me from her parent’s house in Santa Monica and asked me to come get her.  We fought, basically about my belief that as an important national career figure for law students, I could not be associated with her friend’s marijuana use.  I am from the Midwest and my fiancé grew up in Los Angeles and attended school with people like Paris Hilton. People think differently in Los Angeles.  She thought I was out of my mind for being angry with her for hanging out in a room where people were smoking pot.

Because I didn’t want our neighbors to hear us fighting, I decided to drive along Pacific Coast Highway.  We drove for quite awhile before I finally stopped to turn around.  We pulled over to the side of the road, still fighting, and that’s when I saw the mobile home on the beach.  It was for sale.  Boy did it look ugly!  It looked so ridiculous I was confident I could afford it. 

In case you don’t know, Malibu is not a place where there are typically mobile homes on the beach.  In fact, the mobile home I purchased is the only one I know of directly on the beach in Malibu. 

To say this mobile home was run down would be an understatement. It was the first “structure” ever put on this beach, sometime in the 1950s.  Imagine what its interior looked like after 50+ years of use and zero renovation. An 80 year old man was living in it.  I was love struck.  My purchase of this mobile home went off without a hitch.  Despite the fact we were in a real estate boom at the time, it’d been sitting on the market for some time.  The real estate agents seemed astonished anyone was interested in it.

“Whatever you want,” they kept saying as they wrote up the purchase contract.  Incredibly, the owner was so eager to get rid of it he let me take possession of it and move in without even getting financing for a year, and I paid him a nominal monthly rent. 

After a day or two of relaxing in this mobile home, I realized it was not all it was cracked up to be.  Living on the water is fun. However, when you are in a 500-square-foot mobile home from the 1950s, it can get pretty cramped.  There was no heat or air conditioning in the mobile home, either, so the living conditions were pretty Spartan.  After a couple of weeks, I decided I needed to get a boat and this would make the experience of living in Malibu much more enjoyable. My plan was to anchor the boat about 100 yards from shore and then use it on the weekends.  In theory, this was a very good idea.  I started to look on eBay and it didn’t take me long before I found my dream boat.

It was a 15-foot Seadoo jet boat that’d been used for only a few hours.  The purchase price had been an incredible $22,000 but the owner of the jet boat had put a “buy it now” button on the listing for $5,000.  This looked too good to be true and I decided I had to purchase the boat.  I could not believe my luck in finding such a good deal.

I sent a guy who worked in our warehouse to pick up the boat and when he arrived he became a little nervous.  In fact, when he came back with the boat, he hinted the seller of the boat may have had an unusual sexual affliction.  He looked a little shook up. 

“What happened?” I asked.

“It was weird.  When I got there, she had a video camera and started filming me the second I arrived.  She asked me to climb under the boat and to rub it.  She then started saying stuff like ‘Look at the camera and say you like it while rubbing it hard! Tell me that it’s nice and feels good and tap on it.  Look at the camera and say it is smooth and hard while rubbing it!”

The whole situation sounded very strange to me but I have heard weird sex stories in Los Angeles and I figured this was another one of them.  A few weeks before I’d been on a freeway interchange in a traffic jam on a Sunday afternoon.  I thought there must be a huge basketball game or something at the Staples’ Center, but instead there was a porno convention.  It took me 30 minutes to get through an interchange that should’ve taken no more than a couple of minutes. This is the kind of stuff you see only in this part of the United States.

I thought I would anchor the jet boat about 100 yards off the house where the tide never went below.  I also did a lot of research and determined I would need what is called a giant “mushroom anchor” in order to build a permanent mooring for boat. I found a marine supply store on the East Coast and ordered a buoy, mooring anchor, and all sorts of other items to build an official mooring in front of my house and my neighbor’s homes.  It cost me a couple of thousand dollars but the sea captain I spoke with in Maine assured me what I was purchasing could handle “gale force winds” and would keep the boat anchored.  My plan was to use a sea kayak to travel out to the boat when I wanted to go on expeditions.  I would use the boat to travel to and from the shore.

Since you may not be from Malibu, I have to assure you this is something that’s highly unusual.  People who pay millions of dollars for a house do not want to see a $5,000 boat permanently anchored in front of it. In fact, I am not aware of anyone who had ever built a mooring in front of their house in Malibu either before or since this episode.  The claustrophobia of living in a 500-square-foot mobile home on the beach can drive people to do strange things.  I assured myself, however, this is what my neighbors must have realized when they moved to a stretch of beach that included a 65-year-old mobile home. 

My plan was to put the mushroom anchor on the boat and then launch the jet boat at the boat launch in Oxnard.  I would then travel 20+ miles up the coast and drop the mushroom anchor and mooring.  The entire procedure was going to be quite difficult, however, because the mushroom anchor weighed 100s of pounds.  A man who worked in our warehouse had picked up the boat for me, and he recommended a couple of his friends from Mexico who spent their days standing in front of a U-Haul looking for work help me.

“Do they know how to swim?”  I asked him.  He checked and only one of them did.  Therefore, the plan was to use three of his friends to place the giant anchor on the boat, launch the boat, and one of them would travel up the coast with me in the boat to launch the anchor.  Despite having a mobile home that was gradually being subsumed by the sea, I was feeling very enthusiastic about having purchased a boat.  I was also excited to brag to my neighbors about the boat.  My neighbors were getting a little annoying.  The day we moved in, one came over with his wife.

“Look, they bought the lot!” the man said to her.  I was actually proud I had a new home and he was calling it a “lot”.  My neighbor, who resided immediately next door, came by periodically and told me he was amazed our home had not been washed out to sea but assured me it was “going down” shortly and that “I better not be there” when it did.  Being a boat owner would put me on par at least to some degree with my neighbors I thought.

When we finally got the boat launched and started going through the harbor, everything seemed like it was going pretty well.  The anchor was resting in the front of the boat and we had to travel very slowly because the front end was practically in the water.  After about five minutes I was feeling very good about everything, but then I saw a boat screaming towards me with lights flashing.  Since I had never captained a boat before in my life I could not imagine what was happening.  I thought I might be going to prison due to the mooring sitting on the front of the boat.

Hillario, my helper, looked terrified.  “Inmigracion!!” he told me with a terrified look in his eyes.  It was the Harbor Patrol and they pulled us over and made us go to the side of the harbor.  They asked me if I had flares, a whistle, life jackets, and all sorts of stuff you apparently are required to have in order to take a boat into the ocean.  Incredibly, they said nothing about the giant mooring sitting in the boat.  I had none of these things and they wrote me several tickets and told me I needed to take my boat over to a local store and purchase these items before I could venture into the ocean legally. I explained to Hillario in Spanish he was not being deported and he was incredibly relieved.  Thankfully the Harbor Master didn’t pursue it when I explained to him Hillario had no identification.  After spending a couple of hundred dollars on life jackets and other required supplies, we headed over the to Harbor Patrol office to show them what we had purchased and they were kind enough to cancel all the tickets.  The whole episode must have taken us over two hours; however, we were now prepared to venture out into the Pacific Ocean towards Malibu.

We were soon out in the sea and the boat was handling very well. Despite the massive mooring, she was amazingly agile and picking up speed.  We could feel the wind in our faces and the entire event was very enjoyable.  A couple of minutes into the journey I saw another boat rushing towards us.  This boat was larger and looked very official.  As it got closer, I realized it was the Coast Guard.

“Hi, we’ve already been pulled over and we’re all set!” I told the man who boarded our boat.  This guy was serious.  He had a gun and I thought Hillario was about ready to get deported for sure.

“That was the Harbor Master who is from the County of Ventura,” he told me. “I’m with the United States Coast Guard and we have jurisdiction over the ocean.”

“Oh, I’m sorry …”

“What the hell are you doing with that giant mooring in your boat?  It is so big we saw it from over a half mile away.”

I had no idea what to say.  If I told him I was about to launch an illegal mooring off the coast of Malibu, he would not like it.  Actually, the more I thought about where I was planning on putting my mooring, the more I realized it was probably an international shipping lane.  Cruise ships, freighters, and all sorts of stuff went by daily.  I wondered what they would make of my little jet boat if I ever made it out there.  I hoped they would not run it over.

I had to think quickly on my feet.  I started thinking about the past few minutes.

“This is a jet boat,” I told the man from the Coast Guard.  As I was speaking, I realized I could see myself and Hillario perfectly in his sunglasses since they reflected directly toward me like mirrors.  “This boat is fast and these waves are incredibly big.  With this giant anchor here, I prevent the boat from flipping over in the waves.  I am trying to be safe.  You should see how fast this thing is.”

“That’s so cool dude!” the guy from the Coast Guard said.  “I totally understand.  These jet boats are so kick ass!  I want to get one but my wife would kill me!”  I could not believe what I was witnessing.  I thought the guy must be the biggest idiot I had ever encountered.  Just like that he let us continue and gave me some sort of “hang loose” type surfer sign as we motored away.

Some time later, we found it was an incredible feat launching the anchor in front of our house.  Luckily, a man on a jet ski boarded the boat and somehow we managed to all get the mushroom anchor in the water and build the world’s first mooring in Malibu.

Hillario, however, could not swim.  For over an hour I tried to convince him to jump in the water and swim to shore but he refused.  Eventually, it got so bad I pulled the boat up to an area no deeper than his chest and pushed him overboard.  Despite the fact he could have simply just walked to shore in the water he sat there flailing and screaming for help.  I was very close to shore and screamed to a couple of surfers who were wading in the water to help him get to shore.  They refused.

“I am a commercial litigator.  There is no way I am getting involved in this one. I do not want the liability!” one of them told me.  They just stood there. After about 10 seconds of me screaming to Hillario to just “walk” in Spanish, he figured it out and walked to the shore.  Apparently, he had lied about his abilities as a swimmer to get this job.

It was a wonderful sight.  All weekend I tied a kayak to the mooring and jetted up and down the coast in my little jet boat.  I felt as if I was the smartest resident of Malibu ever.

All week at work I was looking forward to a wonderful weekend with more boating adventures.  On Wednesday a call came in and a secretary rushed into my office.

“Harrison!! One of your neighbors called and said there is a boat sinking right in front of your house!  I have no idea what they are talking about!”  I had no idea how one of my neighbors tracked me down.  My neighbors all had pretty nice houses in Malibu and did not associate much with white trash like me who lived in the mobile home.  I called my neighbor back.  She explained to me the boat was filling up with water and her feeling was that something called “a bilge pump” had stopped working.  The bilge pump turns on when water comes inside the boat from waves and then pumps it out.  My neighbor told me the best thing I could do was purchase a battery and come out and install it in the jet boat.  She told me I should also purchase a pump and pump out some of the water.

“It’s going to go under soon if you do not get out here!”

I rushed out of work and went to a marine store and purchased a battery and a pump for the boat.  When I got home I noticed the boat really was sinking and it looked pretty bad.  It was so far out; however, I could not see it very well.  I got in my kayak and started paddling out to the boat.  The sea was very rough and it was a struggle to get out in the kayak.  When I finally made it to the boat I realized there was so much water in it I might not be able to pump it out.  I hooked up the little electric pump I had purchased to the battery and started trying to pump the water out.  There was so much water and so many waves there was nothing I could do.

The last thing I remember is a giant wave coming inside the kayak.  I am not sure how it happened but the car battery had so much charge to it the water electrified in the kayak, and I started getting electrocuted!  I jumped out of the kayak and into the water and the kayak went off drifting into the distance.  I swam towards the boat.  Given the wave that’d just hit it, I figured the boat was going to completely sink within the next 10 minutes or so.  I was panicked.  There were rough currents and I guessed I might be too far from shore to make it if I swam.  In addition, I was about ready to lose a $5,000 boat to the sea.

I considered my options and realized the only thing I could possibly do was to cut the rope between the boat and the mooring.  I would pray the sea would take the boat and I back to shore. I was very lucky to have a knife with me.  My kayak appeared to be drifting towards the shore and I figured my little jet boat and I might be able to achieve the same.  I prayed we would.

Over the course of the next several minutes the sea did carry us back to shore.  The boat was half way under water and filled with water but it started going towards shore and got very close.  At this point a small crowd of my neighbors had formed and they rushed out and tied ropes to the boat and tried to assist me in keeping the boat in one place.  The problem was the waves kept trying to take the boat out to sea.  At this point it was probably 3:00 or 4:00 in the afternoon and for the next five hours or so, I and groups of my neighbors all struggled with the boat.  Eventually using winches and lots of rope, we were able to secure the boat after it was low tide. We had ropes running 20 feet from various homes on stilts out to the boat.  It was crazy. 

One of my neighbors brought out a large bottle of tequila and we were all taking sips while trying various maneuvers to secure the boat.  It was an exhausting experience and required the effort of over 10 men.  By nightfall we had secured the boat.  The boat was still filled with water and it was all inside the engine compartment.  I actually do not know what we thought the next step was.  I am assuming in the morning I was going to drain the water out of the boat. 

I fell asleep quickly that night, but around 4:00 am I awoke with a jolt.  I am usually a good sleeper.  But that night I could not go back to sleep.  I had a sixth sense something was wrong.  I was very nervous and wanted to go look at the boat.  The boat was about 100 yards from my house up the beach so I could not just look out my window.  It was pitch black and very difficult to see.  I had a very powerful spotlight flashlight I had purchased unnecessarily months ago at Sam’s Club and fired it up.  It was like a giant beacon. This light was so powerful that you could hit the clouds with it.  I had never seen anything like it.  I put on some sandals and a coat and started walking down the beach.  The closer I got, the more I realized I could not see the boat — all I could see was the rope coming out of the houses and appearing to go into the sand.  Finally, the truth of what was going on was inescapable: The boat was buried beneath the sand.  In fact, all I could see was the rope going directly into the sand.  Apparently, the tide, waves, and current had decided to bury the boat under the sand while I was sleeping.

Incredulous, shaken, I walked back home and managed to go to sleep. I got up an hour or two later and managed to get a hold of the guy who had picked up the boat in our warehouse.  I told him to go to Home Depot and pick up at least 10-15 guys and purchase a shovel for each one of them.  I explained the boat was buried under several feet of sand and we needed to get it unburied.  By 8:00 am there were at least 15 men on the beach digging.  We dug and tugged on the ropes but could not move the boat.  We were also using winches to try and move the boat and it was so heavy the winches were breaking.  I am lucky no one was killed.  The winches have cables on them and the cables were snapping and then flying back to the people operating the winches.  It was so bad we started using blankets from my house and the people were operating the winches behind the blankets so they were not hit by cables when the winches snapped the cables.  The boat was a disaster.  It was completely filled with sand in the engine compartment.  It must have weighed three times its normal weight.

By 1:00 pm I realized that absolutely nothing could be done.  The boat was not moving.  For the next hour I sat in my house while my workers barked back and forth to each other in Spanish about how insane this entire exercise was.  I realized I needed to find someone who was an expert in this sort of thing.  My neighbors no longer thought this was funny.  There was a boat buried directly in front of their homes.  I decided to walk down to a lifeguard station on the next beach over.  When I got there, I found a man who looked like he had been a lifeguard for the past 50 years.  I had never seen so much sun damage.  I’ll call him “Leatherface.” 

Leatherface told me he’d  been working on the beach for 30+ years and had never seen anyone as big of a jackass as me.  He told me he had been watching this episode from the outset and had never seen anyone stupid enough to build a mooring.  Despite the fact he’d witnessed the entire episode with the kayak, he told me he was not even sure he would have rescued me if I started drowning because I might be better off dead.

Leatherface told me I needed to call a service called Marine Assist to come out and help move the boat.  He explained they would bring a giant tug boat and pull the boat back to the harbor.  That sounded pretty good to me.

I called Marine Assist and they told me they would send out a tugboat for $500 and $175 an hour, but if I wanted them to swim to shore to hook up the boat they would charge me an additional $300 to bring along a swimmer.  I told them I would swim out and grab the rope to hook up to the boat and they agreed.

An hour or so later a giant tug boat arrived about 50 yards out to sea.  My neighbor let me use his kayak and I started making my way to the tugboat.  I got hit by a wave and flipped the kayak.  Between the tug boat captain screaming something at me and all the commotion, I lost the kayak and paddles and soon was standing on the tug boat.  The guy on the tug boat asked me questions about what was going on and then shook his head.  “I’ve never heard anything like this” he told me.  He then proceeded to lecture me just like Leatherface had about how stupid I was.

Lots of people have never heard anything like what I’ve told you so far, nor what was to come next. In fact, one of my ex-employees decided I must be a pathological liar after I told him this story.  It is really hard to believe.

The tug boat captain told me once I swam to shore I should hook the rope up on a couple of strategic points on the boat and then proceed to have the 15 illegal aliens push the boat. He assured me this would get it out to sea.  I agreed.  For the next hour the tug boat tried to pull the little jet boat out but simply couldn’t extricate it from the sand.  It was a Herculean task.  Several times the tug boat captain called me on my cell phone.

“It’s not moving!” he would say, as if I was not there.

“Keep trying!” I would encourage him.

“Ok!”

Eventually, after over an hour the tide started coming in and miraculously the boat started to move slowly.  After several tries the boat started drifting out to sea.  At this point there must have been at least 30 spectators in addition to my workers.  No one on the beach had ever seen anything like this before.  In fact, several of my neighbors had come home early from work to watch the excitement.  As the tug boat started towing the little jet boat away my neighbors began to clap and the workers were giving each other high fives and hugging.  It had been a long ordeal and we were all very excited.  The tug boat operator was even excited and blew a really loud shipping horn and he towed the little jet boat away.

The neighbors and everyone standing around looked really relieved.  As I walked towards my house with around five shovels under my arm, I noticed a British neighbor of mine looking very intensely towards the tug boat and my little jet boat being tugged away.  I realized he had not been part of the celebratory excitement in the past few minutes.  In fact, he was quite focused.

“Something is wrong,” he shouted from his deck.  “The boat is sinking!”

Sure enough, I looked out and the tug boat appeared to be backing up.  I looked and I could not see my little jet boat anywhere.  My cell phone rang and it was Marine Assist.

“This is a disaster!  The boat has sunk!” the tug boat operator told me.  He had conferenced in the owner of the Marine Assist Company.  “I’m going to have to call the Coast Guard about the sunken boat.”  The next few minutes were a blur.  What I do remember is a Coast Guard helicopter showing up within the next few minutes and making a rapid couple of passes over the area where the sunken boat was.  My heart was racing.  My neighbors were all alarmed as well.  I looked down at my phone at some point and realized I had received four or five messages in the past few minutes from Marine Assist.

I called them right back.

“The Coast Guard says we are going to need to call in divers and do an emergency extraction,” they told me.

“A what?”

“An extraction.  You cannot just leave a boat on the bottom of the ocean.”

They explained to me they were going to have to send in divers to float the boat to the surface by attaching blow up devices to it.

“This is out of our league.  We are going to need to call specialists and another boat.”

It was also explained to me that the “extraction operation” was going to cost up to $5,000.  An hour or so later a boat with a bunch of divers arrived and the rescue operation began in earnest.  By the time the rescue was complete I could not see anything because it was dark.  I did receive a call at some point that they were not headed back to Ventura Harbor with the boat and it had taken longer than expected to complete the rescue and therefore more credit card charges were required.  I was also given a complete report from the divers about what was wrong with the boat.

Apparently, there was a huge gash/hole on the bottom of the boat that had been cheaply covered up with some epoxy.  When I’d left the boat sitting in the water it had all dissolved.  The cheap price on eBay and the bizarre behavior with the video camera finally made sense.

When the boat got to the harbor it was so heavy with sand it could not be put on the trailer.  A flatbed truck needed to be called at 2:00 am to tow it away.

This was how I learned that cheap is expensive.  If something looks like too good of a deal, it probably is.  In the case of the jet boat, it ended up costing me much more than the purchase price, just to do mandatory rescues in it.

Your Perceptions Will Control Your Outcome and Life

What You Will Learn How you feel is determined by how you direct your mind. You need to control the meaning you give things and the meaning you allow things to have. The rewards for managing your states are happiness and the ability to control your destiny. You need to ensure you interpret things in a way that serves you and does not hurt you. Take charge of your mind to have the career and life you are entitled to and deserve.

When I was in middle school my girlfriend announced to me she was going to be trying out for the cheerleading squad. Our relationship consisted mainly of us riding our bikes to school together each day.  Occasionally, I might call her after school.  The cheerleading squad in our school cheered for the basketball team.  I attended a public high school in middle school and the basketball team was the most important one in the school.  The entire gym filled up with students, parents and teachers every Friday night.  Everyone was very enthusiastic about it.

“You should try out for the basketball team,” she told me.

I had never been good at basketball.  In fact, it was my worst game and not something I really enjoyed.  However, the more I started hearing about this basketball team and what a big deal it was, the more I realized I needed to try out for it if I had any hope of hanging on to my girlfriend.  It was a little bit more complicated than that. 

I had just left elementary school and come to this new school and, because my girlfriend happened to be popular, I was meeting a bunch of new guys and sitting at the right table in the lunch room.  Unfortunately, I realized all of the people she was friends with were also basketball players.  I am not sure how it happened, however, I was hanging out with the basketball crowd.  We were all very clean-cut and got good grades and sat at lunch looking like good kids. These kids were pretty boring compared to the sorts of kids I would eventually be friends with, but I was tolerating it.  Their mothers typically packed their lunches, for example, and they bought milk in the cafeteria. Their sandwiches would be neatly wrapped in wax paper or little plastic sandwich bags and they would have an apple and maybe some chips . My mother had never packed lunch in my life.  I would sit there at lunch with a couple of Ho Hos I bought from the vending machine with some change I’d scooped from the bottom of my mother’s purse.  I have no idea how I fit in with these kids to this day.

I went home and told my mother about this dilemma. I told her I needed a basketball net built immediately over the garage because tryouts were in three weeks.  My mother grew up in a town where athletics were very important, and she had a strange history with obscure sports. I think she’d actually been a state champion in ping pong when she was younger

My mother reacted in a way I’ve never seen when I told her I needed a basketball net.  For example, once I told her I needed a desk in my room and she told me that was nice but I could study on the floor or on the kitchen table.  When a spring came through my mattress that was a hand-me-down from my mother’s mother after she died my mom told me to flip it over.  The basketball net was different.

“Oh my!  There is no basketball net for you to practice on?  We need to fix this right away!”  She grabbed her cigarettes, made a drink, and started calling her friends to get recommendations for contractors and so forth.  She found one that would come over in the afternoon.  I was incredulous because I had never seen my mother react to anything this way.  I went to my room to watch re-runs of Three’s Company.  An hour or so later she popped her head in my room:

“Hurry!!  The sporting goods store closes in 30 minutes.  Let’s go.”  I’ve got some blue collar roots and my mom was very aware of what was important in life.  When we got to the store she purchased me the most expensive basketball backboard they had.  The next morning I got home from school and there was the most professional contractor my mom had ever hired putting the finishing touches on the basketball backboard.  He was going around with a leveler and making sure it was perfectly installed.  My mom usually cut corners with contractors but not this guy.  I was old enough to know he was really good at what he did.

My mom came home from work early to make sure the backboard was installed properly.  She even demanded the contractor install some lights so I could practice at night.

For the next couple of weeks I must have practiced at least three or four hours a day.  I hit shots from every direction I possibly could, I practiced layups and every conceivable type of shot.  I was getting really good at making shots and starting to really enjoy basketball.  Meanwhile, not only did my girlfriend make the cheerleading squad, she was chosen to be the captain.  She rode her bike over to see how I was doing with my practice one Saturday afternoon.

“We’ll both be captains!” she told me with approval.

When the day of the tryouts for the basketball team finally arrived I felt I was ready.  While I had gotten very good at making shots, the thing I had not prepared for was the fact that none of my shooting abilities mattered if I could not make it to the net.  Basketball is as much about footwork as it is about making shots.  The most damaging aspect of my tryouts came when I was running defense against a very good player and instead of slapping the ball I slapped his nose by mistake with the palm of my hand.  Hard.  He fell down to the gym floor with blood pouring out of his nose.  After that I realized I probably would not make the team.  Kids thought this was funny and word of this quickly got around the halls of the school.  I remember walking to class and people jokingly getting out of the way like I was going to clock them in the face.  The guy I had hit showed up with a giant piece of tape across his nose the next day.  I did not make the team.

How we feel about ourselves is all due to what we tell ourselves certain things will mean.  I told myself if I did not make the basketball team my girlfriend would no longer like me.  I told myself my friends would no longer want to be friends with me if I did not make the basketball team.

When you are thinking about your life you need to ask yourself a few things:

1. Is how you feel determined by the economy?
2. Is how you feel determined by how others treat you?
3. Is how you feel determined by how you think others perceive you?
4. Is how you feel determined by the things you own?

The truth is how you feel is determined by how you direct your mind.  The ability to direct your mind and control your emotional and psychological states is about the most important tool you can possibly have. Very few people have the ability to control their minds and their states.  You need to be able to control how you feel about yourself and your emotions.  I read the papers every day and most of the human interest stories I read are about people who are not able to control their minds and their states. Lately I have been reading a lot of stories about people who have been committing suicide due to dire economic circumstances.  These people are not controlling their states.  We also continually hear stories about stars and others who die due to drug overdoses.  These people are using drugs to try and control how they feel, and it ends up killing them.  When I think about people like Chris Farley and Marilyn Monroe, I am thinking about people who, despite an incredible amount of success, could not control how they felt.  One of the best writers of all time, Ernest Hemingway, ended up killing himself.  He, too, could not control how he felt.  Despite a wonderful world around him he did not care.

You really need to control the meaning you give things and the meaning you allow things to have.  The meaning you give things will control the quality of your life.

When my girlfriend found out I did not make the basketball team she did not appear to care at all.  She was really nonchalant about the whole thing and told me she was sorry about this. Unfortunately, the meaning I gave this was quite severe. I immediately assumed she would no longer like me at all.  The next day I told her that I needed to go to school at a different time and did not ride my bike with her to school.  At lunch I felt really out of place with my new friends who had all made the basketball team.  That was all they talked about at lunch.  In class, several of my teachers started talking about the first game.  Despite some decent friendships, I started to feel like I did not belong with this athletic crowd because I hadn’t made the team. I felt like I’d failed horribly. I started blowing off my girlfriend more and more.  I started sitting at other tables at lunch and associating with different sorts of kids.

My girlfriend broke up with me.  I did not really like her all that much so I was not too upset.  I knew it was coming.  I had allowed myself to get really depressed when I did not make the basketball team.  The real low came about a week after the breakup when she called me one day after school and told me she’d bought me a Christmas gift when we were dating and still wanted me to have it.  She showed up at my house with half the cheerleading squad who all watched me open the board game Yahtzee.

“Wow Yahtzee!!  I have always wanted this.”  What a pathetic sight it must have been seeing me open that board game.  I could not hug her.  I could just stare at this board game with 6 gorgeous cheerleaders standing in my messy bedroom with my ex-girlfriend looking on smiling.

In retrospect, I now realize that not much would have changed with my friends, my relationship, and more if I had not told myself my failure to make the team represented something it did not.  Like people who kill themselves because they cannot control their emotions, I, too, could not control my emotions and what I was telling myself.  The thought that crossed my mind was the head of the cheerleading squad would only want to be with someone who was also the captain of the basketball team.  On yet another level, I thought the basketball players would only want to be friends with someone who was also a basketball player.  The more I thought about all this the less worthy I felt and the more I felt like I needed to fit in somewhere else completely.

Within a short time of not making the basketball team I had made new friends who were not athletes and who were more dedicated to getting into trouble than anything.  My grades plummeted and were so bad the next year my parents enrolled me in a different school.  Most of this happened because of what I told myself not making the basketball team meant.

I remember one public high school I attended had a small enclosed courtyard where students were allowed to smoke between classes.  These kids wore jean jackets or leather jackets and grew their hair long.  These were the bad kids.  They also would get stoned out there, and the school must have known about it.  These were all kids who at some point probably had dreams, too, but gave up somewhere along the way and looked for a way out of their presumed failure.  They started smoking and using drugs and living a life of which they could never be proud. Who knows what sent them over this edge.  It could have been a bad grade in an important class, it could have been the divorce of their parents, it could have been a nasty breakup. What I do know is that in the year I attended that school I witnessed kids who were normal and clean-cut go over to the other side and join this group in the courtyard. 

People look for things outside themselves to help people control their states and how they feel. Many people feel like they cannot control their emotions and so they start looking for stuff outside of themselves to help them feel good. You pay a hefty price when you are not able to manage your states and how you feel about yourself.  There are huge rewards when you know how to manage your states.  The rewards for managing your states are happiness and the ability to control your destiny and what happens to you and your life.  These rewards are something that can pay huge dividends.

The problem most of us have is we tell ourselves something means something it does not.

• You may have lost a job and represented to yourself that the reason you lost the job was because you are a bad person.  You may have lost the job because the company had no money to pay you.
• A relationship may end and you may represent to yourself it is your fault when, in reality, the person who broke up with you is working through some psychological roadmap that existed long before you came along.
• You cannot find a job and you represent to yourself it’s because you are not good enough instead of the fact the economy in the area of the country you are in is horrible.
• High school kids become “stoners” because they represent to themselves they are losers instead of just normal kids suffering through problems.
• I sabotaged my friendships because I represented to myself that not making the basketball team meant I would be rejected by my girlfriend and friends.

Even if something does mean the worst, it does us little good to hold on to this representation.  Instead, we should represent the events in our lives to ourselves in a way that empowers us.  How could I have reacted differently to not making the basketball team?  I could have decided I was cool enough I did not have to play basketball every day to date the captain of the cheerleader squad.  I could have told myself despite not being a good basketball player, I could continue to be good friends with the most popular kids in school.  All of these interpretations would have empowered me.  Instead, I represented the opposite.

The meaning you give things is crucial for your career success.  Whatever happens to you in your career you need to choose meanings that make you stronger and not weaker.  Bad things happen to everyone and the messages we receive from the world are often not positive.  The most important thing you can do is choose meanings that are going to allow you to succeed and do even better.  This is what you need to be doing with your career and job right now.  You need to ensure you interpret things in a way that serves you and does not hurt you.

Don’t fail to reach your full potential or mistakenly classify yourself as someone who is not fit to succeed at the level at which you’re capable. This is not what you want for yourself.  You need to take charge of your mind to have the career and life you are entitled to and deserve.

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