Keep it Simple Stupid: Confessions of a Bad Interviewer
What You Will Learn
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When I was in college, I wrote a 500 page book that went into considerable depth evaluating the incredibly complex race relations that existed within the Detroit metropolitan area at the time. Specifically, I was interested in how African-Americans had, in many cases, avoided integrating into the larger society due to a need to strengthen their own society first. The theory I came up with was quite interesting because I noticed (in an exhaustive multi-year study) that the more religious and ethnic groups had historically come together and developed their own customs, unique beliefs and so forth, the easier it was for them to integrate into the larger society.
I went so in depth writing this book that I analyzed how Africans who had been forcibly brought to Italy had assimilated into the country 2,000+ years before, and then did an exhaustive analysis of how other ethnic groups had assimilated into the various cities and other locations around the United States after immigrating here. It was an exhaustive study that looked at Jewish immigration, Irish migration and multiple ethnic groups over hundreds of years in both the United States and abroad.
It generally took me about 30 to 45 minutes to explain this during job interviews I had during my senior year of college with investment banks, advertising agencies and others who were unfortunate enough to bring this up during the job interviews. Because all this was featured so prominently on my resume people always asked about it and, when they did, out of a sense of enthusiasm and loyalty to the material, I would launch into a long discussion about the material and what it meant. Within five to six minutes there was always a very similar face that the interviewers would make as they would mentally check out and start thinking about something else. When I was done with my lecture, they would generally thank me, and the interview would be over within a few minutes.
If you are thinking “this is some boring shit!” you are not alone. In fact, I was so interested in this information when I was in college that when I started interviewing I could not figure out why I did not get further interviews. I never got the jobs I was interviewing for any time that came up. In fact, it literally bored people to tears. It took me numerous interviews to figure out that talking about that crap in an interview was a huge problem.
One day, I walked into an interview with someone who, at the time, was famous and since has become an even more famous hedge fund manager, Victor Niederhoffer. Even then, this man was probably worth hundreds of millions of dollars and was someone who was regularly in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and other similar publications. I am not sure what he was doing interviewing seniors at the University of Chicago, but there he was. We were about two minutes into the interview when he looked up at me and said:
“What is all this crap on your resume about doing academic research about Detroit?” Niederhoffer had a couple of assistants sitting behind him smiling. A ton of students had tried to get interviews with this guy because working for him even then was considered a ticket to fortune. He was only interviewing 10 students that day and had announced before the interviews even began he was bringing back one two, a most, for further interviews.
“Don’t know …” I said smiling.
“Well, you better forget about it because I can tell you no one cares. Can you forget about it?”
“Yes,” I told him.
“Okay, if you come to work for me, never bring this shit up again. The only thing that matters is what you do with what you know, and no one cares about what you know. Now tell me how many bricks are on that building across the street. That’s the only question I have for this interview. If you can do this, you will show me everything you have ever learned about math right now and that’s something I can use. I want to know the answer right now, and I do not care about how you reach it.”
I looked at the building, did some quick math in my head and then told him.
“Thanks. That’s all,” he said.
That evening I received a call from his office asking me to come in and interview the next week. The “vibe” that Niederhofferr had sent out to me during the interview was something that really left an impression on me. The feeling he gave me was that “results” and action mattered most.
I did not get the job when I went back to see Niederhoffer. In an interview that lasted no more than 5 minutes or so, the person who interviewed me told me my resume “looked too much like I wanted to go to law school” and then asked me to leave. I thought it was very funny and even then was not upset at the time.
What these Niederhoffer guys taught me, however, was that in an interview you have to keep things simple. After the interview with Niederhoffer, when people started asking me about all of the academic stuff on my resume, I would generally keep my answer less than 20 seconds. People would then continue with more questions, and I would keep these answers short and simple as well. Since I was interviewing with businesses and not academic institutions, I realized that the smartest thing I could do was keep things simple, and this always worked.
What does this mean to your job search and life? It means the most important thing you can often do is to keep things absolutely as simple as possible. I am sure there are a lot of things you have an interest in. This may include a 30-minute explanation as to why you lost your last job, or it may be a long-winded explanation of how you chose where to go to law school or get your MBA.
No one cares.
In fact, the less people know, and the less you bore people, the better off you will be.
My grandfather grew up on a farm in rural Indiana. He put himself through school writing for a newspaper called The Michigan Daily. Because he had grown up on a farm and spent his childhood with people from farms, he had a very easy-going style that enabled him to explain enormously complex ideas to people without very much education. When he got out of college, he ended up getting a job with the local Detroit paper covering World War II from Paris and then after the war returned to Detroit where he became a very well-known newspaper columnist and had a radio show. He made his entire living off of keeping things simple and the ability to explain complex ideas to people in an easy manner. He wrote in simple language that the farmers he grew up with could also understand, and it paid off.
The ability to take complex ideas and explain them to people in a simple and straightforward way is something that is a real skill and something not a lot of people can do. In fact, the ability to simplify ideas, concepts and various things is one of the greatest skills there is. We all have the tendency to overly complicate our lives in incredible ways. We make our lives and everything we do much more complicated than it really needs to be. This is a huge and massive mistake. When we make things uncomplicated, simple, and easy to understand and digest we are always much better off.
Think about the people who are interviewing you. They have no interest in long-winded stories from you about this or that. All they are interested in is whether or not you are a good fit for the job. If you sit there telling them impossibly long stories, they are going to get bored very quickly and start thinking about something else. It is a well known truth that almost everyone is more interested in themselves than other people. If anything, you should be getting the people who interview you to talk about themselves and not you in interviews. When it comes right down to it, most interviewers want to talk more about themselves than you.
One of my favorite quotes is by P.T. Barnum who said that “No man ever went broke by overestimating the ignorance of the American public.” Throughout my career, I have watched people who are not all that intelligent and cannot understand extremely complex ideas make a tremendous amount of money and start giant businesses explaining complex things in a very simple manner that would be viewed as condescending by academics and others in the know. I see this time and time again, with various books and other things that come out and skyrocket to phenomenal success. Here’s the best way to succeed in your job search and interviews: Present yourself and what you are doing in a simple, easy to understand manner.
You need to keep things simple and keeping it simple is something that can give you huge rewards in everything you do. The more simple you keep things, the better off you are always going to be. When you are searching for a job, this is the best thing you can do. Do not over complicate anything. Just keep it simple.
One of the most interesting pieces I ever read about the power of keeping it simple was from a well-known copywriter who was hired by the company that manufactured the Swiss Army Watch to market this product in the United States. The company had several different styles of the watches and versions for both men and women. The manufacturer was very eager to run an advertisement in major publications, which gave consumers they choice between several different versions of the watch.
The copywriter told the watch company that this was not something they should do. Instead, they should only market one version of the watch and not even market different watches for men and women. They should just try and sell one watch. The copywriter believed that if people had too many different choices to make between the watches, they would never be able to make a decision. Because of this indecision, they would simply not purchase a watch. However, the manufacturer believed that if they had the ability to choose between several watches, they would be more likely to pick out one they really liked.
Before rolling out a large national advertising campaign, the watch manufacturer agreed to do an A/B test where the manufacturer’s preferred ad showing more than one watch was run against an advertisement showing only one watch. The result was that the advertisement showing only one watch, as the copywriter said it would, outperformed the other advertisement with multiple watches dramatically.
Simplicity works in many, many areas. I am not sure why it is, but businesses and people who keep things simple are often able to do far, far better at everything they do than those who complicate things. For years, Honda Motor Company only made motorcycles. Then, slowly they went into making cars. When they made cars for the longest time they only made the Civic and Accord. When others, such as Chrysler, were starting huge crazes with minivans and other sorts of cars, Honda continued manufacturing just a few models of cars such as the Civic, Accord and Prelude. I remember an interview with the CEO of Honda I read in the mid-1980s where he stated they might never start marking minivans and the sorts of automobiles other manufacturers were making because it would make the car company “too complex.”
Years later, of course, Honda did start making minivans but the philosophy of the company was to keep things as simple as possible for the longest period of time. The reason for this was because of the fact that the more things the business did, the more room there was for things to go wrong.
This is a philosophy you should carry over to your job search as well. When you concentrate of keeping things simple, you do not give employers long-winded explanations and stories in reference to your various moves and so forth. You concentrate on doing a few things exceptionally well rather than doing many things in an average or below average manner. You keep things simple and this gets the best results.
You need to keep things as simple as possible and not overly complicate things. Simplicity is where you can get the best results.
The Use of Testimonials and Endorsements in Your Job Search
What You Will Learn
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When I was in my final year of high school, I remember that in English class one day the teacher handed me back a paper I had written and it had a B+ on it. While there were a lot of classes that I would have been incredibly happy if I received this grade in, English was not one of them. In fact, with the exception of a horrible play I had written for one English class, I had not received a grade of less than an A- in any English class for years. I decided that I needed to meet with the English teacher and go over this. After all, I figured that something must be seriously wrong.
The teacher asked me to meet him for lunch, and so a few days later, I was sitting there with the teacher having lunch. We spoke for some time before the grade came up and when it did I said, “Listen, I have not received a grade this bad on any paper I have ever written in any English class. There has to be some mistake.”
I then proceeded to list all of the other teachers I had taken classes from, including this teacher’s boss who was the head of the English department of the school, and rarely if ever gave “As” in any of his classes.
Incredibly, the teacher looked at me for a few seconds, grabbed the paper and crossed out the “B+” grade and changed the grade to an “A”.
“I know that grade was ‘out of line’ I guess,” the teacher said. “I just wanted to motivate you to try harder. Of course you are also going to get an “A” in the class. Just keep up the good work.”
I will literally never forget this episode because it was something I used in college as well. I would take a class with the head of a department and work my tail off. Then I would take classes with the people who worked for the head of the department. If I got a grade less than an “A,” I would meet with them and tell them about how their boss had given me a perfect grade and how well I had done in this class or that class. In addition, the more classes I took, the more ammunition I had. In every single instance where I did this, I ended up getting my grades raised from “B’s” to “A’s”. I did not know anything about psychology at the time. All I knew was that this worked. The principle was very, very simple: Other peoples’ opinions about my academic work mattered more than the opinion of the people who were my teachers at the time. This sounds incredible and hard to believe, but this is something I quickly learned. Teachers seemed to believe that the opinion of others were more important than their own.
I can still remember some of the teachers’ faces to this day. When I would bring up the judgment another teacher had about my work who was considered better known, more influential, or more powerful than my own teacher, they would suddenly look uncomfortable. They would make loose statements justifying why they had given me a grade lower than an “A”. It was an incredible thing to witness, and it is something I did several times.
Why was this occurring? Well, a paper is a subjective thing. The differences among them relate to things like the logic used in reaching conclusions, writing style, the ability to understand details of what is being written about and more. However, when it comes right down to it the grading of a paper is pretty subjective. There are many obvious differences in the quality of given papers but, for the most part, the grading of papers is subjective. Therefore, the person grading the papers is often in a position where they are questioning reality and are unsure that they are evaluating reality correctly. When this person is provided “cues” that outside authority thinks something is exceptionally good, then they will follow these cues. The idea is that reality is something that is quite subjective and providing testimonials or outside authority for people to understand reality is something that can be of tremendous benefit to helping you convince someone to your way of thinking.
In fact, all of us are somewhat confused about the actual state of reality and how to judge various things. We are always looking for the opinions of others, in most cases, to help up make up our mind. We use what other people think and believe to form the basis of our own opinions. We do this because it helps us make sense of the incredible amount of information out there.
I would like to reveal to you one of the most incredible tools for success that you have available to you. I have personally witnessed numerous businesses and careers transformed by this tool. This tool can work for you no matter who you are and no matter what you are seeking to do. If you employ this tool, you will have many more interviews than your competitors. You will get more job offers than your competitors. You will also look upon your job and the work you do as an opportunity to constantly build on your expertise and sell-ability. You will alienate fewer people along the way, and you will be more confident in everything that you do in your career. The tool I am talking about is PROOF.
About every 1 in 1,500 to 2,000 resumes I review has letters of recommendation attached to them. Some of these resumes also have one or two pages of references attached to them. Others have quotes from various people who have worked with the particular individual. These resumes always stand out to me. They are incredible because they give life to the resume and much, much more depth than they would have without these “letters of recommendation” and other testimonials. Any evaluation that I have of a particular individual is given even further credence by the recommendations of other people. In fact, one of the most helpful things is when there are recommendations by famous people. For example, if someone attaches a recommendation from a Congressman or a Senator, I am generally very impressed. The idea that a senator is writing a recommendation for me to review makes me feel important. We give a tremendous amount of weight to the opinions of others and even more to the opinions of well known, important and famous people.
If you do nothing else as the result of reading this article, get people who can be solid and important references for you in your job search. Get testimonials on your resume or attach a page with testimonials describing what a good worker you are, what good work you do and so forth. If you do this and nothing more, your job search will become probably ten times more effective than without this. By this I mean that for every resume you send out, you will be ten times more likely to get an interview than if you did not send the resume. It is that simple. Testimonials and positive references are something that can bring you incredible results.
I know what you are thinking. What if you got fired from your last job? What if you do not have any testimonials and solid references? What if you did not get along with all of your coworkers? Then remember you will have to fix this in you next job. You want to build up a long line of references and positive testimonials. Your entire career can be built upon a steady stream of outstanding testimonials. The more testimonials you have, the stronger your applications will be. You want the ability to stand out and get the same jobs that others are not getting, and there is no more powerful way than with testimonials.
There is something in our genetic makeup that makes us extremely influenced by testimonials. I have loved watching how various people use testimonials for the longest time, because of an experience I had when I was younger. My father and I used to take trips to New York from Detroit about once a year, because he would need to go there for business and would bring me along when I was around ten years old. While I loved going to New York, the trips were exhausting because we would spend hours walking around. My father loved walking the streets and seeing all the sights and sounds. I will never forget one day when we passed a man who had set up a small table on the sidewalk. He was playing a game where he would shuffle a ball between three different cups and then have people guess which cup it was under when he was done. There were two or three people gathered around him who looked as if they kept winning money.
“This is fantastic! I’ve already won $150!” one man said to my father.
“And I’ve won $200!” a woman exclaimed to my father.
We sat there watching this sidewalk spectacle for a few minutes before someone said to my father:
“You ought to try it too!”
“Yes, start out with $40!” the man shuffling the ball around said.
It made no sense, of course. The man shuffling the ball appeared to be just standing there losing money hand over fist. My father reached for his wallet and put his hand on some $20 bills and was prepared to put them down. Instinctively, however, I knew it did not seem right. Sometimes young people can see things that older people cannot because they have not been so jaded by the world. I grabbed my father by the arm and pulled him away from the game. The man in charge of the game started coming after us.
“You have to try this!” he exclaimed.
For someone apparently losing so much money he certainly was eager for new players.
I am in Las Vegas today and went to see Chris Angel last night. Chris Angel does all sorts of magic tricks. Over the past several years, I have been purchasing various books to learn about the sort of tricks that he does and have learned several of them. The same books that I have read studying many of his tricks have also taught me about the simple science behind what was going on with the man with the ball under the cup on the street corner in New York. The man was using an ingenious tool of “social proof” and testimonials from others out there to convince my father that it really was possible to win. He was giving fake testimonials, in effect. I have seen this sort of act occur on street corners in New York more times than I can count in the several decades since I first saw this. The reason people keep doing this scam over and over again is because it works. We are influenced by testimonials.
When you see an infomercial on television they are using testimonials to influence you. Every advertisement you see on television, with limited exceptions, uses testimonials. The advertisements that run in magazines and are successful are almost always using testimonials to make their point. The reason all of these people are using testimonials is due to the fact that they work. The testimonials work because we are influenced by what others believe about something. You have been influenced by testimonials and are probably being influenced by them on a daily basis. I am not just talking about testimonials found in advertisements. I am talking about a friend of yours who tells you they used something and it works exceptionally well. I am talking about someone you know who appears to be enjoying using a certain product or service, which you also decide to use. We are incredibly influenced by testimonials and, like it or not, we cannot help but be. Most of us give others’ opinions about things almost as much weight as our own–if not more.
If you do not make use of testimonials, references and so forth in your job search, you are straining to get work and convey your specific virtues in a way that makes no sense. You can have people do the heavy lifting for you by talking up your various virtues. This is not a job you need to do yourself. Let other people talk about how great you are. Others can easily make your case, and this is a heck of a lot more effective than if you try and do this yourself. Allow others to make your case.
Another powerful thing you can put into your application materials is information about your performance ratings. For example, “I was the top-rated executive in my division 7 out of 8 quarters.” There are numerous techniques you can use in this regard, but talking about what others have said about you that is positive is enormously helpful. Including comments by supervisors in quotes such as “What Others Have Said About Me” and then listing numerous positive statements that coworkers and supervisors may have made to you formally, or informally, can be incredibly powerful in making your case to a potential employer.
From the time I was 18 until I was 27 years old, I always did asphalt work during the summer. A good part of this work involved selling my asphalt service door-to-door in residential neighborhoods. I thought this was the easiest job possible. All I ever needed to do was show up at a door and tell people how I would like to do their driveway, and that I had done work for numerous neighbors of theirs over the years and continued to do work for their neighbors. While it was more involved that this, using “inferred testimonials” of others was something that worked like magic for me.
I cannot tell you how many job seekers, salespeople and others I have taught the power of testimonials to. However, this is still something hardly anyone uses in their job search. I simply cannot understand why, but it is what it is. For someone in the sales industry, for example, using testimonials like this might double or triple their income. For someone looking for a job, they might get three or four times as many offers–or even more. The power of these testimonials, references, implied endorsements and so forth is like gold. You should use them every single chance you can possibly get.
Alpha Pygmy Goats, Unreasonably Optimistic Russian Attorneys and Setting High Expectations for Yourself
What You Will Learn
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I used to be a law professor, and I remember in my class there was the nicest kid you can imagine who had immigrated from Russia a few years previously and wanted to be an attorney. He hardly spoke English and had a difficult time putting sentences together, however, none of this appeared to matter. He was always the first guy who arrived in class each day and always stayed after to ask questions. During class, he took notes and wrote furiously. He sat in the front row and appeared to believe that he was going to be the greatest attorney of all time. He wore a suit to class each day and other kids were showing up to class in shorts, tee shirts and flip flops. All of the kids in the class liked him a lot, and they respected him a lot.
Each day after class, he would approach me and ask me questions about ridiculously prestigious law firms and whether or not I thought he could get a job with these firms. I never had the heart to tell him that it would be impossible for him to get a job with most of these law firms due to where he was attending law school and his ability to speak English. He did not seem to care, however. For as long as I could take it each day, he would sit there and question me about various law firms and then, from time to time, also ask me questions about the material.
When the semester was over, I continued to hear from him. Every three months or so, he would call me at work at ask me some questions as well. While he was smart, he could not really write effectively, and his writing frequently confused tenses and was a mishmash of words. His writing would have been unacceptable to submit to a court, for example, much less to churn out to a white shoe law firm. In addition, his speech was difficult to understand because he had such a strong Russian accent, and he also would mangle the English language with practically every word he said.
Then one day I stopped hearing from him and did not hear from him for approximately one year. I was getting on the elevator in my building one day and was standing there silent as the full elevator rose to my floor. I heard the word “Professor!” I turned around, and there was the Russian kid standing there in a suit and holding a briefcase.
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
“I work at a law firm in the building,” he said.
I was practically speechless. I invited him into my office, and he told me all about how he had managed to get a position with a decent law firm in the building. We spoke for some time, and I was very, very happy for him. In actuality, I had never believed that this was something he was capable of.
He believed he was capable of this, however. And even though he was working at a decent law firm at the time, he still wanted more. For the next several months, he would call me every five or six weeks and ask me if I had anything at one of the four or five most prestigious law firms in Los Angeles. He was aiming really, really high at firms which hired people from the very, very top of their class at schools like Stanford and so forth, and where the kids that were hired as new attorneys were incredibly polished. Each time I would speak with him I would try and gently tell him that this was not the sort of law firm he should be working at, but I would not say this directly. Instead, I would allude to this by discussing how competitive it was and so forth.
He was not having any of this.
One day I stopped hearing from him again, and I did not hear from him for at least another year. Then one day I was in a large skyscraper that is one of the most expensive office buildings in Los Angeles (rent-wise), sitting in the lobby speaking with someone, and he walked by. I shouted his name, and he came right over to me.
This time he looked different. There was more self-confidence to his face than I had seen in the past. His hair was better cut and he did not have the sort of “bowl cut” I had been accustomed to seeing. He looked like he had a very good pair of shoes on and was carrying an expensive briefcase. I asked him what he was doing. He had switched jobs. While he was not at one of these “top 5″ law firms in Los Angeles, he had joined a group of attorneys who had recently broken off from one of those law firms. The law firm he was at was very prestigious by virtue of the attorneys working there. I did not ask how he got the job, but I am sure it had something to do with calling or visiting one or more of these attorneys when they were still working at the former firm. When they were at the big law firm, I am sure one or more of them said something to themselves like “we would love to hire this guy but we cannot–he just does not have the sort of pedigree, and so forth.” But when they started their own firm, none of this mattered anymore, and they could hire whomever they chose to hire.
That’s what I like to think anyway. I believe this.
I have not heard from this guy in at least 5 years, but I am sure he is doing well. How does a guy who speaks lousy English, cannot write a straight sentence, and who went to one of the worst ranked law schools in the United States (and did not even do that well in law school), rise to the pinnacle of the legal profession to work with some of the best attorneys in the United States?
What does he know that most people do not?
It is simple: He believes that he can achieve whatever he sets out to achieve.
This may be a simple statement but it is among the most “loaded” statements you will ever hear. The reason for this is that most people out there, at some point, believe they cannot go any further and stop themselves. They believe they cannot achieve whatever it is they are interested in achieving. This belief alone is something that keeps them from achieving whatever it is they want to achieve.
I live on a small farm of sorts where I raise ducks, chickens, goats, sheep and tortoises. Several months ago, I purchased a herd of goats to join a male pygmy goat that I also have. If you have not seen a pygmy goat, as the name implies, a pygmy goat is a very small goat. In fact, a grown pygmy goat is about 1/3 the size of a normal goat. I feed these animals every day and spend a lot of time observing them. The strangest thing I have noticed is that the leader of all of the animals–the goats and the sheep–is the pygmy goat. Despite his small size, he is in charge of all of the animals. If he wants to eat first, he makes sure the other animals get out of the way. This little goat is in charge of all of the other animals.
Why would a goat 1/3 the size of all of the other animals be in charge? I know exactly why – because he believes he is the leader.
The other animals could easily intimidate this little pygmy goat with their size, but they stay away.
When I was in elementary school, there was a little guy who was very thin and smaller than the other kids. However, I remember that this little kid was never afraid to fight larger kids. He would lash out and whack them in the face and do whatever he needed to do to win every fight. This kid was so thin and scrawny that I think he ended up winning several sprinting and running awards by breaking various school records when he got older. He was really fast because he had hardly any weight to carry around.
How did this little kid become the leader and the feared one on the playground? He believed he was the leader.
If other kids would have fought as hard as he did, they would have won fights but they did not.
What does this mean for your career? It means a tremendous amount and is among the most important lessons you will ever learn. You need to believe in what you can do, and that you can achieve whatever it is you are trying to achieve. Very few people believe in themselves and what they are capable of.
- They do not believe they can achieve everything they want to achieve in their careers
- They do not believe that they can win various fights and so they back down and never fight
- They do not believe they are qualified for a job so they never apply
- They do not believe they have a good enough education so they set the bar low for themselves
- They do not believe they have enough experience so they do not set their sights high
- They believe others are better than them and resign themselves to this
- They believe so many things about what they are capable of that limit them their entire lives and careers
I want to be very, very clear with you that the problem of you becoming everything you want to be is your problem, and it is all in your mind. You are preventing yourself from being the person you are capable of being due to all sorts of limiting beliefs that are holding you back. If you believe you are capable of being something, you can do it. If you do not believe you are capable, then you probably cannot do it. You are in charge of your mind. The power to be, do and become who you want to be is all in your mind. You need to take control of your mind and become and be the person you want to become and be. It is as simple as that.
In my garage at home, I have what is called a “sensory deprivation tank.” Essentially, this tank is filled with salt water that I can go into and meditate in. The entire tank is dark, and when I am inside of it, I cannot hear anything. My body floats, and I can think through various issues I am dealing with. People may think this is weird or strange, but I do not care. All I know is that meditation is something that has benefited me, and I continually do things to help me become a person. I do not think I would have have been able to become who I am today without meditation. There is nothing more important to me, personally, than making sure I control limiting thoughts in my mind and this is why I go into this tank to meditate. I have been doing this for some time.
Everyone has an incredible number of limiting thoughts that they are contending with. There is no doubt you do as well. I am sure there are countless people out there who have told you that you are incapable of doing this or that, that you should only try this or that, and more. You need to banish this sort of thinking from your mind. This sort of thinking does not help you one bit. In fact, it is this sort of thinking that will keep you in a state where you are not reaching your potential for the rest of your life. That’s right. Limiting thinking will keep you in a state of not reaching your goals for the rest of your life.
Every few months, something unusual happens in my office. I will be sitting in my office and the receptionist will come into my office and announce:
“There is someone here to see you. They understand they do not have an appointment, but they apparently believe it is important that they speak with you.”
I will then send the secretary scurrying out to get more information and will find that the person sitting in the lobby is a job seeker who is coming to see me personally about getting a job in a law firm. This is something I am sure happens in recruiting firms all over; however, every time this happens, I am amazed by the power of the human spirit and the people who are doing this.
In several cases, the people sitting in the lobby waiting to speak with me have flown in from other parts of the United States. They are always impeccably dressed and have their little portfolios containing their resumes. In most cases, the people who are doing this do not have very good qualifications. They have not gone to the right law schools, and they do not have the pedigree that would allow them to get the best jobs. But they keep showing up because they believe in themselves.
These are my heroes and the people with the spirit to achieve. What is inside of them will lead them to great achievement.
One of the most unusual things I have seen in my life, in working with countless job seekers and others, is that so many people go into interviews and other situations expecting not to get the job. That’s right. They flat out expect to lose and not get the job when they go into an interview. People simply do not believe they will get the job.
“What’s the use of trying?” many people tell me.
You need to banish that sort of thinking from your mind. You need to believe in yourself and that you will get the results you want in your life. This is the only way you are ever going to get the job you want or reach your full potential.
As Seen on TV, P.T. Barnum, Penis Pills and Your Career
What You Will Learn
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I confess that I took no pains to set my enterprising fellow-citizens a better example. I fell in with the world’s way; and if my “puffing” was more persistent, my advertising more audacious, my posters more glaring, my pictures more exaggerated, my flags more patriotic and my transparencies more brilliant than they would have been under the management of my neighbors, it was not because I had less scruple than they, but more energy, far more ingenuity, and a better foundation for such promises. — P.T. Barnum
One of the greatest marketers of all time was P.T. Barnum who coined the phrase “The Greatest Show on Earth.” P.T. Barnum was the absolute king of promoting various events during the 1880’s and understood advertising and marketing concepts that are still in use today. He was able to make an absolute fortune by capitalizing on sensational headlines and arousing curiosity in various sideshows. He knew what people wanted to see and hear, and he aroused their curiosity. He used language and was able to create a sense of urgency so strong that people often fought to get into his shows. He was also a man of the people and able to identify with the people around him.
One of PT Barnum’s greatest lessons, however, involves the importance of promotion. One of my favorite quotes is by P.T. Barnum is, “Without promotion something terrible happens: Nothing!” In fact, it is the people who are most successful at promotion that are able to achieve the most success in virtually every calling there is. Without promotion very little can happen. Businesses who do not promote go out of business. People who do not promote themselves successfully also fail to get the sorts of jobs they are capable of getting. It is a huge tragedy when people fail because they are simply unable (or unwilling) to promote themselves as they should. I wonder to myself if you, or people you know, are not living the life you are capable of due to an inability to effectively promote yourself. Many people are, and this is a massive tragedy. In fact, most people out there do not know how to successfully promote themselves.
Last night I went to Target with my wife, and I was pleased to see that they had several areas of the store that are now dedicated to “As Seen on TV” products:
- sandpaper you put on your hand that can remove all the hair off your body
- a tool to file down your dogs nails
- a blanket with holes for your hands so you can wear it
- scratch remover for a car
- a towel that soaks up anything, and can be used thousands of times
- putty that can glue together anything
- a carrot chopper
- a juice maker
There used to be an “As Seen on TV” store in Santa Barbara and, when I would go in there, I would spend hours and hours inside this particular store looking at stuff. These stores are my dream come true. I wish there were more “As Seen on TV” stores, and there were Targets stuffed with every good that had ever been sold on television. I would probably never leave.
Why am I so interested in the stuff that is “As Seen on TV”? I am completely and utterly fascinated by this stuff because, with extremely limited exceptions, all of the stuff being sold is complete junk that is being marketed incredibly effectively. The only thing any of these products has is that, somewhere along the line, an incredible copywriter and/or salesperson has gotten behind these products and endowed them with super human qualities. People line up to buy these things the same way people used to line up to see P.T. Barnum’s shows. These products also appeal to the average person–i.e., all of us. The people who are marketing these products are absolute geniuses in many, many respects and they could teach you and I a ton about getting a job. People that know how to market things really have an advantage in the world.
Before I go any further I want to make something clear to you. When you know how to package and sell something, you can do anything. The ability to sell is among the most important skills there is, and has ever been. More importantly, the ability to sell yourself is exceptionally important.
- When you can sell yourself, you can get any job you want.
- When you can sell yourself, you can get promotions.
- When you can sell yourself, you can help your company expand.
- When you can sell yourself, you are capable of incredible achievement.
You need to understand the skills of selling. If you can sell yourself, you can do anything.
Massive fortunes are made by the people who are able to market these products successfully on television. Do you have any idea how much money people make who sell this stuff on television successfully? It would absolutely boggle your mind. People who are able to take inanimate objects like this and package them are among the most successful people out there in marketing.
The woman who cleans my teeth in my dentist office lives in a modest suburb in Los Angeles. However, each week she takes some of the most outrageous trips you have ever imagined. Her best friend’s husband came out with some sort of pill that he claims makes men’s “private parts” larger and he advertises it in magazines, on television and other various locations. The guy has gone from living like an average Joe to spending his weekends taking his friends (and my dental hygienist) to Rio, Cancun, Hawaii and other locations on his private jet. The guy apparently makes millions of dollars a month with his penis pill. He started out advertising in magazines, moved to television, and the rest is history. There is nothing in these pills but some common herbs and vitamins, but none of this seems to matter. It is his ability to sell this product that makes all of the difference. I can tell you that as far as I know, probably no advertising executive on Madison Avenue and in any of the largest advertising firms on the planet has a lifestyle like this.
You will not find most of these successful marketers (like the guy with the penis pill) working in large advertising agencies. The people who are marketing these products in infomercials and other areas are typically “outsiders” to the big corporate advertising firms. The reason is that most large advertising firms do not want to do direct response television advertisements where they need to be accountable immediately for the result. Large advertising firms and others prefer typically to do “branding” sorts of advertisements where the results the ads get are not really measurable. You would prefer to do this sort of advertising if you were a big advertising firm, as well. If you were a big advertising agency, you would not want to have to be accountable for the results of your work either.
However, the people who do direct response advertising on television, the people who sell penis pills and people like P.T. Barnum, all need to be accountable the second their ad runs. If people do not purchase their product, they do not earn money. Therefore, the people who promote these sorts of products develop the most outrageous and effective skills they can to sell these products and get your attention.
One of the most interesting facts, that has been true as long as I remember, is the fact that the National Enquirer is read by more people each week than Reader’s Digest, Time, US News and several other publications put together. The National Enquirer is incredibly popular. In addition, some of the highest paid writers in America also work at the National Enquirer. The key to what they are doing is writing the headlines that appear on the cover. These headlines, as I am sure you can remember, are absolutely fascinating. But they sell magazines, lots and lots of magazines. While other magazines experience financial problems, people keep buying the National Enquirer in supermarket checkout lines to the tune of millions of copies a week. We buy the National Enquirer because it interests us.
An interesting article by Jay Gourley ran in the Washington Monthlyin 1981 that discussed the differences between “quality press” and the “popular press.” This article discussed that the popular press follows the motto “tell them what they want to hear” while the quality press tells them “what they ought to hear.” Gourley wrote that, ”Popular journalists generally see quality journalists as dimwitted and pretentious. Quality journalists generally see popular journalists as immoral and brash.” This is a conflict that exists everywhere between advertisers selling penis pills and large pharmaceutical companies, between magazines like the National Enquirer and The Economist, and between large advertising firms and individuals out there peddling carrot peelers in 30 minute infomercials. However, I would submit to you that what ultimately matters is whether or not something is sold and people buy it. The most important thing is whether or not people buy something.
I am constantly amazed when I see people with very little intelligence or academic prowess come out with a book about this or that, and sell millions and millions of copies. It could be a story about a woman who spent a romantic night with a famous man and is writing a tell all. It could be a 200+ page book about a diet someone likes. There are so many ridiculous books out there it is difficult to believe. These people make millions of dollars writing books about the most stupid topics. Simultaneously, there are tons of books out there written by superstar academics that discuss stuff that is really important. These people are professors at the best universities all over the country. However, more than often we are buying the books about crap, than we are the books by the really smart people. What everything ultimately comes down to is whether or not something sells. It does not matter how smart you are, or how many degrees you have. It matters if you can get people to ultimately pull the trigger and buy what you are selling.
Recently, I have started to read and study the works of various copywriters. I have studied copywriters on and off for the past decade or so, but am always drawn back to their works for various reasons. These copywriters run workshops that they charge thousands of dollars to attend, sell binders full of other best ads for hundreds of dollars, and will basically sell you anything if you pay them money. Primarily, I am drawn back to the work of copywriters because I am amazed time and time again when I see products and people come out of nowhere to dominate the national consciousness. Because I am so interested in getting people jobs, the idea that the quality of our letter to an employer, a headline, or something along those lines can have an incredible influence on your candidacy and whether you end up getting the job of your dreams is fascinating to me.
There is also something to be said of the fact that when people are following the rules and doing things the same way others are, they may not be getting the best results they are capable of getting. This is true as well with your job search. P.T. Barnum, infomercials, other sales people and vehicles outside of the mainstream are more often than not the ones who are actually moving products and selling lots of stuff. The writers for the National Enquirer are some of the highest paid writers in the world–not the writers for the New York Times. Everything is about the ability to arouse peoples’ interest and get them to buy something.
The most successful people and marketers are able to get your attention. They are able to get you to part with your hard earned money and they are able to close the deal.
What does this have to do with your job search? It has everything to do with your job search. Your job search is no different than the conflict going on in the business world between traditional advertisers and the mavericks like P.T. Barnum and the guys with infomercials out there. What do advertisers like P.T. Barnum and ”As Seen on TV” ads and others have in common? They grab your attention, make an offer that motivates you to act by picking up the phone, signing up (or whatever). These ads ask for action and they try and make the sale now–and not later. They know that their objective is to get you to act because if they do not get you to act
- … they will not fill their circus with seats
- … they will lose hundreds of thousands of dollars advertising their gadget
Traditional advertisers do not care what results they get (for the most part) because it does not matter to them. They are used to following the rules. They run ”image” and not “direct response” advertising. This is a massive difference between what the people who are making the real money advertising are doing. In image advertising the results are not measurable. When you need someone to pick up the phone, or fill out an order form and order a product right now, you had better bet you are going to do everything within your power to sell the product as effectively as you can right now.
In your job search, I want to encourage you to think creatively and understand that you need to stand out with your applications. You need to get employers’ attention and get them to call you. You need to arouse their curiosity, and you need to have an offer that looks better than the next guy or gal. It may seem unusual to you that people are getting incredibly rich selling stupid stuff like pet nail files on television, but they understand something most people do not: It is all about the ability to package and sell something that matters. It is more important how something is packaged and marketed many times than what the product is. It is all about the marketing. Everything is about the marketing. Regardless of how good you may look on paper, regardless of how good your resume and experience are, if you do not package yourself correctly you are doing yourself a huge disservice.
Heart of Darkness, Emotion and Your Career
What You Will Learn
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Everything is about emotion. The ability of someone to arouse our emotions and heart is what really drives us. Without emotion, you have nothing. We all have emotions deep within us. Inside each of us are deep emotions that many of us do not even understand. Your ability to use emotion to connect with others is something that will have a profound impact on your career.
One of my favorite movies in all respects is Apocalypse Now, loosely based on Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novel, Heart of Darkness. The novel is less than 100 pages long; however, it has incredibly significant psychological messages that deal with our connection with both ourselves and the world.
The book deals with the flashback of a man named Marlow working for a Belgian trading company known only as “the Company.” Marlow is sent on a steam boat up, what the reader is led to believe, is the Congo river to the Company’s remote Inner Station. As Marlow goes up the river into territory that is increasingly more and more remote, the journey takes on a psychological dimension and becomes, in effect, a quest by Marlow to understand himself and elements of his unconscious. He says “Droll thing life is-that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for futile purpose. The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself–that comes too late–a crop of indistinguishable regrets.”
Marlow begins to see himself as traveling into the unknown and primal reaches of the mind. The more one reads the book the more evident it becomes that the story is about a journey into the subconscious and a confrontation with one’s own self.
The Inner Station is run by a man named Kurtz who trades ivory. Once he arrives at the Inner Station, Marlow is struck by the decaying facilities and the incredible and racist exploitation of the native Africans by the Europeans. Virtually every character in the novel remains nameless and is referred to simply as The Manager, The Accountant and so forth. These characters are all people who have almost completely lost their individuality in the face of the dark of the jungle.
The novel is important because it shows that there is, within each of us, a subconscious emotional self. The characters of the Accountant, Manager and others that Marlow meets to me are like many of us who lose our individuality and emotional selves once we get out in the business world. Our emotional selves are among the most important components of who we are and what makes us tick. They are something that we all need to discover and use. They are latent and deep within us, waiting to be found.
One of the most unusual experiences I ever had in my life was with a girl I scarcely new and it happened several years ago. She and I had spent some time together simply talking and lived on opposite sides of the country. We spoke late into the evening one night in a small cafe. Neither of us, as far as we knew, had any interest in being involved with one another at all. We were discussing, for the most part, a business-related matter.
However, I personally felt a strong affinity with her as we spoke and I could tell she did as well. The bond was not sexual–it was more of a shared understanding between our hearts and what lied within us. As we were saying goodbye, the two of us hugged and all of a sudden we both started crying and sobbing almost uncontrollably. In fact, the emotional outpouring that occurred was incredibly strong. We sat there on a corner of a busy city street hugging for at least a few minutes. Neither of us understood what was going on. What was so remarkable about this particular episode is that we both started crying without any prompting. There was simply an emotional outpouring that seemed to come out of nowhere. It was something that I did not know I even had within me, and it is something I will never forget. In that moment I discovered a part of me within my heart I did not even know existed. This emotion and ability to connect with someone else like this is incredible. The bond with her at that point I think was so powerful that were I to ask her to run off with me to a deserted island and leave everything behind, I am confident she would have followed.
Stanley Kubrick’s movie Eyes Wide Shut is a compelling psychological drama that follows Dr. Bill Hartford (played by Tom Cruise) on his sex adventures after his wife Alice (played by Nicole Kidman) reveals that she contemplated giving up everything for a quick affair with a naval officer a year earlier. The entire movie is based around the shock that Dr. Hartford experiences after learning of this. The idea that there is something dark and emotional like this within each of us is stunning on many levels. Deep down there are parts of ourselves and our psyches we simply do not understand, but which are very emotional in their nature.
In contemplating this particular episode years later, it occurred to me that there was an emotional part of myself and herself that had connected on a deep and important level. We both knew this connection was there, despite the fact that we scarcely knew one another. It was an experience I will never forget because it is a person that I scarcely knew at the time. Nevertheless, there was a deep emotional bond there that really meant something.
I am sure you have experienced these sorts of emotional connections with others in your life as well. Powerful emotional connections and attachments are rare; however, we all experience strong emotional attachments to people, ideas, places and things. I am sure your eyes may have started watering at seeing something beautiful, when you heard a wonderful story, or when you saw something wonderful happen. We are primarily emotional people and much of our decision-making ability is based on emotions. People are seeking connection, and connection is one of the most important things we can have.
The emotional bond between people is not something that I would necessarily call sexual. In fact, the sorts of emotional bonds that exist between people are something else. I remember my best friend growing up was one of the toughest guys you can imagine; he was always getting in one fight after another. In addition, he had tons of girlfriends and was very well liked. When I was around 16 years old I came home from winter break from Thailand where I was going to school, and spent a few weeks with all of my friends. The night before I was going to say goodbye to my friend before returning to Thailand, he broke down crying and I remember hugging him. It was the most emotional I had ever seen him, and it still makes me uncomfortable to this day. However, he is also someone I will stay in touch with and be friends with as long as I live.
One of the biggest mistakes most of us make in our job search, careers and lives is expecting that being professional is enough. What all of us are seeking in the world is an emotional connection and we want to feel connected with others. Beneath each of our exteriors and inside of us is an emotional person and someone who has a profound ability to be connected to others. This is where the power lies, and it is in this emotional person that our true power lies. Your career and life will often revolve around your ability to use this emotional person effectively. When we are able to connect with one another, incredible bonds of trust can develop. The emotional person inside of us wants to feel connected to the people around us. We are, at heart, emotional people and are seeking an emotional connection.
If someone is unable to connect with others emotionally, they will typically be terribly alone and isolated. They may be unemployed, or if they are employed they will typically not go very far in whatever they are doing. Having an emotional connection with others is something that can make a huge difference in your career. The stronger you are able to connect with others, the more of a bond there is going to be. The more of a bond there is, the more you are likely to get hired and the more you are likely to keep your job. If people feel an emotional connection to you, they are likely to want to be around you.
The thing about this emotional bond is that it is not something you need to work with. It is already a part of you. I would go so far as to say that some of your ability to connect with others is already part of your DNA.
Connectivity is what every relationship is built upon. It’s nothing more than getting in touch, feeling what the people you are working with feel, seeing life the way they see life, looking at the situation from their point of view, on their side of the desk. It is looking at their life, understanding their hopes, their dreams, their fears. It’s a very powerful shift in the way you conduct yourself, but one that will put so much more enjoyment, excitement and effectiveness into everything you do and everyone who does it with you.
You need a real connection with everyone you deal with in your professional or personal life. For example, when you’re out at a restaurant and a business and an overworked server comes up to you, it’s important to connect with him or her. It’s about conveying to them that you appreciate what they’re doing and that they’re adding pleasure to your dining.
You know it’s hard and you know it’s difficult, and you’re thankful. And smiling from the depth of your heart because you know that gives them acknowledgment, that makes it worthwhile and thank them for their effort. It’s carrying that same sense of purpose and passion everywhere you go, and in everything you do. It’s realizing it’s all about them. It’s never about you.
Your job search, career and life will take off when you learn to connect to the real needs and desires of the people you are servicing, and stop trying to assume you know what they want. Because issues that are very exciting and important to you may be totally erroneous and unimportant or uninteresting to your employer or potential employer, you have the obligation to yourself and to them to identify and understand what issues, needs, desires, and wants they are really motivated by and connect with them on that basis. If you do that and only that, your career will improve because you’ll be totally in sync with where people are coming from.
Work, Details, Your Surroundings and Your Mind
What You Will Learn
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Yesterday, I was getting a haircut and, before the haircut, the woman in the salon was washing my hair. As is typical in most salons, the woman also gave me a scalp massage for a minute or two while washing my hair. I was enjoying the scalp massage and told her so:
“You guys ought to start offering these scalp massages for an hour in addition to cutting hair. This is great!” I told her.
“It is obvious you are feeling my cosmic aura and energy,” she said. “You can tell that I am an energy healer.”
“You’re an energy healer?” I asked.
“Yes, I am above a Reiki healer and have a gift.”
“Really, what is going on with my energy?” I asked.
“You have too many small things to get done. You need to concentrate on getting small things done. When you get the small things done, everything will come into focus.”
I asked her a few more questions about this, and then she offered to come over to my house for $100 for 40 minutes and do some work on my energy field. Her advice about getting small things done is something that really stuck with me. The reason for this is because small tasks and little things are something that can build up and ultimately hold many of us back. Small things can become so numerous that they are often crushing. In fact, many of us allow numerous small things to build up and these small things can obscure us from the larger and more important tasks we need to accomplish. The ability to manage small tasks is a skill, and it is a skill that is really essential to your success in your career. Getting small things done is about not letting things “slip through the cracks,” and being able to control what is going on in our environment. The ability to control and master small tasks is about being able to control and master work and often life itself.
The best lawyers, for example, are the ones who have mastered the smallest details and the intricacies of whatever they are doing. Mastery in any job typically comes after having done it for thousands of hours. The longer someone does a given task, the more likely they are to master small details. The more they master the details, the better they become in the overall job and work that they are doing. With a tennis player, for example, the more they play the game, the better they may get at their second serve or their top spin. The piano player may learn to master a certain chord. Everyone masters details the longer they do something, and we respect people who are able to master details.
One of the things I have noticed throughout the years is that the market respects people who have the ability to master small tasks. Everything out there is in the details. For example, the best made cars are typically the cars that master the small details the best. These cars have smaller tolerances between various parts and things are tighter fitting. The cars function better over time because they are put together with greater tolerance in their small details. If we are purchasing an expensive handbag, the odds are always very good that this handbag will be expensive due to not only the material, but also due to the small details that are present in the stitching. We appreciate when people are able to master small details, and the market pays well for this. The mastery of small details shows that we are in control of our work. When details are done more effectively, the market also pays more for the work that we are doing. Employers seek out people who have mastered details. Consumers seek out people who have mastered details. We need to get good at mastering details.
We all have numerous small things that we need to get done. In fact, getting small things done is often something that haunts our every moment. For many people, a massive amount of small things build up to such a degree that they are never able to see the big picture and everything that is going on around them. One of the most incredible things I see wherever I go in the world and wherever I meet people, is that most people are putting off doing countless little things that constantly get stretched out year after year.
- Organizing a sock drawer
- Cleaning out the garage
- Organizing under the bathroom sink
- Purchasing new dishes
- Cleaning out the glove box
The inability to keep small details organized in your life is often a reflection of your ability to master the details of your work. If you cannot master the details in your own life or surroundings, it often looks to your employer and those around you that you will never be able to master the work you are doing.
Several years ago, I was speaking with a management expert and he told me that he can tell a lot about what sort of employee someone is going to be by how clean they keep their office. We have all seen offices in various states of disrepair, and I wonder if there is some truth to this statement. Incredibly, this management expert would hold back certain employees from promotions and other advancements based on how they kept their office. He did not go into a lot of detail about this; however, I instinctively got a real sense about what he was talking about. There is something to this.
I have noticed throughout the years that the people who tend to be the most organized also tend to be the same people who turn work in on time. Everything about our work is really in the details. We give people a good understanding of how good we are likely to be at something based on how many details we have mastered. The more we have mastered the details of our work, the more it appears as if we have mastered the work itself.
When I call various executives on the phone, I am always able to tell a lot about them based on the content of their voicemail. For example, do you know people whose voicemails are like this:
“Hello. Today is January 19 and I will be in the office all day. If I did not pick up the phone I am likely on the phone with a client or …”
or like this …
“Hello. This is John. Please leave a message!”
The person whose voicemail contains a date and so forth sends the message that they are really on the ball and ready for business. You sense that they have a routine that they follow every single day, and you also sense they are on top of whatever they are doing. This person sends off an air of professionalism and attention to detail that most others simply do not. For what it is worth, I have seen that people who are that on the ball with their voicemail messages are most often the best employees and do well with almost every employer they work with.
It is all in the details.
I work in a library of sorts, and am surrounded by thousands of books I have purchased throughout the years. New books arrive in my office on almost a daily basis. I have notes on my desk and stacks of books in various corners around me that I am waiting to review. I am hardly someone who looks all that organized, but there is actually a method to my madness. I keep one notebook on my desk, and one only, and I take notes all week long. At the end of each week I make lists and deadlines from these lists and reorganize the books in my office and put them back in one place. If I did not do this, I am not sure anything would get done. One of the most important things for me, personally, is being incredibly well organized. I never let any task I am working on slip through the cracks.
Several years ago, someone I was working with called my mind “like a vice grip” and seemed to admire me for this. I did not start out this way, and used to be horrible with details, but learned very quickly once I became an attorney how important the details really are. The story I am about to tell you makes me smile when I think about it, but it is in actuality not really that funny. My first job out of law school was working for a federal judge and as part of this, we were responsible for denying hoards of petitions by various prisoners in the federal system to get out of jail early or have their convictions overturned. One day, about three weeks into this first job of mine, the judge I was working for called me into his office and closed the door. He seemed visibly upset and I could not figure out what was wrong. I got a strange “vibe” from him that I will never forget that seemed to be a combination of extreme fear and anger.
“Do you realize that you made a typo on this order and almost let a bank robber out of prison?” he said.
I looked at the order. I had gone through probably 20 petitions of prisoners that morning and denied all of them. For some reason, however, I had done a “search and replace” in an order I had worked on and replaced the word DENIED with the word GRANTED. The judge had even signed the order and, only after reviewing all of the orders he signed, did he realize the mistake I had made. The judge knew how to look at details and was extremely good at it. In fact, he was a superstar, and to this day I respect him more and more each day for his incredible ability to control details. Despite having the most cases of any judge in his district when I worked with him, he had the shortest docket (cases pending). He had time for gold, rest and relaxation. He did not have to take work home with him every night. He knew how to control the details better than any one else I have ever known. Controlling the details has huge rewards.
I never made a mistake like that again. Incredibly, I had almost ended up letting a bank robber out of jail by not learning to control the details.
Keeping your office and surroundings neat and organized is a sign of detail mastery. There is a certain level of discipline that is required to keep things neat, clean and organized. If someone does not have this level of discipline on their desk, in their office, in their home and even in their car, then people around them wonder if they can also organize other aspects of their careers and lives. A career requires discipline and a life requires discipline as well. Getting your surroundings organized is a metaphor, in my opinion, for getting your mind organized.
For several years, the desk in my office was on the second floor of a building and faced a window right above a traffic light. The street that my office overlooked was not that busy but was perpendicular to a street that was extremely busy. Thus, most of the time the stoplight in front of my office was red and there were generally people sitting in their cars waiting for the light to turn green. I would estimate that 90% of the time I looked up, I could see people stopped at the stoplight. I could look down at people directly in their cars. (A disturbing fact I am going to just get out of the way is that a lot of people pick their noses when they are sitting at stop lights. For years I looked down out of my window and saw various people picking their noses. Without going into detail, I would estimate approximately 20% of the people I witnessed on a day-to-day basis did something inappropriate with the products of their excavation.)
However, one of the more interesting patterns I started to notice after some time was how people’s cars looked on the inside. Some people have very clean cars that look well organized inside and others have cars that look very unorganized and are dirty. People keep their cars in an extraordinarily different level of cleanliness on the inside. Some people have a collection of fast food bags and so forth that probably have stuff growing in them together with years of newspapers. It is incredible to me the level of disrepair that different people keep their cars in.
One day I looked outside and I noticed one of our contract temporary employees had been pulled over by the police right beneath my window, and they were searching her car. This woman had been brought in from a temporary employment agency to help us answer phones during a very busy time. This woman was incredibly clean cut, very beautiful, very well spoken and appeared quite polished in all respects. However, as they pulled stuff out of her car I realized there must be something terribly wrong.
- There were dirty blankets and towels
- Multiple hairbrushes
- Several gym sized duffel bags that appeared to be full of old clothes
- Rotten fruit
- You could see several empty packs of cigarettes
- A half full bag of cat litter
I had no idea why the police were searching her car, or what she had done. What concerned me was her car. From a psychological perspective, it seemed to me that what was going on in her car could only be a reflection of what was going on inside of her mind. The mess inside of her car was shocking for its magnitude and was such that it probably would have taken her at least a year to allow the car to get to that point. I filed this away in my memory and told myself mentally that the woman did not seem all there.
Over the next week, it become obvious there were several problems with this woman related to her ability to get things done. She was making incredibly inappropriate remarks to others and, although I was not involved in supervising her, the issues with her soon became profound enough that whomever was in charge of supervising her ended up telling the temp agency to send someone else. On her last day of work, she went around the office telling everyone that her supervisor was evil because he was a WASP (White Anglo Saxon Protestant) which was definitely a first in my career. In a word, the woman turned out to be quite crazy.
I have noticed that the most psychologically unstable people typically have the dirtiest and most disorganized bedrooms. The most disorganized offices. The most disorganized surroundings. When I was young, I was living in Spain with a bunch of young people one summer, and there was a girl in the room next to me. One day, the person supervising the dorms walked past her room and saw that it was a complete wreck. There were papers everywhere and the room was in very bad shape. The most interesting thing to me about this was how he reacted. Later that day he called her into his office and confronted her, saying that he thought she was using drugs due to the condition of her room. As it turned out, he was right. She gave him the drugs,and the next day they put her on a plane and sent her home. She ended up getting expelled from the private school she was attending due to this.
The person overseeing the dorms made this connection from nothing more that the condition of her room. He had noticed it was clean for weeks and then suddenly went to hell. He said something I will never forget: “Our surroundings are a reflection of what is going on in our minds.” For many people, doing drugs for your mind is like going into a home and turning over all the furniture. When people’s minds are messed up, their surroundings go to hell as well.
When I was growing up I lived with my mother, and she held a job which required her to leave for work every morning at around 7:00 or 7:30 am. She would not come home each evening until around 6:30 or 7:00. When she would get home, she would often spend an hour or two making dinner and then finally call me and my sister down to eat at around 9:00 pm. By the time we all finished eating at around 9:30 or so, my mother would be far too tired to do the dishes and they would be stacked in the kitchen with all sorts of dirty pots and pans. Because my mother tended to cook a lot, the collection of pots and pans would often be quite extensive and the kitchen would be a real mess.
The next day I would invariably come home from school and see this giant mess. The mess would be so huge that I would often decide to wash these silly dishes, rather than go out to play. Given my mother’s hectic work schedule, the entire house would often be messy as well. My room and my sister’s room would be messy. My mother’s room would be messy, and various rooms in the house would all be messy. If I did not do the dishes, my mother might do them when she got home, or she might declare that we should all go out to eat. This was pretty common. She would take us all to a Greek diner called the Grecian table up the street and, once there, we would sit there for an hour or more while she smoked cigarettes and drank coffee while eating and waiting for our dinner. These dinners were so boring and long . Typically I would go down the street while we waited for our meal to a little pizzeria, called Buscemies, and play video games.
The plates would be back home piled up when we got there. I always had a real dislike of all this mess, and it was something I found quite upsetting. What i noticed was that when things were not messy around the house, everything seemed to be much calmer and happier. A clean and organized house, in many respects, means a clean mind. Your office and your surroundings should remain clean because this is often a reflection of your ability to master details. What do we think about the person whose room may be clean but there is dirty clothing, papers and other stuff hidden beneath their bed? What is our opinion of the person who had a clean house but whose closets are stuffed to the brim with junk? There is something to this, and we all sense it. A messy closet can almost be like a messy area of our mind–it may be hidden from public view, but it is there.
Many people are calmed by the serenity of zen gardens and its simplicity. Steve Jobs, who has studied zen, has made an entire career out of doing small details well and keeping things uncluttered in his work at Apple.
Around 25 years ago, I saw a fascinating presentation by a handwriting expert. He was able to give in depth psychological insights to people by only examining their handwriting and, in most cases, only their signature. I did not know it at the time, but people’s entire psychological makeup can often be deduced from just observing nothing but their handwriting. What was so interesting about this was that the handwriting expert provided in depth psychological profiles of people without ever meeting them. After he had done this, a psychologist was brought out who had spent hours interviewing and testing these subjects and in every single case, the handwriting expert was right on. The idea is that we can tell a lot about people based on what they put out there on the outside. A handwriting sample that shows a lot of detail, for example, is a person who is typically very detail-oriented. A sample that shows messiness–a person who is not and so forth.
However, the most interesting part of all this was the the handwriting expert’s observation and belief that people could change by changing their writing style. He believed that if people started paying more attention to their writing style, they could become more like the person they wanted to be based on mimicking the writing style of the person they wanted to be like. I found this incredibly interesting at the time. This is almost similar to the change I experienced psychologically when the house I grew up in was clean and organized.
There is a way that I have noticed throughout the years to recognize people who will do well in their jobs. It is in the details, and the details are evident in the way they maintain their work environment, cars and even homes. The more attention there is to detail in these regards, the more likely the person is to be good at whatever it is they are doing. If you have not mastered your mind, it is going to come through in the details. You need to understand that people are watching you and how you manage your surroundings as evidence of how you master details. Your surroundings are a reflection of what is going on inside your mind.
Government Bailouts, Groups and Your Career
What You Will Learn
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Recently, something quite interesting has been happening in the American economy. The government has decided to get involved in running various businesses. These businesses include insurance companies, banks and automotive companies. This is something that I am almost 100% confident is going to likely be a disaster. In fact, it is already turning into somewhat of a disaster as far as I am concerned.
History has shown time and time again, that when a government tries to operate a business, this ultimately fails. It never worked in Russia, for example, and China and India have only started expanding and growing in relation to their ability to run a “hands off” approach to businesses in the country. The more freedom people in a country have to operate their businesses, the more innovation is likely to occur, and the more businesses are likely to be started.
What is needed to start the American economy are people willing to take risks and start and operate businesses. In order to take risks and start businesses, people need to be able to have the prospect of large rewards. There is no reason to start various businesses unless there is a prospect of substantial reward.
First, I do not think the government has any business being involved in business to begin with. The idea that the government is loaning money to failing auto companies, insurance companies and others is sheer lunacy. I grew up in Detroit. The American auto companies have been losing marketshare and failing since the 1970s. I love America and drive an American car, but the point is that it does not make sense to put money into a failing industry. America has some of the greatest companies on earth, and many of the largest companies on earth–companies that are expanding. Putting money into something that works seems a heck of a lot more intelligent to me than putting money into something that is contracting and is broken. Putting good money after bad is something that stifles innovation and will not lead to the sorts of changes needed in the American automobile industry. If the auto companies were allowed to fail (and they should now), then someone would be able to come along and purchase their assets very cheaply. They could start a new auto company with a lower cost, or labor structure perhaps. They could innovate in other ways to keep the costs down and profits up. More money would likely end up going into the American economy over the long run. Instead, we are putting money into something which has been slowly failing for over 30 years.
Second, the government has no role legislating our paychecks. Limiting peoples’ ability to make a certain amount of money is something that will serve to undermine industries in an incredible way. Businesses operate with a set of incentives and rewards. People go to work in various businesses due to the salaries they receive and the potential rewards they can receive in terms of bonuses. In addition, businesses also take various risks and make various investments in the hopes of getting large windfall rewards. For example, if a company invests $1,000,000 in something that is unproven, it hopes to get a reward that may be twice that. This is just how it works and it has always worked this way. In order to attract the sorts of executives that will take the risks and see the opportunities out there that will turn $1,000,000 into $2,000,000, a company will need to incentivize them with various potential bonuses and rewards. The best executives will almost always go where they believe they can make the biggest impact out there, and create the most opportunities for themselves.
One of the strangest things the government is doing now is providing a tax on bonuses of 90% on people earning more than $250,000 a year who receive government bailout funds. This is just going to force the best people to not go to work for these companies. It is as if the government is investing money in companies which will not be able to have the best people working for them. Due to this, these companies are likely to do poorly.
Several years ago I was taking a sales class from a man who had recently started a school to teach other people how to be salespeople. In the class, day after day, the man told one story or another about what an incredible salesman he was and gave multiple examples to the class about how much of this and that he had sold. The man was pretty well known and incredibly good at sales. After a career in sales in which he had made millions of dollars selling everything from real estate to jewelry, the man decided to start a sales school. He had a lot to teach, and his material was very, very good.
One of the strangest things about the school; however, was that the man who was in charge of the school never once tried to sell the product he was selling (sales training) to the public. He never answered the phones in the school, and never had anything to do with selling the product. The only people who were allowed to sell the product in the school were the salespeople in charge of selling the sales school.
The sales class I was in was pretty small. There were no more than 10 students in the class. The class cost a couple of thousand of dollars, and after several sessions of the class I started to feel that this salesman was selling himself short. I remembered when I had called the school the people who answered the phone had been very poor at selling me on the sales school. It was only due to my knowledge of the particular man that I had taken the classes. It occurred to me that if the salesman’s salespeople had been more effective, he could have sold numerous people on the school when they called. It did not make sense to me that I was taking a class with someone who was such a great salesperson, who was not out there selling his own product.
One day after class I decided to stay late and speak with the salesman about his operation.
“If you were in charge of selling your own product, you would likely have 100+ people in this class. You are a much better salesperson than the people you are employing to sell this for you. Why aren’t you selling the product yourself?” I asked.
The man looked at me and smiled. He seemed very happy that I was asking this particular question. He looked up and me and his answer was very simple.
“Because if I sold my own sales school the people who worked for me would very quickly feel undermined and quit. Also, my company would never grow if I sold my own product. No matter how well I sold the product, I would always be extremely limited if I sold this myself.”
This was something that I forgot about until just recently. The lesson is that an organization can only function and grow when there is freedom of movement among the people in it. In effect, when there are groups within the organization that are allowed to function independently of oversight, the business grows. When you see small local businesses you will generally find an entrepreneur or other business operator who is intimately involved with all aspects of the operation and doing most functions. He may be assisting with accounting, filling in with various sales functions and more. In such a situation, the business can never really grow and reach its full potential. A business will only reach its full potential when it is allowed to operate independently of one individual, or one power.
The mistakes the government is making with the economy and American business at the moment are quite relevant for your career, as well. You need to be working in organizations and with groups where there is a freedom of movement and where both you and the company can expand. The more constraints there are in your movement, and the more a company is managed by one individual, or one organization, the more problems there are likely to be, and the more likely you are to eventually be out of a job. It makes no sense to participate in organizations where the organization and your growth is constrained by outside forces. Organizations need multiple independent groups to survive.
Flow, Your Ego and Your Career
What You Will Learn
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Artistotle believed that more than anything we seek to be happy. There are some individuals who do their work and continually find happiness in this work, and for whom work takes on a meaning that transcends what most of us experience in work. These people feel completely involved in the work they are doing and are completely focused. They do not experience emotional turmoil when they are doing their work. In Mihhaly Czikszentmihalyi’s book “Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience” (1990), he described a state of “flow” where people involved in an activity “forget themselves, the time, their problems.” Flow is something that athletes experience when they are at their best, artists experience when they are at their best and we all are capable of experiencing when we are doing something that we love.
According to the great soccer star Pele, during his best games he felt a strange calmness he hadn’t experienced in any of the other games. “It was a type of euphoria; I felt I could run all day without tiring, that I could dribble through any of their teams or all of them, that I could almost pass through them physically. I felt I could not be hurt.”
Flow involves a state where we are able to concentrate with little effort, and where we are able to complete a certain task with very little effort. Another important component of flow, and I would argue the most significant, is that when some people are in flow they lose self consciousness. Instead of being conscious of themselves in relation to others, they move into another sort of state. This state Czikszentmihalyi also seems to believe, is “a loss of ego” (p. 122). According to Czikszentmihalyi, loss of ego is a rare transcendent experience.
What is this state of “loss of ego” in our work? How does loss of ego translate into our professions and lives? I know of numerous people whose careers are defined by this state of flow. They do their work in a manner that seems to not involve their ego and, instead, seems to transcend individual and self-seeking types of behavior. They are able to do their work in a way that is similar to the way many people worship. Their work is not calculated, and people around them feel good by their presence. They are extraordinarily good at whatever they do. Their ego is not involved in their work–their work is not about them, but about the work itself.
People who are able to enter a state of flow in their work become “egoless,” and do their work unconcerned with
Power or titles
Personal recognition
Profit
Their identity
Competition
This may sound like an incredible state to be in; however, this is a state that numerous people are able to enter into when they truly love something, and can get into a state of flow. Paradoxically, it is the people who do not care about power and money and other things, and are able to enter into this state of flow, who most often end up achieving the most, financially and otherwise. These same people often then become controlled by their egos and quickly lose whatever it is they achieved, and subsequently lose flow. It is the ability to remain in flow and egoless that I believe is one of the greatest determinants of being successful. Since so few people are able to do this, and since this is so relevant to your career, I believe understanding flow and the ego is something that can change your career and life.
One of my first memories as a child was when I was playing outside our apartment in Lansing, Michigan, and my mother called me inside for a few moments. My mother had recently purchased me a yellow Tonka Bulldozer toy, and I had been playing in the bushes of the apartment complex with the toy. Across the way, I noticed there was a boy perhaps a few years older than me also playing with some toys. I went inside for a few moments and when I came back outside my truck was missing. I could not have been more than three years old at the time; however, I can remember to this day how upset I was. I cried and cried, and I remember my mother comforting me about this. I am sure the boy across the way stole my truck.
The fact that this is one of my first memories is quite striking to me. I would argue that this is something that was one of my first true introductions to my “ego” and the idea that I, like almost everyone on this planet, was getting a piece of my identity from forms, objects, titles and other things that are not part of me at all. Indeed, my pain related to this little truck being stolen was there because of the fact that I identified the truck as an extension of myself. As I grew older and older, I came to identify with more toys and other objects that I was given by my parents. Then, I would start to see friends with better toys and objects, and start feeling a profound sense of lack because I did not have toys and other objects that were as nice. As my life progressed, I would start to admire people who had better houses than I had, more important parents than I had, went to better schools than I did, and so on.
When I was old enough to understand advertisements in magazines and on television, I would start to want things there, too. I remember when I was no more than 12 years old I saw a picture of the most expensive car ever manufactured at that time, an Aston Martin Lagonda, and I dreamed of my parents owning this car and driving me around in it. I thought this car was something that would be really meaningful. Several years ago, I purchased one of these used cars for not more than thirty thousand dollars, and spent another thirty thousand dollars restoring the car. I did this, I am sure, because there was a part of me that really wanted something for my ego from this car. When you see old men driving around in old cars they have restored, this is what they are most often doing–it is related to their ego and a sense of lack they are trying to fill from the past with a material object.
My stepfather ran a small boating business and around our small two bedroom house he always had scattered magazines with pictures of bigger and better boats that he could buy if he ever made enough money. One day my stepfather came home with a 1977 Chrysler New Yorker, which was the biggest and worst car I had ever seen. Within a few months I remember a Rolls Royce dealer in Palm Beach, Florida kept calling our house because my stepfather had indicated he might want to trade the new car in for a Rolls Royce. We never could afford any of this stuff, but my stepfather always dreamed of these things and wanted them. He was never ever satisfied. Was he any different from any of us?
When I got older, I started comparing my bicycles with other kids’ and always wanted the best bike. I never felt like my bike was good enough. I wanted to have the very best bike. In fourth grade or so, when people started having girlfriends in school, it was very, very important to me to have the most desirable girlfriend in the school. I would get into fights on the playground with kids over girls. I would continue fighting men in one form or another over women for the next 20+ years until I settled down. When video games came into vogue, I started competing with other kids as to who could have more video games. I always wanted to have more and better video games than other kids. Soon, designer jeans came into vogue, when I got into seventh grade or so, and I wanted the most pairs of designer jeans–Jordache, Calvin Klein, Sergio Vallente jeans. I wanted nothing more than for my mother to take me shopping each weekend to get more clothes. Soon I wanted a moped as well. I dreamed about getting a moped incessantly.
As I got older and progressed through my life, there was one thing after another that I wanted, and there was always something else. It never ended.
The friends I had.
The people I associated with.
It soon became titles like “President” of my class.
It became recognition for various achievements.
It became where I went to school.
Then it became what I did for a living.
How much money I made when I started as an attorney.
What sort of car I drove.
Where I lived.
How prestigious my employer was.
How big my company is.
What school my child goes to.
On and on and on …
Do you see the madness in this? It is all around us and we are all part of this madness. There is a huge problem with this, and it is related to the drive that all of us have on both a conscious and subconscious level to somehow add to who we are by possessing or associating with something outside ourselves, such as an object, person, place or title. Most of this drive is due to our persistent identification with people, things and other forms outside of ourselves. We subconsciously or consciously believe that our self worth comes from outside of ourselves and not inside of ourselves. We are persistently trying to find ourselves and our identities in things that are outside of ourselves, and the struggle seemingly never, ever ends. It is a sickness, and it is something that almost all of us suffer from. We continually want more and more.
I have been around the world and visited shrines, monasteries and other sorts of places. Even in the places that seem the most enlightened, people are constantly wanting more and more. Throughout the years I have become involved with various spiritual organizations in my quest to improve my mind. I have gone to groups that preach that we need to be in here and now and not look outside ourselves for value. However, it almost always happens that within weeks of attending one of these seminars or events my phone starts ringing. People learn I am the CEO of a company and assume I must be rich. They call and write wanting money and donations. They talk about how they need a new this or a new that. People visit me at home unannounced, seeking donations and constantly come looking for alms. These are the same people whose message often is “everything is within you.”
It is almost impossible to find anyone, or any group of people, who is not constantly striving for more and more, and striving to fill some void. There is something missing in almost all of us and in almost all of our groups. You can be part of one religion or another and they may preach to you about how Jesus preached that we are complete with God, for example. The message is comforting, and our image of Jesus is someone who walked around in sandals and a robe, and was not concerned with wealth. However, regardless of what church you are a part of, they almost all expect you to give them money. There is nothing wrong with this in substance; however, they often use the money to build giant and incredible monuments that boggle the mind with their size and ornateness. You wonder why these same organizations do not use their resources to support the poor. No matter how much they are given, most religious groups will continue to ask for more and more. It never stops. They will soon want a new building, a new wing to a building and more. Their hunger will never, ever end.
This is no different from us. We soon want new cars, new televisions, the latest fashions and more … we too are never satisfied. As long as we seek to be complete in objects and forms outside of ourselves, we will never be complete.
People and groups are continually trying to complete themselves by acquiring things, titles and more. The problem with this line of thinking, though, is that it simply never works. Whatever rewards we receive through possessing one thing, or getting one title, quickly go away and we find something else that we are interested in and “need.” We are living in a society that is dominated by consumerism and the need to possess things. Our measure of progress in our society is almost always related to possessing more and more. We simply spend most of our lives trying to fill a gap that we perceive we have between ourselves and people who we think are better than us.
For the past few years I have employed a driver. I live about an hour or two from my office, depending upon the level of traffic that there is each day. For me, being productive in the car (i.e., my time) is worth more than spending three to four hours sitting behind the wheel each day. I am in Los Angeles and throughout the years I have had a variety of drivers. I have had professional drivers, who were committed to being drivers, and I have had people who did not really seem to have any interest in driving. This never comes out in the interviews, as much as I would like it to, but it always comes out.
When I first started interviewing people to be drivers, I started seeing a lot of guys show up that really deep down wanted to be actors. You could see this from their resume. I did not hire these guys, and their interest in being a driver was to make money and then, hopefully, also make some connections through the driving that would lead to future acting work. I was smart enough for the most part to avoid this. Then I hired one guy I did not think would be interested in other things, and within about a month of hiring him, I discovered that he was in a band. He started giving me CDs of his band playing, asking for days off to go play various gigs, and his work just got shoddier and shoddier in so many respects. It became clear to me that he had no interest in what he was doing.
When he would not show up for work I would call a car service I have been using for some time. The drivers of the car service were all guys who did this sort of work for their careers, and they were incredibly enthusiastic. They would have Internet inside their cars so they could check traffic. They would know all sorts of special routes they could take. Their cars would always be spic and span. They would wear dark suits and always hold open the doors for me. Their service was fantastic and many of these guys had been doing the work for 20 years or more. These guys were also very happy. They had interests and could talk about a lot of things. They loved their jobs. They had an almost “instinctual” relationship with the road and understood how to avoid various traffic in certain locations. In a word, they were passionate about their work and in a state of “flow” as far as I could tell. When you were with them, you could tell they were “in the zone” and the drives with them seemed to go faster, and the entire experience was just better.
I contrasted this with the guy I hired from the band whose interest lied in being somewhere else.
Most people in most jobs are interested in being somewhere else …
Then I hired a guy who was from El Salvador, and he showed up and had complete enthusiasm for his work. He told the person who interviewed him for me that he wanted nothing more than to be a driver and was incredibly enthusiastic to be working in the United States. A few weeks into me hiring him, however, he started asking me the “secret” to my success and all sorts of other questions. He started telling me that this was the last thing he wanted to do. He wanted to be someone else, and one day, he was going to have a driver like I have one. All he spoke about was how he was capable of so much more than simply being a driver. I noticed that he started getting really shoddy about his work, and making a bunch of stupid mistakes. He too did not really care what he was doing. Then I noticed this same pattern in the next person I hired. This person too wanted to be somewhere else, and be doing something else. I heard them on their cell phone talking about starting businesses, doing other things and more.
None of this is to say that the people who are drivers are wrong in wanting to do whatever it is they wanted to do. But the point is that most people go through life not present in their jobs and always feeling a profound sense of lack, and wanting to be and do something else. As a consequence, they never succeed in what they are doing. This sense of lack and a need to be something different ends up permeating their entire lives and controlling them as long as they are alive. There is always something else they need to feel good about themselves–whether it is a job, title, person, place or thing. There is just a continual sense of lack.
This is their ego talking to them, and I do not think it is productive, and I do not think it helps them.
We are not just attached to things. I know people who spend their days and nights driving around from place to place, because they feel like they need a ton of friends in order to be happy. This struggle to meet new people and be popular almost never ends. Others work all the time so they can accumulate material possessions. Others have a cadre of different lovers, hopping from a sense of completeness from each one. People need something outside of themselves and chase after this throughout their lives in order to get a sense of completeness they feel is missing inside of them. It is good to have a lot of friends, but there is something wrong when all of your time is consumed by the need to have more and more friends.
One of the most persistent things among most people is our identification of self worth with objects outside of ourselves. This includes not only the material things we possess, such as cars, houses and other things, but also things like our job, our titles, the awards we have received and where we went to school. We endow things with a sense of self and our importance and feelings of self worth come from objects outside of ourselves.
In movies, television shows and others there is always a character it seems who is a sex addict, drug addict, gambling addict, or alcoholic or has some other disorder. Our culture is obsessed with the addictions of stars and others. One of the most interesting shows to come along in years is the show called “Intervention,” which follows people with various addictions. What is so interesting about all of these cases of addiction is that what most people are doing with their lives with drugs, sex, gambling, or liquor is the exact same thing that most of us are doing with our lives: Seeking a sense of fulfillment in something outside of ourselves. We watch people on shows like “Intervention” who come close to killing themselves with substances and other addictions, and we cannot help but recognize part of ourselves in them: No matter how much they get of whatever it is they are addicted to, they are never going to be complete and happy. No matter how many titles, wealth, friends–or whatever it is we are seeking–we too will never be happy. We will always be seeking more and more to make us feel complete as well.
Most of us are no different than a skid row heroin addict who needs one fix after another. The heroin addict does some heroin and for a time feels good. But then he eventually needs to go and find some more. The only difference is that what the heroin addict is seeking causes visible damage to them, whereas what we are seeking is a psychological disorder.
I am continually witnessing society’s desire to find fault with others. My wife subscribes to various magazines such as “Us Weekly,” “People” and others. Each week these magazines contain all sorts of incredible gossip stories about this celebrity or that celebrity. The majority of these stories are unflattering. We read about horrible break ups, public spats and more. Consider, for example, the public’s fascination with Brittany Spears and the things that have happened with her. There are, of course, more such stories. Why are we so fascinated with these things? I think this has to do with the fact that when we hear bad information about others it makes us feel superior to them. Our self identities are so fragile that just as we are seeking things outside of ourselves to complete ourselves, we are also obsessed with those we believe have more, or are more than us, being weaker than us on some level. We all do this. We are obsessed as a culture with people who we perceive are above us, suddenly having less.
Several years ago, when my company began to get quite large, I started hearing all sorts of rumors about myself from various employees. There would be rumors of affairs, rumors that I was involved in something illegal, rumors that I had done this or that. The larger my company grew, the more I started hearing rumors like this. When certain employees would get fired they would persist in these rumors. For a long time I used to be incredibly upset by these rumors because they seemed to be malicious. I realized, though, after some time what was going on. Most of the people who were involved in spreading such rumors had been fired, or were people who I considered poor employees and let them know I thought this. When I confronted these people, I wounded their ego and how they perceived themselves. Their revenge and way of feeling “complete” again was to find some level of superiority to me in whatever way possible. This meant an interest in rumors and whatever weaknesses I might have. Our interest in others’ weaknesses often adds something to our need to feel complete. We love hearing negative stories about our enemies and people whom have made us feel inferior.
When you are in conflict with anyone, it is usually due to the fact that you have somehow wounded their sense of self of vice versa. On its crudest level, you could injure this person or kill them so you can feel better about yourself and be “complete” (and people do). On another level, you will turn against them and attack them verbally, or undermine them in order to establish your ego and how you feel about yourself. This is something that we all do in one sense or another, and it is something that characterizes most of our lives. We want to be right about various conflicts because if we are right, we somehow feel validated as people. Deep down we want to feel better than others, and we get this through being right. When we are right and the other person is wrong, who we are is validated as a person.
When I was growing up, my mother used to sit at the kitchen table or on the couch smoking cigarettes and talking on the phone to her friends for hours at a time. All of the conversations would almost invariably revolve around some perceived insult my mother had received, or given, or something that had happened–or vice versa with one of her friends. The entire conversation would go on for hours at a time, and she would either be supporting her friend, or her friend would support her. They would talk and talk, back and forth, until some sort of consensus was reached that my mother was right about something, or her friend was right about something. My mother would then feel better. If it was my mother’s ego that was involved, she would then call a few other friends after the conversation to see if they too thought she was in the right. She would always get their agreement, and then would move on. Other conversations I heard my mother having growing up involved rumors about other friends, or bad things that had happened to people they knew. These sorts of conversations I think dominate our consciousness and what we are doing, because they make us feel better in relation to others and make up for this sense of lack that we are constantly seeking to fill inside of us.
“Sure she is beautiful, but she is not very intelligent.”
“I would not want to have the responsibility he does. It would be horrible to be scrutinized all the time.”
“They may appear to be a happy family, but she is really a pill popper and addicted to prescription medications.”
“That was a good performance, but she is also anorexic.”
“They cheat on each other.”
“Oh, he is rich, but he has to work all the time and is really very unhappy.”
On and on and on … how many statements like this have you heard? I have certainly heard a lot of them. Why is it that we need to denigrate others around us? Why is it that our self worth is often tied up in what others are doing? How can this be explained? We do this because there is a profound sense of emptiness and need for us to feel better than others. This is a collective disease. Religions do this, and are well known for this. Orthodox Jews, for example, feel superior to Jews who are not as observant and do not cover their heads. Extremely Orthodox Jews feel superior to other sorts of Jews who are not as observant. The same can be said for people of most religions.
It is important that in our lives we get into a state of “flow” where our ego is not involved in what we are doing. We need to be detached from the ego and, instead, just concentrate on what is before us. I think this is the highest state of being in both our lives and careers. The idea that we are complete and do not need outside verification in any form in order to feel successful. We do not need to feel in competition with others.
The people who experience the most problems in their careers are those who are more concerned with being recognized, paid and getting more and more–rather than the work they do. The fact of the matter is that once you start down this road, enough will never be enough. An executive who asks for a raise once due to having done something well, will likely ask for a raise a short time later if he does something right. Pretty soon, this executive will start concentrating on how much others at similar companies are making and feeling a sense of lack. He will ask for more and more raises, and then will start looking for another job. He will find a new employer who pays him a better salary, and then the same process will repeat itself over and over and over again. The executive may settle down at some point, or he may not. Because of this executive’s continual focus on what he lacks, he wastes his energy and never is able to get in a state of “flow” in his job where he could truly reach his potential. His work is shallow and nothing more than something that simply leads to immediate paychecks, raises and bonuses. The work cannot possibly ever be the quality that it would be if the executive’s ego were not involved.
The executive never learns to truly appreciate the work he is doing. Others in the workplace are viewed as competitors, and not people to cooperate with unless there is a secondary motive. The ego seeks out only immediate rewards and views others as people to compete with, and not work with, unless they can appear as if they can lead to rewards that will enhance the ego. If the employer is not viewed as prestigious in the market, the person will feel personally hurt deep down because their ego is tied up in the employer. Their identity is in their employer and they are not necessarily one with their work.
I would encourage you in your career to release and get in a state of flow. You need to step back from your ego and realize that no employer and no job can even fulfill your ego. Your greatest satisfaction in your career and life will come when you are able to be one with your job and what you are doing. Be in the here and now.
Your Brain and Your Career
What You Will Learn
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In our job searches and careers, there are a variety of forces that can hold us back. However, in almost every single case the thing that can hold us back more than anything is ourselves and our own minds. In fact, your brain and what it is doing–how it thinks and the way it processes information–is the single greatest determinant of what will end up happening to you in your career and life.
I would like to go a “little deep” with you today and discuss something with you that is pretty far out in terms of your career but which, at the same time, is the largest single thing determining what is happening with you and your career: Your brain. This is a crucial determinant in your success or failure. What is most interesting about your brain is that may be you are being benefited, or held back, on either an organic or a psychological level by your brain.
Natasha Richardson, a well-known English-born actress, died after a skiing accident in Canada this week. She apparently fell down and lightly hit her head. After the injury, she declared she was fine and refused any medical care and went back to her hotel room. However, around an hour later, she started complaining of a really bad headache. She was then taken to a hospital in Montreal and then a short time later, flown back to New York City, where she ended up dying. According to Scientific American:
“…The tragic story, if confirmed, is a reminder that even minor blows to the head can lead to devastating bleeding that can cause strokes or otherwise damage brain tissue. One possibility, sometimes called “talk and die” syndrome, is that the actress had delayed bleeding between her skull and her brain stem, which sits at the top of the spinal cord and regulates consciousness, breathing, and the heart and connects the brain to many of the body’s sensory and motor nerves. Another possibility is that there was a tear in the inner lining of her arteries, causing blood clots. To find out more about Richardson’s potential injury, we spoke with neurosurgeon Keith Black, chairman of the Department of Neurosurgery at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles….”
How fragile life is and how quickly things can change for people at the blink of an eye! Richardson apparently died of what is called “talk and die syndrome”. In “talk and die syndrome,” someone hits their head and initially they are OK; however, they eventually end up dying when blood gets between the skull and the brain, which is called an epidural hemorrhage. What ends up happening is that there is a pressure on the brain as the blood builds up, and this pressure eventually can end up killing the person.
I think this episode is chilling because it is a metaphor for the experience of many of us in our lives. There is something horribly wrong with some of us but we do not know it and continue forward in our lives as if everything is fine. What is wrong with us is often invisible, we cannot see it and others may not know about it either. Yet, here we go through life with some weakness, some fatal flaw, or something else that will end up killing us. It is something that is small at first; however, it ultimately ends up being something that has a massive impact on our entire lives and may actually kill us. For others, we may be impacted by seemingly small events that took place years ago, and we do not even realize they are impacting us today.
I am sure, 100% sure, that there are both positive and negative things that may have happened to you in the past that are working their way through your career and life right now. These things are affecting you and how well you do in your career and how well you do in your life. These things are psychological in nature and affect your entire view of the world. The good news about these things is that you can fix them. You can learn about these weaknesses and how they are affecting you in the world right now and can do everything within your power to fix them. This will take care of the situation right then and there. The bad news is for people who have suffered traumatic brain injuries, for example, is that many times there is nothing they can do to fix these injuries. They are in a state that they simply cannot easily snap out of.
While Richardson did not survive this incredibly tragic injury, many people who experience brain injuries do end up surviving. These brain injuries can have traumatic results on their lives. I am not sure what it is, or the reasons for this. However, I have seen this happen with people throughout my life and read story after story of this. A bad blow on the head can do tremendous damage to people and their lives.
For as long as I can remember, I have been incredibly interested in the brain and how it functions. The reasons I have been so interested in the brain are numerous; however, one of the main reasons I have been so interested in the brain is due to the fact that what happens with our brain can have an incredible impact on not only our lives, but our success and other factors. My career has been dedicated to human achievement and helping people make the most of themselves, who they are and what they can accomplish. It is for this reason that the most upsetting thing for me of all is when people are impacted by their brains in a negative way.
Several weeks ago I was speaking with a neurosurgeon in his late 80s who showed up at my daughter’s birthday party. He told me a very interesting story about a man whom he had treated when he was a military doctor several decades ago. He had been stationed at a base where there was a soldier who had simply turned quite mean. The soldier had been a nice, quiet kid from the Midwest whose personality had undergone a complete metamorphosis.
He became quite violent and had to be restrained in his bed 24 hours a day. The soldier would buck around so much that the hospital had to weld the bed to the floor. For hours a day, the man would scream obscenities and mean things at anyone who came near him. He was an incredibly evil man and had become very, very angry. His family had tried visiting him on more than a few occasions but were given such a barrage of savage insults and mean statements that they stopped coming to see the guy completely. For the past few years, he had been in this military hospital, strapped down to a bed and was “the meanest son-of-a bitch” anyone had ever seen. He simply could hurl one insult after another at various people, and the only thing he seemed to care about was how he could insult people.
The neurosurgeon, however, had to sleep in a part of the base where he was woken up by this guy’s blood curling screams each morning. While his job was not to treat patients who had apparently gone mad, he decided after months of listening to this man’s screams and being awoken by them each morning, that he wanted to investigate what was wrong with the guy. The doctor, I also sensed, was a very good person and wanted to help everyone he could.
He tracked down the man’s doctor. Apparently, the man had been injured in a simple fall on the base and over weeks and weeks had become progressively meaner and meaner. No one seemed to know what was wrong with him, and the man was now incredibly isolated and alone. He was just incredibly angry and perpetually so. The neurosurgeon asked to look at the man.
At the time, there apparently were not modern CAT Scans, so the neurosurgeon arranged for the man to have his head x-rayed. When the x-rays were developed, the neurosurgeon discovered that there was a blood clot that was isolated over a portion of the soldier’s brain. This small blood clot was activating the portion of the brain associated with anger. Incredibly, the surgeon was able to do a small operation on the man and relieve this blood clot. Over the next several weeks, the man returned to complete normalcy. He had been so incredibly mean to certain members of his family, however, that many people refused to ever speak with him again.
What is so vivid about this example is that everything that happened to this man was completely organic in nature. His brain was able to be easily repaired, and once this occurred, he was right back to normal. We think nothing of approving of a medical intervention like this to operate on someone with a sick brain. Nothing whatsoever. We expect it and know that a simple operation can rapidly bring this person back to normal. Why is it, then, that so many of us are unwilling to look inside ourselves and see what it may be that is holding us back? What it may be that is preventing us from reaching our full potential? What it is that if we changed would make us the best we could be?
Someone I knew growing up fell down a flight of stairs one day in their house. For the next 30 minutes or so the person laid unconscious. When they woke up, they went into the hospital. They were put under observation for a few days and eventually the hospital decided that they were ok and let them go. While the change in this person was slight, the person lost their job a short time later. They became very hostile and undermining of their superiors. This occurred throughout the person’s career, and they never really recovered. To this day, this person in someone who is very hostile to other people like this to the point of spending their days on gossip boards defaming anyone who they perceive is against them. The person is incredibly isolated and alone. It is very sad, but all of this is almost certainly the result of a similar brain injury. Our brains are complex and can really mess with us and screw up our lives. What if this person was to get a CAT scan? Would that change anything? Maybe none of this is related–maybe it is.
A woman I was once very close to, was travelling down the freeway one day in a small sports car. I received a call from the accident scene where she had totaled her car. She had woken up from the accident after being unconscious for around 5 minutes, and her head had been violently thrown against the windshield. When she woke up, she appeared completely normal and was able to speak with people in a coherent way.
A few days later, however, she started acting really bizzare. She started crying a lot and did so about issues that were quite paranoid. She started believing that everyone in her neighborhood was talking about her. When she drove down the street, the woman thought people were looking at her. Finally, one day she declared she needed to get the hell out of where she lived because everyone was staring at her and moved out of her house. She lived in one place for a few months and then decided the people there were out to get her. The last I checked, she had moved several times. Everywhere she goes, she is suddenly under the belief that people are out to undermine her and get her. Is she crazy? Not exactly. You can speak with her and she can carry on a completely normal conversation. It is what is going on in the depths of her mind that is so frightening. She has changed and become a completely different person.
These episodes are scary to me. They are frightening due to the fact of how common they are. In fact, if you personally are suffering from numerous different symptoms, they could be related to issues with your brain that could have occurred due to a fall or some other accident. One of the more interesting books that I have read in the past few years was a book by neuroscientist and psychiatrist, Dr. Daniel Amen, called Change Your Brain Change Your Life. In this book, Amen reviews and discusses the fact of how our brains are wired and can have a profound impact on our emotions and our thoughts. What Amen does in his studies and clinics is brain imaging studies on people having various issues.
For example, many of the common problems that people suffer from, such as distraction, worry, anger and more, are often related to a brain malfunction. People who have anxiety and are plagued by this often have issues with their basal ganglia. People with trouble focusing typically will have issues with their prefrontal cortex. People with a bad temper may have issues with their temporal lobes. People that have issues connecting with others may have a deep limbic problem. One interesting passage of the book relates:
When the limbic system functions properly, people tend to be more positive and more able to connect with others. They tend to filter information in an accurate light and they are more likely to give others the benefit of the doubt. They are able to be playful, sexy, and sexual, and they tend to maintain and have easy access to positive emotional memories. They tend to draw people toward them with their positive attitude.
When the limbic system is overactive, people tend toward depression, negativity, and distance from others. They are more likely to focus on the most negative aspects of others, filter information through dark glasses, see the glass as half empty, and less likely to give others the benefit of doubt. They tend not to be playful. They do not feel sexy, and they tend to shy away from sexual activity due to a lack of interest. Most of their memories are negative, and it is hard for them to access positive emotional memories or feelings. They tend to push people away with their negativity.
Positive Limbic Relational Statements
“We have a lot of good memories.”
“Let’s have friends over.”
“I accept your apology. I know you were just having a bad day.”
“Let’s have fun.”
“I feel sexy. Let’s make love.”
Negative Limbic Relational Statements
“Don’t look at me that way.”
“All I can remember are the bad times.”
“I’m too tired.”
“Leave me alone. I’m not interested in sex.”
“You go to bed. I can’t sleep.”
“I don’t feel like being around other people.”
“I don’t want to hear you’re sorry. You meant to hurt me.”
“I’m not interested in doing anything.”
Change Your Brain, Change Your Life:
The Breakthrough Program for Conquering Anxiety,
Depression, Obsessiveness, Anger, and Impulsiveness
pages 260-261
When your brain works right, then you work right. If your brain has trouble, then you are likely to have trouble. Exercise, sleep, stress, smoking, too much caffeine, negative thinking, how you think moment by moment can have a negative impact on your brain. Your diet, social connections and being with other people can help your brain. Is your behavior helping or hurting your brain? Day in and day out people are either hurting their brains or helping their brains. Focusing on what you love, being grateful and meditation can help your brain.
When you are looking for a job and when you are in a position where you may be seeking a job, it is important to understand that your brain is influencing the things that happen to you. If there are persistent issues that are holding you back in your job search or causing you problems, then it is important to understand just how serious these problems are. It is possible, for example, that there is more wrong than that which just meets the eye. There may be certain variables in your brain that are influencing what happens to you and these may be organic–or they may be psychological.
My advice to you today is to watch out for your brain. There are psychological things that are likely influencing you, and there may even be organic things that are influencing what is happening with you. Getting to the bottom of your brain and what is going on inside of you may be among the most effective career moves you will ever make.
Plato’s Allegory of the Cave and Taking Your Thoughts and Life Out of the Shadows
What You Will Learn
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One of the largest challenges to finding a job, changing direction in our lives and becoming the people we are capable of becoming, is learning to see the world in different ways. Several years ago I was on a jet with one of the wealthiest men in the country. This guy had recently purchased a jet that I estimate was probably worth at least $25,000,000 at the time. He used the jet to hop around the United States for leisure purposes. He really did not do any business at that point anymore, and had been retired for a few years.
I had been brought along as a passenger with him at the last minute because we were both traveling to a wedding together. I want to be clear with you at the outset that this is not the sort of society I normally travel in. However, on this day I had the opportunity to spend a few hours with one of the richest men in the United States, and someone who by the time he was in his mid-40s was worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
What I am about to tell you right now is not about how this guy got so rich. What is most interesting about this particular guy is how he thought about the world and the opportunities in it. I spoke with him during the flight that day and then I spoke with him for several hours once we arrived at the wedding. This was some time ago and I was just starting out in some respects, and was very eager to learn the secrets of someone who was so successful. In fact, I thought this person had a tremendous amount to teach and the more I spoke with him and asked him questions, the more I realized that he had a way of looking at the world that was much different from mine.
A few weeks before traveling with this mogul, I had been to a party at one of his friend’s houses. His friend was an electrician. The two of them had gone to high school together and stayed best friends ever since then. His friend was uneducated and had not gone to college, but was someone who worked very hard. The house I visited for the party was the most unbelievable house I ever saw. They guy had done so well as an electrician that he had actually had gold laid between the cracks in marble on his floor. The home must have been at least 20,000 square feet. I had never seen anything like it. On the airplane that day the guy started telling me about how his friend had gotten so rich.
“When I made all this money I started getting disappointed that all my friends were uncomfortable around me. If I ordered a $300 bottle of wine at dinner, they would be worried they would have to contribute to the bill and then would not order entrees . It was very uncomfortable. People did not want to travel places with me because they were uncomfortable with me paying for their hotel rooms. So at some point I decided that my best friends needed to be ridiculously well off as well, and I made sure they were.”
“What did you do?” I asked him.
I was expecting him to tell me that he gave them the money they needed. Instead, he really opened my mind about how some of the wealthiest people out there think.
He explained that his friend who was an electrician had spent 20 years with a little ad in the Yellow Pages driving around doing electrical work in the blue collar area of Los Angeles he worked in. The guy had one helper and they worked Monday through Friday traveling around doing some work, giving estimates and so forth. When the electrician’s friend got really rich he sat him down because he realized they could not be friends if they were not both obnoxiously wealthy.
“How much do you make a day?” he asked him.
He explained how he billed out at $65 an hour, his helper at $32.50 and hour, and how the two of them spent about half an average day giving estimates and the other half actually doing work and making money. When the tycoon listened to this, he thought the solution to the problem sounded really easy.
“All you need to do is get 200+ guys like you billing $65 an hour, seven days a week and not have to give any estimates and you’re going to be fabulously wealthy!”
“That’s impossible!” the electrician said.
“Absolutely not. We’ll figure it out.”
A few days later tycoon took the electrician to Beverly Hills, got him a haircut and bought him a $1,500 suit. He paid someone $500 to put together a little write up about the electrician’s company on expensive stationary. Without being dishonest, he made sure the write up sounded like the electrician had one of the largest electrician outfits in the country. A week later the electrician was sitting in a conference room at a major cell phone company in his new suit, after having been coached by the tycoon.
“Our company is one of the most established electricians in California. We can service and do all the electrical maintenance on all of your cell phone towers in California, Arizona and Nevada …” was something along the lines of what the electrician told this company.
“You need to look the part to get the job!” I remember the tycoon telling me about why he bought his friend such a nice suit. “You need to go for the moon. Show up ready to do the most outrageous and highest paying thing imaginable, and deliver. That’s all you need to do.”
Within a few weeks of his friend sitting him down, the electrician had landed a contract to maintain and do all the electrical maintenance for all of the cell phone towers in several states for a major cell phone company. Within a year his company had gone from two people to several hundred, and the electrician was making more than a million dollars a month. Aside from some coaching from a tycoon, he did this all on his own. Now he travels around with his friend to vacations on private islands and so forth, and pays his own way.
Is this story incredible? Yes. But this is the sort of thing that happens all the time. There are countless people out there who live lives in obscurity because they cannot see the opportunities that are right there in front of them. How many electricians out there are taking advantage of the opportunities that are out there like this guy?
Are you taking advantage of the opportunities that are in front of you? I refer to ideas like what we see with the electrician as “people discovering the truth.” There is “truth” out there, and this truth is that you can be whatever you want to be and become. But you need to see the truth first. So many peoples’ lives are held back forever by their complete inability to see the truth. The truth is that most of the obstacles out there are in our own mind and and this is something that holds us back. Most of us are in the dark figuratively, and cannot see everything that we are capable of becoming.
In Plato’s, The Republic, he writes:
See human beings as though they were in an underground cave-like dwelling with its entrance, a long one, open to the light across the whole width of the cave. They are in it from childhood with their legs and necks in bonds so that they are fixed, seeing only in front of them, unable because of the bond to turn their head all the way around …
This passage is well known both for its simplicity and the profoundness of the message that it contains. This particular passage of The Republic is written as a dialogue between Socrates and his students.
Men trapped in a cave sit with their backs to a fire and are not allowed to turn around to see what is behind them. They are chained in the cave their entire lives and all they can see is a blank wall. The only thing they can see is the shadows of objects that are held up behind them. When objects are held up to the fire, they project shadows and the men identify these shadows. But the men can only identify objects by the shadows, and they cannot see the objects themselves. The shadows are as close as the people ever get to seeing reality.
Between the fire and the prisoners there is a walkway that is raised. Along this walkway various animals, plants, puppets and other things are moved. The prisoners see these shadows. There are also echoes that come off of the wall from the sounds on the walkway, so the prisoners are not even hearing reality. Socrates implies that it would be reasonable that the prisoners would see the shadows as real things and the echoes as real things as well. Hence, the prisoners would see the sounds and sights not just as “reflections” of reality, but as reality itself. The entire group of men and their society would become dependent upon the shadows on the wall. Thus, the men would praise the men who were able to guess the next shadow and these would be seen as among the most intelligent prisoners and as people who understood the true nature of the world.
Socrates then introduces another idea to the scene and the cave. For example, what if a prisoner is allowed to stand up and someone showed him the things which cast the shadows. The prisoner would not be able to recognize the objects because all he understands are shadows. He would believe the shadows on the wall to be more real that what he is actually seeing.
Socrates also asks about what would happen if a man were forced to look at the fire. He would likely turn away and look back at the shadows, because this is what he perceives to be real. If the man were dragged out of the cave, would the man would the man be angry for this being done to him? He would be at first pained by the Sun and confused by the objects around him. However, when he eventually came to understand what the world really is, he would be sorry for the men whose lives were spent in the shadows. When the man tries to describe the truth to the men in the cave, they resist learning the truth and think their friend is crazy for doing so.
In the cave allegory, the men who are in the cave represent most of the world. They do not see truth and only see representations of objects and things. They are the majority. The man who escapes the cave and sees the true nature of things is the minority.
What the cave represents to me is that there are few people out there who really see the true nature of things in the world. Instead, they are interpreting the world through reflections, shadows and echoes. For example, why did the electrician in the story I told you take out a little advertisement in the Yellow Pages and travel around from house to house giving estimates and doing small jobs throughout his career until advised otherwise by the Tycoon? Probably because this is how he believed the work should be done. Everyone else did things this way and he saw this and followed the crowd.
What does all of this mean to you, your job search and your life? I would submit to you that if you are like 99% of all people, you are operating by interpreting shadows and sounds. You are not seeing reality and what opportunities lie before you. You are not seeing what you are truly capable of, and what you can do. You do not realize the incredible number of opportunities there are.
When you are operating in the shadows you are not seeing the true nature of things. There are powerful and penetrating insights into the world and the nature of things that are available when you start to think very carefully and closely about things. These insights are what are separating the people who are going to really get the results they want, from those who will not.
I have heard numerous stories about people over the years who achieve incredible success in their careers and lives. In every case, these were people who stepped out of the shadows to see some new way of doing things. They opened their mind by challenging an assumption or something along those lines about the way they have done something in the past. The rewards for stepping out of the shadows are huge. When you see the truth out there, you can accomplish far more than when you are simply in the shadows.
The idea that Plato is attempting to make clear is that people who are trapped in a cave can only see the shadows of objects projected on the wall.
Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss it, you will land among the stars.