Do Not Be Controlled By Your Need to Feel Significant
What You Will Learn
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When I was around 15 years old, I was in front of an ice cream parlor in Grosse Pointe, Michigan and there was a large group of kids around my age gathered around a well-dressed man who appeared to be in his mid 30s. The man was wearing a good-looking dress shirt, khakis and good shoes. I quickly realized, however, that the kids were all making fun of him. The man was quite off emotionally, and all he kept saying was that he used to work for a United States Congressman. The kids were all making fun of him and asking him about what he did for the Congressman. The man would list various details about what he had done for the Congressman but after a few minutes would begin acting crazy again. The kids were not being nice to this man. Based on his mannerisms and other things, it was obvious to me that the man had experienced some sort of nervous breakdown. For weeks I would see him around the city nervously puffing a cigarette. Kids would always stop him.
“Tell us about how you went to Yale Law School,” they might say. The man would then launch into a monologue that would slowly descend into his insanity. For example, he might start talking about how he went to Yale Law School and then somehow segue into a story about how he had worked on a project for the Congressman where he was fighting against rapists being chemically castrated. Then he would start talking about his own anatomy. That was one I remember. The man was clearly insane, but by all accounts, had at one time associated with, and worked with, some incredibly important people in Washington.
All he kept talking about, however, was how he worked for a Congressman. I learned later that the man was from a very old and extremely wealthy family in the city and was living with his family after going crazy. No one knew how he went crazy, but he did.
After watching the chemical castration monologue, I never chatted with the man again or joined the groups of kids who would taunt him. I felt very sorry for the man and was not interested in participating in this. Kids thought it was funny talking to him, and I viewed it as cruel.
What occurred to me back then, however, was that all the man wanted to talk about was what he had been. He had a need to feel important and significant. As I have gone through my life, I have come to realize that one of the most important things to any human being is to feel important. We all need to feel important and will do whatever it takes to feel important. I have a lot of people in my family who have done great things, such as Laura Ingalls Wilder (the author of Little House on the Prairie), a former United States Senator, Amelia Earhart , a former President, and others. The thing about this, however, is that no one in my family has really done anything of great significance like this for well over 100 years. However, to this day, many members of my family define themselves entirely by someone else’s past achievements. This is something that makes them feel extremely important. I have watched many of them tell anyone who will listen, even within a few minutes of meeting. Other relatives have gone to Harvard, Yale, important East Coast prep schools, like Andover and Exeter, and to this day will tell the people they encounter about their achievements in attending these schools within moments of meeting them. There is nothing wrong with this. Every single person does this. We all have a profound need deep inside of us to feel important.
We try to feel important based on who our families are. If this does not work, we may try and feel important based on the groups we are associating with. We may join the Army or Marines to feel important. We may become doctors or lawyers to feel important. We may convert to a different religion to feel important. We may convert to Orthodox Judaism to feel important. Regardless of who we are, most of us are doing something to do everything we can to feel important. Everyone I know does this. Feeling important is one of the most fundamental human needs that there is. In fact, for people who are motivated by achievement (presumably you are if you are reading this), feeling important may govern their entire outlook on life.
I want to talk about you and your job. If you have ever lost a job, then a major source of your identity and importance has been shaken. If you are in a good job, then a good part of your identity and significance is most likely related to this job. If you are an attorney, a good measure of your importance in the world is likely related to the prestige of your background and your current employer. Our sense of importance is incredibly tied up with our careers and how we are doing in these careers. For most of us, there is nothing more important to our sense of importance than our careers.
One of the hardest things in my career is dealing with the incredible anger and sense of betrayal that people experience when they lose their jobs. Although I deal with people who lose their jobs and are making career transitions for a reason, I also run several companies and am ultimately responsible for final decisions as to whether or not someone stays or goes in the company. One of my greatest personal successes and failures is having run companies that have boomed and then have experienced setbacks due to forces beyond my control. For example, a couple of years ago I was running a large student loan company. All of a sudden, the financing for this company dried up. For months, I tried to make the company work and kept many employees on. When the company finally could not hold its own anymore, I was faced with letting hundreds of employees go. The employees who lost their jobs became incredibly angry, and many are still angry with me to this day. In fact, based on what I have seen, some have dedicated their lives to being angry with me. I do not harbor these people any malice. I know that when they lost their jobs, their very foundations about what made them feel significant and important in the world were shaken. Since they know I am the ultimate decision maker, they have let their anger out on me and, in trying to tear me down, this makes them feel more important. I hope for their sake it is working and wish them well despite their attempts to harm me.
We all need to feel significant and will do so in every means we possibly can.
Before we go further, however, what I would like to encourage you to do is explore what makes you feel significant in the world. The more you understand this the more you will not allow your need to feel significant work against you. You need to make your desire to feel important work to your advantage and not against you. Consider what you are doing to feel significant? Many people will try many different things in their push to feel significant. You need to realize that the most important thing you can do is skillfully apply your need to feel significant. I love the study of Buddhism, kundalini yoga, meditation and other mind enhancing personal development tools. What one begins to realize the deeper and deeper one goes into these studies is this: You need to surrender all attachment in order to truly be free. This is a crucial observation because the more attached you are to feeling significant and the more you concentrate on this attachment the unhappier you are likely to be. True happiness really does come when we can just be. Notwithstanding, hardly anyone knows how to just be. Instead, they are constantly pushing to feel significant.
Your emotional state shapes you and what happens to you and your life. You need to choose how to control your mind. When you are looking for a job, the most important thing you can do is move away from being attached to the need to feel significant and move, instead, to a position where you are not attached.
I want to discuss something briefly that I believe is relevant to your need to feel significant. I have spent almost my entire career working and living in Los Angeles. I was young when I first moved here and saw countless people who desired to be famous actors and actresses, writers in the movie industry and producers. I know so many people who have done this that I am having a hard time recalling them all right now. One of the clearest patterns I have noticed is that most of the people who want to become involved in the movie industry come at it in an arrogant and superficial level. They act as if they are incredibly important and are, quite simply, full of attitude. They are also incredibly calculating. Others come with a strong desire to just be in the entertainment industry. Their desire is not about being better than others. It is just to share their talent with the world. The pattern I have seen over and over again is the people who are clearly focused on their own significance never make it–and if they do, it is never at a high level. The people who are focused on the work go to a different level of stardom and rise to a higher level. They are focused on the work and not how it sets them in relation to others. They are able to go into the “zen” state where they are only focused on the work and their need for significance does not factor into the equation. These are the people who most often succeed at the highest levels from what I have seen.
Being focused on the work is incredibly important. Being focused on your own significance is attachment, and all attachments eventually result in disappointment.
One of the most important things for any human being out there–you included–is to feel significant. In fact, this need is so important that most of us will do whatever we can to place ourselves in a position where we feel important. While this is something that is fairly widespread, I have learned to recognize this more among the highest achievers than others. In some cases, going to excellent schools, or having worked for the very best employers can actually be something that drives people more and more to find reasons why they are significant and important in the world.
Your need to feel significant may have created for you a life that you do not deserve. Since I am involved in the legal industry, I know how to recognize good attorneys. I know someone with the most amazing legal skills who never finished law school who, in my opinion, would be an incredible lawyer. This person thinks like a lawyer and has a mind that works in a way that is quite brilliant from a legal perspective. Unfortunately, this person grew up believing that the most important people in the world are those who work as executives in large corporations. This person’s career has been incredibly unfulfilling and marginal due to this. He was working in large corporations because this was his idea of what would make him significant. This person could be a world famous attorney today if he had pursued his real skill.
I chose to go to law school because I believed that lawyers were very important. I took the law school admissions test and, despite months of studying, did horribly. I took the business school admissions test and did exceptionally well despite not studying. I struggled to get into law school because my test scores were so sub par. When I applied to business school, I applied only to Stanford Business School (at the time it was ranked the #1 business school in the country) and got in. I believed, however, that lawyers were more important, and I would be much more significant if I was a lawyer and always pursued this despite my better judgment. For three years of my life, and three years of law school, I did something I hated because I believed this was what would make me significant. I was never unhappier in my life.
What have you done with your career and life out of the need to feel significant? How well has this served you? People will do all sorts of things to feel significant, and you are no different. What have you done to feel important.
I believe that the need to feel significant is one of our most important needs as people. In law school, I had the opportunity to view patients in a mental asylum, as well as people who were being evaluated after murdering people. When people start disassociating and actually going crazy, what happens most of the time is that they start imagining themselves as far more important than they actually are–like the former aide to the Congressman I met. They start telling you how they know this famous person or that famous person, how they are related to this important politician, or how they are actually this famous person. When I was studying these people I always understood that these people were just trying to feel important.
Listen to the people around you and how they talk about various things. The need of people having to feel important will come out when they tell you how they know this piece of information you do not, how they socialized with this person, how someone complimented them about something–and more. Most people are literally obsessed with feeling important.
As part of my job, I often have to entertain men who are clients of our company. If you go out for a steak dinner with a group of men in a strange town, it seems that about 90% of the time, one of the men will suggest going to a strip bar after dinner if you are in an area where there are a bunch of them. When men are together in a group, saying that you are morally offended by this sort of thing is generally not an option. I am not trying to offend anyone–this is just how things are.
I went to high school in Bangkok, Thailand for a year when I was growing up, and I am totally not interested in strip bars anymore. They say that people in France never become alcoholics because they are given wine from the time they are are old enough to hold a cup. This is in contrast to Scandinavians, Americans and others who are denied alcohol as if it is sinful and end up going crazy when they are exposed to it. So, too, is it with me and strip bars. I cannot even begin to express to you how messed up it was going to school in Bangkok at the age of 16. All the boys and girls in my class did all weekend was hang out in strip bars. This was literally the meeting place for our class on the weekends. The entire class would be in strip bars on Friday and Saturday nights every single weekend. As such, in this day and age, I tend to just sit there bored while the people I am with go crazy dancing with girls and throwing money at the stage. By the time I was 17 years old, I had probably spent the equivalent of 20 lifetimes in strip bars–and strip bars in Bangkok back then were insane and not something I should be talking about. The stuff that went down on stage was just plain wrong and makes even the gaudiest and wildest strip bars in the United States look like G-rated movies.
A couple of months ago, I was on a business trip in Atlanta, and a girl at one of the strip bars came up to me and started talking to me. Typically, the girls will strike up a conversation with the objective of giving you a “lap dance” and charging you $10 per song or something along those lines. I was not interested in this, and have not been in decades, because I know the drill and have lost interest. I am also married (but I can tell you from experience this does not seem to bother 99% of the men who go to these strip clubs.) In any event, a girl who looked exactly like Marsha Brady on the Brady Bunch sat down and started talking to me. Given the fact that my profession is getting people jobs, when I meet new people (especially in fringe professions (stripping is one of them), I am interested in learning about how they wound up doing what they do and also what their job entails. This particular girl was at a bar ordering a drink across the room. She made eye contact with me and smiled, took a hit of her cigarette, walked over, grabbed a chair sitting next to me, turned it around so the back of the chair was facing me, and sat down backwards.
“Do you want to see my tattoo?” she immediately said. She took another long hit of a cigarette. I was sitting with two other men, and they were also watching this spectacle. She had a shirt on and pulled it up standing up to show me her belly. On her belly, just above her crotch, was the most incredible tattoo:
PROPERTY OF EDUARDO ↓
Apparently, Eduardo had claimed everything starting at her waist down as his property. This giant tattoo made this clear.
“Wow, how does Eduardo feel about you working here?” I asked her.
“We’re divorced.” she said.
“Oh, you better get rid of the tattoo then,” I told her.
“Would you like to lick it off?” she asked.
I almost fell out of my chair! That was very original. Over the next 30 minutes, however, I started learning more about her career and particular aspirations for her life. What I found most interesting about the entire conversation, however, was how she kept coming back to the fact that Eduardo had been associated with a certain brutal gang that had chapters all over the United States. She bragged to me about how the gang frequently cut peoples’ heads off in Mexico, and anyone who crossed the gang was likely to be in severe trouble. She literally could not stop talking about the gang and how the gang was the most brutal and serious gang the world had ever known. At the time, there was a lot of violence going on in Tijuana (several killings per day), and she bragged to me that this particular gang was involved with this epic violence. She was also very proud of her association with Eduardo since he had been such a high-ranking gang member.
What I realized about 20 minutes into the conversation was that her “claim to fame” and what she felt most significant about in her life was the association with this gang. It was the most important thing she had in her life. She had left home when she was very young and did not have any meaningful contact with her family. She also did not have an education. All she had to feel significant about was the fact that she had been married to a member of a brutal gang. That was it.
Had I been trying to impress her, I am pretty confident that anything I would have told her about myself would have paled in contrast to her former association with this gang. She had so ingrained this into her need for significance that there was nothing I could really do that would measure up to how important she was due to the gang affiliation.
Have you ever met someone who is incredibly angry at the United States? Have you ever met a criminal? Do you know why people do bad things? Deep down, most of the evil in the world is related to peoples’ need to feel significant. The fastest way to become important, for many people, is to point a gun at them. “Okay, you’re in control!” you might say to them.
One of the most amazing experiences in my life was the day someone tried to kill me. When I was around 17 years old, kids in Grosse Pointe, Michigan developed a tradition of holding “keg parties” at banquet halls around Detroit. The banquet halls were typically in terrible neighborhoods. The kids would go out and purchase a bunch of beer kegs, rent out a banquet hall, and then charge kids admissions to get into the hall. The kids who would go to these parties were all from Grosse Pointe, which at the time was almost 100% white and a middle- to upper-middle-class suburb. One Saturday evening, I picked up a friend of mine to attend one of these parties. Since I was attending school in a different part of the Detroit area, I did not see him very much anymore. He had become a very good student in the past few years and was quite proud of himself. As we were walking into the banquet hall, two African American kids from the bad neighborhood pushed ahead of him in the line we were standing in. They were apparently thinking they might like to attend the party, as well. My friend said something to the kids, and they started arguing. I do not remember what the argument was about. Some of the kids who were hosting the party came out and told the African American kids to leave and that it was a private party. As the African American kids were walking away, my friend said the most offensive and incredible thing I had ever heard him say:
“You guys better be careful how you act because one day you are going to be working for me.” The kids did not flinch, looked at him and walked away.
Sometime later we exited the party. I was still a little shook up about what my friend said. As we were walking towards the car I noticed the kids my friend had made the remarks to were sitting on a snow pile. They appeared to have been sitting there for some time.
“These kids are going to kick our asses,” I told my friend.
“Just look down and keep walking,” he said.
I got into my Yugo and my friend did, as well. We were parked in an alley, and I started the car. A second or two later, I heard a knocking on the windows. It sounded like metal tapping on glass. I looked up and saw a gun barrel pointing directly at my face.
“Who’s in charge now!!!” I heard the kid with the gun scream. I will never forget how terrified I was at that moment. I am still terrified thinking about it to this day. I think the car must have already been in gear because within less than a second I had peeled out and was driving like hell away. I had thrown my body in my friend’s lap and was not even looking out the window. As we drove away, I heard several gun shots, and one of then hit one of the lights on the back of the Yugo. Had I been a second later in starting the car, I am confident my friend or I would have been killed.
What was going on here? My friend had said something to these guys that had implied he was more important than them. They responded by showing him a gun which instantly made them more important. This is how most violence works, I think. We want to feel important.
I have been sued before by people who have lost their jobs in our company in nuisance lawsuits. Some of these former employees worked in places in our company where I never actually met them–such as in our warehouse. When it really gets down to it, I believe I have been sued because someone feels unimportant when losing their job and wants to level the playing field. The lawsuit gives them more power, and they suddenly are significant. This works. It is no different than pointing a gun at someone: Suddenly you have instant power. I read recently a study that doctors who spend more time with their patients socializing, and are less professional and more likable, get sued much less often. They study concluded that they probably get sued less because they do not hold their superiority over the patient, and allow the patient to express themselves and feel more important. They listen and show empathy for their patients. More professional and more distant candidates do the opposite and get sued more often.
Practically every person out there has a massive need to feel significant, and they will do this at whatever cost they can. I recently read some excerpts from the biography of the woman who played Marcia Brady on the Brady Bunch, Maureen McCormick. What really struck me about this biography was that after the series had ended, her life spun out of control in a downward spiral of sex and drugs. Nothing really significant or important at all happened in her life after the series ended. As she is reflecting back on the life she had, she appears to be looking for any significance apart from the work she did on the television series. What struck me about this life after the television series was that one of the most “significant” things that appears to have happened to her is a date with Steve Martin.
Martin had asked for McKormick’s phone number through Chevy Chase.
“I remember him being a very good kisser,” McCormick writes about Martin. “But I was insecure and either high or spaced out (most likely both), and I didn’t laugh at his jokes.
“Though Steve was too polite and confident of his talent to say anything, I’m sure my inability to carry on a normal conversation or respond intelligently put him off,” she writes. “We never spoke again after that date. I’ve always regretted my behavior because he impressed me as an extraordinary guy. I would’ve enjoyed a second date.”
People look for significance in the smallest details and do everything within their power to feel significant. We all have the need to feel significant and this need is something that really controls and governs many of our lives.
Think about the people around you (and yourself) and what these people will do in order to feel important. The list of things that people do in order to feel important is almost neverending:
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People will collect material possessions
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People will get involved in certain extracurricular activities
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People will do drugs
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People will get tattoos
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People will associate with certain groups
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People will run for office
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People will go to certain colleges and schools
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People will associate with certain types of people
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People will criticize others and tear them down
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People will contribute money or time to organizations
We all want to feel that we are unique and special in some way. This makes us feel as if we have a purpose and meaning for our lives. One of the largest challenges of our lives is making sure that we do not meet our need to feel significant in a way that is destructive. For example, many people in their need to feel significant will try and be critical of others. Another popular thing that people will do in order to feel significant is to manufacture all sorts of illnesses. Throughout my life I have witnessed numerous people who would come down with all sorts of sicknesses and ailments that, in my opinion, were related to getting the care and attention of others–so they could feel significant. According to one definition I found on Wikipedia:
In Münchausen syndrome, the affected person exaggerates or creates symptoms of illnesses in themselves in order to gain investigation, treatment, attention, sympathy, and comfort from medical personnel. In some extremes, people suffering from Münchausen’s Syndrome are highly knowledgeable about the practice of medicine, and are able to produce symptoms that result in multiple unnecessary operations. For example, they may inject a vein with infected material, causing widespread infection of unknown origin, and as a result cause lengthy and costly medical analyses and prolonged hospital stay. The role of “patient” is a familiar and comforting one, and it fills a psychological need in people with Münchausen’s. It is distinct from hypochondria in that patients with Münchausen syndrome are aware that they are exaggerating, while sufferers of hypochondria believe they have a disease.
I have a distant relative that never ceases to amaze me. I love him and he is a very nice person. I do not know how to judge the truth of the things he has told me, however. For example, in the past couple of years he has told me stories about people he knows who have murdered people and about the number of gangs he has been associated with in New York. Some time ago, I was in his home, and he started showing me all sorts of things. One thing he showed me was a sword that had allegedly been stolen from a house several years ago during “a job” that his friend did. He told me the sword was from a general in the Ottoman Empire and probably worth millions of dollars–I am sure this made him feel very significant. The only problem is that the blade on the sword looked brand new. Who knows if it is genuine or not? The point is that this person was trying to feel significant by something he was dreaming might be worth millions of dollars–much more than he has ever seen in his life. In realty, the sword is probably not more than 20 years old–who knows its value.
You need to understand that your need to feel significant is something that controls your life. The best thing you can possibly do for your career is detach from this need to feel significant and realize how this is controlling so much of what happens to you. More importantly, you need to do the work you love and live the life you want without being controlled by a need to be significant. This will change everything for you and allow you to contribute to the world in a productive way.
Understand Your Ultimate Goal
What You Will Learn
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Several years ago I was living in New York City and taking the subway to work every single day. Like many young people, I had been taught somewhere along the line that this was “the place” to work and where the most sophisticated work happened, where the highest salaries are paid and where the most important work occurs. I think this is true to a great extent. The city is extremely exciting and people work so hard there they cannot help but become incredibly good at their jobs. The concentration of businesses in New York also creates an abundance of extremely sophisticated work for people to do.
While I love living in New York, I asked myself frequently while living there “What’s the point?” People work so hard there and live in small apartments and put up with so much. The city is incredibly expensive and it is difficult to work in. People from all over the United States come to New York seeking to be at the pinnacle of their professions whether it is law, advertising or public relations. People are coming there really seeking something. What people are seeking is to feel differently about themselves.
New York can be a really stressful place to live. At the time I was living in a small apartment and despite making a good salary I quickly realized that there is not much to do inside small apartments. Like many people in New York I spent a good amount of time walking around on the streets, going into cafes, seeing movies and exploring museums. There is a lot of activity in New York City and it is a very exciting place to be. As a young man I started to ask myself what all of this means. The entire city seems to be dedicated to working extremely hard. If you are inquisitive like I was and you’re thinking about where you want to spend the rest of your life, one of the questions you ask yourself is: What does this all mean? What are these people in this city all trying to achieve?
When I think of images of New York what I see are men and women rushing down the street on the way to various jobs. They are all going to and from work and the streets are incredibly crowded with people rushing about on their way to and from work. On the streets themselves, there are people working as well selling sodas, coffee and other things from carts. When I think of New York City I think of people rushing around working. The image I have of New York is simply “work”.
Last night I saw a picture in a magazine and it was of the roof of Rockefeller Center where apparently there is a garden with a lawn. The article went on to describe how incredible it was that there was a garden in the midst of this concrete jungle. It was a happy article, but it left me thinking that “green grass” is something that is sort of unattainable in New York. New York City represents streets and a world where not much grows. There is too much concrete and progress for this.
When I look at all of the people on the street the image is traditionally of a man or woman rushing somewhere. There is typically a bit of stress in their face and they do not appear totally excited about where they are going or what they are doing. They have something to do. They do not say hello to people on the street. They need to rush off and be somewhere. Work is too important. Who cares about green grass?
I think a lot of what you see in the expressions of the people of New York on the street is a metaphor for much of our work lives–we are rushed, stressed and unhappy. I heard a statistic recently that something like 15% of all Americans are clinically depressed. A lot of those people rushing back and forth on the streets of places like New York will smoke cigarettes to alleviate the stress. They will drink to excess, use cocaine and do all sorts of other things to feel good. Many will also go shopping and spend incredible amounts of money on haircuts, suits, vacations and do other things to feel good. The jobs they have are something that they have pursued in order to capture something. Everyone is chasing goals.
When we are growing up many of us are taught that we need to be lawyers, architects, or doctors in order to be happy. This message is that something needs to happen outside of us in order for us to feel good about ourselves. When we become doctors or lawyers we are taught that we need to be partners, or reach a certain level, in order for us to be happy. Many of the people I know in New York are obsessed with the consumer culture and can tell you about the latest this or that. These people are incredibly knowledgeable about various things that are available for purchase. This is part of what many of us are as people, however. We believe that something outside of us needs to happen in order for us to be happy:
- We need to purchase something
- We need to get a particular type of job
- We need to receive a particular acknowledgement
- Someone needs to do something for us
- We need to get promoted
The idea with all of these things is that something outside of us needs to happen in order for us to be happy. The fallacy of this thinking is that nothing is ever good enough. There will always be a better job, something else which can be purchased and something else outside of us that can happen in order for us to experience happiness. I have no doubt that much of our thinking in this world is driven by the fact we are in a consumer society and as part of this society we are constantly bombarded with advertisements that link up the purchase of a particular good or service to being happy. That is why, for example, in the heart of consumerism in an area like New York City the idea that something outside of us can make us happy is even more pronounced.
The most amazing place to me in the world is Thailand. If you have never been there, you need to go. I spent some time attending high school there and the experience of living with the Thais changed my life. The people there are extremely happy and despite massive western influence have largely stayed removed from a psychology which requires external events to occur in order for them to be happy. The last time I was in Thailand my wife and I met a man who stated he goes there at least twice a year because it is the only place in the world where people are happy all the time. He feels good there because people do not think about happiness the same way. The thinking of the people of Thailand is that happiness comes from the inside and not the outside.
When you watch a baby you can see the baby be happy about an incredible number of things. They can laugh at a light bulb on the ceiling. They will smile for the most trivial reasons. When you watch a baby being happy what comes to mind is that we are born happy. Happiness is on the inside. Happiness is something we are born with.
Back on the street of New York people are rushing too and fro and the thought that occurs to me is that people are working so hard and living these lives because their ultimate goal is really to be happy. They believe that if something occurs they will be happy. This is such a Faustian bargain and it makes no sense. People are doing all of this and working so hard because they believe that if they do they will be happy. When you think of someone walking down the street singing a song because they are so happy, the image is typically not of someone in New York. The image is most likely of someone in the country where there is no one around to judge, evaluate and tell the person they should not be happy. You need to be happy regardless of what is going on outside of you. We are seduced by the outside world into definitions of happiness that require various external things to occur before we can be happy. Happiness is inside of you and never requires any sort of external intervention.
The reason I am focusing so much on your happiness is because the happier you are the better job you will get and the better you will do in your career. Your happiness will guide the course of your life. When you are happy you perform better at your job. When you are happy all the time people want to be around you. When you are happy good things happen to you and continue happening to you. Most of all, the best way for you to be happy is to stop focusing on externalities and realize that happiness is already inside of you right now.
You do not need any rules of what must and must not happen for you to be happy. You can just be happy. You need to realize that what is already inside of you will give you joy if you allow it. You need to set up rules which allow you to be happy for no reason at all–just because you are happy.
Another important way to insure you are constantly happy is to change your focus. I am amazed when I go into different companies and meet people. I can always get a very good sense of what the people are like and what the company is like by speaking with the people. In some companies the second you get there the people are talking about how exciting this or that is and what a great place the world is and how much opportunity there is. In other companies the people will be talking about how awful the world is, how tough the economy is and more. Most of this thinking occurs and is prevalent in these companies regardless of the state of the economy. When the economy is good the people focus on the bad and when the economy is bad the people focus on the bad as well. This sort of negative thinking is very destructive. People feel what they focus on and a negative focus is self reinforcing and continues to make things worse and worse.
Focus is one of the most important skills you can learn. Refusing to be negative is a skill that really can help you accomplish a great deal in your life and career. Right now you can start thinking about who has wronged you in the past and get angry. You can focus right now on jobs you have lost and get angry. You can focus on people in your life you were close to that died and feel incredibly sad. You can continue focusing on negative things forever if you like (which many people do) and will continue to feel absolutely dreadful about your life. You can share your negativity with everyone you meet and insure that you spread this negativity everywhere. This is what a lot of people enjoy doing. They focus on the negative.
Refuse to focus on the negative.
When you look at the world around you there are many choices you need to make. For example, if someone is rude to you one option you have is to be rude back. Another option is to empathize with them and see if there is anything you can do to brighten their day and make them feel better. You need to choose meaning which support you and make you continually feel good. Nothing in your world and life has any meaning except for the meaning you give it. One thing I have noticed about the unhappy people and the most unproductive organizations is that they are constantly judging and putting a negative spin on people and events around them. They decide to interpret things in a negative way and this ends up doing them a massive disservice.
When you think about all of the famous people in history who have died despite being incredibly gifted but have taken their lives with drugs it makes no sense. All of the overdoses and issues of rock stars and other entertainers are nonsensical. Some of the most talented people in the world have used drugs like this to excess, most likely because they felt stressed and upset by the world around them. They wanted to feel good. Managing how you feel about yourself and your life is probably the greatest skill you can have. You need to feel good about yourself and how you feel about yourself is most often determined by the meanings you give to circumstances and the world around you. The most important thing you can do with your life is to choose meanings that are empowering you.
One of the reasons I think that so many people get into so much trouble when they get famous is that they are suddenly surrounded by people who are even more famous and talented than they. They look at these people and they start comparing themselves with other people. Because they make happiness external, they start not feeling as good about themselves due to the fact that someone is better than they are in one way or another. One of the ways that we look at the world and interpret the world is through contrasting ourselves with others. For example, I run a group of career sites that I believe are the best at what they do in the world. I feel very good about the power of EmploymentCrossing and how good it is in terms of getting people jobs. However, if I decided that the measure of my success was whether or not this site had as many users as a free site like Monster, I probably would never feel that good about myself and my business. The reason I would not feel good is because I would be measuring my success and ability to feel good by something external.
I made this mistake growing up. I grew up in a very wealthy neighborhood with parents who were not well off. Since the people around me were making such a big deal about cars, homes, vacations, clothes and so forth (none of which I had at the same level), I decided that I should feel bad about myself. This is a crazy reaction. A choice I could have made was that I should feel happy that I am being exposed to this and glad my parents are able to afford for me to be in an environment where I can associate with these sorts of people. Instead, however, I chose the negative interpretation. I think this is how many of us run our lives. We so often use contrasts to make ourselves feel badly instead of to make ourselves feel good. You need to use contrasts to make yourself feel good and not bad. Contrast is one of the most important tools you can possibly use in your psyche and it will change your life.
One of the largest obstacles to our true happiness is not just the contrasts we make it is the rules we make for when we can be happy. I remember one time I was on my way to visit a relative with my mom and I had on a shirt that I thought was alright and a sport jacket. I was probably 25 at the time. My mom started getting all agitated in the car and was very unhappy and angry with me. She wanted me to stop at a store and purchase a new jacket, slacks and shirt. The whole thing seemed very strange to me.
“You need to look ‘crisp’ and if you do not these people will not respect you. Your clothes have too many wrinkles. You need to be ‘crisp’,” she said.
Somewhere along the line she had picked up a rule about the importance of being “crisp” that led her to believe that wrinkles were a massive sort of sin. Perhaps she was right, but if she did not have this rule she would have had a much better time that day and so would have I. Many of us have rules about the way things need to be that prevent us from being happy. We want things to be a certain way before we will allow ourselves to be happy. We decide that to be happy we must be rich, lose 10 pounds, have a certain mate, or drive a certain type of car. We allow ourselves to be paralyzed by rules that are difficult if not impossible for us to ever meet and this prevents us from ever being happy. So many people out there are paralyzed by rules like this. Relaxing these rules would change their lives forever.
I would challenge you to stop externalizing your happiness with rules, conditions and more that will continually make you unhappy. Instead, you need to adopt a belief for your life and career that defines success as simply being happy and failure as not being happy. While we all have our ups and downs in life, the most important thing that you can do is to be happy. When you are happy your career and life will change as you know it. More happy people will start coming into your life and you will attract the energy of good opportunities and other happy people. Your life is too important not to be happy. Change your mind and you will change you life.
The Most Important Person You Communicate With is Yourself
“The mind can make a heaven out of hell or a hell out of heaven”
-John Milton
What You Will Learn
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Several years ago, I was home after graduating from college and I met a guy who was friends with my girlfriend’s brother. He had graduated from Yale University a year or two before and was driving a truck all around Detroit delivering meat to restaurants. He typically drove this meat truck from 4:00am until noon each day. He got paid in cash at the end of each day by his boss. He had been the first person from the public school he had attended to go to Yale in three decades, had been a star football player in high school and college, and was an all-around great guy. What I noticed about this guy was that he was probably one of the happiest guys I have ever encountered. He did not drink or use drugs and he worked out every day. He had lots of friends and got along with everyone extremely well. When this guy saw people he beamed a smile at them and made them feel very good about themselves.
As I got to know this guy, I realized most of his friends from college were currently off at law school, or medical school, working on Wall Street, or pursuing higher degrees. I found it incredible that this guy was so happy driving a meat truck. He seemed to have absolutely no ambition to do anything else. He loved driving the meat truck. In fact, I would not be surprised if he were still driving a meat truck to this day. This guy was very interested in other people and seemed to love to sit down with me and discuss my goals and what I wanted to do with my life. He would then offer me very intelligent insights into various career paths and moves he thought I could benefit from making. Whenever I saw this guy he beamed. He appeared to love everyone in the world.
What was so amazing to me about this guy was that he was driving a meat truck. A couple of years later when I ran into one of his friends he was still driving the meat truck. He loved driving a meat truck. This is what made him happy. Based on the kind of people he went to college with, I am confident that no one else in his class ended up driving a meat truck (much less around Detroit). But this guy loved driving the meat truck.
I can imagine what people must have been saying about this guy’s career choice of meat truck driver:
- You have more potential.
- You are wasting your talent.
- You should go to graduate school.
- You should find a normal job.
- You should at least be a supervisor of meat truck drivers.
This guy was having none of that. He was listening to his heart and doing what he wanted to do. What made him so special in my mind was the way he communicated with himself. For him, driving a meat truck was a huge victory of sorts and something that really represented what he wanted to do and be at that point in his life-or permanently, for all I know. He was not allowing what other people undoubtedly thought to influence him. Instead, he was influenced only by what he felt was the best use of his time and what made him happy.
When I look back on this guy and the people I have known who have gone on to do incredibly important things, I think that he is probably one of the more successful people I have ever known. The reason I think he is so successful is because of the way he communicated with himself. He communicated with himself in a way that made him happy. I have no idea what was going through his mind; however, I bet his thought processes went something like this:
- I love being outside when it is cold in the morning and there is no one else out there.
- I love being able to be at peace with my thoughts when I am driving.
- I love not having to be involved in office politics.
- I love getting the opportunity to lift things and exercise.
- I love the people I work with and talking about simple things.
- I am so grateful I am not sitting in an office every day.
- I cannot believe how much fun this is compared to hanging around with a bunch of boring intellectuals.
- I am so lucky to be getting paid in cash.
- Driving a huge truck like this is a blast.
- I am so lucky to be able to have my entire day free after I finish work each day at noon.
You can see what this guy probably thought about his situation. I am not sure of this because I never did ask him. But the power he had that so many people do not is that he knew how to communicate with himself in a positive way.
One experience that offered one of the most stunning contrasts I can ever remember was when I started operating my asphalt business in college out of the inner city of Detroit. For one summer I had hired all of my workers out of a drug rehabilitation center in Detroit where my mother’s boyfriend sat on the board. Through the people I met at this center I started to meet many other people around Detroit who were not affiliated with the drug rehabilitation center but who came to work for me. I became so attached to the area that I actually moved down into one of the worst areas of Detroit and lived there for several summers. Incredibly, I actually believed that it was a happier place in many respects than the all-white, middle-class suburb of Grosse Pointe not too far away where I was from. In contrast, Detroit was almost 100 percent black. These were completely different worlds.
The level of poverty that I saw in these families in Detroit was not extreme–people were just very poor. Most of the houses that poor people around Detroit live in are houses that were probably pretty nice in the 1950s and 1960s but had not been painted or worked on since that time. There is a lot of peeling paint and gutters falling down. Inside the house, the carpet is worn through in many spots. Holes are patched in walls. Buckets sit beneath various areas of the room. Window coverings are torn but still there.
When I would meet these families I was always amazed that the people seemed so happy. I worked seven days a week in my asphalt business and spent 12-14 hours a day with the people I worked with from Detroit, and they all seemed very happy for the most part as well. In fact, the people I was meeting around Detroit seemed in most respects a lot happier than the people I was meeting from the suburb of Grosse Pointe.
I realize that this may seem a little difficult to believe; however, I largely felt this was true. The people I was meeting in Detroit lived in neighborhoods where everyone seemed to know one another and socialized a lot. They were not ashamed of being poor, and they typically moved around from family members’ houses to friends’ houses at night. It was a completely different culture. Everyone knew who the bad people were– the drug dealers and the gangsters– and most people were removed from that. This is a different story and not something that is important, but I would say that I believe the people that I met there were more connected in many respects than the people I met in the suburbs. They did not seem to worry about stuff as much.
What I saw in Detroit was that, like the guy I met from Yale, people were not looking to assign a negative meaning to everything. They did not have as many rules about how life should be, and they did not judge themselves by those rules. Surrounded by poverty and a lifestyle that most people in America would abhor, the people I met were happy, always laughing, and close with each other. I think the people who had the fewest rules about how they should be living life, were the happiest. People became unhappiest on the street when they started believing they needed to be powerful or exceptional. The people who did this are the ones who became drug dealers and gangsters. In the area I was working in, the people who had ambitions like this were also the ones who almost always ended up either being killed or going to prison. Accordingly for many, a lifestyle of simplicity was far more preferable.
When you are spending your days working with people who socialize with people who make their living on the street, you start to pick up ways new ways of thinking. One of the things that I heard and learned was that when you start trying to be a big deal you often get smacked down (i.e., killed) or sent away. The drug rehabilitation centers, community groups and other organizations around Detroit were in many cases telling people how to communicate with themselves in the most effective ways in order to be happy. I think the people I saw who stayed out of the gang and drug culture had learned the way to really communicate with themselves most effectively.
What I learned back then was that a lot of the quality of our life is a product of how we communicate with ourselves. The quality of our life and our happiness is largely the result of the meanings that we give our lives and the things that happen to us. The more rules we have about the way things should be, the more unhappy we are likely to be. Rules are often our enemy.
The most unhappy people I have ever met in my life have most often been the most intelligent people. They see the world around them in a way which is not helpful to their happiness. If someone says something to them, instead of taking it as a positive comment, they will take it as a negative comment and get extremely angry and flustered. If they hear a piece of news that does not sound important one way or another, instead of not reacting to the news they hear they allow themselves to get flustered. All around them the world looks like a complete war zone and they are taking in peoples comments, looks and so forth and interpreting them in dangerous, harmful ways.
One time when I was in law school I took a course called Psychiatry and the Law, and I had the opportunity to work inside of a psychiatric institute where murderers and others were evaluated by a state psychiatrist to see if the State should put them on death row. I would sit behind a mirrored glass and a psychiatrist or team of psychiatrists interviewed a given murderer about his crime. What I noticed in my limited exposure to this was that when a murder was committed, the person often committed the murder for reasons that made no sense but were, instead, related to how they interpreted things.
For example, in one murder two men were sitting around the home of one of their girlfriends. They needed money to buy drugs so they went out and robbed a liquor store. When they got back from robbing the liquor store and buying drugs the girlfriend asked them where they had been and they told her they had been out buying liquor. Later that evening the three watched the news and there were details about the liquor store robbery. The woman watched with the men (not knowing they had been the ones who robbed the liquor store) and then went to bed. After she went to bed the two men continued to drink and do drugs and decided that the reason she went to bed was because the woman must suspect them both of the robbery. They believed she would report them to the police in the morning. They convinced themselves of this and then went and killed her with a baseball bat and bedpost, put her dead body in the trunk of her car, and drove her car into a lake.
The murderer I saw interviewed, had an exceptionally high, near genius level IQ. He admitted in the interview that what he believed at the time did not make sense. He was simply misinterpreting what something represented. This is craziness, but it is also the exact same type of craziness that many of us communicate to ourselves on a daily basis. We tell ourselves that something represents something that it does not. This is a serious issue that holds us back to an incredible and profound degree. It is our communication with ourselves about what something represents that often makes us unhappy and prevents us from making the absolute most of our potential.
Imagine what your life would be like if you took every slight (imagined or otherwise) and, instead of getting upset, interpreted it in a positive way. They way we feel about our lives and the world is 100% due to the meaning that we give to what is happening to us. If you master your communication with yourself, you master your life. You need to know how to communicate with yourself. People who do not communicate with themselves properly are continually in a stressed state.
You need to communicate with yourself in a way that makes you feel good about yourself, not bad. The reason I think the most intelligent people are most often the most unhappy is that they can see so much meaning in everything and they continually interpret this meaning in a way that works against them. Communication most often breaks down due to differing perceptions of what precisely is meant by someone.
In your job it is exceptionally important that you are consistently interpreting things in a positive manner and not a negative matter. And if you are having a difficult time finding a job you need to do the same thing. Positive energy begets more positive energy. I want so much for you to be happy and have the life you are entitled to and deserve. Your life begins and ends in your mind and how you communicate with yourself.
Everything is Negotiable
What You Will Learn
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Life is Negotiable
Something very few people truly realize is that everything is negotiable. Literally everything. You can negotiate practically anything, and it is important to think of your career, life and everything you do as a chance to negotiate the best possible deal and circumstances you can for yourself.
Your career, your pay, your hours, your health insurance, your parking and everything are all negotiable.
I remember when I first started practicing law I joined a law firm, and there was a girl in the law firm who had gone to a very good law school and done very well there. However, the girl was quite “flippant” and did not work that hard. She did good enough work; nevertheless, she would come in maybe around 9:00 and be gone by 4:00 or 5:00 each day. She did things in the evening like take tennis lessons. On the weekends she liked to go horseback riding, and she had a far different life than I and the other associates in the law firm had.
I could not understand this. While I was working at least 6 days a week and walking around the law firm like a zombie, like the rest of the associates in the law firm, this girl seemed to think that she was a member of a country club. She was relaxed and practicing law for her was not something that was nearly as intense as it was for the other associates in the law firm. We all worked like hell and were terrified because we wanted to impress the right people, wanted to make partner in the law firm and were afraid of getting fired.
One day I was out with a friend of mine who was a partner in the law firm. I could not believe it when he explained to me what had happened with this particular woman:
“Before she started here, she negotiated a contract where the firm agreed to make her partner within 5 years. She also negotiated that she would not have to bill more than 1,500 hours a year.”
I was almost speechless when I heard this. What a superstar this girl was for negotiating this. I have been intimately involved in the legal industry for years and have never heard of someone negotiating a contract like this with a potential employer while they are in law school. Most people joining law firms work their asses off for years and have no security that they will ever make partner. They are nervous for years and scared and frightened. This girl, unlike any of the other young attorneys in the law firm, never had to worry about this. She had sealed her fate even before she joined the law firm and in return she was calmer, enjoyed life more and had employment and advancement security.
This is the power of negotiation. This girl asked for something I have never heard of anyone ever asking for, and she ended up getting it. This was incredibly smart of her and something that ended up changing her life.
You too can change your life through negotiation. The ability to negotiate is one of the greatest skills you can possibly have. You need to negotiate, and when you negotiate effectively you will have more security, wealth and happiness than those who do not negotiate.
Everything is negotiable. I negotiate every single day and in every single way.
Let me walk you through my day today. This is a typical day for me and each day is punctuated by a series of negotiations like this.
I woke up this morning on the Gold Coast of Australia where I am on business. I went downstairs to fetch a cab to the International Airport in Brisbane. When I got downstairs, I asked how much the fare to the airport was. I was quoted between $200 and $250. I told the first cab driver in line that I would pay $140 and he agreed. I did not accept a metered fare, and I simply made an offer and it worked. As it turned out, the cab driver was going the 70-minute drive to the airport because he wanted to go see an open house for an apartment near the airport. I gave him a nice tip when we got to the airport, and he was extremely grateful. I saved a lot of money, and everyone was happy.
When I got to the airport, I asked for a seat in an exit row with no one beside me. I was nice to the ticket agent, and they made this happen. Incredibly, the coach area I was sitting in was full except for the seat next to me. My simple request made this happen. It is really incredible what you can get if you just ask. I probably had more room than if I was traveling in First Class.
Then, I went through customs and stepped directly in the Duty Free Shop. I have been wanting to get an IPod for some time and, if you can believe it, I carry a CD player around with me everywhere because I am able to download songs onto my computer and then burn them onto CDs. This has worked for me for some time; however, it is getting very old. I have literally been walking around with a portable CD player for the past 25 years and, this week, I decided I needed to start using an IPod permanently.
At the Duty Free Store, instead of an IPod, I picked out a Sony MP3 player with wireless headphones. As I was at the cashier, I started being nice and requesting a discount. Incredibly, the woman at the counter disappeared and went to talk to a manager and came back a few moments later and agreed to give me a 5% discount. This was not a lot of money, of course, but it ended up saving me around $15 on the item. I do this everywhere I go. If a Diet Coke is $3.00 in certain stores I exclaim, “This is too much!” and say I’ll pay $2.00. Most times the cashier smiles and laughs and tells me no. Nevertheless, this strategy works all the time wherever I go.
Several years ago, during the “real estate boom,” I saw a house for $2,500,000 that I liked on a nice stretch of beach in Malibu. The house had been on the market a few days and I am sure would be selling in a jiffy. There had not even been an open house yet.
“I can’t afford this right now!” I told the owner. “I have another house I am paying for! Can I rent it for $3,000 a month for a year and decide after a year if I want to buy it?”
“Sure thing!” he said. Little did I know the man’s wife was from Asia and had known people who had been killed in a terrible tsunami which swept through many areas of Asia. She wanted to get the hell out of there, and they took the first offer which came along. The savings from this was incredible, and I got to enjoy an exciting house for only $3,000/month.
The idea I am trying to make you understand is that most things are open to negotiation. In fact, the way I look at it, almost everything is open to negotiation.
Most people assume that when you go into certain sorts of stores that there is no negotiation. In almost every store and every case I have ever seen there is negotiation. You need to adopt a negotiation mindset and do everything within your power to consistently negotiate everything you can.
In your career your ability to negotiate will pay gigantic rewards. You can negotiate almost anything–from the assignments you get, to the work you do, to your promotion, to your health and life insurance, you name it. You can also negotiate your way into a job and your way into various promotions and so forth once you have gotten the job you are after.
My only word of advice about negotiation is never do too much of it. You never want to piss people off. Negotiate too much and you will find your employer extremely turned off. It is often best to negotiate only about the small things at work and never do so too much. Do not forget, however, that there is far more that you can negotiate than you might first realize.
Do Not Create Too Many Rules
What You Will Learn
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One of the biggest mistakes people make when they are looking for a job, working in a job and in life is this: They have too many rules.
- They have rules about the jobs they can apply for.
- They have rules about how they apply for jobs.
- They have rules about where they can apply for jobs.
- They have rules about whether they will or will not use recruiters.
- They have rules about how many jobs they apply for.
- They have rules about the type of work they will do.
- They have rules about the hours they will work.
- They have rules about the wages they will start making.
- They have rules about the sort of health insurance they need to receive.
- They have rules about the reputation of the employer they are working for.
- They have rules about the diversity of the employer they are working for.
- They have rules about the challenge of the job they are working in.
- They have rules about the vacation policies their employer should offer.
- They have rules about the challenge their job should offer.
- They have rules about the sorts of people they will be working with.
- They have rules about the style of the people they will be working with.
- They have rules about the accomplishments they people they work with should have.
- They have rules about the academic degrees the people they work with should have.
- They have rules about the material possessions the people they work with should have.
- They have rules about the neighborhoods the people they work with should live in.
- They have rules about whether or not the people they work with should have families.
- They have rules about the organizations the people they work with should belong to.
- The have rules about the race the people they work with should be.
- They have rules about the training they should get on the job.
- They have rules about the attractiveness of the people they work with.
- They have rules about the religion of the people they work with.
This list is probably less than 10% of the sorts of rules that you have about what your current or next job should be. We make up so many rules for what should exist where we are working and in the work that we do. These rules are constant and we continually create numerous, numerous rules about what our jobs should be like. We also do this with our lives. We believe we should be more wealthy, more religious or spiritual, have more friends, have closer intimate relationships and more. We, in fact, continually create rule after rule for ourselves and about what we desire and want for ourselves. The problem with this line of thinking is that it prevents us from ever finding fulfillment in what we are doing right now.
For most of my entire time growing up, both of my parents were single. It was amazing to me watching them go in and out of various relationships because after each relationship one would say something like “I need someone who is more educated.” The next relationship they were in they would find someone who was educated. When this relationship would end they would say something like “I need to find someone who is not so interested in ideas and is more interested in sports and taking care of their body.” The next relationship they would find someone who was very outgoing with sports. When that relationship ended they would say something like “I need someone who knows how to relax.” They they would get into another relationship and, in my mother’s case, she found a guy who liked to watch television while eating all of his meals. Then she said “I need someone who has better manners” when that relationship ended. To this day I see my parents coming up with impossible combinations of rules for who their ideal mate should be and the rules are “refreshed” and modified and added to as each relationship ends and another begins.
For the close to 40 years I have known my parents they have been making new rules about mates on and off at least once a year. I am not being critical of them for doing this because we all do this. We are constantly making new rules about so many things in our lives. We make these rules over and over and over. We are constantly creating one rule or another about how something should be this or that in order for things to be as we feel they should be. If the world does not match what we are seeking then we choose not to feel good about ourselves, feel some sort of angst and not be happy.
The result of these rules is that they serve to isolate us in many respects. The rules give us reasons for not feeling like everything is perfect and that something is wrong. The rules prevent us from working on what is in front of us at the moment and making the most of it and being happy. The rules separate us from people, jobs and opportunities. A major key to happiness in life and success in your chosen calling is doing everything within your power to not have so many rules. The more rules you have the less happy you will generally be. Rules are something that create a blueprint for how we believe our lives should be. The more blueprints we have about the way life should be and the less our life conditions match these blueprints the less happy we will be.
Several years ago I had a mix of people who were very young and others who were quite older (in their 60s) working for our company. In our company’s younger days the young people were extremely enthusiastic about it. Desks were doors, for example, and we used the area where a door handle should have been for cords. The young employees went out after work several times a week. We had a pool table that doubled as a ping pong table in the office. A foosball table. Darts. In general, the office was an extremely fun place to work and had the atmosphere of a carnival. The company attracted the best young people and young people loved working for us because we were young and energetic and quite excited about the world and doing very well. In the 2001 recession our revenues continued rocketing up. For the young people in our company, it was a great place to work and matched their expectatons about what a young California company with a strong online strategy should be.
As the company grew we started hiring older people who had a lot of experience and in some cases had retired and were coming back to work. These people brought a lot of experience to the table but did not share the same enthusiasm for working for a younger company.
One day I heard one of our older employees, in their 60s I believe, arguing with one of our star younger employees who was much more intelligent than the older employee. I could not believe what the older employee said to the younger employee: “If you were so talented you would not have to work in a small company like this and would be working in a large company like I did when I was at your age!”
This argument was amazing to me. Essentially what the older employee was saying was that it was not a good thing to be working at a smaller company. His idea was and his model for the world was that it was a bad thing to work at a small company instead of a large company. I could tell that the older employee was not happy with their job but I never knew it was for this reason. In effect, the older employee was trying to share with the younger employee a “rule” about how he should feel about his job based on the size of the company he was working at. We all have these rules. These rules control so completely for many of us how we feel about our careers and lives that it is profound. People believe they need to work a certain place in order to be happy. Once someone works in this or that place they believe they need to be doing a certan type of work there in order to be happy. Once they are doing this certain type of work they believe they need to be making a certain amount of money. The list goes on and on …
I can say unequivocally that the smartest people I have known in my life have most often been the ones who are the most unhappy. The reason for this, I believe, is due to the fact that these smart people are continually using their intelligence to create rules and not feel happy. They look at the world around them and can see all sorts of reasons that they should not feel fulfilled and happy. This thought process then ends up making them continually feel unhappy and unfulfilled with the world around them.
When I grew up in Detroit people always seemed to be comparing this or that to something in a large city. They would say “this is a New York-style art gallery”, or “this food is just as good as California cuisine in Napa Vallue,” or this is similar to that. This comparing and contrasting is also a form of rule making and it is something that we all do I think. We say to ourselves that where we live must be just as good as somewhere else. We do this with everything. Our jobs. Our mates. Our lives …
There is nothing wrong with having certain standards about the sort of work you would like to do. There is also nothing wrong with having standards for your job. However, there is a tremendous amount wrong when these are not standards but rules which control whether or not we find the job we are after and whether or not we can enjoy the jobs that we are in. Your life and career will never be fulfilled if you have too many rules governing it.
One of the strangest things to me is every time I go to New York City and spend time with connected and wealthy people. I love New York City and I love the people there in so many ways. However, unlike any place in the world I have ever encountered the people there have learned to create so many rules. There are rules about where the best places to live are. Rules about the best places to eat. Rules about the best places to sit in restaurants. Rules about the best clubs to go to. Moreover, what is so completely confusing about New York is that these rules are always changing like the ether. A rule about something one day is completely different the next.
A giant secret to being successful in your career and job is making sure that you have rules that empower you and do not cause you frustration. Rules about how to get a job and how to enjoy the work you are doing are something that can cause you a tremendous amount of harm. You need to choose rules that empower you and give you the strength and power to push forward and enjoy what you are doing. Not rules that hold you back and continually cause you frustration.
Anthony Robbins, Work, Jobs, Careers, and Missions
What You Will Learn
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There have been only a couple of times in my life when I was doing something I truly loved. The first was when I was an asphalt contractor and was out in the field each day doing asphalt work. It made me feel like I was building something and truly making a difference. It made me feel like I was free. I loved the smell of the tar. I loved the sun on my face and body. I loved the people I worked with. I loved going to the asphalt plant each morning. I loved driving the trucks and operating the machinery I did in my business. I loved the work so much that I would find myself getting up each day at the crack of dawn even if I had a few hours sleep the night before so I could go out and work. I wanted to work seven days a week and rarely took a day off. I became very depressed on the days it was raining and I could not work. When it was winter and I could not work I would look towards the spring with incredible enthusiasm. I simply loved the work I was doing and was very enthusiastic about it in so many respects. It was something that I literally lived for. When I was out with people the work I did was all I could talk about. I simply loved, with an incredibly contagious enthusiasm, the work I did. I would sometimes be doing the work and remind myself every few days that I had not even had anything to eat! I had become so engaged in the work that even eating was something that did not matter to me. My heart, body and soul were so into the work it is difficult for me to describe.
I loved this work so much that people and customers sensed it. Everyone I came into contact with, knew I had a passion for asphalt. I dreamed about asphalt at night. I talked about it everywhere I went. My business grew so fast I could not believe it. The love of the profession and asphalt was like being swept up by a giant wave. It was something I treated as a mission.
There is an incredible strength that can come to you when you treat your job and your career like I thought about asphalt. I know that deep down within you there are various times when you have found yourself incredibly engaged in something. I have seen this so many times before and with so many people. Everyone gets engaged and excited by something. There is something that lights up everyone of us. God has given us this gift to be completely lit up and enthusiastic about something. We all have it.
I remember when I was in high school, one of the worst students in my school could not pass most classes. He had a lot of family pressure and it became almost all- consuming. He felt like a failure and started using drugs, abusing alcohol and doing all sorts of things to dull the pain. When the time came to apply to colleges he did not even get into the easiest state college to get into, despite the fact that his father had endowed a large scholarship on the school. He was so depressed about this he almost committed suicide and I remember he literally disappeared for a few days and went to a hotel in a bad neighborhood where he sat in a dark room alone contemplating ending his life. He felt like he had no purpose and that there was nothing he could possibly do with his life.
He and I had taken a chemistry class together and I had barely managed to earn a C+ in the class. He, however, had easily gotten As in the class without even studying. He loved the intricacies of the information and an understanding of chemistry came naturally to him. He just understood it. He understood it better than the teacher and he had some sort of gift. It was as if he knew what she was going to say before she said it. He could not understand how others could not think this way. He did not have to try and still did incredibly well in the discipline. He however, did not think it was that big of a deal.
After my second year of college I was home for the summer and I was getting out of my car to go to a party and I walked past him. I did not recognize him until he came up to me. Since high school he had grown a beard. He was wearing beads and had become a hippie of sorts. He looked like he had smoked pot several times a day for the past few years and had a “burnt out” look about him. He looked so different, in fact, that I did not even recognize him when we passed each other. He recognized me and came up to me and gave me a hug.
After the party that evening he and I went to a restaurant together to eat and catch up. He had flunked out of college in Colorado and was living at home. His life appeared to be a huge failure. I remember sitting there and thinking to myself of the guy I had known five years previously, who was so much more enthusiastic. Nothing was becoming of him and it was a very sad thing. His life, to him and me as well, felt like it had no purpose. He was on a path that was going to lead to certain destruction. As we sat there together, I remembered how well this guy had done in chemistry. He had long since dropped out of college. He was not working. He was living in his mother’s basement and spending most of his day smoking pot, playing video games and being generally unproductive. It was incredible to me how run down he was and how little his life had become. In the back of my mind, however, I kept thinking about how good he was at chemistry and how much he liked and enjoyed it.
“You need to study chemistry,” I told him. For the next hour or so a passion came over me and I told him in hundreds of different ways why he needed to study chemistry and how important this was for him and how it would affect the course of his life and everything that happened to him from now on. I told him that he had a gift and moreover that he loved it. I told him that this gift and his extreme dislike for other subjects at a natural, visceral level was God’s way of telling him this is what he needed to be doing and this is what he needed to be studying. I told him with everything I had that this is what he needed to be doing and he needed to take action and do this right now and start pursuing this direction with his life immediately. Something overcame me and I was so enthusiastic about this that I did not even myself understand it. I followed him out to the car and said goodbye to him. I would not hear from him or see him for another year.
One year later I was with a group of guys my age and was back from school again for the summer. We were making our way around, picking people up and we made our way over to my old friend’s house to pick him up. We all went inside to grab him and back downstairs into his mother’s basement. When I got down there I saw sights I could not believe. He had little plastic models of molecules all over and next to his bed. He had huge chemistry textbooks spread around the basement. When he walked out I noticed he had shaved his beard off and was wearing glasses. There was an energy about him and he looked much happier. The “angst” that I had seen about him for ages was gone. He looked happy for the first time I had ever seen him. The basement was clean and there was no trash and so forth scattered all around as there had been before.
He looked happy.
When we went out that evening he did not use drugs and sipped the same beer all evening. I could tell how happy he was. He told me that he had gone back to school and was studying chemistry and loved it. He was also working in a lab. He did not know exactly what he wanted to do for a living, but he really loved what he was doing. He had taken organic chemistry and loved it and had done incredibly well in it. His life had literally changed and he was now doing well. I was incredibly happy for him. He told me that he had followed my advice and found something that energized him. He felt like he was on a mission.
This episode is something that also changed the course of my life. In looking at what happened to my friend, by finding a passion, I was convinced deep down in the body of my soul and DNA that when we find something we are good at, and approach it like a mission, everything changes. Our entire life can change and who we are can change in an instant. Literally, our entire future can be altered by the type of work that we are doing and the feedback we are getting.
My friend had sat in a small $20/night hotel in a bad area of Detroit for two days contemplating ending his life. He had no contact with the outside world during that time and no one knew where he was. He sat there and felt like dying. I cannot imagine how this must have felt for him. He felt like dying, I believe, because all of the input he had gotten from the world had been almost entirely negative and his passion was not ignited by anything.
- He was not an athlete and could not receive positive feedback from this.
- He did poorly in every subject except for chemistry and received horrible feedback for this.
- He could not get into colleges.
- He was considered a failure by his family.
All of these things conspired to make him feel as if his life had no purpose. He felt like he was a complete loser and he felt this way because of the fact that almost all of the feedback he was getting from his environment was negative. He did not have a passion.
When I was in high school, a couple of years before I graduated, I remember a student in my school with poor grades in virtually every subject and ok test scores had amazed the school and everyone around them by applying to Harvard College and getting in. It was something that I have heard people talk about even as recently as a few years ago. It is absolutely legendary because by every stretch of the imagination this student never should have been admitted. I even remember hearing something about the fact that the school authorities did everything within their power to dissuade him from applying because they thought he would never get in.
However, this particular student had a passion and was on a mission. Since the age of five or six he had been collecting bugs. He loved bugs and was fascinated by them. He went to conferences. He wrote papers. He spent his summers traveling the world to study different types of bugs. He had rooms of his parent’s house filled with bugs. He was consumed with the study of bugs and thinking about them. He was on a mission and Harvard knew it. Regardless of his grades, the admissions officers of one of the toughest schools in the world wanted him. A mission is much more powerful than being good at lots of things. A mission will take down walls, open up opportunity and transform your life. You need a mission.
Let me repeat: You need a mission.
I firmly believe, from the bottom of my heart, that this is the most important career advice you will ever receive. A mission changes you and will transform your life and career. There is nothing more important than a mission.
- We respect people with a mission.
- Employers want to hire people on a mission.
- A mission energizes you.
- A mission energizes people around you.
- A mission tears down walls.
- A mission gives your life purpose.
- A mission transforms you.
When I was an asphalt contractor I was energized with passion. It was the most important job for me in the world and I loved it. I had a girlfriend at the time who loved me more than anything. She wanted to get married and worshipped me. She saw the mission in me and was attracted to it. She would have done anything for me. Her father saw the mission in me and also gave me numerous opportunities. I remember when I got into law school and I told her I was going to law school.
“That’s so sad,” she told me. “Most people never find something they love and you are going to be just like the rest of people if you do this. You do not belong behind a desk all day.”
I remember I was out one evening and having a great time and a bunch of young lawyers from the top law firm in Detroit at the time came up and started talking to her and her friends. When I was around these girls they appeared to light up. The lawyers did not have the same passion I did and they also did not appear connected. It is hard to explain. To a tee every one of the girls blew off the lawyers. They appeared almost disgusted by them. I was still in college and went up to them and started talking to the lawyers. I worshipped them because they had gone to the best law schools and appeared to have achieved so much. They all told me they did not like what they were doing. None of them were happy. They were all quite negative not just about what they were doing, but about life as well. It was a huge contrast from where I was in with my life at the moment.
When I went away to law school my girlfriend very quickly lost interest in me. I received a couple of phone calls from her and on the last phone call she had taken over managing the career of a very famous rock star. All she talked about was how he had “passion” and loved what he did. She was attracted to the passion. She could tell when she was speaking with me that I had no passion for school and what I was doing. Despite her incredible love for me at one point, she could not bear spending her time with a man who was not flowering inside and on a mission. We are all attracted to people with a mission.
There are three stages in a development of what you do with your productive time and you need to get to the highest one. The first stage is a job. The second is a career. The third is a mission.
At the outset I want to note that there are arguably four stages and not three to what you do during your productive time. In the first stage you could put “work” instead of job. Work, however, is something that is so detestable and negative in its connotation that I do not classify it as developmental at all. Work is something you do in the short term and not because you are interested in it or it excites you or even to make a living. Work connotes short-term projects such as mowing a lawn for $10 and doing something which takes you absolutely nowhere but to a short term reward of a few dollars. Work is detestable and not something that develops you the way you need to and want to be developed. Work has a negative and not a positive connotation in all respects. Work is hard. Work is reserved for the most unfulfilled souls in society. Work does not lead anywhere and we know it. Work is there because it is something we have to do and gives us almost no fulfillment. We do not think positively about work and we avoid work.
It is for this reason that I do not refer to work as “developmental” in terms of what you do with your productive time. A job, career and mission connote “showing up” every day. It is when we begin to “show up” in either a physical or a mental sense on a daily basis that I believe your relationship with your productive time transforms. You need to “show up” daily–or at least Monday through Friday. If your relationship with what you do does not involve you showing up on a daily basis, then what you are doing is “work” and not a job, career or a mission. You need to be showing up and move away from work to a higher stage of development. No one should have to “work” because “work” is short term, un-enjoyable and does not lead anywhere in the way I define it here. Work is looking for short term projects for hours, days, weeks or months to pay the bills. Work is the guy standing with a group of other workers on the corner hoping a contractor picks him up to do some manual labor for the day. Work is offering to do some work online that you do not enjoy. Work is prostitution and selling our body or time for something we detest. No one should have to do work. Work is a horrible thing because it does not take you anywhere and is unfulfilling.
A job is something that most of the world does. When you think about a job, an image you might have in your mind is a man working mindlessly on an assembly line all day. He shuffles this or that back and forth and clocks in each morning. He does not particularly like what he is doing but does the work because he needs to make money. The work does not give him any particular satisfaction one way or another but he endures it. He looks forward to going home each evening and getting off work. He looks forward to his annual vacations. He calls in sick from time to time just to get out of work. He does his job because he needs to earn money. This is the saddest part about this. He does not do his work because he loves it. If he did not need money he would not do the job. It is as simple as that.
One of the greatest fantasies of people who just have “jobs” is that they may one day win the lottery. The fantasy and idea is that if they win the lottery they will no longer have to do their job. There is a fantasy of having to go tell their boss to “piss off” and moving on and not having to worry about work anymore. There is no need to have to work and they do not want to go to work particularly. They are putting in time until they are allowed to retire. They look forward to their lunch hour each day. They know when the next public holiday is coming up. They do their work but have no real interest in it.
For example, people just doing a job will rarely, if ever, make any effort to improve themselves for their work. They will not be studying ways to improve themselves outside of work in order to improve and get better at what they do. They will not take classes to understand what they do. They will avoid thinking about their job when they are not at work. The priorities of a person with just a “job” are the time they spend out of work and not at work. They do a job because they have to and not because they want to.
It is important to note that people in an incredible number of professions fall victim to just doing jobs. For example, my dentist was telling me some time ago that most other dentists that he knows are only doing the work they do for money. They do not care about the work at all. They hate looking in mouths all day but do it because they have to. They go to conferences to learn about the latest developments in dentistry not because they want to but because they have to. Their priorities are being away from the office. They do the work they do but are not all that enthusiastic about it.
Incidentally, dentists have one of the highest rates of suicide among most professions. Why do you think that is? It is due to the fact that they do not feel a passion for how they are spending their time I believe. The trap of a profession like dentistry as a job for someone who does not like it is severe. People who goes to school for years to learn how to be a dentist and get out and build up a small practice where they may be making $200,000 a year, suddenly finds themselves with expensive car and house payments, perhaps private school tuition for their children and more. There is nothing else that they know how to do and they cannot quit because they have too many obligations. They are literally stuck doing something which gives them no passion and makes them unhappy. They feel like they have made a huge mistake with their lives. They report to a job each day and feel trapped.
I know tons of lawyers who are in this trap. It is a horrible thing for them and they are incredibly unhappy. They do things like fantasize about opening wineries. They fantasize about buying the companies of their clients and doing this. They get fat because they are trying to fill up with something that they enjoy because they are not happy at work. They cheat on their wives and husbands because they are searching for glimmers of happiness and excitement in dull lives. They very frequently abuse alcohol and drugs in an effort to forget and escape something they detest.
My mother had a job when I was growing up. She called in sick every chance she got. She did not like going to work every single day. She was not happy and the thought of work made her extremely unhappy. She couldn’t care less how she did at work for the most part. She was an incredibly intelligent, attractive and capable woman but she reported to a job daily. The first day she qualified for a pension she quit her job. She did not want to be there. She did not like it.
There are so many problems with a job that it is difficult to believe. A job just does not give you the satisfaction you are entitled to and deserve in your life. I am sure you know people who are just doing jobs. You may be one of these people. Why are you doing a job? You should never do something you are not interested in. There is a huge difference between this and not doing what you want in life.
When I was younger I remember I was fixed up with a girl that everyone thought had it all. People really liked her and all of the boys I knew thought she was fantastic. I remember when I went out with her I felt zero connection to her. For whatever reason, she was also pushed by her friends to go out with me. We sat there in a restaurant on our first date with absolutely no chemistry, making small talk. It was “work” for both of us being together but we felt like we needed to make it work. There was no connection for either of us but we both felt we needed to be there. We were there physically but not mentally. So we went through the motions of having an evening together and at the end of the evening had a long passionless kiss. I think we both did this because we were “show up” for something that we felt we should. Then we started dating and going out with other groups of people and it was the same thing. We would only hold hands when others were looking. We would talk on the phone at night and both almost felt like it was work. We both knew it but we were both showing up to something that we did not really feel in our hearts was for us.
This is what work is. Have you ever felt passion for someone? Have you ever felt something just clicked for you? Have you ever felt that something did not click but you did it anyway? It is when it does not click that you are doing work. In the case of the lovely woman, we both felt no passion or connection and we would not have been there had we felt like we did not need to be. We were there physically in every sense but neither of us had the heart, soul and mind of the other.
I keep coming back to the sexual nature, the passionate nature of a job because it is this “sexual” type charge that you need to have for your work. When a man is committed to a woman and a woman is committed to a man they think about each other all the time. There is a “charge” there that makes a massive difference. The charge is such that they are one heart, mind and soul. They want to be together all the time. We all know what this charge is and we feel it when we are near certain people. It is more than physical–it is emotional and comes from deep within. It is this sort of charge that drives many men to achieve to impress women and vice versa. It is this charge that creates many marriages. It is this sort of charge that creates new life and often brings children into the world. There is nothing more important than this charge and this charge is a motivating force of life itself.
When you do not have this charge for your work it is like being with someone you have no feelings for. If you are heterosexual it is like trying to make love to someone of your own sex and falling passionately in love with them. If you are homosexual it is like trying to make love to someone of the opposite sex. There is no charge and attraction. It is ass backwards.
This is why you need to move away from trying to do a job and move up and away from this. Instinctually, we understand this in terms of our love lives and follow it. Notwithstanding, very few people follow this in their choice of how they spend their productive time earning a living each day.
A final thing to understand about a job is that someone doing a job would quite readily and happily do something else if the opportunity presented itself and the conditions were right. For example, my mother seriously investigated taking all of her money and moving my sister and I to Wyoming so she could operate a dude ranch. A lawyer doing a job will happily change what he or she is doing many times if the pay is right. Dentists may quit what they are doing once they have amassed enough money to live comfortably and then try something else. People who do jobs are not committed to them just as I was not committed to the girl I was fixed up with.
The next step up from a job is a career. There is more “attachment” to a career than there is to a job. A career connotes a sense of commitment and something you will be doing for a long term. I first heard the word career when I was in law school. To give you a sense of the difference between a career and job I will repeat the episode here.
In my second year of law school many students were applying for judicial clerkships. A clerkship is when you go to work for a judge and work inside the judge’s chambers for one or two years helping them make decisions on their cases. In the case of federal clerkships, they are extremely prestigious and competitive to get. Because the smartest students were doing this, I felt like I needed to do this too because they seemed to be taking applying for these extremely seriously. I sent my application to around 10 judges in Michigan where I am from, and two days later a judge called me and asked me to come see him within a day or two for an interview. Less than a week after applying, the judge called me and made me an offer and told me I had to let him know whether I was accepting the offer within a few hours or he was going to make someone else an offer. The job paid around $30,000 a year at the time and I also had another offer with a New York City law firm paying $83,000 a year. It is easier to get a job with a New York law firm paying this much than it is to get a federal clerkship. I was confused because I did not understand why I should take a job paying so much less money.
I called the career services dean of my school.
“This is a career, not a job,” he told me. “If your plan is to practice law forever then who cares about how much money the clerkship pays.”
This is the difference between a career and a job. We think of careers in terms of long term. The idea is that we will be doing them forever. We want to be enriched in a career and we think in terms of the long term. In my case I did not quite understand what the career services dean of my school meant but I took the clerkship. I realized there was something profound in what he was saying and I am glad to this day that I listened to his advice.
People doing a career are committed to what they are doing. There is a level of commitment that is not present in someone who is simply doing a job. The persons know that they are in something for the long term and they are going to make it work.
In India to this day there are arranged marriages. I go to India quite often and virtually everyone I know in India is in an arranged marriage. In an arranged marriage there is typically very little contact between the bride and groom before marriage. They will be introduced after a rigorous screening process by their families and may not spend more than an hour or two together getting to know each other before they are formally married. However, in India there is almost no divorce and, incredibly, these weddings work out much more than the average wedding in the United States or other Western countries, for example.
The reason I believe these marriages work out and what several Indians have told me is that the couples enter the marriages committed. They treat the marriages as something they have to work out. They do not consider other options like divorce and marrying someone more attractive, younger, wealthier and so forth. Their focus and concern is on the fact that a marriage has been arranged for them and they are likely to be together forever with the person. They need to make it work out. Most Indians believe that as the couples come to know each other they come to love and respect one another and passion develops out of this. Because so much work is involved for both sides in arranging the marriage, it is near blasphemy for either side to not make the marriage work. Therefore, the couples do everything within their power to nurture one another and care about each other.
I have a great deal of respect for this system of marriage for numerous reasons. However, the largest lesson you can get out of the Indian system of marriage is that it is like the difference between a career and a job. A career is something you are committed to deep down and plan on doing forever. A job is something you only do because you have to. When you do a career you are willing to ride the ups and downs and make the most of everything no matter what. You will do whatever it takes. You will try and make it work even if you are not passionate about it. You will try and learn what it takes to succeed. You see yourself doing this in the future. You try and fall in love.
This is what people do who have careers. They do whatever it takes to make it work because they see themselves doing this in the future and they have committed to it. A career is much better and preferable to having a job. You need to commit to something before it can work. In relationships you generally need to commit to the other person before they will reciprocate. No persons in their right mind will marry someone not committed to them. You should not do anything you are not committed to. Commitment is a hugely important thing. You need to be committed.
Far too many people have jobs and not careers. The reason for this is that they are doing work that is tiding them over. They are doing something out of circumstance and looking and hoping for something better. Despite being involved in what they are doing, they cannot necessarily see themselves doing what they are doing five or ten years from now. I personally feel that one of the largest problems in the world today is that far few people have careers. They have jobs. Why should anyone simply do a job? A job is boring for you and will not lead anywhere. You need a career.
You can have a career doing anything. You could be a floor sweeper and have a career. You could be a teacher and have a career. You could be a salesperson and have a career. You could be a doctor, lawyer, or dentist and have a career. You literally can do anything and have a career. People who have careers are so much more happy, well balanced and better off in work and in their social and family lives than people who have jobs. They key to having a career is that you are committed in your body and mind and you see yourself doing something in the future.
I love going into companies and meeting people who have careers. When you go into a company and find people who have been working there 10, 20 or more years you will find people who have careers. They are often well settled emotionally. They are happier and there is a certain energy and enthusiasm around them. They could be doing anything. They could work in a warehouse stocking boxes. They could be bookkeepers. They could be doing any number of tasks in the company. The point is they have careers and they see themselves doing something long term. People with careers generally have families at home. They generally are well balanced and people like them. They are supportive of their employers and their employers are generally quite supportive of them.
Far few people have careers. They are not emotionally connected to their work and believe they need to be somewhere else. Persons with careers want to learn about what they are doing often when they are not working. They adopt the attitudes, mannerisms and ways of being of others in their career. They take a certain amount of enthusiasm in what they do. They are generally good at what they are doing. Everyone knows who they are and what they do.
The next highest state of development after a job is a career. It is far better to have a career than a job. A career is something you always do and will always do. If you are currently doing a job, the next best thing you can do is have a career.
I recently had the privilege of traveling to Australia from Fiji with the motivational speaker Anthony Robbins. We took a small plane Tony chartered from Tony’s resort in Fiji to Nadi, the capital of Fiji. We were in Nadi to catch a flight to Brisbane, where Tony was on his way to give a seminar called Date with Destiny. Tony is the one who first told me about the distinction between a career, job and mission about a week ago over lunch at his resort and few subsequent discussions. You may have heard Tony say before things like “Live with Passion!” and understand his true and incredible motivation. As we got off the little plane in Nadi I looked over at Tony and he was “in state”. His entire body language had changed from what I had seen earlier and even though his seminar was not for the next few days he was busy preparing for it in his mind. He stepped differently. He pushed his chest out when he walked. He was no longer smiling. The second we had gotten on the small airplane he opened his laptop and began preparing. You could tell that something had come over him and it was a transformation I have never seen in anyone. As we waited at the ticket counter, Tony went into an incredible state where his focus and passion were incredibly transparent in his body language and energy despite the fact that he was not even speaking.
Tony is an incredibly passionate man. The first day of his seminar, he spoke for 11 and half hours straight without a break to eat, drink or use the restroom. He gets teary-eyed when he speaks. His body language changes and he rises up. Tony is the “real deal” and someone who is on a mission to change peoples’ lives. And you can see it in the results of him. Thousands of fans cheer for him and millions of people all over the world know who he is. Tony is on an incredible mission and his mission is so strong I predict people will be talking about him hundreds of years after he dies. His mission makes him part of who he is and has become. In the coming weeks NBC will even be making a television show documenting Tony on his mission to change lives.
If a man like Tony Robbins had chosen to be a doctor, lawyer or a dentist, imagine what would have happened. His passion for changing lives would never have been realized and the incredible accomplishments he has experienced in his life and for other peoples’ lives never would have occurred. It is pathetic to think about this–but this is exactly what most people do.
You need this passion and your career needs to be a mission. You need to go into “state” and you need to find something that takes over your body and your mind and that motivates you to an incredible extreme. What is it that you could do that would make you immortal? What is it that charges you up like being in love for the first time? What is it you could do forever? What is it you would do even if no one paid you to do? What is it within you that gives you the most extraordinary charge you can imagine?
The highest state of work is when you are on a mission. You need to be on a mission. For me, my mission is getting the world jobs. When I looked around me and saw the mistakes I had made with my choice of work, being a lawyer and how unhappy this made me I knew the power of what we do for a living. I have seen so many lives ruined by choosing the work someone does not like or enjoy. I have seen so many people not being able to find missions and be unemployed. I have watched people commit suicide because they felt rudderless in what they did for a living. I have been in loveless relationships and relationships filled with love and gone down my own path of destruction. The difference between having a job, or career and having a mission is huge. Look at people like Tony Robbins. Look at the people you respect most in the world and the chances are they are on a mission. A mission changes everything and it will propel you forward.
When I found my mission of getting jobs for the world, everything changed. I have thousands of books I have read about this. I have started companies and reached millions of people in my mission. I think about my mission all the time and it just keeps getting bigger and bigger. I love my mission and it is the most meaningful thing in the world for me. It has transformed my life and I am a completely different person today. I even look different physically.
I have watched missions transform the lives of people everywhere. But so few people ever find missions. You absolutely, positively need a mission and it is going to change your life. A mission will bring you everything you ever wanted, help transform the world and take you to worlds and dreams you cannot even comprehend- of the body, spirit and physical world.
Never Stop Growing
Sir Edmund Hillary was the first man to climb Mount Everest. On May 29, 1953, he scaled the highest mountain then known to man-29,000 feet straight up. He was knighted for his efforts. He even made American Express card commercials because of it! However, until you read his book, High Adventure, you don’t understand that Hillary had to grow into this success. You see, in 1952 he attempted to climb Mount Everest, but failed. A few weeks later a group in England asked him to address its members. Hillary walked on stage to a thunderous applause. He then moved away from the microphone and walked to the edge of the platform. He made a fist and pointed at a picture of the mountain. He said in a loud voice, “Mount Everest, you beat me the first time, but I’ll beat you the next time because you’ve grown all you are going to grow… but I’m still growing!”What You Will Learn
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I first read this quote several years ago and it stuck with me. I am not sure who recorded it, or why, but the importance of this quote to my life, the lives of my employees, and to you cannot be overemphasized.
I grew up in a small city outside Detroit to which I do not return often. A few years ago I had to go back, and in my few days in the town I visited gas stations, hardware stores, and other such places. Inside many of these businesses I saw people I grew up with working at cash registers and doing other, similar of tasks. Many of these people are the nicest people you will ever meet, and they are also extremely happy people. What struck me about the people working these jobs was that many of them had been far more intelligent, far better socially, and far more talented in many respects than I ever was. These were people I knew could have become doctors, lawyers, or anything else they wanted to be-and they still could. However, what happened to many of these people is that they stopped growing and stopped trying to be the best they could be in all respects.
Don’t you ever stop growing.
One of the most shocking things I saw when I visited home was a girl I had a serious crush on growing up. She used to be an athlete and someone who was very concerned about her appearance. She was someone who I remember as being so attractive and in demand that, from the time she was 14 years old, she was always dating men a couple of years older. What struck me when I returned home and saw her was that she had probably doubled her weight and looked like a completely different person. There is nothing wrong with being overweight; nevertheless, she was someone who at some point simply gave up on trying to look the best she could.
There is a positive side to this: she has the potential to be who she was before. There is nothing more exciting than having an opportunity to improve yourself.
You should never stop trying to be the best you can be. Each day is a new opportunity for learning. Your career and your life need to follow the path of constant growth. You want to get better and better at each thing you do.
One of the men I respect the most in the world is Al Gore. After he won/lost the election to George Bush, I (and many others) believed that he would simply fade into obscurity like most politicians do after leaving office. Al Gore was different, though. Several years later, it almost brought tears to my eyes when I saw him campaigning for his movie, An Inconvenient Truth. To me this was a huge comment on his character because it showed that he kept growing even after losing. I imagine that if George Bush had lost the election he would have simply returned to Texas. Gore was different. He kept growing and did everything within his power to continue growing. And he is still growing.
This is the sort of person we need to be in our careers. We need to always be looking for room to grow and get better at what we do. The more we grow, the more exciting our lives and careers continue to be. There is nothing more exciting than always growing in your career.
Some of the hardest things for attorneys to do are get a job in a major law firm when they graduate from law school and make partner at a major law firm. It is interesting to watch the race between attorneys trying to make partner. What generally happens is that there are some attorneys who grow and others who do not. Attorneys who do not continue growing typically do not get better at their jobs and eventually leave the practice of law. The ones who end up with the best firms and with the best jobs are almost always the attorneys who kept growing. This is how it is with everything: the ones who never give up and never stop trying keep growing.
When you drive down the street, you will see tons of businesses that are products of continual growth and reinvention-whether they are restaurants or department stores. Many people and businesses are content with staying small and never learning what it takes to grow and improve. Other companies keep growing.
All around you are businesses and people who will refuse to grow. Some of these businesses and people may be better than you are right now. If, however, you are always seeking to improve, grow, and move forward, you will eventually wind up on top. Do not settle for mediocrity. As businesses, we are seeking to grow and improve every day while many of our competitors rest on their laurels. Remember that past achievements are never enough because you can always do better.
A few years ago I drove by an open house in a very expensive neighborhood. It was the most expensive house in that neighborhood. I did not go into the open house, but the house was so remarkable that I asked my realtor about it because I was selling a house at the time. My realtor told me that it belonged to a couple who purchased this incredible mansion in their 90s. They had only lived in the mansion for one year before dying. Living in a house like that had always been their dream and, through years of saving, stock trading, and so forth, they had finally made enough money to afford the house.
That is an example of two people who refused to stop growing. Think about it: while many people in their early 70s were checking out and going to nursing homes-or dying-this couple kept growing and pursuing their dream. It is an incredible story to me.
You, too, should never stop growing. You can learn ways to get better and better at your job. If you have certain weaknesses, you can learn how to strengthen yourself in these areas. You can also work to improve on your greatest strengths. This is one of the smartest things anyone can do. Just keep getting better and better at everything.
A couple of years ago I went to see Anthony Robbins speak for five days. Prior to attending this conference, I was always kind of secretive regarding my profound interest in self improvement. I must admit, I love self improvement and have been pushing myself for as long as I can remember with one self improvement product or another. In school, if I became aware of a vitamin that would help me think better to get better grades I would take it! Today, if I hear about a good business book I will generally do my best to read it. I have thousands of books on different subjects.
What I realized at the Anthony Robbins event was that the majority of people there were among the most successful in society. There were surgeons, investment bankers, and numerous others who I did not expect to see there. I realized that most of these people were like me and also interested in continually becoming better and better. They never stopped improving.
When I look around at the people I have known in the past who have been the best at anything, what I notice is that they, too, never stop improving. All they care about is ensuring that they make their next performance much greater and more effective than the last one. This is not confined to Anthony Robbins’ conferences. It is seen everywhere you find the most talented people.
The past is over. What you need to do now is focus on growing in the future and getting better and better. Do this and you will always come out on top.
Choose an Employer Who Is Marching Forward
There are generally two types of employers in this world: the employer who is marching forward and the employer who is in retreat. There is also a third type of employer (for whom nothing is changing) that merits some discussion as well. However, for the most part, there are employers who are marching forward and employers who are retreating. What I am about to share with you could be the most beneficial advice about choosing between employers that you will ever receive.
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When I started my first job with a law firm, the firm was growing at a meteoric pace and had been around less than 10 years. Other attorneys in the firm worked like mad at all times. The firm was getting the most important cases in the area and, in fact, many of the most important cases in the country. The firm was attracting top graduates from the best law schools all over the United States. We were so busy, I knew several people who regularly slept in the office. This firm was also different from any other firm in the city at the time.
Attorneys wore shorts and sandals to work and some even chewed tobacco at their desks. Rumors of crazy drinking, drug use, and incredibly hard partying by many of the attorneys in the firm were quite prevalent. I do not think any of the attorneys in the firm were involved in any sort of outside organizations or sat on any boards-they were too busy to do so and, frankly, such things did not matter. The work these attorneys were doing was also in the paper very often. It was a world unlike any other American law firm I had ever heard of. It was a great place and they did really good work. This is an example of an employer “marching forward” and the absolute best place to get a job.
After about a year of working all the time, I told myself I needed a change. I went to another law firm across town that had been around for decades. Incredibly, I was able to almost double my salary in the process. This law firm was so white-shoe that on my first day they put a plaque on my door that said “Mr. Barnes.” People whispered in the halls and there were strict dress codes. One time, a partner told me to polish my shoes better. This was a firm that had been used to doing certain things a certain way for a long, long time. There were people in the firm who had had very distinguished careers in government and were on the boards of important companies and organizations.
This law firm had been around for over 50 years and was able to recruit the best law students, but when I got there I did not have any work to do for over three weeks. During those three weeks, I also saw at least a couple of people quietly be asked to leave. The strangest thing about the firm was that when I talked to associates and other young attorneys they said that having any work to do was a privilege and had to be earned. They spoke about how you needed to get favor from certain people in order to get work. Most of the work this firm was doing was unimportant and certainly was not in the papers very often.
After about six months of being at the firm, I realized it was dying. Partners were being fired or asked to leave and the firm was very slowly wilting away. There was hardly any work going around in the office. Today, I do not think the firm is even around. This is an example of an employer in retreat and the worst possible place to work.
I once spent two weeks in Atlanta with our company’s general counsel-a former fighter pilot. He loves to bring up military analogies for lots of things. I now find myself thinking in terms of military analogies as well from time to time. There are employers who are on the attack and gaining market share from rivals, employers who are in retreat and losing market share, and a few employers who are simply holding their own. Economics is a form of warfare, and business is warfare as well. If you are going to fight a war, it is important that you fight on the correct side.
The employer marching forward is easy to spot-it is growing. Employers who are growing are hiring more and more people. They are expanding their offices into new territories and areas. Their revenues are increasing. They are enthusiastic about the future. Their cultures are defined by specific goals. They may also be somewhat disorganized. Typically, the employer who is marching forward has discovered a new way of doing things that is much more efficient than the way of doing things in a previous time. Some examples of companies you have probably heard of who have done this in the past are:
-Google-organizing information online
-Ford-producing cars that the average man can afford
-eBay-organizing goods for sale online
-Apple-inventing a way to organize songs and information (the iPod)
-Facebook-coming up with a model that allows people to efficiently connect with others
-Wal-Mart-bringing goods to areas all over the United States at low prices
-YouTube-allowing people to share videos online
-AT&T-allowing people to communicate over the telephone
When a company designs or invents something that is new and creates efficiencies, it is a time of great excitement. People want to work for companies that are creating efficiencies and doing things in new ways. Other companies also want to do work with businesses like these. The reason these companies are so popular is because they are saving people money (Wal-Mart), allowing them to do things they have never been able to do before (AT&T and Ford), or making something accessible and easy to use (Apple, YouTube, and Google).
Companies that are creating new ways of doing things become very popular with consumers and others because they enable them to save money. They also become very popular places to work because of their upward momentum and the possibilities this creates for people. You can see new companies starting all the time that are changing their industries and how the world operates. They are examples of employers marching forward.
Employers marching forward also have other characteristics that are worth mentioning here. They tend to be hiring more people. They tend to be excited about the future and where they are going. Established competitors will initially look at the employer marching forward with disdain. The employer marching forward is one who is excited about the future and the people working there typically feel the same way.
The workplace dynamics of an employer marching forward are unique. The employees working with such an employer typically work very hard. The work will be scattered around and people will be juggling multiple responsibilities. The employees inside the company will also have far more opportunities available to them than they are able to take advantage of because the pace of growth is so rapid. For example, in an online publication that is marching forward, advertisers may be calling the publication trying to advertise and be very frustrated that no one is calling them back. However, the people inside the publication may be so busy with other tasks which are more productive that they do not have time to call back! This is what it is like in organizations that are marching forward. There are literally so many opportunities that people are chasing them around like crazy.
This year, I had the opportunity to work with students from the UCLA MBA program who were studying one of our companies. I overheard at least a couple of these students talking about how great it would be to work for Google. Everyone wants to be part of the next great thing. I have since heard that Google has instituted a hiring freeze. Notwithstanding, companies that are marching forward attract the enthusiasm of the best and brightest. This is just how it works. The best want to be with that which is growing.
The converse of the employer who is marching forward is the employer who is in retreat. The military analogy here would be that the army has marched as far as it can go and now needs to hold on to the ground it has gained. Most employers who were at one time marching forward eventually stop marching forward and go into retreat. This is not always the case, but it usually is. When a company finds a new niche, space, or way of doing things, eventually others catch on and start attacking it with rival products. Products are imitated. Services are imitated. Word catches on and all sorts of people are attracted to working for the new company.
An interesting trend I have seen around Los Angeles, both from when I was a lawyer and from people I have met in the course of running my business, is the following: a group of people come along and start a company. They may be from a foreign country and have not gone to school in America or have any connections. They start the company and get it off the ground simply by virtue of the tremendous value that their product or service provides. They may be engineers who have designed a new medical device. They may manufacture and import toys. They may be brilliant property investors. Regardless, their company thrives and it grows to great heights.
When a company grows due to business methods that are clearly successful, it begins to attract the interest of people who are more interested in preserving their own income and status than they are in creating value for others. These people include professional executives, lawyers, and accountants. While I hate to be so direct about this, you may want to call these sorts of people “professional bureaucrats.” Professional bureaucrats are people who went to the right schools and have the right education. They know all the right clubs to belong to, the right clothes to wear, and have a view of the world that is, in most cases, based on distinctions between class and background. These sorts of people are most interested in preserving their income level, standard of living, and status vis-à-vis others.
The world of the bureaucrat is one that is defined by the organization for which you work, your background, and the security of your job. The bureaucrat rarely understands what makes the business at issue tick. When bureaucrats come into an organization, they set up structures and procedures to protect their income stream and also to protect their status. They will set up a series of titles for various employees. They will set up reporting systems. The entire fabric of the organization will begin to change. The organization will become based more on being “protectionist” than on growing. I have seen this more times than I can count. Everything in the organization becomes centered on protecting status. That is what bureaucrats do.
In most instances, once an organization becomes overrun by professional bureaucrats it begins a slow process of deterioration and retreat. The reason for this is because the emphasis is now on protecting the interests of the bureaucrats rather than on growing the company. When the bureaucrats were first attracted to the organization (which was then marching forward), people both inside and outside the company more than likely believed that it would never fail and would always be marching forward. Once a company begins to bring in professional bureaucrats and begins to bask in its achievement, it becomes disconnected with the markets or people it serves. The company then begins a period of slow (or rapid) decline.
Companies that are in retreat will also try to manipulate the market in every way they possibly can:
-They may try to get legislation passed to benefit them.
-They may decrease portions or sizes or offer less to increase profits.
-They may constantly offer sales or special deals, or try tricking consumers.
None of these methods work over the long term. Eventually, even the most talented bureaucrats will leave to seek companies that are marching forward and will leave again when that company also goes into retreat. People and resources are attracted to companies and situations that are creating value, not destroying it.
In your search for a job, and in choosing between employers, you need to find an organization that is marching forward. The employer marching forward will provide you with the most important opportunities over the long run and the best overall career. You should also be aware that all employers go through different stages, and when you get in will have a real bearing on what happens to your career over time. The best time to get in is at the beginning of the growth cycle.
This is where the most opportunities typically are.
When you are looking for an employer, you should do everything you can to get a job with the employer who has just begun the march forward. Employers can march forward for decades if they are smart; however, most only march forward for a couple of years. In every economic market there are employers who are marching forward or beginning a march. It is your task to find this sort of employer.
Do Not Be Immobilized in Your Job Search
What You Will Learn
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Several years ago, I was sitting in my office and the most amazing candidate came across my desk. The attorney had a degree in a hard science discipline from a school like CalTech or MIT (I believe it was physics), had gone to a good law school and finished first in his class. Not only that, he was currently working at one of the top law firms in the world and was in a practice area that was not just desirable at the time, it was white hot. His practice area was so in demand at this particular point in time that one law firm I had been dealing with offered another candidate of mine (an attorney only three years out of law school) a $50,000 bonus to take an offer (which was unprecedented at the time). This was the year 2000 and things were more different in this particular year than they ever were in history. The demand for this particular type of attorney was through-the-roof. The candidate who had received this bonus offer did not look 10% as good as the candidate whose resume I was staring at right now.
This stellar attorney wanted me to assist him with moving to another law firm. At this particular point in history, the market was so good that I estimated this person would get interviews at every single law firm that I sent him to. However, as I studied his resume I became nervous. I did not want to offend any of my clients by having them not accept an offer. I figured that law firms would literally be salivating over this candidate and throwing offers at him. I was concerned and wanted to make sure that I did not create a feeding frenzy the likes that had never been seen before.
When the market is really good and a recruiter has an exceptionally good candidate, he/she often needs to be careful because he/she does not want to upset his/her clients if the candidate does not take an offer. As you can imagine, it costs law firms a lot of money to bring people in to interview. They need to schedule the interviews, first of all. These blocks of time that the attorneys are interviewing the person could be used for productive work. With attorneys billing at $800 an hour and more in some of the best law firms, five or six hours of their best attorneys’ time could easily cost a law firm $5000. Law firms will also typically bring an attorney they are recruiting in more than one time, take the attorney recruit out to lunch or dinner and spend time debating amongst each other whether or not they are interested in hiring the attorney. Due to this, I realized that I could really upset a lot of people by sending this attorney to them if he was not interested in working for them. The cost to recruit this person for the average firm, up until an offer was extended, could easily be $20,000.
The best recruiters typically have a tremendous amount of credibility with law firms. If the recruiter tells the law firm to go ahead and extend an offer, the law firm knows that the offer is very likely to be accepted. When I was most actively recruiting, I believe a great part of my success was that I would always tell law firms when offers were going to be accepted. This made my candidates get jobs with the best law firms and it also enabled me to get more offers for my candidates. A good recruiter does not allow his/her clients to play guessing games with candidates.
This particular candidate was in a different part of the United States and I did not end up meeting him face-to-face until weeks later. Instead, I spoke with him on the phone for several hours extensively going through his goals and needs. The situation was somewhat complicated because at the time the candidate was also going through a divorce, and I remember spending just as much time discussing this with him as his job search. However, after days of speaking on the phone, I believed we had finally settled on the perfect firm for him. I say “firm” because it was crystal clear to me that he would almost instantly get an offer from any firm he went into.
There is something else that I want to bring up, which is a really unusual phenomenon that I have noticed with law firms and the most exceptional candidates. Throughout my career I have had a few candidates like this particular one who had perfect records and were incredibly in demand in the market. It is always interesting to me to watch what happens. Something I have learned is that all firms (and employers) have inferiority complexes. For example, had this candidate had a more average record (schools, firm) within 30 minutes of sending him out to law firms they would have immediately started calling to schedule interviews. When you send someone who is incredibly stellar, however, a lot of the firms simply do not end up calling right away to schedule interviews. Instead, they wait for you to call and convince them to interview the person. I am not sure why this is, but my opinion is that it has something to do with the fact that the firms suddenly want to play “coy” when someone who is exceptional shows up. They suddenly do not want to look desperate.
After I sent this candidate out, I called the “coy” law firm a couple of days later and explained to them that the candidate looked like a perfect match for them. I explained to them that I had spoken extensively with the candidate about them and that I thought things would go very well. The firm summarily agreed to book the candidate for an entire day of interviews, followed by a dinner. This was something that law firms rarely did on first interviews. Instead, they typically bring the candidate in for what is called a “screening interview” and meet with the candidate for 20-30 minutes. This is basically so the law firm can get a sense of whether the candidate looks like they might do okay if the interview process goes further. They want to make sure that the candidate is someone who looks like someone they would hire before committing to further interviews.
The day after my candidate came in, I called the law firm seeking information. After sending them this particular candidate, they became a big fan of mine and my phone calls were getting returned in less than 20 minutes. On this particular day, I did not receive a phone call back until several hours later. There is a bit of a ritual that plays itself out with law firms when you send them candidates they really like. I will typically chat with them for an hour or more about nothing. This is something that really breaks down the ice and puts me in a position where they will willingly share information. If the candidate is good enough, the law firm is also “recruiting” when speaking with you and they want to be nice to you so that you will say good things about them to your candidate. With this particular candidate, I had probably spent 2 or 3 hours chatting about nothing with the hiring partner of this particular law firm. We knew a lot of similar people and agreed that we would grab lunch if I was ever in his part of the country.
Late in the day my phone call was returned by the hiring partner’s secretary. “He wanted me to tell you we are not moving forward,” she said.
“Any reason why?” I asked her.
“He did not give me any reason,” she said.
For the next several days I started stalking this particular hiring partner with phone call after phone call. Worse yet, my candidate kept asking me when he was going to be receiving the offer. I told him I did not have any “final news” yet. Now what I am about to say may seem a tad unethical, but I want you to understand a little bit about what really good recruiters do. A really good recruiter can literally snatch candidates from the jaws of death and get them hired when they are about to be rejected. This is something the very best recruiters out there can do. When you have rapport with the law firm they will follow your lead and often actually hire the people you are recommending to them. Here, I needed to know what was going on.
Several days later I managed to track down the hiring partner.
“I am really sorry I did not return your calls,” he said.
“You cannot reject this guy. He is exactly what your law firm has been looking for.”
“I know,” he said.
I sold the partner on the candidate for at least 15 minutes, finally getting him to agree not to reject the candidate and to bring him in for another full day of interviews with different people. I have no idea how I did this, but I did not give up on my candidate. I absolutely refused to give up because I knew that he really wanted to work in this particular law firm.
As the conversation with the partner was winding down he asked me if I had met the attorney. I told him no.
“You should meet him,” he said. Generally, when you are talking to exceptionally important people (and this attorney was, at the time I saw him, in the legal newspapers frequently and I am sure he was making well over $2,000,000 a year) they have the ability to keep most of their interactions to niceties. Here, the fact that this came up at the very end meant that he was leaving me with something that he wanted me to think about. This one remark about meeting the candidate was something I should do.
It occurred to me that I had never seen a picture of the candidate. I had also never had the opportunity to observe his mannerisms and how he might do in interviews. Given the fact that an Oracle of an Attorney had just given me the strongest possible hint that I should meet this attorney, I decided to do so. I called him up and told him I wanted to fly him to Los Angeles at my expense so we could chat and get to know one another. Not a lot of recruiters will do stuff like this, but it was a habit I had really gotten into doing. I flew candidates from all over the country to meet with me, and the process had really yielded some outstanding results. When you get behind someone and show them what they need to do and say once you understand their particular interviewing style, incredible things can happen to them. It can change their lives.
I will never forget the moment this particular candidate walked through the front door of my office. He had the longest hair of any man I had ever seen. His hair went clear down past his buttocks. He had so much hair that he had manipulated it with barrettes or something to keep it away from his eyes. When he sat down and started talking to me he was also quite depressing. He just kept talking about his divorce. The divorce was the least of my worries, however. I simply could not get over how much hair this guy had. I had never seen a man with so much hair in my life.
Hair is a personal thing and I did not want to upset this particular guy and did not bring it up immediately. In fact, it was not until we were eating lunch that I decided I should say something about it. It was the white elephant in the room. I did not want to upset him because men can get really sensitive about their hair.
A couple of years prior, I was visiting my home in Michigan and saw one of my dear childhood friends. He had lost a little bit of hair and he was sitting in the front seat of a car and I was in back. I tapped the back of his head and said “looks like you’re getting a little bald spot.” To the astonishment of everyone in the car he turned around, leaned over the seat, starting punching me in the face and screaming never to call him bald again. It was a bizarre episode from a guy who was traditionally very mellow. It was for this reason that I was careful not to say anything about my candidate’s hair for some time.
“I do not know how to say this,” I finally said as we were eating desert. “But do you think cutting your hair may make it easier for you to get a job?”
Unfortunately, my worst fears were confirmed. The candidate started going off in a rampage, saying “there [was] no fucking way!” he was going to be cutting his hair and would not bow to the establishment and a whole host of other things. He must have gone on a verbal rampage for at least 15 minutes and I realized it was an incredibly sensitive issue for him.
He told me it had taken him over 3 years to grow his current hairdo–just about the amount of time he had been working in his current law firm. He had not always looked like this, and if he had I am sure he would have had a very difficult time getting a job with the law firm he had joined when he was in school.
In addition to his incredible depression over getting divorced, the biggest issue this guy had was his hair. He also told me that if the law firm that was not interested in him and was unwilling to make a decision about him right away, he wanted to look at other firms. A lot of other law firms. We discussed at least 15 more law firms and he told me he wanted to speak with them all. I knew they would all want to speak with him and I was afraid. However, I also knew that he was qualified to work in them and I should abide by his wishes. If they wanted to discriminate against him because of his long hair there was nothing in particular I could do about this. That was their issue and not mine.
Over the next several weeks he interviewed at every single one of the 15 law firms and was rejected from every single one of them. After he was rejected from those firms I managed to get him interviews at several other law firms, and he was rejected from these as well. While the law firms did not say it directly, I knew that for all of them the issue was the hair. They could just not get over this.
The stupidest and saddest thing ended up happening with this candidate. Due to his long hair, no one ended up hiring him. He might have been able to get hired if he had a little bit better attitude, but as the interviews progressed he seemed to get angrier and angrier. At one point he told me he was contemplating suicide. Everything just kept going downhill.
A couple of months later he finally called me up and said, “I may consider cutting my hair.” At this point, however, he had already interviewed with almost all of the firms in his geographic region of the United States. There was not much more that he could do. He ended up dropping off the map and doing something else besides practicing law. His career as he knew it, had come to an end.
I have thought about this particular episode several times throughout the years, because this person sabotaged himself and his career. This particular person could have fixed everything by simply getting a haircut. He was in charge of what happened to him, just like you are in charge of what happens to you as well. You choose what the world and your career will be for you. As George Bernard Shaw wrote in Mrs. Warren’s Profession:
People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don’t believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and if they can’t find them, make them.
This statement is incredibly relevant to your life as well. You are in charge of what happens to you. Anything you want to happen, you can make happen.
If someone was to come to you and say that unless you got a job working as a bank teller in some part of the United States within the next 12 months, you would be executed at the end of 12 months, you would find a way to get a job as a bank teller.
- If it meant cutting your hair, you would cut your hair.
- If it meant moving to another part of the country, you would move to another part of the country.
- If it meant applying to 10,000 jobs, you would apply to 10,000 jobs.
- If it meant mass mailing your resume to every bank branch in the United States, you would mass mail your resume.
- If it meant calling every bank manager in the United States, you would call everyone you could.
- If it meant losing 100 pounds so you were more presentable, you would lose 100 pounds.
- If it meant taking English lessons so that you sounded better, you would take English lessons.
- If it meant learning how to do math equations in your head, you would learn how to do this.
- If it meant learning to always be smiling, you would learn to always smile.
- If it meant learning to laugh at stupid jokes, you would learn to laugh at stupid jokes.
In fact, my guess is that you would do absolutely whatever it took in order to get a job as a bank teller. You would make sure that you did not leave any stone unturned, and would do whatever it took to survive. I know you would, anyone would do this. People are in the business of surviving.
Why then do so many of us not do whatever it takes to get every job we are going after? You need to do whatever you can within your power to get a job. You need to go after a job like someone who is going to be executed if they do not get the job. This level of commitment to your job search will change everything. This is what you need to do if you are going to get the job that you are seeking. This is what the people who really succeed do. They make their search for a job an all consuming obsession.
What I saw that was so disappointing in my long-haired candidate was that he was not doing everything within his power to get a job. You may think it is unfair that someone cannot have hair past their buttocks and get a job in a white shoe law firm paying well into the six figures, but this is just the way it is. Society has rules and we can use these rules for our benefit or against us. Having hair that is not past your buttocks is a rule that must be followed to get a job with most major law firms. I am sure there have been historical exceptions, but probably not many.
As a consequence of this man not playing by the rules and not doing everything within his power to get a job, he was almost driven to suicide. In fact, he may very well have been, I do not know. What I would impress upon you is that you need to do whatever you possibly can to succeed in your job search. If you do not do this, you will not experience the success you are entitled to.
Many of us believe that being smart is about how high our IQ is. However, the ranks of the unemployed contain plenty of exceptionally intelligent people. The real test of someone’s intelligence, in my opinion, is their ability to take action and get the results they want from life. When I think about the story of the man with the long hair, what I think about is immobilization. His job search was immobilized because he refused to cut his hair. Are your immobilized in your own job search and career? If you are not doing whatever it takes to get a job then you are surely immobilized.
Does your lack of self confidence prevent you from applying to every possible job? If so then you are surely immobilized. Does your fear of the unknown prevent you from looking for a better job? If so, then you are surely immobilized. Does your jealousy of someone else prevent you from working effectively in your job? If so, you are surely immobilized. You are immobilized whenever you are not functioning at your highest and best state. This is what you need to do and if you are looking for a job, the most important thing you can possibly do is throw out all of the stops and do whatever it takes get the job of your dreams. You never want to be immobilized.
You Need to Stop Competing and Seeing Differences Between You and Others
What You Will Learn
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If you are looking for a job, trying to improve in your current job, or simply wish to experience a better life, there is one thing you need to do: You need to be friends with everyone you meet in business, and stop competing and seeing differences. This is a statement that falls on deaf ears for most people. In fact, this is the exact opposite of the way most of us think. Instead, we view others as competitors and the slices of pie as limited. We view opportunities as few and limited, and feel the need to compete for what little there is.
What are the rewards for looking and seeing commonalty between you and others? They are incredible. In the Year 2000 I started a legal recruiting firm. I did not start the firm until around March of that year. I had no legal recruiting experience and knew absolutely nothing about about the market. Since I had been a practicing attorney for years, the fact that I was now recruiting seemed almost surreal to me in many respects. I had decided to just enter a zone where I did not care what happened to me. When you are in the recruiting business, what typically happens is that law firms will call you in a very formal way to tell you they have no interest in a candidate of yours. The conversations will typically last no more than 30 to 45 seconds.
“We are calling to let you know that we have no interest in John Smith,” they might say.
“Thank you,” would be the standard response.
After several weeks of this I began to feel that the entire situation was somewhat absurd. This is what recruiters do all over the country. I decided that the best thing I could do was mix it up.
“We’re calling to let you know we have no interest in John Smith,” a caller might say. The callers were typically women in their mid-20’s to early 30’s who were called “recruiting coordinators” inside law firms.
“You know, I was just outside having my third Diet Coke in the past hour and I realized that I have not heard your voice in some time. I really like your voice, how are you?”
“Fine,” they might say, still a little stiff.
“I am not sure how much longer I am going to be doing this recruiting thing. It is really exhausting. Law firms are really uptight. Do you enjoy making all these calls? It must be a real buzz kill just calling a bunch of recruiters all day. I cannot believe you and I are doing the jobs we are doing.”
This is what I would do with every caller. Eventually, I would get into my personal life and they would start to talk about themselves as well. A few months into this I was astonished when some of these women called me on the way home from work on their cell phones just to chat about random stuff, unrelated to work. One woman’s husband was going to be building a deck on the back of her house that weekend; one man who was a recruiting coordinator was going sailing; another girl was leaving her job because she wanted to ride a motorcycle across the United States.
I did the same thing with my candidates. (I actually ended up marrying one of them a few years later.) My candidates and I would talk about the most random stuff. Only about 1-2% of my time on the phone with my candidates and law firms was ever about anything having to do with actual business. I enjoyed what I was doing and made numerous friends. I looked at the entire process as something that was meant to be fun, establishing connections and nothing more.
Prior to becoming an attorney, I had been an asphalt sealing contractor around Michigan for over 7 years. Much of my job involved going door-to-door and selling my service. Someone I had never seen before would answer the door and I might say something like:
“Hi. I’m here to sell you the service of putting some asphalt sealer on your driveway but I am not in a very good mood right now. My girlfriend from school is working in Washington, DC and she just broke up with me so she can see other people this summer. I’m not too happy about it.” This is the last thing people expect from a salesman.
I would show up at the home of the person, well dressed and looking professional, and invariably the person would start talking to me about my personal situation and offering me advice. I would never have to sell the person anything. I would slip in how much the service was going to cost and the person would always agree. The next year I would show up at the person’s front door and they might ask me about my personal life and I would tell them what was going on, and they would do the same thing. Using this particular method of selling asphalt sealing, I was able to become probably the largest residential asphalt sealing contractor in Michigan in less than a couple of years. It is all about treating people as your friend.
I never talked about the service. I just disarmed myself, exposed a vulnerability of some sort and let the person start consoling me and offering advice. I liked getting the advice.
In the legal recruiting industry I was amazed at how fast the business grew by me just mellowing out and being disarmed. By the end of 2000, with less than 7 full months of recruiting under my belt, I had made 29 placements which had generated over $1,000,000 in fees. The most prestigious and well known recruiting firms at the time all wanted me to merge my recruiting firm with their recruiting firm. The phones were ringing off the hook with referrals and people wanting to work for me. I had people flying to Los Angeles to meet with me and seek my advice about how to get a job from places as diverse as New York and San Francisco. It was as if I could do no wrong in the work I was in. None of this was just due to the economy being really good, either. In the year 2002, I ended up placing every single candidate I worked with. The legal market was horrible in the year 2002.
I am telling you this to show the power of chilling out, going with the flow and treating everyone you are dealing with as a friend and not a competitor. Make yourself vulnerable and figure out how to deal with everyone you are encountering in a pleasant, happy way. Your career depends on this. You have no competitors. The world is yours for the taking, but you cannot take it in a way which views the world as having limited resources and opportunities.
The competition in law firms to become partner is something that has always interested me, because I am an attorney and also have spent the majority of my career in the legal industry. When most people think of becoming a partner in a law firm, they view the competition as internal between them and different attorneys in the law firm also competing to be partners. The young attorneys almost invariably view themselves as competing for a limited slice of pie. The idea in most law firms is that they can only make a limited number of partners per year. Accordingly, the attorneys inside the law firm will work as much as they possibly can and play one political game after another to get the people they are competing with off of the partnership track, getting themselves ahead. The competition these attorneys go through with each other can last years and it is brutal.
Few attorneys in this competition really ever step back and take the time to realize what they are competing for: They are competing for a share of the law firm’s profits. In this respect, however, law firms only make money when they have clients who are willing to pay for the law firm’s services. The easiest way any of these attorneys could virtually guarantee that she will make partner, would be to bring in a tremendous amount of business and concentrate on this the second he/she got out of law school. An attorney with enough business can work in virtually any law firm out there, and they will be welcomed as a partner in almost any law firm.
If you have enough clients, it does not matter where you go to school and it does not matter how good you are at political games within your firm. The person who brings in the money and the clients is the one who ultimately controls everything. In fact, one of the largest law firm collapses of 2009 (Heller Ehrman) happened because one partner with a tremendous amount of business left the firm. As a January 26, 2009 story in the Wall Street Journal recounted:
Heller’s management focused on trying to merge with a bigger, stronger competitor, concluding that it was the only way the firm could stay alive amid continuing lawyer defections. At a shareholder gathering last spring in Colorado Springs, Colo., Heller’s chairman, Mr. Larrabee, said the firm had plenty of choices of merger partners. Last summer, Baker & McKenzie LLP, one of the nation’s largest firms, emerged as a serious candidate. But after weeks of negotiations, the deal cratered in August, partly because of business conflicts. Heller lawyers had sued many of Baker’s clients.
A new suitor soon emerged. On Aug. 21, Heller gathered 40 key lawyers at the San Francisco Ritz-Carlton to discuss its potential white knight: Mayer Brown LLP, an 1,800-lawyer firm. The mood was upbeat.
But another problem cropped up. Robert Fram and Robert Haslam, whose intellectual-property group was among the firm’s highest grossing, had said they were considering heading to another firm. Heller attorneys implored Messrs. Fram and Haslam to stay. If they left, some lawyers believed, the Mayer deal would crumble.
M. Laurence Popofsky, a Heller lifer who was the firm’s chairman from 1988 to 1993, recalls telling Mr. Fram over lunch: “People’s pensions are in jeopardy. Employees are at risk….If you do this and don’t give the merger a chance, you will hurt an awful lot of people.”
Mr. Fram says Mr. Popofsky and others tried to persuade him to stay. But his team, he says, didn’t want to join Mayer and then jump ship if they were unhappy. “We didn’t feel like that was something we were ethically comfortable doing,” he says. On Aug. 29, Mr. Fram informed Heller that he was leaving.
Here, one of the oldest and most respected law firms in the United States collapsed primarily due to the departure of an important partner. The importance of having business inside of a law firm is paramount and of incredible importance for an attorney’s success. The entire success of a law firm can hinge on whether or not it has business. What this means is that the competition inside law firms between people seeking to be partners does not really have to be internal. The only thing that the associates seeking to be partner need to do to guarantee their success is go out and get as much business as they can. Indeed, their true success or failure is almost entirely based upon their ability to bring in business. There are no internal opponents and no external ones either. There is is a huge pie of opportunity out there (business waiting to be claimed) and all someone needs to do is go out into the world and claim this opportunity for themselves. The attorneys engaged in brutal competition with one another at law firms all over the country would be well served to step back and realize that all they have to do is stop competing with the people inside their own law firm and go out into the world and get clients.
You need to understand that you have no opponents. Your success will largely be determined by you ability to go into the world, find commonality and make friends with the people around you. Establish commonalities and do not look for differences.
Using this one simple idea in business can have profound rewards. It can literally change your career and life. You must abolish from your mind the idea that the people you are dealing with in your career and in business are your competition. You must eradicate the idea from your mind that you even have any competition. A quote from Wallace Wattles in The Science of Getting Rich is instructive in this regard:
Intelligent Substance will make things for you, but it will not take things away from someone else and give them to you. You must get rid of the thought of competition. You are to create, not compete for what is already created. You do not want to have to take anything away from any one. You do not want to drive sharp bargains. You do not have to cheat, or take advantage. You do not need to let any man work for less than he earns. You do not have to covet the property of others, or look at it with wishful eyes; no man has anything of which you cannot have the like, and that without taking what he has away from him. You are to become a creator, not a competitor; you are going to get what you want, but in such a way that when you get it every other man will have more than he has right now.
It easy to find enemies out there. It is easy to be suspicious of people. It is easy to not take extra time with people. It is easy to find reasons not to be friends with people. This is what most of what the world does. This is what we are trained to do. We look for differences. We want to find how people are different than us and not the same. This is a path that is not going to take you anywhere and will not help you. If you want to experience the most incredible success you have ever known, if you want your career and life to change, you need to find commonalities between you and everyone you come in contact with. People will open doors for you when they identify with you.
Over the past several years I have watched Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen rise from nothing to become two of the most important and respected best selling authors of all time with their Chicken Soup for the Soul series of books. Chicken Soup for the Soul was the #1 book on the New York Times’ best seller list for over 100 weeks and is one of the best selling books of all time. Canfield and Hansen have made millions of dollars through the sale of these books, and have also done countless other projects related to these books.
The publication of these books has rocketed them from small time to international stardom practically overnight. I study success for a living so that I can share it with you and change your life. I have been to several of Canfield and Hansen’s seminars because they typically have pretty good speakers and are somewhat interesting. One of Hansen’s most popular seminars is his Mega Book Marketing Seminar, where hundreds of people spend three days learning how they can hopefully write and sell a best selling book. Hansen has been doing this seminar for years and each year gets up and does a Power Point presentation about what a great marketer he is due to the incredible sales of this book. Sometimes his partner, Canfield, gets up and shows a photo copy of a million dollar check he received from a publisher. On the several occasions I have seen Canfield speak, he also always shows a picture of his house and tells everyone how it cost $5,000,000.
I like these guys and they really do seem to have a bit of an interest in helping people. Canfield is also featured in the movie The Secret where he talks about how he was able to make his book popular by landing an article in the National Enquirer about his book.
Yesterday, I found some marketing inside a magazine sent to me called Radio-TV Interview Report and saw a testimonial from Canfield and Hansen. Essentially, what this magazine does is allow authors to advertise the fact that they are available for radio and television ads if producers or anyone it interested in interviewing them. The testimonial they put in this magazine really threw me off for a reason I will share with you in a moment:
We’ve done several things for marketing which worked well, and advertising in Radio-TV Interview Report was one of the most effective tools we have used. When our book was first published, no one knew who we were. But all that changed after appearing on hundreds of radio and television talk shows. We averaged anywhere from 3 to 4 radio phone interviews a day for that first year. We’re convinced that this ongoing barrage of radio and television publicity helped create the word-of-mouth necessary for our book to become a national best seller!
Our ads in Radio-TV Interview Report helped us hit #1 on the New York Times best seller list, and we’ve stayed there for 100 weeks and counting! But none of that would have happened had we not been willing to do several interviews a day every day on stations large and small–a commitment we continue to do to this day. We highly recommend RTIR whenever we advise authors and speakers who want to get publicity easily and inexpensively.
Despite having attended a few of their seminars, this was the first time I realized that they had grown their business so fast through advertising in this particular publication. Notwithstanding, what is so interesting to me about this is that according to Canfield and Hansen, most of their success was due to simply chatting on the phone with various radio stations across the country. This is no different than a major cause of the success I experienced as a recruiter or asphalt contractor. When you just mellow out and do everything you can to start relating to people and connecting with them, a lot of stuff happens. If you think about it, 3 to 4 radio interviews a day takes a lot of time. In fact, this is how it looks like they spent the substantial majority of their time for at least a year. The key to their success, then, was establishing affinity with others. There is nothing standoffish about this. This ability to connect with people rocketed them to having one of the best selling books of all time.
One of the easiest ways to get a job is to establish lines of communication with the hiring personnel or people who work for the employer you want to work with. Once you establish communication, having the people you are working with feel comfortable and develop an affinity for you is even more important. Once you have achieved affinity and communication, then you are not only in a good position in terms of getting a job, but can excel in the new position as well.
It is very easy for me to tell the relative health of companies and firms. When you go into a firm and see people getting along very well, joking and having a good time, you are generally in a successful company. The reason is because the people inside the company are communicating, and feel comfortable with one another. When you go inside a company and there does not appear to be solid communication between people and groups of people, you are most often in a company that is in trouble to some degree.
Having open lines of communication is among the most important thing you can possibly do, and is something that will consistently get and keep you employed. Be friendly with everyone you meet. Stop looking for differences, and do everything within your power to find affinity with other people. This will change your career permanently and take you to a far different place.
Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss it, you will land among the stars.