To-Do Lists, Tactics, Strategies and Going to the Moon

Companies, governments and other organizations are typically organized in the following way:

At the top of the pyramid are people whose job is to strategize for the organization. These are the people who set the entire tone for a group and define what it is supposed to accomplish.

• In the case of a war, for example, the President might declare that an overall strategy is to extinguish terrorists in Afghanistan, to make the world a safer place.
• In the case of an organization, a strategy may be to legalize something that is currently illegal.
• In the case of a company, a strategy may be to create a product that dominates a given sector.

Every group needs to have a strategic objective that is promoted by its leaders if it plans to survive in the long-term. “Without a vision the people perish.”

The reason this is relevant to your career is because when you are choosing a company to work for, or even when you are governing your own life, it is absolutely crucial that a clear strategy is defined. You need a plan for your overall life and career that you are seeking to accomplish. I have met countless people throughout the years and asked them what they wanted to accomplish in their lives, and the responses I got almost invariably reflect what eventually ends up happening to them.

I once met a man who told me that his vision for his life was to own a bike store. At the time he was the president of a division of a major company. He had the right pedigree, schooling and personality for his job at the time. However, his long-term goal was so inconsistent with what he was doing for work, I could not believe it. A few months after he told me about his goal, he lost his job and ended up dropping off the face of the earth. It was so strange what ended up happening with him, but it was not difficult to believe. His overall objective ultimately led him to doing something different.

I have met so many people throughout the years who have absolutely no strategy. They may have gotten good grades and they may have gone to great schools. They may get jobs with the best companies and firms. However, the persons without an overall strategy for what they want to accomplish with their life, never rise very high. The people who head companies, governments and other organizations, and who make these organizations thrive are typically masters at setting strategy for both their personal overall objectives and those of the organizations they lead.

When I was practicing law there was an attorney I worked with who used to keep meticulous “to-do” lists on her desk. She was a very good attorney and nothing ever managed to get by her. Each day she would do a new to-do list and she would prioritize different tasks based on what she had not completed the day before. She was an exceptional attorney who was well respected by the partners and others in the law firm. During a time when the best attorneys in the law firm were getting elected to become partners, this woman was one of the chosen few. I was not surprised and I do not think anyone ever was surprised by this. This attorney was very good at accomplishing everything on her to-do lists, and at the time I would have been willing to bet that becoming partner had always been at the top of her long-term accomplishment list.

I came to know this girl quite well, having spent some time around her and other people at the firm. The thing was that she actually had no major goals in particular for her life. She just did her job as well as she could do it, and creating small daily goals just worked very well for her to progress her career. I want to be clear that this girl was also generally what you might call a super achiever. She had attended Harvard Law School, was on law review in law school, and had also clerked for a very prestigious judge. Today, this woman is still a partner in this law firm, and I am confident she makes an excellent living and is doing exceedingly well in her law career. There are thousands of people like this in many of the most prestigious positions throughout the country. Many of these people I have known throughout the years have arrived at their positions due to continually setting daily and weekly goals. Goals, to-do lists and so forth are very powerful things. In fact, if you are not setting daily to-do lists and goals you are really short changing yourself. The reason you are short changing yourself is because without utilizing these tools you will accomplish far, far less with your time.

People who do not create daily and weekly to-do lists spend most of their time “reacting” to various things that happen to them throughout the day. These people may spend more time than necessary on personal or business phone calls, spend more time than necessary at lunch cavorting with coworkers and so forth. They will spend more time on unimportant tasks than necessary and less time on important tasks. Their days will meander along, with lower levels of accomplishment and productivity than they might otherwise have–if they were just willing to set some goals. The person who goes into an office or job each day without a “to-do” list or a clear set of goals will always be problematic because his or her efforts will be scattered and less focused, as compared to the efforts of those who do set daily goals.

This particular woman will always be successful wherever she goes. However, I highly doubt she will ever become a political leader, lead the law firm, start a law firm, or do anything like this with her life. In fact, she will probably spend her entire life doing exactly what she is doing right now. The reason is that she is someone who has mastered the art of being tactical, but who does not have an overall understanding of strategy. In many respects, strategy is far more important than tactics.

I know many people who have become famous, incredibly successful, wealthy and so forth. I am privileged and fortunate to know these people, and from these relationships I have been able to learn what has worked and what has not worked in helping people attain success. In every single case, prior to these people reaching incredible heights in their careers and lives they always had a major overarching strategy. For example:

• “I want to be an internationally famous movie star.”
• “I want to start the most profitable large law firm in California.”
• “I want to inspire millions of people through my work.”
• “I want to be an incredibly rich plastic surgeon.”

These are all things that I have heard people say back when they were just average Jane Does and John Does– before years later emerging on the side of something fantastic that they did with their lives. The most successful super achievers out there accomplish incredible results due to simply having a strategy. When you have a strategy everything else falls into place.

In order to succeed in any job you need to have the following (1) a personal expectation of daily and weekly goals you can write down and meet or (2) a good manager who gives you certain daily and weekly goals you can meet. Beyond this, you need a strategy. In every job it is essential that you are working with a company, or organization, with a concrete strategy, and that you amass a helpful set of assumptions that relate to the tactics you are to follow in your job.

The attorney in my example set her own expectations and goals. This is generally how it is for most attorneys. After a few years attorneys become quite independent in much of their work and know various procedures and whatever may need to be done in the matters they work on. They are given a great deal of independence in terms of how they are to work, and much of what they do involves responding to court deadlines, client deadlines and doing various work in response to different needs that may arise. Clearly an attorney who creates lists of daily and weekly goals is likely to accomplish much more throughout the day than one who does not. In addition, by using to-do lists this attorney, being so focused and organized, is unlikely to miss or forget to tend to various tasks.

Attorneys who do not set various daily, or weekly goals are likely to miss a lot of important deadlines. They are likely to not be as productive as they could be in various work-related matters, and their careers and productivity will suffer as a result. These are the sorts of attorneys who end up getting fired.

In contrast, the attorney who has explicit goals day to day knows what is expected of his or her performance at all times. An experienced attorney knows when certain things are to be done and is prepared to get them accomplished according to deadline. These skills are earned through experience; for instance, at one time or another, most successful attorneys were micromanaged and were given smaller assignments as young attorneys. Most jobs out there are not like this. In fact, the “average job” of an executive, or any other worker, requires that the person meets certain targets or objectives, which they receive from a manager.

In a well run organization, in which the employee does not know or learn “instinctively” what he or she is supposed to be doing, there are typically managers at various levels who give the employee tasks to do and objectives to be met. These managers at various levels are assisting the organization in carrying out its overall strategy and strategic objective. Strategic plans are the long-term and grander objective that is to be accomplished, and the tactics are the means for each individual to do a given task.

Most companies and organizations have what are called middle managers. The role of a middle manager is typically to insure that the strategic objectives requested from the higher level executives are carried out by the lower ranks. The middle manager may be told to start selling a certain amount of given product in the state of New Hampshire and may therefore recruit a force of salesmen and others to assist with the task. The middle manager may recruit salesmen, set goals for the salesmen and get others to assist in carrying out this objective. Good middle managers will have a series of goals and other measurements to insure that the people they are supervising are meeting their goals. The people working for the middle manager will be required to meet a series of tactical targets in order to reach their specific goals. Typically, the middle manager will also be given a list of goals by upper management, which makes clear what goals the manager and his team are required to meet.

The higher up you go on the food chain in any organization, the more strategy is involved. The lower you go on the food chain in any organization, the more tactics are involved. Typically, before any worker or person can be in charge of setting strategy, they must prove that they can follow instructions and be tactical.

In your job it is extremely important that you are working for managers and organizations that are skilled in both being strategic and setting tactical requirements for your work. An organization without any particular strategy is unlikely to survive for long. The reason for this is that the people working within the organization are never going to have much of an idea as to what they should be doing. They may go about their jobs, for example, but their actions will be inefficient and scattered. People will be hired inappropriately and fired inappropriately. People inside the organization may not be given coherent or measurable orders by their managers. It is important that you are always working for a good manager; the more organized the manager the better. You can only meet goals and accomplish various tasks when you know exactly what is required of you. Similarly, a manager can only tell you what is required of you when he or she too would have been given tactical goals to follow in pursuit of a strategic objective.

If you were to drop a bunch of scientists (or workers in any profession) into an office building and tell them to “do something useful”, most likely nothing productive would occur. Without a leader everyone would just do their own thing. Without a goal or focus, people would basically sit around doing not much of anything, fiddling their thumbs all day. This would be the beginning of a very strange sort of company or organization; however, surprisingly, this sort of thing happens all the time in government agencies, businesses and other organizations. Without any direction people are also extremely unhappy and do not like their jobs. A business setup like this does not position itself to succeed in the long run.

Now, if you were to get a group of scientists together and state: “Build a rocket to go to the moon in less than ten years…” something very different would occur. One of my favorite speeches is President John F. Kennedy’s May 25, 1961 address to Congress, in which he sets the “strategic objective” of going to the moon:

I therefore ask the Congress, above and beyond the increases I have earlier requested for space activities, to provide the funds which are needed to meet the following national goals:

First, I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish. We propose to accelerate the development of the appropriate lunar space craft. We propose to develop alternate liquid and solid fuel boosters, much larger than any now being developed, until certain which is superior. We propose additional funds for other engine development and for unmanned explorations–explorations which are particularly important for one purpose which this nation will never overlook: the survival of the man who first makes this daring flight. But in a very real sense, it will not be one man going to the moon–if we make this judgment affirmatively, it will be an entire nation. For all of us must work to put him there.

Secondly, an additional 23 million dollars, together with 7 million dollars already available, will accelerate development of the Rover nuclear rocket. This gives promise of some day providing a means for even more exciting and ambitious exploration of space, perhaps beyond the moon, perhaps to the very end of the solar system itself.

Third, an additional 50 million dollars will make the most of our present leadership, by accelerating the use of space satellites for world-wide communications.

Fourth, an additional 75 million dollars–of which 53 million dollars is for the Weather Bureau–will help give us at the earliest possible time a satellite system for world-wide weather observation.

Let it be clear–and this is a judgment which the Members of the Congress must finally make–let it be clear that I am asking the Congress and the country to accept a firm commitment to a new course of action, a course which will last for many years and carry very heavy costs: 531 million dollars in fiscal ‘62–an estimated seven to nine billion dollars additional over the next five years. If we are to go only half way, or reduce our sights in the face of difficulty, in my judgment it would be better not to go at all.

Now this is a choice which this country must make, and I am confident that under the leadership of the Space Committees of the Congress, and the Appropriating Committees, that you will consider the matter carefully.

It is a most important decision that we make as a nation. But all of you have lived through the last four years and have seen the significance of space and the adventures in space, and no one can predict with certainty what the ultimate meaning will be of mastery of space.

I believe we should go to the moon. But I think every citizen of this country as well as the Members of the Congress should consider the matter carefully in making their judgment, to which we have given attention over many weeks and months, because it is a heavy burden, and there is no sense in agreeing or desiring that the United States take an affirmative position in outer space, unless we are prepared to do the work and bear the burdens to make it successful. If we are not, we should decide today and this year.

This decision demands a major national commitment of scientific and technical manpower, material and facilities, and the possibility of their diversion from other important activities where they are already thinly spread. It means a degree of dedication, organization and discipline which have not always characterized our research and development efforts. It means we cannot afford undue work stoppages, inflated costs of material or talent, wasteful interagency rivalries, or a high turnover of key personnel.

New objectives and new money cannot solve these problems. They could in fact, aggravate them further–unless every scientist, every engineer, every serviceman, every technician, contractor, and civil servant gives his personal pledge that this nation will move forward, with the full speed of freedom, in the exciting adventure of space.

An organization and the people inside an organization, who have tactical as well as strategic objectives, are always able to function far better than those that do not.

The employees will be given orders, goals and so forth that are to be met, and they will know that if they are on task, they will be doing what is expected of them in their job. A law firm, for example, may tell its attorneys that they are “required” to bill 1,800 hours a year. As long as the attorneys do this they presumably are meeting their goals. How the attorneys meet this goal is up to them–as long as they meet it. They are responsible for managing their day-to-day tasks and activities in order to achieve this objective. With goals they are required to meet, employees know what to do–and when employees know what to do they can be effective with their time and can contribute to the organization’s objectives. If employees do not have a series of tactical objectives they can follow, they will not be able, in most companies and organizations, to succeed as they should.

You need to be part of a company with a strategic objective and you should seek out companies with strategic objectives that you believe in. However, it is not simply enough for a company to have a strategic objective. The company must also have managers and others who are constantly setting goals and tactical objectives in coordination with their managers, to reach the longer-term strategic objectives. I would encourage you to create to-do lists on a daily basis that are taking you towards your goals.

The most crucial first step, though, is devising an overall strategic objective for your life and career. You need to know where you are going. There is power in to-do lists, but before creating any to-do list, the most important thing you can do is set a goal for where you want your “to do list” to take you. And then, eventually, you will get there.

Why the Best Executives are So Highly Paid

The higher I have risen in my career, the more criticism and the more obstacles I have faced. In today’s world, if you lay off an employee, fire someone, or make any other potential decision that upsets people you will face incredible scrutiny. Former employees will go on blogs and criticize you and your leadership style. You will be attacked by many people. This is something that has happened to every leader and every organizer throughout the ages. The leaders of companies, organizations and religions are subject to incredible criticism and attacks by virtue of the position they are in. In some countries, the leaders are assassinated. Anyone who organizes groups of men and women, whether it is a country, a religion, or a company, will face criticism and pressures that the average working man and woman simply do not face.

When you go to the worst neighborhoods in any city in America you will find areas where there is rampant unemployment–people are living on the street, and where drugs, prostitution and murder rates are all high. The people you will find in these areas are those who are unable to follow orders and to successfully work for others, for the most part. They are people without jobs.

When you drive out of the ghetto you will find average, middle class and working class neighborhoods, where you will pass countless rows of houses, in which the televisions flicker each night. Inside each of these homes is a man who goes to an average job each day, follows orders and gets paid. He lives much better than the man in the ghetto, and his ability to follow orders and work in an organized system is rewarded. He gets a roof over his head and a job that brings him a steady paycheck.

The better the area, the more likely you will find men who are incredibly skilled in following orders, and in addition to following orders, they are usually in positions where they are giving orders–and are highly skilled in doing this. The better middle class neighborhoods will contain doctors, lawyers and other high level professionals, who have gone to school and learned to follow orders and procedures properly. These neighborhoods may also contain highly skilled laborers. The best neighborhoods will contain the upper level managers. Again we are talking about highly skilled people.

Then, in every city–as there has always been, you will find homes that are gigantic and have gates and other amenities that boggle the mind. These are the homes that are lived in by the wealthiest men. Some of these homes are so fantastic that the average man cannot even imagine setting foot inside them, much less living inside. These are typically not the homes of the men who follow orders, or are skilled in following orders. Instead, these are the men who are mostly skilled at giving orders, creating procedures and getting incredible amounts of work done through hundreds, if not thousands, of people. The most successful men, or women become this way because of the amount of work they can accomplish, and often the number of people they can get to do all the work that needs to be done.

The man who shovels a ditch each day is only affecting the dirt in front of him. He is paid accordingly. The man who supervises a group of ditch diggers is paid more because he is able to ensure that more work gets done by a group. The man who manages the group that supervises the group of ditch diggers is paid even more. And so on. The more skilled the executive, the more he is able to control, and the more work he is able to get accomplished. This requires an understanding of people, the environment, and the economy, and it involves making numerous decisions and calculations whilst taking every factor into account each day.

One of the most fascinating questions that I have heard before is why do certain executives in major corporations earn so much money. When you see a large company like General Electric, Home Depot, Disney, Apple and so forth, you will generally find Chief Executive Officers who are earning millions and sometimes tens of millions of dollars per year. It may seem hard for you to believe that someone’s efforts are actually worth $50,000,000 a year; however, there is a reason these people are paid so much, which is very easy to see. Nevertheless, throughout my entire life I have heard numerous people complain about the high salaries that top level executives receive. These complaints keep up year after year, but the salaries of the top executives in big corporations never end up decreasing. Instead, they end up increasing every year. For example, a recent article in the Atlanta Business News relates:

Even as the U.S. economy suffered its worst downturn in decades last year, many of Georgia’s leading public companies pushed pay for their top executives higher.

Retired Coca-Cola chairman Neville Isdell had a total compensation package that topped $23 million.

Delta Air Lines CEO Richard Anderson ranked third in the AJC survey at $17.4 million.

Current Coca-Cola chairman Muhtar Kent has a total compensation package of more than $19 million.

Median pay for senior Georgia executives rose 3 percent in 2009 to $1.88 million, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution analysis of pay packages for more than 100 executives of Georgia’s 20 largest publicly owned companies.

…[These increases came during] a year when 13 of the 20 companies saw their net income fall, and 17 saw the price of their stock drop. http://www.ajc.com/business/top-63374.html

WASHINGTON (CNN) — One day after President Obama ripped Wall Street executives for their “shameful” decision to hand out $18 billion in bonuses in 2008, Congress may finally have had enough.

“You can’t use taxpayer money to pay out $18 billion in bonuses,” an angry Sen. Claire McCaskill says.

An angry U.S. senator introduced legislation Friday to cap compensation for employees of any company that accepts federal bailout money.

Under the terms of a bill introduced by Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Missouri, no employee would be allowed to make more than the president of the United States.

Obama’s current annual salary is $400,000.

“We have a bunch of idiots on Wall Street that are kicking sand in the face of the American taxpayer,” an enraged McCaskill said on the floor of the Senate. “They don’t get it. These people are idiots. You can’t use taxpayer money to pay out $18 billion in bonuses.” http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/01/30/executive.pay/

Why do the salaries of the top executives in various corporations keep rising despite the anger of politicians, bad economic conditions and so forth? The reason this keeps occurring is mainly because exceptional executives are rare. The truly exceptional executive, or corporate leader, is someone that very few companies can locate. The exceptional executive has the ability to lead a company and its people, and can organize all the necessary resources to get things done. There are no schools that can effectively teach someone to be an exceptional leader, or how to organize resources and marshal them in an effective way. The skill of a great executive leader is something that is more innate than taught. The skill of a great leader and executive involves controlling things and people around them (like the ditch digger)–but often also controlling people, places and things that may be thousands of miles away from them. Very few people have the ability to exert control beyond their immediate location.

The average worker and manager do not have the ability to do anything but control what is around them. A man can be a good salesman, for example, but inspiring an entire sales department and getting tons of salesmen to work productively for him is an entirely different matter. It is for this reason that good salesmen rarely become good sales managers. It is even rarer that someone can control and inspire and make productive not just a sales department, but also an accounting department. It is even rarer that someone can do this for an entire company and all its many divisions. Rarer still is the person who can do this for an entire company, and then make his company a leader in its field.

Everyone in any company is generally under the supervision of an executive of some sort. The people’s job security, and the growth and survival of the company is dependent upon the decisions that the top level administrator is making. When companies fail it is generally due to the skills of the executive (or lack thereof) and how the executive has organized (or has failed to organize) the resources of the company. If, under the direction of some executive, a company starts to perform poorly, there are many possible factors that might point towards the executive’s performance as a possible cause for the decline in productivity. For instance:

• The executive may have people doing jobs that are unnecessary, and which do not in any way lead to the profitability of the company.
• He or she may have too many people on staff to do various jobs.
• He or she may be pursuing unprofitable lines of business and therefore wasting resources.
• He or she may be making decisions about certain markets or business dealings that do not make any sense.
• He or she may be engaging in graft, corruption, or other illegal activities that hurt the company in the long run.
• He or she may be overpaying certain employees and underpaying others who deserve a higher salary.
• He or she may not be organized enough to properly produce and deliver the company’s product or service.
• He or she may not be hiring the right people.
• He or she may not be inspiring employees to do good work.
• He or she may be hiring the wrong people.
• He or she may be paying too much for supplies and goods that the company buys.

There are thousands of small decisions, relating to those above, which a good executive and corporate leader needs to consider on a daily basis. These are the sorts of decisions the highest paid executives make, and they are the sorts of decisions that can assist corporations in reaching their objectives. The better these sorts of decisions are made the better the company or organization will do. These decisions are so important to an organization’s survival, and so few people are proficient in making them–it is no wonder why there are so few excellent executives. This also explains why many executives are hated and unpopular for their decisions; each decision typically affects many people some way. and unfortunately not every decision can affect everybody in a positive or welcomed manner. When you are trying to be a good executive, or leader, it is absolutely impossible to please everyone. The executive who tries to please everyone will always fail and take the company or organization right along with him.

A big debate in the United States has been and probably always will be healthcare. I remember during the Clinton Presidency when Hillary Clinton tried to get universal healthcare pushed through. She failed and in a public statement I remember her saying something to the effect of “You cannot get anything done in Washington. These people are impossible to work with!”

While what she said may have had some truth to it, her job as a politician/executive/administrator was to do her very best to get others organized to accomplish her objective. The responsibility of an executive is to get things done, not to make excuses. The highest paid executives are able to implement and get things done; the lowest paid typically are not able to do this.

The survival of any company, or group, depends on having skilled administrators who can get things done and keep the group going. A man like Saddam Hussein, for example, ultimately failed as an executive because he was unable to keep things going, and he ended up having his country invaded and taken over. A more skilled administrator would have done whatever was needed to keep the country operating and to keep himself in power. The Korean Dictator Kim Jong Il, despite being ridiculed internationally, has been able to keep his country going and to keep himself in power. This is a monumental achievement, which means that Kim Jong Il is more powerful and skilled than it might otherwise appear.

Help and Promote Expansion

Whenever I speak to other business owners and ask them how they are doing, one thing I hear over and over is the following: “Things are going well and we are expanding.”

In fact, I hear this statement so often it is difficult to believe. It is as if the people believe that the only sign of a successful business is if it is expanding.

The funny thing about this is that I get this response even when I know the opposite is really what is occurring. Companies state they are expanding even when they are laying people off. Today I read a press release from a company that was in the process of mass layoffs and it mentioned that the company was still in the process of growing and expanding. I read the following recent story about layoffs at another company:

Word has been spreading that there were mass layoffs …

CenterNetworks has the story, saying they’ve received several unconfirmed reports that there have been mass firings at the company’s New York City offices. The story also points to several comments on Twitter, including some from an employee who posted comments from the conference room where the layoff notices were given.

Product Manager Derek Tumolo also posted on Twitter that at least eight people were fired, but other rumors are suggesting the total is much higher. There also are reports of visibly angry people on the street and security guards stationed outside the company’s headquarters.

Further, a comment from “Tucker” left on Cheezhead’s own article notes, “Not sure if this story still holds true. Heard that …. massive layoffs just this morning. Seems really contradictory to what they say in the Crain’s piece.”

We’re keeping our ears open for more official information and will update this post accordingly.

UPDATE: After requesting a confirmation or denial of the mass layoffs, we received the following statement from Lou Casale [COMPANY NAME REDACTED]…:

While demand for our service remains strong and we continue to grow, we regularly assess our business and the economic environment around us to ensure we remain a healthy, strong, growing company. Given the current economic environment, we have made some adjustments, which includes a reduction in workforce. [COMPANY NAME REDACTED] is taking these steps to position the company for long term. http://www.cheezhead.com/2009/04/15/layoffs-at-theladders/

The company at issue above is a good company. It is just like most companies in that it is trying to portray constant growth in the face many companies face from time to tiem.

There is something about the concept of growth that is incredibly important to people, which is why people talk about it on an ongoing basis. Even when companies are laying people off they talk about the fact that they are expanding. This entire mentality seems extremely strange to me–that we are so focused on growth and how large an organization is, as a measure of its success.

A couple of years ago our company had over 750 employees. The managers in the company seemed very excited about the number of employees we had and the fact that we were growing so rapidly. Interesting to me is the fact that at that time the company was not all that profitable–not with so many employees. In fact, many companies and their managers seem to believe it is more important to be expanding and growing than to be profitable and to have a company that runs like a tight ship and is built for long-term stability.

We are programmed to believe that expansion is the most positive thing and that not expanding is equivalent to dying and contracting. Here are some instances where we see evidence of this mentality:

• Religions talk about the fact that they are expanding and take great pride in this.
• Companies talk about their expansion, and take great pride.
• Groups talk about how they are getting new members, and are therefore becoming stronger.

There is a belief out there that if something is expanding it must be good, and if it is not expanding there must be something wrong with it.

Businesses are generally either growing or contracting. It is very rare that any organization just remains the same as it is. And businesses that seek to remain level are usually really contracting. Expansion is always considered the most positive thing. We expect companies and organizations to be growing because this indicates that the organization is being well received in the world.

In order to expand, an organization, business, or government generally needs to have a product, ideology, or something else that is in demand. Providing something that is in demand brings the opportunities to expand. There must be at least some positive public response to what an organization is offering, and due to this positive public response, more people are interested in joining, purchasing, converting and so forth. There are numerous products, organizations and ideologies out there that are very good but that, for whatever reason, have been unable to expand.

I spend a lot of time in Malibu, California and in my time there I have had the opportunity to meet numerous extremely wealthy people–people who live in homes that are worth $25,000,000+, fly around on private jets and who have vacation homes all over the world. Most of these people sell some sort of product, service, or ideology. It is not just that they sell a product, service, or ideology, but that they have been able to dramatically expand this product, service or ideology.

The service might be a little pizza, hair shampoo, a restaurant, a tequila, it might be a type of radio station, it could be a religion (my next door neighbor has his own religion), beauty product….It could even be a law firm. Whatever the product, service, religion, or ideology is, the person has managed to EXPAND its reach to more locations and more people throughout the world. It is rare, for example, that the people I meet who are super rich, with their private jets and so forth–have a product that is just sold in Los Angeles, or even just in California. Instead, these people have created a way to market and sell their product throughout the country and, in most cases, the world.

In most cases it is not the product itself that is that great, it is the ability of the entrepreneur(s) or business owner(s) to take a small local demand and expand it to a larger market. This is where the real skill lies. I like to spend time in malls because inside of malls you can see the products and services that have managed to expand. In most cases these products or services have originated in large cities like Los Angeles and New York. The reason I think this is the case is because rent is extremely expensive in larger cities, and businesses need to do their work extremely well, efficiently and so forth in order to survive in these markets. Those that are able to survive in the largest markets are most often the services, products and so forth that are best able to deliver the service using very well executed organizational methods.

It is the ability to expand that product, service, or ideology that is most significant, not the product itself. Anyone can open a steak house that serves steaks and salads. Not everyone, however, can open a Ruth’s Chris Steak House, with outlets all over the country. Expanding requires tremendous organization and skill. A budding religion cannot expand unless its leaders have incredible organizational and management skills. A service cannot expand unless its leaders have organizational skills. It is the ability of the company to organize its product and service that is most significant in business, politics and life. If the business organizes properly to meet the demand for what it has to offer, the company will grow stronger and will be more likely to survive. If it does not organize properly to meet the demand, then it is likely that it will die off.

Countries are another example of organizations seeking to expand and grow. So are groups that support ideologies such as democracy, socialism, Islamic fundamentalism, Christianity, Communism, Mormonism and so forth. Through expansion each group believes it can increase its influence, and therefore its power. Wars are generally fought by groups seeking to expand their influence. Wars are generally won when the ideology that the war seeks to expand is met with enthusiasm by the people the war is against. When the ideology is met with indifference, or hostility the war is generally lost.

• It would be very difficult for an Islamic nation to take over the United States because the majority of the United States is not Muslim and most people have no interest in that ideology.
• It would be next to impossible for Americans to go into a Muslim country, for example and conquer it. The “American ideology” simply would not sell in a predominantly Muslim country, just as the “Islamic ideology” would not sell in the United States.

Each of these hypothetical examples could be viewed as an attempt to “sell the wrong product in the wrong place.”

If, however, there was a huge demand for Islam in the United States due to the ideology being accepted by most Americans, then it might be relatively easy for an Islamic country to take over the United States. Back when the British were colonizing many countries, before the British government would arrive on the new land, Christian missionaries often showed up and converted people in the country to the new religion. When the British government eventually showed up ,the people were much easier to colonize and to win over, because they had already converted to a common religion. Islam, Catholicism, capitalism, democracy and other methods are all ideologies that have generally expanded and been successful in their expansion in cases whereby the product/ideology was appealing to the audiences that they expanded into. Russia, for example, very quickly converted to capitalism when it became an option. The people were ready for this shift, and they wanted it. It would be very hard to make a comparable switch in the United States over to communism, for example, since the substantial majority of the people in the population are not ready for and do not want it.

In Nazi Germany when the Germans marched into some of the first countries they took over, they were met with little resistance. The territories conquered arguably were people of “Germanic” descent and they shared similar social philosophies with the Nazis. It was only when Germany attempted to conquer areas that did not share its political or social philosophies (such as France), that it started to get into serious trouble. Without an audience interested in what Germany was “selling”, the Germans were destined to lose the war. So too was it with the Romans, the Ottoman empire, and other governments and ideologies throughout history that have come up against the wall in their attempts to expand into places where they were not welcome. So too was it with the United States in Vietnam and in Iraq.

When any organization or ideology is expanding there will always be forces in the market that want to slow down the expansion, or to stop it completely. These forces are generally competitors and others who are accustomed to working under one ideology, or business model, and are trying to protect their territory. Therefore, you will see:

• Dictatorships attacking signs of democracy.
• Communist countries attacking democratic countries.
• Small businesses attacking large businesses as impersonal.
• Large businesses attacking small businesses as inefficient.
• Companies that make handmade products attacking those that mass produce them.
• Companies which use “natural” ingredients attacking those that do not.
• Organizations that employ well trained workers attacking those that do not.

Organizations and individuals are constantly doing everything in their power to find and create demand in order to spur expansion. At the same time there are always forces out there trying to slow the expansion down.

The entire world of business, politics and religion is a tension between expanding and contracting. Certain things expand and others are continually contracting. When something is expanding it is growing and when something is contracting it is considered to be dying. If a product or ideology is considered to be beneficial and in demand then it will be poised for expansion. If a product is not considered to be beneficial then it will not be poised for expansion.

In business, companies are continually reinventing themselves in an attempt to come out with products and services that are considered more beneficial. Religions are also continually reinventing themselves to appear beneficial. The Catholic Church, for example, has made many changes in the 20th century in an attempt to continue to appear relevant. There is a giant struggle amongst religious groups–and many types of organizations, between being relevant to people and not being relevant to people.

What does all of this mean to your career and life? In business, religion and politics nothing is ultimately more important than being on the side of expansion–not contraction. Employers, religions and others all want people around them who are going to help them expand.

• When you see the résumés of strong managers they often discuss how they “grew” a division.
• Candidates for a Chief Executive Officer, Chief Operating Officer and so forth always talk about how they have “grown” a department, for example.
• The résumés of sales people always mention how a candidate has increased sales and performance.
• Certain professions, such as public relations, advertising, marketing and so forth, deal with creating positive perceptions of given products or services so they can expand. A candidate for a marketing job might emphasize the part that his work played in helping a company or product expand.

Employers and all organizations are interested in those who can help them expand and grow. Everything for employers is about expansion. Everything for most religions and political parties is about expansion. Life is about expansion, and to most of us the very ideas of expansion and growth seems necessary to our survival.

True expansion only occurs when there is a “genuine” demand for the product or ideology seeking to expand; however, many people can create demand for a product or service by virtue of their skill. However, this is generally “artificial demand”, which never lasts and does not really “hold” for the long term. For example, after September 11, 2001 General Motors sold a ton of cars with its “Zero Percent Interest” and “Employee Pricing” sales, which were advertised aggressively. While the public may not have been as enthusiastic about General Motors cars compared to other cars on the market, GM was able to expand in a quick and short-term manner, with aggressive advertising. In order to expand, most businesses must keep the phone ringing and people coming through the door. Advertising is one way they accomplish this goal.

If you go to any town anywhere in America you will probably see a billboard for a personal injury attorney somewhere on the road. It is like this in every city and town in the United States, and I have yet to encounter a decent size town where I do not see this. Some of these attorneys who advertise on billboards are excellent attorneys; however, many of them are not. Despite being horrible attorneys, these are the most recognizable attorneys in the cities and towns in which they live, and they are therefore considered the top attorneys. It is all because of the “artificial demand” they have created for their companies through use of the media.

Good services are easily able to expand and to hold their expansion. For example, McDonald’s is a fast food restaurant that people seem to really enjoy. This fast food restaurant went from one location to tens of thousands over the years, and very few of them have closed down. When the business expanded into new markets it discovered there was a genuine demand for its product. Other restaurants that attempted such expansion may not have been so lucky. The reason for this is related to (1) the popularity and demand of the product (often based on a perception of value), and/or (2) the ability of the restaurant to manage its expansion.

Business is about expansion. Expansion can occur when the product is so good that it catches on virally (such as Google did–in a very short time), or it can occur through advertising, whereby the perception of demand and value can be artificially boosted (as in the GM sale after September 11 example). Your job, in every company, organization and so forth that you will ever work for is to be on the side of expansion. The more you can contribute to expansion and growth the more job security you will have. The more you can show a potential employer that you can help them expand, the more likely it is you will be hired. One of the most important keys to securing and holding a job is being on the side of and assisting with expansion. The more you can assist with expansion and can be seen as someone who will make this happen, the better career you will have.

How to Be a Good Manager

Among the many interrelated problems that can occur in an economy, are people having not enough work, not enough holidays, not enough benefits, and of course–not enough pay. As disruptive and problematic as these issues may become to people, hands down the most severe problem is when there are no jobs available at all.

Companies and organizations are all out to survive and the worst thing that can happen is a company or organization finding it can no longer survive. When a company can no longer survive, the jobs disappear with it, which is the absolute worst thing that can happen. I am sure we can all agree that having no job at all is far worse than having a job that is less than ideal.

For as long as I can remember, I have turned on the news and read the paper and seen one story or another about a strike for more benefits, higher wages, more paid holidays, shorter work hours and so forth. I have heard about workers walking off the job so they can have more of this or that. It is going on across the country, every single day. There is probably not a decent sized newspaper in the United States that does not contain at least one article per day (and there are usually more), mentioning how workers are upset about this or that, or they want more of this or that, or they are refusing to work because of this or that.

Many workers are, and always will be, angry that they do not receive enough of what they already have. They always want more. However, the worst possible thing that can happen is for the workers to suddenly lose everything that they do have.

This is more common than you might think.

Companies and organizations everywhere are struggling, and are in many cases shutting down these days. This is what happens in areas of the United States and the world when workers and others demand too much from the companies. The companies simply pack up and close down a large percentage of the operation, or they go away completely. Everything stops and suddenly those discontent people who formerly handled all of the jobs–are left with absolutely nothing to do.

I remember when I first moved to Bay City, Michigan in the middle of the 1990s to work for a federal judge there. Bay City at one time had employed countless people in the automobile industry, just like Detroit and scores of other towns scattered around the Midwest. My girlfriend and I were looking for a house and we had a hard time deciding if we wanted to buy or rent, because houses were so cheap. Some houses in the city were so cheap that the owners, instead of hiring a real estate agent, had simply taken bars of soap and written the price of the house on the widows: “$5,000!” said one house. “FIRST $10,000 TAKES IT” said another house on its windows. Detroit and other areas of the country where people got great benefits have now literally been driven to the ground by worker demands. Companies and jobs have gotten the hell out of these places because they are incredibly dangerous places for companies to operate.

The job of a good manager should be to keep a company in business and to keep it creating jobs. Very few managers understand this, and this particular misunderstanding has probably killed more companies than anyone could ever count.

The key to effectively managing a company is to keep the company in business. Companies are kept in business by pro business managers. It is as simple as that. If you want to be a manager–and a good manager you need to truly be on the side of the company. Workers and managers can generally be put into two categories: (1) those who are on the side of the company at all costs, and (2) those who are on the side of the worker at all costs. Which worker or manager do you think lasts longer in his job? Which worker or manager do you think is more likely to be let go?

Something that many people are interested in at some point in their careers is going into management. In many respects, management is much easier than not being a manager; however, in other respects being a manager is much more difficult. The reason being a manager is so difficult is because it requires a completely different orientation from the non-manager. Most people who are working inside of an organization are most concerned with what the organization can do for them. The manager needs to be more concerned with the organization’s needs, not his or her own needs. The best managers always focus on the interests of the organization–not so much on the interests of its workers.

Most men out there do not truly understand this concept of management in my estimation, and so most of these men (or women) fail when given the opportunity to manage. Moreover, the larger a company grows and the more bureaucratic and “professional” its management team becomes, the more likely the company is to fail; this assumes a management team that becomes more concerned with establishing perks and other incentives than the company’s need to survive–a common occurrence. Once a company gets large enough it attracts managers and others who believe that the gravy train will roll on forever. At some point these same workers choose to overlook the fact that one can only milk a cow for so long–and usually, by the time the people realize this it is too late; they are either already on the chopping block, or their company is no longer profitable, and ends up downsizing or shutting down completely.

The best managers are able to take into account, and to balance the interests of both the organizations and the people working in them. One of the largest mistakes managers make is deciding that instead of being for the organization and its survival they are, instead, just looking out for the people working inside of the organization, at all costs. More organizations fail due to this type of manager than for any other reason I am aware of. In fact, this sort of manager is among the worst sort of cancer any organization can have. I have seen managers like this ruin numerous organizations, and all around America each day organizations both large and small die off due to this style of management.

Several years ago I was standing in the Camarillo Outlets on a Monday morning. New Year’s Day had fallen on a Friday and our company’s human resource manager had told me that every single company and law firm he knew of had Monday as well as Friday off so they could have a four day weekend. I found this hard to believe so I asked him to research this and to be absolutely sure. Sure enough, he came back later in the day and informed me that “yes” every organization out there had this Monday off.

As I stood there in the mall on that Monday I was at a total loss for words. On almost every other day of the year, it would have been impossible to find any parking whatsoever at the Camarillo Outlets. Today, however, the entire mall was like one giant ghost town. There were hardly any people there at all–other than staff, of course. As I walked around the mall I could not but help feel a bit angry. I realized that this was not a holiday anywhere else but our company. That day over 150 employees were being paid for a day that was not really a holiday.

I am not saying that the employees were not hard working and did not perhaps deserve a day off. Nevertheless, a business is a business and in order to run a business effectively it needs to make effective use of its resources. People are a resource and spending tens of thousands of dollars one day to give people a day off when it was not even a holiday did not make sense.

“Where did you hear yesterday was a holiday?” I demanded to know from the HR director when he came in on Tuesday morning. He proceeded to tell me that everyone had the day off and it was a “common holiday”. I had my assistant do some research and we were unable to find any good sized companies that had indeed given that Monday off. I was starting to become extremely displeased. I looked at numerous other things that this same employee had done and became quite concerned when I realized the number and extent of benefits and other perks that the HR manager had created. These perks had become so extreme that they literally put the survival of the company at risk. Moreover, any attempt I made to curtail or cut back on anything was met with so much hostility, I could hardly believe it. I realized right then and there that this person was completely out for his own self interest, and working against the company. A company that keeps people like this around cannot survive.

The difference between a good manager and a poor manager can either make, or break, an entire company. Many people go into management and immediately take pride in having an orientation towards helping the people they are supervising. Helping your subordinates is often a good thing; however, it is not good when it ends up destroying the capacity of a company to create and foster long-term jobs for its staff. When there are no jobs there is only misery and the misery that is left behind when there are no jobs is extreme.

Drive through places like Detroit that have powerful unions and see what is left behind. There are no jobs and the economy is in shambles. The few workers who remain, however, have tons of rights. A man who works on an assembly line may be prohibited under union rules from picking up a piece of trash. If something needs to be cleaned up he needs to call a person in another part of the factory to come clean it up. For many managers, an organization is something to be bled dry, and is just a giant money-making machine. For many managers, the greatest skill they have is how to get money, more perks, benefits and other things out of the organization for themselves and the people they supervise. Their skill is not in creating value for their company. Instead, most managers are skilled in taking from the organization.

What these managers do not understand is that you cannot take more than comes in, and the more you take the greater the possibility that there will soon be nothing left to take. Eventually, these sorts of managers and this management culture ends up choking the organization completely and it either closes down, or packs up and goes somewhere else to do the work. Managers concerned with taking from the organization typically have no care in the world what happens to the organization and such managers move from job to job throughout their careers, generally leaving companies worse off than when they joined.

A great deal of our social policy in the world is based on taking. Politicians come into office and believe that companies exist to feed tax dollars into the system. They tax the companies as much as they can and give the workers more and more rights. Pretty soon the companies are gone and the money slows down too. Individual states across the U.S. do the same thing as well. They tax their most successful companies and eventually the companies leave and take with them the jobs. Or the companies end up closing down.

The greatest distinction between companies that run and continue going forward and those that go out of business is good managers that care about what happens to the organization. When a company has good managers who care about what happens to the organization, it is likely to survive. Decisions needed to keep the company going forward are made, despite the fact that they are difficult to make, and may be unpopular with the rest of the staff. Any company that is able to make unpopular decisions is more likely to survive than one that is afraid or unable to.

As a manager, and in order to be a manager, it is extremely important that you be seen as someone who is on the side of the company and out to make the company profitable and do well. The more you are seen and perceived as someone on the side of the company the more you are likely to grow as well.

If you are a force that is against the company, who is more interested in increasing the expenses of the company–this will be interpreted by the company as something that is counter to its survival. A company needs to survive and companies keep around people whose objective is to help them survive.

Managers who are agitators, protestors for workers’ rights and so forth often care more for the workers and therefore ultimately end up killing the workers’ jobs in the process. Managers like this create unemployment, bad economic conditions and incredible problems in their wake. A prevalence of managers like this in a country or state can actually lead an entire economy towards a serious depression. The health of any company requires that good managers see both sides of the equation, and do everything within their power to keep the company healthy and moving forward. A well-run company keeps its eyes open, and will steer clear of managers who care more for the worker than the organization.

There are managers and people out there who simply have a strong dislike of organizations in general. You will see them being careless with the company’s money, time and property. They will always be making a major effort to get more of this or that for the people they are working with. These people ultimately end up “doing in” the organizations and people they are working with.

The best managers have a real concern with how much money is spent, how the work is completed, and if workers are being efficient with their time. These managers are concerned about insuring the organization is continually making progress in everything it does. On the opposite end of the spectrum there are managers interested in selling assets, borrowing money and refusing to do what it necessary to increase business in order to make more money for the company. These are the sorts of managers companies should not keep around.

Once you understand these fundamental principles you can master the art–and the business of being a great manager.

Believe in the Possibilities

Most people in the job market need something else even more than they need a job. The same is generally true for people that are unhappy with their career paths. Contrary to what many of these people may believe, what they need in order to cure their misery is actually something far, far different from a mere job change.

Last night I was walking through the Forum Shops Mall in Caesars Palace and I could not help but notice something that is probably the same in malls all across America. There are young men around 15-18 who seem to beam with incredible enthusiasm in the malls. They just hang out in groups, smiling and looking quite happy. They hold their heads high and their posture is very good. They joke with each other and appear very confident in their behavior. This is a stereotypical group of young men, the likes of which I have been seeing in malls for quite some time.

There is something else you see in the malls too: You see men who have gotten on in years. By the time those young men are in their mid-20s, a lot of that energy and enthusiasm has disappeared from their faces completely. Instead, they look more serious. They no longer walk with the same posture, or same confidence. They do not appear to be as happy anymore, and you can just see from their faces that life is no longer as fun for them. When the same man gets to be in his 30s, his enthusiasm has probably drained even more. He may have begun to grow a pot belly. Some men wear golf shirts that are reminiscent of the few moments of fun that they may expose themselves to once in a while. By the time most men are in their 50s any trace of that beaming–that happy self expression and playfulness in their faces is almost gone completely. They appear to shuffle when they walk and they are missing that posture that is erect and meets the world with incredible enthusiasm. You see these men everywhere. The life force within them seems to be fading.

This is not true for all men, of course. Nor is it true for all women. But still, many people do lose zest for their careers and for life; it just disappears over the years as people work and experience various family, career and life changes–and challenges. Once it is gone, even if, say a person finds a new and better job, this zest will still be missing. Most men and women, once they start losing this zest in their late teens and early 20s, begin losing it more and more each year…it simply never comes back. This is a very predictable phenomenon that I have seen time and time again. The energy that once characterized a person simply vanishes.

Young men who are 15-18 will tell you of the incredible things they are going to do when they get older. They have all the confidence in the world and believe that whatever they want to do is possible. I remember once driving to Chicago O’Hare airport with a friend of mine when I was around 19 years old and in my first year of college. We were going to pick up my friend’s buddy, with whom my friend had attended a very competitive private school in New York City, called Collegiate. The friend was now attending Williams College (an incredibly difficult college to get into), and was flunking several of his classes because he was convinced he was going to be a famous white Jewish rap star. He was getting ready to drop out of college and pursue this rap career–even though he had never produced a rap album, hardly knew anything whatsoever about music, and the few novice recordings of his rap music that he had made sounded horrible. Yet he had the confidence to believe that he could do this. He was literally walking away from one of the most competitive colleges in the United States, and whatever future that might have led to, in order to pursue a rap career. At the time this seemed absolutely insane to me, but the more I think about it now, the more beautiful I think it was: How many men by the time they reach their 40s, for example, would have tried something like this?

Think about the white-shoe lawyer, working in a large law firm and maintaining his serious life each day. Do you think this serious lawyer would be willing to walk away from this serious life in order to do something that he really wants to do, like pursue a rap career? The odds of this seem miniscule to me. This young kid pursuing a rap career had that life force, that enthusiasm that is really only present in the young. Most of us have lost this by the time we are in our mid-20s.

Several times a month, various people ask me why I spend time writing about life and career issues each day. After all, what I do is run career companies that are engaged primarily in getting people jobs. If this is my job then why do I spend so much time each day writing articles and doing other things that do not appear related to my business? According to the people I speak with, it does not seem to make sense that someone dedicated to getting people jobs would be so interested in the state of mind of the people in the job market.

Why not spend this time improving the functionality of the websites that I run?

Why not spend this time having direct conversations with job seekers?

Why not spend this time working on trying to make money for the company?

The greatest gift I believe you or I can receive is inspiration. When we are inspired we can go out and accomplish anything.

A job is just a job, but if you are inspired you can create whatever opportunity you want in the world. Inspiration is what changes everything and it is what will change your life–even more so than a new job. A new job is a good thing; however, being inspired is far more powerful and can help you to forever change your life for the better. All it takes is one dose of inspiration and something that ticks within you to inspire you to change your life.

At some point a man starts to droop, the enthusiasm leaves his face, and he starts to believe that there are massive limitations on him in the world. You know this man, or woman; it may be someone with whom you are very close. It may even be you. Perhaps you no longer believe that this or that is possible and feel constrained and limited by your abilities. You might have begun to believe that whatever you attempt in the world will be met with resistance and that you will fail. You may take refuge in your home, or apartment and resign yourself to doing the same job over and over again, believing that you will never really experience the sort of life you want, and the sort of life you see others living. You may watch others living in fame and glory on television, and read about them in the papers. All along you can only watch life from the sidelines because you have come to believe you are not good enough, talented enough and more.

Did you ever stop to think that it might be in some people’s best interest for you to not be good enough? Perhaps your parents do not want to see you do better than they have done in life. Perhaps your spouse wants to see you remain at a certain level so they can control you. Perhaps your friends are afraid you will never stay friends with them if you do everything you are capable of. Therefore, you live your life and spend your career surrounded by people that help reinforce and perpetuate a view of yourself as someone resigned to a life of mediocrity, or even failure.

We go to schools and they teach us how to do many things; however, most do not inspire us about what is possible for us to accomplish by using the knowledge they have given us. Being inspired about what is possible is what can propel us to succeed in our lives and careers. When you are inspired you can do just about anything.

The reason I write each day is because I want to provide you with some inspiration to have and to create the sort of life you are entitled to, which you deserve. I would like to inspire you to make the absolute most out of yourself, and to do everything within your power to better yourself. I want you to be the best you possibly can be. But first you must realize that the power to do this lies within your own mind, and it is directly related to how inspired you allow yourself to be, and to what you believe is possible.

Libraries, book stores and other places are filled with countless tools meant to inspire you. Seek out sources of knowledge and inspiration that will inspire you as to what is possible in your career and in your life. Read and study inspirational texts and find a source of inspiration to help power you forward. You will only go as far in your life as you think you can. Most of us fail on this inside long, long before we fail on the outside. A man or woman can go through hell, but if this person knows on the inside that he or she is going to succeed and ultimately do amazingly well–then this person has nothing to worry about.

The road to the life you desire lies before you, you must simply pave it.

Move Towards the Light

There is a story I heard some time ago about a man named Rabbi Akiva, who lived in Palestine. He was considered an extremely good person and also a sage. He became the greatest scholar of his time (he lived in the second century) by his consistency. He attended school later in life, at age 40, and it was at this same age of 40 that he became a ba’al teshuba (a Jew who returned to traditional Judiasm). Prior to that time, it is said he actually hated the Jewish sages.

Following the Bar Kochba rebellion against the Romans, the then rulers of Palestine, in about 82 A.D., it was ordered that Rabbi Akiva be executed publicly. When the day for Akiva’s execution came, all of his students were in shock that such a great man could be executed. They could not believe that such a good man could be unfairly and wrongly executed. However, the Rabbi did not care who was responsible for the injustice against him, and he was very calm and content. He was not concerned with blaming anyone else for what had happened to him, and chose not to be angry, fearful, or sad. He was being executed because he had violated the Roman decree of not teaching Torah in public. He had been warned, but had disobeyed, because in his opinion Jews without Torah are like fish out of water-they will soon die. Several other sages had been executed for exactly the same reason prior to Rabbi Akiva’s execution.

What is so powerful about this portion of the story is that most of us in this sort of situation would be concerned about being a victim. Most of us are always looking for one reason or another to label ourselves a victim. Someone else is responsible for an injustice against us or whatever else may have happened to us. It seems we have never possibly brought misfortune upon ourselves. Even those of us who have done something wrong never feel as if punishment is deserved. A great many people out there spend their entire lives blaming others for the circumstances that they face.

As Rabbi Akiva was being executed, the students standing near him were very upset about the tragedy and injustice occurring before their eyes. They asked him how he could appear so serene while he was about to be burned to death. He answered them that it was because he previously wasn’t sure if he would ever have had the chance to do a Kiddish Hashem (public sanctification of God’s name) before he died, and now he had that opportunity-by saying the Shema (a common Jewish prayer) as he was dying. In reality this would be the best moment of his life on earth.

When I first heard this story I wondered to myself how this particular episode could be the best moment in his life. How could a man about to be executed for a crime, which should have never been classified as a crime in the first place, believe that what was about to happen to him was going to be the best moment in his life? What good can possibly come out of accusing and killing an innocent man?

The reason that I believe Rabbi Akiva approached this the way he did was because he had been given the opportunity to come face to face with evil. He chose to see the worst thing that could possibly happen to him as an opportunity to confront and to rise above evil. He chose to see this act against him as a service to God, and an opportunity to resist becoming angry, blameful and negative. Instead, he confronted his execution with calmness and conviction, choosing to be a force for good in the world.

One of the most negative things we can do is leave our minds open to others’ negative influences. When most of us come face to face with negative influences, thoughts and ideas, we too turn negative. There is a lot of noise out there in the world, and most people in the world become one with this noise instead of resisting it. For example, in facing an unjust execution, most ordinary men would be led kicking and screaming to their death. Here however, Rabbi Akiva faced his execution with calmness and conviction, despite being wrongfully sentenced to death.

Life is about dealing with positively and negatively charged poles–light and darkness. Every situation and every emotion has its opposite, just as life itself has its opposite. We are continually facing either positive people and circumstances, or negative people and circumstances. We are facing the opportunity to move to the side of negativity, or the opportunity move to the side of positivity. Life is a struggle between bringing the light into our lives and bringing the darkness into our lives.

• When we see a child smile at us, it brings light into our lives.
• When we meet someone and have a connection with him or her, it brings light into our lives.
• When we get our dream job, it brings light into our lives.
• When we get a promotion, or a raise, it brings light into our lives.

The best moments in our lives are when we allow the light to overcome us, and the worst moments are when we allow the darkness to overcome us. Darkness is represented by many things:

• When someone attacks us, or accuses us unjustly of something, it brings darkness into our lives.
• When we are in a situation wherein we and/or others are gossiping negatively about someone, it brings darkness into our lives.
• When we cheat, lie, or steal, it brings darkness into our lives.
• When we try to hurt others, it brings darkness into our lives.

The way you think on a day-to-day basis, the people you associate with, the places you go, the things you do, what you read, what you watch on television and the things you say are all an expression of either darkness or light, the positive or negative.

What does any of this have to do with your career and life? I believe that what I have described above is among the most powerful of lessons that you can ever learn. When you are overcome by the light, the light cannot help but be part of who you are, a part of your entire world. The more time you spend around the light and what is positive, the more your life is likely to be positive as well. If you spent all of your time hanging around drug dealers it would probably be very difficult for you to remain part of the light. Similarly, if you spent all of your time hanging out in a bar in a bad neighborhood with a bunch of drunks and strippers, it would also be very difficult for you to remain part of the light.

The light is everything that is positive and good in the world. The power of the light is something that transforms all those who are around it. You should do everything within your power to remain connected to the light. The more you are around the light, the more you become like the light. Your goal should be to become like the light and maintain contact with what is good, positive, happy, spiritual and uplifting. Similarly, at the same time you should be doing everything within your power to avoid darkness.

• You can move towards the light by–rather than looking for what is wrong, looking for what is right about your life and the people in it.
• You can move toward the light by–rather than trying to get revenge, offering forgiveness.
• You can move towards the light by-rather than worrying, taking charge of your situation.
• You can move towards the light by–rather than fearing something, becoming courageous.
• You can move towards the light by–rather than associating with bad people, associating with good people.
• You can move towards the light by–rather than raising your voice and getting angry, approaching the situation calmly and in a friendly manner.
• You can move towards the light by–rather than talking badly about others, refusing to participate in such discussions.
• You can move towards the light by–rather than complaining about your life and the people in it, appreciating all of it.
• You can move towards the light by–rather than doing something destructive, doing something constructive.
• You can move towards the light by–rather than not working and being productive, working and being productive.
• You can move towards the light by–rather than being a victim, deciding to be the one in control.
• You can move towards the light by–rather than taking from others, giving to others.

The best piece of career advice I can give you is to always do everything within your power to move towards the light–and never away from it. The more you truly live going towards the light, the happier, more fulfilled and better off you will be. The more you are going away from the light, the more pain and suffering you will encounter in your life.

The Danger of Judging Others

When I was growing up in Grosse Pointe, a suburb outside of Detroit, I lived on a street where all of the other families were married, and my mother was the only single mother on the street. At some point it became clear to me that the other families in the neighborhood did not approve of the fact that my mother was single. Our next door neighbors, for example, did not particularly like living next door to a single woman.

One time I was doing some work on my mother’s front lawn and the father of the family next door was fixing a flagpole, which was on the side of the house. His wife was standing there handing him screws and so forth while he was on a small stepladder. I frequently did yard work around my mother’s house because I wanted it to look as nice as the neighbors’ houses. I did this all on my own and, since I did not know what I was doing, I frequently did more harm than good. While many kids are forced to do yard work, I actually did it of my own volition. A few hours after I had started doing some yard work on this particular day, the couple fixing the flag sort of looked over at me and frowned in disapproval as I was in the middle of screwing up some yard task. A few moments later, I heard the man say the most amazing thing to his wife:

“The reason we are so happy and have such good kids is because we are moral. We do not believe in things like divorce. Our kids will always do better than that sort of kid and always be much happier because we set such a good example.”

For a 12 year old boy from a divorced family standing in the front yard of his mother’s house doing “voluntary yard work” this was not an easy thing to hear. It was a sign that I was being excluded by people in the neighborhood and being looked down upon simply because my mother was single.

We had originally lived in another part of Grosse Pointe, in a house that my mother had purchased for around $30,000 in 1975. While we had been living there, she remarried and her second husband, John, became very sick and ended up dying of cancer in the late 1970s. After he died, my mother received an insurance settlement of around $100,000 and decided that she wanted to use the money to move to a nicer neighborhood than we were living in at the time. The $30,000 house was in a white blue collar working class neighborhood where our neighbors put on overalls to go to work in factories and so forth each day. The $120,000 house my mother later purchased was in a white collar neighborhood where our neighbors put on suits to go to work each day. $120,000 was probably the equivalent of around $500,000 back in the early 1980s.

One of my mother’s sorority sisters from college, Diane, lived a few doors down from our house. Her sorority sister apparently also did not feel comfortable having a single woman on the street; my mother learned of this from other sorority sisters of hers, which she still saw around Detroit. These other sorority sisters also shared with my mother various insights of our neighbors and other acquaintances, which they had learned about from Diane. Although Diane did not tell us what she thought, and most of our neighbors never said anything about what they thought, my mother’s other sorority sisters were more than happy to pass on to my mother what everyone was saying about her. Pretty soon, my mother learned that our next door neighbors, along with all the other “picture perfect” families around our house disapproved of the fact that there was a single woman living on the street. This was very hurtful for my mother to hear.

My mother acted as if this did not upset her, but I knew that it did. For my mother, purchasing a $120,000 house in a decent suburb of Detroit was one of the most significant things she had ever done–a lifetime achievement. She was very proud of this and wanted nothing more than to be accepted by our neighbors.

My mother also learned that certain parents in the neighborhood did not want their children coming over to our house because they thought it would be bad for their children to see a single mother. In my mother’s defense, she had never had a lot of boyfriends and so forth; in fact, she dated less than 10 men over my lifetime that I know of, including my father. Nevertheless, our neighbors seemed to think there was something wrong with a woman being single and did not want this influence rubbing off on their children.

To their credit, many of our neighbors were right on, and as it turned out, going over to our house could have been a bad thing in many respects. My mother rarely got babysitters and I was home alone after school from the age of 10 or so. Moreover, because my mother worked all the time she was tired at night, so even when she did come home from work there was little supervision. Finally, my mother went out many evenings with friends and I was home alone. With no supervision, I got into trouble from time to time, doing things that young kids do and, were I a parent, in retrospect I might not have wanted my children over at my house either. Nevertheless, this was something that hurt my feelings as well as my mother’s.

One evening when my mother was out, a woman across the street came over to my house and invited my younger sister and I over for dinner. I was excited, and when I showed up at her house for dinner with my sister she gladly welcomed us inside. I was no more than 12 or 13 at the time and my sister was around 5. We were inside no more than a few minutes when the woman looked me up and down with disapproval and told me that if I wanted to stay for dinner at her house I would need to go home and take a shower and change clothes. I was hurt by this, but then I decided to run across the street, where I quickly showered and changed clothes. When I finally sat down at the dinner table with the woman, her husband, and two children, the woman told me to put my napkin in my lap. As I started eating she told me I was not holding my fork properly. She told me to wipe my mouth with my napkin at another point. Finally, she said something I will never forget:

“If you do not wipe your mouth off when you get food on it we will never invite you over to eat again.”

For the rest of the meal I sat there in silence and in fear. I was never invited over to her house again and whenever I saw the woman she would look at me with disapproval. She made her disapproval of me known to her children: one time I remember her little boy was playing on our street and he said something like: “My mom says not to talk to you because you are trash! Ha-ha!”

We lived on a street that branched into two streets, and people used to drive by and throw liquor bottles and so forth at a large grass triangular divider that separated the streets. It was not a frequent occurrence, but after three or four months there would always be a collection of a few beer bottles on the divider and some broken ones in the street.

There was another woman down the street with a son and daughter who used to come by with a broom and dustpan to clean up the mess. Even though I had absolutely nothing to do with those bottles that had been thrown, I always knew that the woman thought I was responsible. In fact, she told my mother about it and was even angry at her. I had not even drunk liquor at that point in my life. This woman also had a son who was my age. He was very clean cut but used drugs, which of course, his mother did not know. One day the son and a few of his friends were on drugs and they grabbed a skateboard off of my front lawn and took it over to his house, where they smashed it into pieces with a sledgehammer.

He and his druggie friends thought it was funny at the time, but several of them told me about what had happened and who was to blame. I called the boy’s parents and demanded they give me the money for the skateboard (it was expensive) and they refused. I told them that several other kids had seen the boy do this. They told me they did not believe me, and I told them they could call any one of the kids who had seen what their son had done. They did call, and all the kids that were questioned told the parents that their son had been responsible for destroying my skateboard. The boy still denied to his parents that he did it. When the boy’s father called me up to tell me he would not be paying for the skateboard I could not believe it:

“My son says he did not do it and, even though the other kids say he did, we believe our son. We are not going to pay for it.”

Living with a single mother meant that, at the age of 13, I often had to fight these battles on my own. However, even at such a young age I knew there was something very wrong about this. It just did not make any sense whatsoever that a parent would completely avoid taking any responsibility in these kinds of situations, and would be so willing to look the other way.

When I was around 14 years old I looked out my window and in the house directly next door to me I could see the girl next door to me, around 17 at the time, having sex with her boyfriend behind a couch. Seeing this became a regular occurrence, as I witnessed it more than a few times. Within a year or so, we found out that the girl was not only pregnant but planning on having the child. She was not married and it was a real scandal of sorts. She lived at home and raised the child in her parents’ home–and she still lives with her parents. This was the same family that had judged my mother and told all of the other families in the neighborhood that they did not like living next to a single woman. Incredibly, this was the same family that was so vocal about how bad it was living next to a single woman.

A year or so later, the 18 year old daughter of the other woman (the one who always cleaned up the intersection and blamed me for the mess, whose son had ruined my skateboard)–became pregnant. She too decided to have the baby while still in high school. In this extremely conservative (mostly Christian) area, this was almost unheard of.

The girl who was pregnant, her boyfriend and the entire family were in the room when the baby was born. When the baby came out, to the astonishment of the white mother, the white boyfriend and the white parents, the baby was obviously of African American decent. This was one of the largest scandals I ever heard of growing up.

To give you some background, the city I grew up in Grosse Pointe, did not have a single black family, as far as I know, in the mid-1980s. Despite having over 25,000 residents and being right next door to Detroit, which was over 80% black at the time, Grosse Pointe was 100% white. It was really a unique place from the standpoint of racial uniformity. Furthermore, most of the residents in the city only associated with other white people. The city was so white that when our mailman changed one year and we got a black mail man, upon seeing a black man our tame dog suddenly became ferocious because it had never seen someone with dark skin in its entire life. This was a very homogeneous group of people.

When I was in college I heard that the daughter of my mother’s sorority sister a few doors down had gotten divorced and moved in with her parents, and had been living there for years. This was also another real shocker. This particular family had been very devout Catholic, and had even been somewhat discriminatory towards people who were not devout Catholics, or who did not follow all of their same rituals when we were growing up.

Then, when I was in law school I was watching the television show 20/20 one evening and I saw a story about how the little boy who had called me “trash” when I was growing up was in prison for raping some girls when he was in high school, living at home with his mother. The mother had long since been divorced. The story was about how his acceptance to the University of Michigan had been rescinded after they learned of the rape. I could hardly believe that the little boy who had been prohibited from even talking to me when I was growing up was now in prison, and had destroyed his own life. I could also not believe that here a mother who would not let her children even talk to me because I did not wipe my mouth properly while eating, now had a child in prison for rape.

What does all of this mean? For me, it is really unusual that in every case where the people were extremely judgmental of our family, the same things that they judged and excluded us for came back to give them the very same sorts of identities in their own lives. Is this simply a coincidence? I am not sure if it is coincidence or if there is a deeper message to all of this. The message to me seems to be that if we judge others and exclude others due to these judgments, then these judgments may turn around and come back on us as well. It is also a sign that people are often hypocritical–nobody is perfect, no matter how hard they may pretend to be.

In The Great Gatsby, Gatsby buys a house in a prominent area of Long Island in the hope that he can get the girl of his dreams, Daisy. Gatsby had had an affair with the married Daisy five years previously before going into the army. Following the affair, Gatsby fantasizes about Daisy and wants nothing more than to be with her. Because Daisy is in a world of extreme wealth, Gatsby believes that the only way he can win her is by being very wealthy. He does not confront her with his feelings; instead he tries to win her simply by showing her how wealthy he is. The message is that Gatsby believes that wealth and money are more important than the power of love.

In order to become wealthy, Gatsby engages in bootlegging. Across the bay from where Gatsby buys his house live Daisy and her husband. Gatsby can see the green light of Daisy’s house from his window. He decides to throw numerous parties at his house, in the hope that Daisy will come by. Many people come to his parties, but Gatsby is not really friends with any of them, and they are just using him for his wealth and hospitality. Despite his wealth, Gatsby is never really accepted by the society in which he is trying to fit in.

One of the morals of the story is that love and happiness cannot be purchased, no matter how much money someone may have. In the story, all of the characters are controlled by money. For example, both Tom and Daisy are married and have a child; nevertheless, they both commit adultery. Daisy commits adultery with Gatsby and Tom with a woman named Myrtle. Both people try to find happiness with lovers and, despite doing so, they refuse to leave their spouses because of the risk of jeopardizing their wealthy lifestyles. While not being happy with their spouses, they also could not allow themselves to be happy with their lovers. The message is that happiness is not something one can buy.

Daisy eventually loses her respect for Gatsby, when she finds out that he is a bootlegger. Similarly, Tom, after having an affair himself, is angry when he learns that Daisy has had an affair. The characters in The Great Gatsby are all very hypocritical. The Great Gatsby is an incredible novel and, for me it has always struck me as making three very important points: (1) that acceptance cannot be bought and (2) that people cling to status and in the process ignore the world around them, and (3) that people are often very hypocritical.

In my experience growing up on that street in Grosse Pointe, I learned that acceptance cannot be bought; however, I also learned that people often cling to status while ignoring the world around them, and that people are often hypocritical. The fact that those people who shunned my family and me, due to forces largely beyond our control, ultimately experienced the same issues in their own lives–this was something that was very instructive for me to see. The more we judge others for their circumstances, the more we are likely to suffer from those same circumstances.

The Greater Your Purpose, the Greater the Obstacles You Will Face

Several years ago I had a girlfriend who had an older sister who was nothing short of incredible. She was a world class swimmer and had set countless records in the state. She had times in swimming that would easily have qualified her for the Olympics, and she was planning on going to the Olympic trials in one year. In addition to this, she had been taking college level course in high school (called Advanced Placement courses) since she was a freshman, and had gotten the best score possible (all “5s”) on all the exams. To top all of this, she had gotten a perfect score on the SAT and had overall amazing grades. Without even applying to many schools she had gotten a scholarship to an Ivy League School, despite being from a fairly wealthy family. She had gotten such good scores on college level exams in high school that it was not even going to take her three years to graduate from college. The girl was, in all respects, absolutely phenomenal.

From what I understand, her father used to beat her up. He would go out most evenings after work and get very drunk. He would then come home and mix some more drinks, and then literally get the girls out of bed and tell them they were not good enough, they were ugly, lazy and so forth and slap them around. The mother did nothing through this. Sometimes when he was beating the daughters up, while the mother was sitting in a corner crying, he would yell at her, saying that he would not need to have other girlfriends if she were not so ugly. I cannot imagine being exposed to something like this growing up. It is hard to comprehend how truly awful it must have been. One evening the man chased my girlfriend’s younger sister around the house with a knife while naked, and he was thrown in jail for several days after the offense.

The father, it turns out, was also very smart. He had been a professional athlete, gone to an Ivy League school and gotten a perfect score on his SATs as well.

From what I understand, the older sister who had achieved so much had done so in large part because her father always told her she was never good enough. She wanted nothing more than to prove him wrong. The entire time the girls were growing up, the father would wake them up in the middle of the night and beat them while telling them they were failures and so forth. My own girlfriend was extremely scarred from this experience emotionally (which is a different story).

My girlfriend’s older sister went to the Ivy League school and she was not there for more than four or five months before she was abducted off the street one evening and raped by two men from a bad part of town, who had been hanging around near the school. After the rape she was in the hospital for several days because she had been assaulted pretty badly. She then decided to take the rest of the semester off.

She went home and started smoking cigarettes (a few packs a day).

She started smoking pot several times a day.

She gained a bunch of weight.

She stopped swimming.

…She never went back to college.

She got a job as a waitress and within several months she married one of the cooks in the restaurant. The cook was a guy who never went to college, and was very unintelligent. He was a big muscular guy, and was extremely intimidating. But he was nowhere near the young woman’s equal in terms of intelligence, social class and so forth. Without being too insulting, the guy this amazing woman had married was from the wrong side of the tracks.

Within a few years, the girl had had a few children with her husband. They were both working low paid jobs and living in a $500-a-month apartment in a bad neighborhood.

I used to go over to the house and see the girl, which was a sad experience for me on many levels. She was a voracious reader, who was reading various “deep books” like titles by Steven Hawking, and other complex books. She would always want to discuss these books but, to be honest with you, she understood them at a level far above my understanding. For example, if discussing a physics book like Steven Hawking she would not confine her discussion to Hawking but would discuss how Hawking’s theories did not make sense in light of a related theory by Einstein (which I had never heard of) that was in another book.

The girl eventually divorced the man and is now living alone with her children. She is alone and not really doing anything with her life. She probably will never go back to college and she will probably retire as a waitress.

I want to ask you something: Is this girl accomplishing her purpose in life? With all of the gifts she has, is her purpose to sit around in a small apartment smoking all day? This may be her purpose, but I do not think it is. I think she was put on this earth to do much greater things.

Clearly this girl has faced severe and horrible obstacles in her life. No one deserves to be assaulted by another person–let alone her own father. No one deserves to be abducted and raped. However, just as this girl faced these obstacles, other aspects of her life were very easy for her. School was easy. Being an Olympic-level swimmer was easy for her. But life ultimately was not easy. The obstacles she faced were ultimately not easy to overcome. In fact, they were so difficult, that this amazing person all but dropped out of life.

We all face obstacles on our way to becoming something. A child needs to learn to speak and walk. Then it needs to learn to read. We all have so much to learn from the beginning of our time on earth.

I can remember when my parents first bought be a bicycle home from Sears. I tried several times to ride the bicycle and each time I tried, I ended up falling down. Eventually, my parents put the bicycle in the garage. I was young back then, but I can still remember to this day not believing that I would ever be able to ride a bicycle, not like all the other kids in the neighborhood. I thought bicycles were simply not for me.

Several months later my father went into the garage for something and I saw the bike. Much to our surprise I hopped on and had no problem riding it. There were a bunch of kids playing out in front of my house; as I rode right past them and they were playing and screaming “go!” at me. Some were pretending to stand in front of the bike as I approached, and then they would move out of the way at the last second. It was one of the most fun-filled and joyful experiences of my life up until this point, and the fact that I have not forgotten shows that it really had an impact on me.

The reason I could suddenly ride the bike was because I had grown in all that time, while the bike sat in the garage. Before that time the bike seat had been too far from the pedals.

Not being able to ride the bike for a short time was simply an “obstacle” that was put in my path. Had I given up on bike riding at that point in my life it would have been a huge tragedy. I came to enjoy and absolutely cherish riding my bike throughout my childhood. My purpose was simply to ride a bike and to enjoy my childhood. How silly it would have been to have given up riding a bike completely at that point in my life.

However, many people give up at the slightest sign of resistance. Sure, my girlfriend’s sister may have been traumatized, but at the end of it all, she was left with a choice–to rise above and persevere, or to give up. Unfortunately she chose the latter. Perhaps you have given up on something in your life as well.

I do not care what your religion is, but imagine for a moment if my ex-girlfriend’s sister were to meet her creator when she dies. It might go something like this:

“Well, you certainly impressed me by breaking all of those Olympic swimming records and winning all of those medals. And the books you wrote about particle physics were absolutely unbelievable. From what I understand, you were one of the most popular professors at Yale University, and the fact that you became an astronaut later in life is even more than I expected of you. I am glad I gave you the skills I did. I am sorry about the abuse you suffered at your father’s hand, and I am sorry about the abduction and rape you experienced in college, but I needed to give you challenges of the highest order to give you the strength to become everything you were capable of being, and so you could show others what was possible in their lives.”

And she would have to tell her creator the following:

“Olympic medals? What are you talking about? I never won any Olympic medals. I never finished college and I have never written a book. I was never a professor at Yale University and I was never an astronaut. But, yes, thank you for apologizing for what happened to me. It was awful, you are right. I was upset about this my entire life. I have been divorced several times and never married a man near my equal. I also shared my pain with my children all of my life and they too know the terrible pain I experienced. They grew up poor on the wrong side of town. Now my daughter is a waitress like me and my son has been in prison for most of his life. My other daughter is a drug addict. I cannot believe I died of lung cancer from smoking. You know what a good athlete I used to be! So, yes, thank you again for apologizing for what happened to me but you have the wrong person! I did not do any of those things you are talking about.”

The most important thing we can do in our lives is to do what we came here to accomplish and make the absolute most of ourselves. There is nothing more important than this.

What did you come here to do? While you may not know exactly why you are on this earth, or what you came here to accomplish, it is time you found out. You have natural gifts in something that can lead you to greatness. We all do. I have yet to meet a person without some significant gift. Their ability might be comedy, it might be getting along with people, it might be cooking, it might be working with complex ideas, it might be athletics–but we all have a gift, and it is there waiting to be used to take you to the life you are entitled to and deserve.

Your life is not just about being a nice person, being a good friend, being a good person, doing a good job at work, doing good business, being healthy, giving to charity, or being a spiritual person. It is about accomplishing what you were put on this earth to accomplish.

Say, by chance, that someone put you on this earth and told you to accomplish something. Knowing your particular skills and strengths, what would they have told you to accomplish?

• Would it be being a good person?
• Would it be doing well in your career?
• Would it be donating time and money to charity?
• Would it be creating wonderful works of art to inspire the world?
• Would it be helping others with your unique gifts?
• Would it be amassing as much money as you possibly could so you could buy nice things?
• Would it be using drugs or other substances?
• Would it be getting fat?
• Would it be robbing liquor stores?
• Would it be cheating on your spouse?
• Would it be gossiping about others behind their back?
• Would it be getting fired one job after another?
• Would it be arguing with your spouse?

I believe that you, in particular, were put here for a reason and whatever that reason is, you need to discover it and fulfill it. It is a positive reason, not a negative reason. I know that there is some skill and something untapped in you that will allow you to achieve a great deal in your life in some direction. What did you come here to do?

Most of us are either moving towards something or away from something. We are either moving towards our purpose in life, or we are moving away from our purpose in life. Many people are after different things in their lives. Some people are looking for knowledge, other people are looking for money, others are looking for status.

Were you put on this world so you can be better than the next guy or gal? Were you put on this world so you can be right in every argument? Were you put on this world so you can have a bigger house than the next guy? Were you put on this world so you could have a more important title than the people you work with? Are these the reasons you were put on this world?

I interview people all the time for various jobs and as a recruiter I used to interview several people a day. When I am looking at someone’s résumé and studying his or her résumé for some time I very quickly get a good sense of what is important to the person and, in a sense, who they are. I can tell the conformist by a résumé. I can tell the hard worker by a résumé. I can tell the confused person by a résumé. I can spot serious (and not as serious) psychological problems with someone–on the person’s résumé. After all my years in this profession, I can often deduce what is not on the résumé by what is on the résumé.

In interviews, my favorite part of talking to people is telling them what they did right and what is so great about their résumé. I always point out something that is “there and not there”, and whenever I do this I see the person who I am interviewing lights right up. Yesterday I was interviewing a guy and I said to him something I do not think he has ever heard:

“You went to a good business school but not the best. What’s so incredible, though, is that you managed to get a far more competitive job than most everyone who went to a school like Stanford Business School. You should be very proud of what you have accomplished.”

I could tell this man was really happy to have heard this. We live for these small moments of recognition, and when people see our potential for greatness, it brings light into our lives. When someone sees what is positive behind the things we have done it is meaningful to us. We all should try and find the good in others as much as we can. Incidentally, the more we find the good in others the more we can find the good in ourselves.

The other reason I have found complimenting people about their résumés and achievements to be so useful is because it often allows people to see there is purpose to what they have done. People love it when we notice what they have done, that may not be immediately obvious to others. Noticing what people have done helps show that there is a purpose to what they are doing.

There is something wonderful in the world when we see a work of art that we admire that has power, when we see the smile of a child and it brings us joy, when we give of ourselves to others and feel joy in helping a person, when we help someone get a job, when we sit outside in nature and view the trees and flowers, when we spend time with someone we love, when we meet someone and we find an immediate spiritual connection. All of these things are powerful, and derive true ecstasy from experiencing positive and nurturing things. The fact that we take joy in being around certain things and not others can also help us to devise our own purpose in life.

Is our purpose to be lonely, angry, resentful, vengeful, hurtful, confused, stressed out, upset and confused? Are we here to feel these things or are we here to feel more positive things?

We need to do what we came into this world to accomplish. What we are here to accomplish revolves around the things that give us joy, and it has a character to it that other things do not possess for us. When we find this, we can forge a path to greatness. Along the way to greatness, though, we are sure to experience numerous obstacles. The obstacles are going to be there for each one of us; they will be enduring and ever-present.

The greater your purpose, the greater the obstacles you will face.

I think my ex-girlfriend’s sister had a great purpose in her life and it is for this reason she faced incredible obstacles. You will face obstacles along your journey as well. The greater the obstacles you have faced, the greater your purpose ultimately will be. When the obstacles come along, push through them with everything you have. The key to meeting your purpose is pushing through whatever obstacles you face.

Order and Disorder and Your Career

Two of the most fundamental laws of the universe are the following:

• Order leads to disorder; and,
• Disorder leads to order.

Every single person, place, or thing that you encounter follows these laws, which present and repeat themselves time and time again. In fact, both order and disorder are good things because they can be used to lead to great improvement in our personal lives and in society. How you make order and disorder work for you will in large part determine your success and failure in life and in your career.

A few years ago a very intelligent friend of mine, an attorney, came over to my house and started telling me about what a good investment property was. He had spent his career advising companies around the world about various legal issues, and had recently returned from working in Europe. His family owned a large mortgage company and bank, and had been in the business since the early 1900s. Clearly banking and property investment were in this guy’s blood.

When I asked him why he was always so enthusiastic about property investment, this is what he said:

“Owning property is insane because you are always under attack. The government is always taxing it and will take it away if you do not pay your taxes. If you owe money to a bank for the property they want their money at the same time each month and if they do not get their money they will take your property away. If you have tenants they may try and sue you if they fall down. If it is commercial property, you have to keep it rented out to keep cash flow coming in the door. Not to mention the fact that the elements are constantly wearing away at the property: Roofs need to be replaced; Air conditioners and heaters break. Carpet wears out. Everything in the property is continually falling apart and in need of repair or replacement. It is a challenge to hold on to property, which is one major reason why its value increases over time. None of this even takes into account things like earthquakes, wars and various things that people in other parts of the world need to deal with.”

After he said this I thought about the statement because there was a lot of depth to it. Here it had come from a man who had spent his entire life and career involved in the property business in one form or another. What he was describing, in effect, was the fact that the longer things are around the more they tend to lead to disorder. The force that he was describing, that made property so difficult to hold on to over time, was the force of disorder. This force of disorder is incredibly strong and will lead to the breakup of a property very quickly if it is not maintained, taxes are not paid and people are not living in it constantly.

Have you ever seen what happens to a house that has been abandoned? When I was in law school in Virginia I lived on a farm that was over 500 acres. The owner of the farm had several houses that he had scattered throughout the farm, which he rented out for extra income. They were all a mile or so apart and I lived in one of the houses. There was one house on the farm that the owner had stopped renting out around 10 years previously for some reason.

The first thing that happens to homes that are abandoned is that kids generally show up and have fun smashing the windows. I do not know where these kids come from, but you can practically set your watch by it. This particular house was in the middle of nowhere, but still its windows had been shattered. I have seen this phenomenon occur with abandoned houses and all over the world. After a house has been abandoned, within a few years weeds start growing, and a process of accelerated decaying occurs as bugs, weeds and all sorts of other elements take over the house and its surrounding area. Within 10 years the house looks like it has been abandoned for 100 years. The disorder that takes over a house and takes it to the ground and back to nothing works very, very fast once someone is not there maintaining it.

In Detroit, where I grew up, people burn houses that have been abandoned. They just go and light them on fire. It is as simple as that. This is the ultimate form of disorder. However, once the house has been burned to the ground all that remains is a lot. The remnants of the house are carted away by city authorities and you are left with the same lot that was there right in the beginning. Disorder leads to order.

When a criminal is out of control, stealing and committing all sorts of crimes, the police do everything they can to find the criminal. When they find him they put him in handcuffs and then drive him to a prison where he will be put in a small prison cell. In society, our way of controlling criminals is to impose order upon them. Where there is disorder we create order. Putting a prisoner behind bars is a way we try to impose order on disorder.

When someone is happy and feeling good about themselves it is always a challenge for them to remain in this state. They may feel ordered and content; however, according to natural law they can never feel this state forever. They will be under attack from outside forces and the world, and their state will eventually be disturbed. People will insult them. Bad things will happen in the world, which will upset them. Chaos will occur in the world and eventually there will be disorder. The person will become frustrated or discontent about one thing or another. Order naturally leads to disorder, inevitably.

Our bodies are made up of billions of cells, and bones and tissue. The physical order that we represent will also one day be gone because we will die. When we die some of us will be cremated and go into the sky as smoke and dust, eventually scattering our remains around the earth. Or, we will be buried, whereby our bodies will decompose over time, and eventually turn into the earth. The order that our bodies represent and hold will eventually change into a state of disorder.

• It is this way for every living creature on the earth.
• It is this way for every plant.
• It is this way for every house and every building.
• It is this way for every piece of machinery.
• It is this way for every boat, car and airplane.
• It is this way for every single thing on earth.

The order that exists will always become disorganized and put into varying states of disorder. When something is put into a state of disorder it will be transformed into a new state again, whereby it will once again be reorganized into something that represents order. This is a never-ending cycle.

Ideally, each time something is subjected to further disorder it has the opportunity to reorganize itself into something different. An example of order coming into being from disorder is the creation of diamonds:

Diamonds form between 120-200 kms or 75-120 miles below the earth’s surface. According to geologists the first delivery of diamonds was somewhere around 2.5 billion years ago and the most recent was 45 million years ago. That is a long time, my friend! According to science, the carbon that makes diamonds, comes from the melting of pre-existing rocks in the Earth’s upper mantle. There is an abundance of carbon atoms in the mantle. Temperature changes in the upper mantle forces the carbon atoms to go deeper where it melts and finally becomes new rock, when the temperature reduces. If other conditions like pressure and chemistry is right then the carbon atoms in the melting crustal rock bond to build diamond crystals. There is no guarantee that these carbon atoms will turn into diamonds. If the temperature rises or the pressure drops then the diamond crystals may melt partially or totally dissolve. Even if they do form, it takes thousands of years for those diamonds to come anywhere near the surface. http://www.gemsutra.com/diamonds.html

The creation of diamonds represents disorder being changed and coming together as something quite beautiful. The pressure on the rocks creates a diamond. However, not every type of disorder becomes something great. When many people are exposed to disorder, what emerges is something bad. In addition, many people stay isolated from others and the world, in an effort to avoid disorder.

When you are in a company and lose your job you are exposed to disorder. Almost any job you are working at you will eventually lose or leave–disorder is a natural law. Almost every company that you are working for will eventually go out of business (some time in the future). Many people’s lives and careers are punctuated by an extreme amount of disorder. They move from relationship to relationship and job to job and profession to profession. Each exposure to this lack of security and order in their lives is a chance to expose themselves to disorder, and to potentially change their lives for the better.

When you lose a job this is an example of being exposed to disorder. How you react to this disorder will, in large part, determine how successful you become in your career and life. Many people panic and get extremely upset and desperate when exposed to this sort of disorder:

• They take the first job they are offered, even if it is beneath their skill level.
• They may not look in other geographic areas where there are more opportunities.
• They may get depressed and turn to drugs and alcohol.
• They may confine their job search to looking on one job board, rather than exploring all the additional options available.

There are numerous potential responses to disorder when we face it in our lives. Disorder needs to be seen as a good thing and should be viewed as a chance to create a diamond, instead of something worse than what existed before. It is very powerful knowing that the disorder we face will lead to order. If you are not near retirement age and you are fired from a job, or lose a job, you need to understand that the “order” of a new job will come back to your life and you will find another job. Disorder always leads to order. The methods that you follow and how you go about creating the new order, represented here by the new job, are very significant and powerful. When disorder is imposed upon you, or you face impending disorder, it is an incredible opportunity for you to reorganize yourself and your life into something better.

There are all sorts of responses we can have to disorder. I read an interesting article today about an alarming increase in bank robberies in Spain due to current unemployment rates hovering at 20%. The article dealt with a contractor who had robbed four banks to pay his employees (before he was finally caught). This is a negative response the man had to the disorder he was facing, due to a bad economy. A positive response to a bad economy might be to find new sorts of work that need to be done, instead of robbing a bank. Another response might simply be having fewer employers on the payroll. Disorder always leads to order.

It is the same with relationships. There is order and there is disorder. Both order and disorder are related and are present in every relationship. Sometimes things are going well and other times they are not. Many people crave order in relationships and others crave disorder. In every relationship there will always be order and disorder. It is important to make disorder work for you in relationships and not against you.

Because order always leads to disorder, it is important that we look upon disorder as something positive and not something negative. In addition, there are times when we are in an ordered condition, when being in this condition may not really be in our best interest. There is a real danger in isolating yourself and not allowing yourself to be exposed to disorder. The more you are exposed to disorder the better the chance that you can reorganize and become ordered at a higher level.

There are many people out there who are in stable relationships but who are not growing in these relationships. They may have paired themselves with people who did not challenge them, or who are far beneath them in terms of intellect or something similar. This is very common. Many people seek out people and situations that do not challenge them so they are not exposed to disorder. They are frightened of disorder. In their careers, many people put themselves in situations wherein they are not challenged, just so they can avoid the risk of being exposed to disorder (i.e., being forced to learn new skills and to push and grow outside of their comfort zone). They choose to live lives of mediocrity and deny the achievement of their own potential, because they are unable to challenge themselves. This is extremely common. It is more than likely occurring with you at some level within your own life.

The two laws that (1) order leads to disorder and (2) disorder leads to order, are something you should understand in your own life. You need to make order and disorder work for you. You need to utilize disorder so that you can grow. The best thing that can often happen to you is to be exposed to disorder by losing a job, or experiencing some other sort of setback. The times we are exposed to disorder are some of the most important in our lives. Our reaction to disorder shapes our lives to come.

Change Your Reactions

When you see a fight occurring between any two people (or groups of people), it is always the case that one side believes it is right about something and that the other side is therefore wrong. It could be a disagreement over a political or territorial issue, a religious belief, or something else. Countries take sides about one issue or another and entire wars commence and continue for generations–based on one country believing it is right and the other is wrong.

When you pick up any newspaper you will see endless stories of conflict. I see so many stories about

• suicide bombers,
• sniper attacks in the Middle East,
• drug wars in Mexico,
• hotel bombings throughout the world

and so forth that I do not even read these articles anymore. The entire first section of almost every newspaper out there is usually about one conflict or another: Conflict between people, conflict between governments, conflict within governments and so forth. There is so much conflict going on that I simply cannot keep track of it and it has become boring for me to read. It is basically the same tired story over and over again.

There is so much conflict in the modern world, and so many countries are dedicated to taking sides that one country has forged a real reputation for itself. Out of the hundreds of countries in the world, we are all aware of a single country that refuses to participate in any external conflict: Switzerland.

I used to be a litigation attorney and this entire job involved two sides fighting it out to prove in court that one side was right and the other was wrong. Conflict is huge business and many lawyers make millions of dollars a year helping various people fight conflicts:

• The companies that sue other companies believe they are right.
• The people who sue the companies believe they are right.
• The companies that sue the people believe they are right.
• The people who sue the other people believe they are right.

In addition to lawyers, some of the biggest companies in the United States and in other countries have become rich and powerful by making weapons that assist countries and others with conflict.

Conflict is about ego. It is about saying that I am right and the other person is wrong. When people get divorced, it is usually because one person is wrong and the other person is right about something. I can remember that when I was going through a break up with a live-in girlfriend several years ago a fundamental issue was that I was not organized and neat enough. I was “wrong” because I did not organize my closet in a certain way (shirts of a certain color did not always go together), and I was “wrong” because I was not organized enough. There were also some crazy things that I thought my ex-girlfriend was wrong about as well. Nonetheless she would certainly tell you that I was wrong about more things than she was. Even in deciding who is wrong there is a balance, which kind of functions like a points system:

I may have done some bad stuff but you have done more bad stuff…therefore, I am more right than you are.

This is the nature of conflict. We are always blaming another person for something. People disagree all the time. Life is about disagreement. Everyone is in disagreement about something–more often than not, although you may notice that some people disagree more than others.

If you meet a man on the street who is down on his luck and sitting in a gutter, and you ask him why he is there, he will always have an explanation. His explanation will almost always involve someone else and something someone else did to put him in his current situation.

When you speak to someone who got fired from a job his or her explanation will almost always involve someone else and something that someone else did.

When I am out and about the town in Las Vegas, I always see couples fighting and disagreeing about this or that. In the table next to us at Lawry’s The Prime Rib the other night there was a huge disagreement going on between a couple in the seat next to us:

“I only had two drinks.”

“It is too much. You had a drink before we left too.”

“I did not, and if I want to relax it is my business ….”

“I am very upset that you will not listen to me. You need to change.”

And so it goes. During the dinner I got mad at the waitress because we waited over 45 minutes for our Prime Rib to arrive. Our waitress was wrong, of course and I was right.

When I am walking down the Strip I can always spot a couple disagreeing about this or that. Disagreement is pervasive and something that occurs on a consistent basis between people. People become angry over disagreements and this anger is something that is always there.

• People leave and walk out of marriages because one person is wrong.
• People leave jobs because they believe their employer is wrong about something.
• People get angry at others because the other is wrong about something.
• People become alienated from friends and loved ones because they believe the other person is wrong about something.

“You need to change …”

One of the most popular sports right now is Ultimate Fighting. This involves one side “winning” and the other side being right. Sports, in my opinion, is a civilized form of war between two people or groups of people. One city can fight another city. In the Olympics, one country can annihilate another country–without endangering the welfare of its own people.

Many people spend a good portion of their time angry and blaming others for this or that. They may be angry with another driver. They may be angry with a relative. They may be angry at a boss. Everyone wants to blame another for their own unhappiness, their own shortcomings.

We are all struggling to be perfect, and to be something. Most of us are doing what we can to move towards some sort of ideal that we have for ourselves, and for our place in the world. This ideal could involve a better job, a better car or house, a different mate, getting our children into certain schools, winning a competition, or more. We are all trying to move towards this ideal, and we will never reach it. Even if we reach aspects of this ideal for a short time, the chances are great that we will soon decide that another ideal exists, and we will then redirect ourselves towards it.

The problem with this struggle to attain our perfect life is that we are never, ever going to find the perfection we are seeking. There is always going to be someone more successful, happier, better off, faster, stronger, better looking and so forth than us. We could reach one ideal of what we are seeking for ourselves; however, there are other goal posts that we will never reach. This struggle consumes most of our lives.

In Orthodox Judaism, the Sabbath (also known as Shabbat) is supposed to be a time during which people do no work. Cooking is not allowed. Commerce and spending money is not allowed. Not even writing with a pen, or working on a computer are allowed. Driving a car is not allowed (this involves work because the pistons move up and down). Carrying objects a certain distance is not allowed because it involves work. Electricity is not allowed to be turned on and off under the more literal interpretations of Shabbat because this involves the movement of electrons and setting them to work.

Beyond doing no work, the Shabbat is a disconnection from the material world and from the act of “becoming” that most people constantly struggle with. Our days are generally filled with work and changing and trying to become something–we want to earn money; we want to improve in our careers; we want to get better at whatever we are doing; we do not want another person to get the upper hand on us in business. On Shabbat, people are supposed to do no work, to just be happy with who they are and contemplate the spiritual aspects of life. People are supposed to enjoy their families and lives, rather than worry about racing around from place to place, as we all do during the week.

What is interesting about this time is that it is a time when people can just be themselves, unencumbered by trying the change and become someone or something new. More importantly, commerce and work in some respects almost always involve a form of conflict:

Is the person doing his/her work correctly?

Did I get a good enough deal?

Is this person cheating me?

Can I make this piece of work better?

Hardly anyone follows Shabbat. In fact, most Jews do not follow it. The pressure of becoming, of commerce and so forth is so strong that this spiritual aspect of life often goes ignored. We prefer to work and to be in conflict. It is what we are used to. In fact, most people’s lives are spent within the conflicted struggles of business and commerce, working desperately to become something new. Even this one simple day of rest on Shabbat is a gift and a right that most people in the working world do not seem to give themselves.

What I find so profound about the simple idea of taking a day off from everything, is that this is something that most of us never allow ourselves to experience. It is largely for this reason, I believe, that most of our world is continually in conflict, as we are also continually in conflict with ourselves and others.

We are always looking outside of ourselves for peace. We believe that our peace will come when we are able to change others. We blame others as the cause of our frustrations, failures and disappointments. We feel angry with others. We are always trying to prove the other person wrong, and trying to be right ourselves.

We spend our entire lives with an opponent, angry at others and the world. We go into depression about others and find ourselves angry, hurt and torn up inside. We constantly try to move towards some destination in business, in our careers and our lives, and we feel tensed that we are not arriving there. Our lives are spent in this tension, hoping to be or become someone else.

The best piece of advice I can give you is instead of looking outside of yourself for fulfillment, look within. Your reaction to the world is what is controlling how you feel. When you feel tension, or react to the world in a negative way, you are creating that state within yourself that is characterized by frustration, anger, tension, depression and all sorts of other negative emotions. The wonderful truth is that you are in charge of how you react, and when you choose not to react in a negative way then your life will begin to change.

Most people spend their lives in a negative reaction and trying to change others or change their place in the world. We are always moving towards something. When we stop trying to move towards something and we stop reacting negatively, our lives become much more fulfilling.

My advice to you is to try changing from a position of reaction to one of acceptance of the world. When you accept you can go much further along your way towards whatever goal you have, and you will have less conflict with the people you meet along the way. You do not need to, and often cannot change anyone, anyplace, or anything around you: What you can change is your reaction to what you encounter.

Next Page »