Focus, Instead of Going Unconscious
Several years ago I used to live in a house that had a room overlooking my neighbors’ backyard. I had a little exercise area with an elliptical machine and a StairMaster set up in one corner of the room, and whenever I would exercise I could look directly out to my neighbors’ backyard and see whatever was going on there. It was generally a pretty bucolic scene with a nice garden and some trees. About once every two or three months I would be exercising on the weekends and I would see the man of [Read more]
Plan for Success–Not Failure
When I was younger, there was a restaurant on Telegraph Road in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan that used to offer people a percentage off the price of their meals equal to a person’s age, on the person’s birthday each year. So, on your twenty-fifth birthday, for instance, you would get a 25% discount on your meal. On your fiftieth birthday, you would get a 50% discount on your meal. Not surprisingly, this particular restaurant was extremely popular with older people on their birthdays. In fact, elderly people came from all over town on their birthdays [Read more]
Bad Dancing, Submitting, and Surrendering
When I was in college I used to hate going to parties where there was a lot of dancing. In fact, I did everything I could to avoid it. If I took a girl to a party and she insisted on dancing, I would generally have one of my friends dance with her because I disliked it so much. I am not sure what it is about dancing, but it is just not something that gets me all that excited, and it never has. If I really have to, though, I will dance. [Read more]
It is Better to Be Known for Something than Nothing at All
When I was 20 years old, running an asphalt business in Detroit, I purchased a fax machine, a couple of business phone numbers, and I bought some lists of companies and businesses I thought would have big asphalt parking lots I could work on from a mailing list company. I then rented a loft apartment for the summer and hired a salesman named Jim, who was a career salesman in his 50s, to come into the loft and cold call businesses about potentially hiring me to do some asphalt work. “Hello. I am calling to ask you a question: Isn’t it about time you invested in getting your parking lot patched up and sealed? Your parking lot is the first part of your business that your customers see and set foot on. I’d like to swing by and give you an estimate today.” The salesman [Read more]
Time Economy Jobs and Productivity Economy Jobs
In a law firm, when an attorney stops billing hours and no longer has any work, the person will be very close to losing his or her job. Survival in law firms involves staying busy and making work all the time. This is one reason it is so hard for young attorneys to stay employed in law firms. They find that they must ingratiate themselves with the right people, in order to consistently get work. Moreover, they have to do excellent quality work. And finally, because law firms typically charge clients by the hour, the attorneys [Read more]
Bullies and Your Career
One of the guards was always incredibly bored and was therefore always looking to get into long conversations. My job kept me pretty busy, but one day I decided to sit down and start chatting with him. I was glad I did because it turned out to be one of the most interesting conversations I had ever had. The guard told me he had spent the last 10 years of his career sitting in police cars outside the homes of a few kids in the neighborhood where I grew up. These homes were within a few streets of my house. The retired officer told me that he and various policemen had been doing 24-hour surveillance of a few of these homes for “at least a decade, just watching who came and went”. “A couple of your neighbors were among the most powerful crime bosses in the country,” he told me. “They were being watched all the time.” The neighborhood in which I grew up consisted of quiet urban streets. Since the courthouse I was working in was around 100 miles from there, it was a real coincidence to find myself talking to someone who had spent 10 years sitting in a police car right down the street from my house. I certainly never saw these police cars or the policeman doing stakeouts down the street when I was growing up, and I never heard anything about it from anyone. The people that the guard mentioned, with whom I had gone to school, all had Italian last names, and their parents had been rumored to be in the mafia. When I asked the retired policeman what the parents did to warrant such massive police attention, he said something I will never forget: “Lots of stuff. But like most people who succeed over a long period of time, they were experts in bullying and intimidating people, and getting them to do what they wanted them to do. They are just grown up bullies who are really mean-spirited.” This former policeman essentially saw the world in terms of bullies and the bullied. In fact, everything about the way the guy saw the world was in terms of people intimidating others, and people being intimidated by others. He was very short, and in listening to him speak I started to feel that he himself had had probably been bullied when he was younger, perhaps because of his stature. The guard’s statement really stuck with me because at the time I was working in a courthouse, seeing all sorts of conflicts every day. I was seeing cases of companies being sued and suing people. I was seeing all sorts of cases of bank robberies and other crimes. However, when I looked at most of the cases I was dealing with, I realized that most of the conflict always had a bully on one side of the conflict. In fact, when it comes right down to it, most conflicts involve bullies in some way. Over the next several months I started looking at every case I worked on in a different light.
- I saw a case of a man who found a bum on the street and talked him into robbing a bank for him by intimidating him.
- I saw a case of a woman hurt in a giant convenience chain, in which the chain was “lawyering up” and intimidating her by dragging up her past, threatening her with malicious prosecution and questioning her motives.
- I saw a case of a company copying a very small competitor’s product and then making it incredibly difficult for the small company to sue, by making the legal process extraordinarily cumbersome and expensive for them.
- I saw a case of the government bullying someone that it did not like by taking away their property and making things difficult for them.
Your Invisible Power
Your Invisible Power was the first book and by far the most powerful and popular works of Genevieve Behrend. Here, she presents, perpetuates, and shares the knowledge of the Troward philosophy at its best, teaching us how to use the power of visualization and other processes to transform your life. The concepts of Mental Science are written with the purpose that their suggestions may furnish you a key to open up the way to the attainment of your desires.
Your Invisible Power provided me with deep insight into numerous life changing theories regarding how to attract to yourself the things you desire, the [Read more]
Carpenters, Fancy French Restaurants, Backstage, and Your Career
One of my favorite stories is about a man who has a creak in his house. For years he has tried one way or another to fix the creak, but every single time he walks through the old house it still makes that annoying squeaky sound. No one has ever been able to fix the problem, and the man does not know exactly what he should do. He has been living with the creak for years and it just seems to get louder and louder. He has been told the only way to get rid of [Read more]
Bears, Foster Homes, Resourcefulness, Love, and Endless Opportunity
When I was around 12 years old, my mother decided to take my 5-year-old sister and I on a trip from Detroit to Northern Michigan. There was not a lot of preplanning involved, and all we knew was that we were going to be gone for two weeks. There was no decision made about where we would be staying, or what we were going to do once we got there. We simply got in the car one early morning in late summer and started driving north. After several hours of driving, my mother would [Read more]
Trust Your Intuition in Your Career and Life
When I was around 11 years old, a couple of friends of mine, Charlie and Dave, had found a use for an amazing garden of sculptured bushes that was behind Charlie’s house. I had never understood or appreciated how exciting a garden could really be. Charlie’s dad was a very successful salesman of something or another, and he and his family lived in a giant corner house on a street called Sunningdale, in Grosse Pointe Woods, a nice suburb of Detroit. Charlie was about the richest kid in our elementary school class, and he was also a [Read more]
