Supermodels, Your Body, and Your Mind
I have recently moved into a condominium in Las Vegas and every single day I go down to the gym and exercise. The condo building itself is very large and the units themselves range in price from $100,000 to upwards of $5,000,000. One of the most exciting things about being in this condominium is that there is such a variety of people. It is unlike any other place I have ever been in the world. There are some people in the gym who seem to think they are better than everyone else; there are other people [Read more]
My Trip to the Playboy Mansion: The Importance of Challenging Convention
A couple of years ago, I received a telephone call from a friend of mine who is a pretty well known business motivational speaker, that he had gotten some tickets to a party at the Playboy Mansion. I figured that there was no way in hell my wife would allow me to go, and figured at the time, that this was the sort of thing only single guys did. My immediate reaction to hearing this was that I would like to go, of course, but that it was just something that was not going to happen. For days my friend sent me one email or another with various details about how fun this party was going to be and various pictures of Playboy models and so forth. He was really quite excited about it. The man was also in his 50s, a lot older than I am, and his enthusiasm was really quite something and not like anything I had witnessed before. In fact, some of the pictures he started to send me began to get just downright dirty and I was afraid to open them in the office because they were bordering on porno. I told my wife about the invitation after having received a barrage of emails from my friend over a period of a few days. My immediate reaction was that she was going to tell me not to go under any circumstance and that would be the end of it. Instead, she became incredibly enthusiastic. “Wow!! That’s so cool!! You need to go!” She also wanted to go to but I told her I had only one invitation. She called up all her friends and was really excited that I was going to be going to the Playboy Mansion for a party. My wife is the greatest and really has a lot of trust and given her incredible endorsement, I made plans to go. “I told my dad you were going and he said he had gone to a party there several years ago too!” my wife said. The more I thought about the situation the more I realized I had to go. Even my wife’s father was enthusiastic about me going to this party. The next week her parents were over here and her dad came up to me and asked me if I was excited about going to a party at the Playboy Mansion and I told him I was. I am from the Midwest and this is not how parents (or wives) would be likely to behave there. My wife grew up in Los Angeles, however, and she and her parents certainly had some different thoughts about the propriety of this sort of stuff. The party invitation I received stated that you had to wear pajamas and slippers to it. Since I did not have any pajamas and slippers, I sheepishly gave a copy of the invitation to my assistant and asked her to go pick out some pajamas and so forth for me. My assistant then was also from California, so I should have foreseen her reaction. I was expecting her to perhaps quit over this, or think I was some sort of scumbag for going to this party. However, the exact opposite occurred as well. My assistant was a professional stalker and had actually started a website dedicated to her stalking activities, www.IamNotaStalker.com. Her stalking activities for the past several years have involved going around to the homes of celebrities, locations of movie shoots and scenes, and taking her picture in front of them. She is the best in the world at celebrity stalking and since quitting her job as my assistant a year or so ago, has been stalking full time. My assistant was incredibly enthusiastic about me going to a party at the Playboy Mansion as well. “I wish my boyfriend could go with you, he’d love it!!” she said. I heard her talking to my wife on the phone at one point about how cool she thought it was that I was going to the party. She purchased me some black silk pajamas and black slippers for the party. Since Hugh Hefner does not have enough parking at his mansion for giant parties, the invitation to the party stated that I was to be picked up in a bus in the parking lot of the Beverly Hills Hilton Hotel. No regular clothes were allowed so I had to meet the bus wearing my pajamas. The party was on a Saturday night and I took a shower and then put on my bathrobe and slippers. I decided to give myself around two hours to drive from my house to the Beverly Hills Hilton to get picked up for the party because there is a lot of traffic around Los Angeles early Saturday evening. When I stepped into my pickup truck in a pair of pajamas, I became very concerned that I might get pulled over. Nothing about the situation would have looked right. Moreover, I had recently purchased some hay from the feed bin for my goats and sheep I am raising in my suburban back yard, so there were all sorts of loose hay stuck in the truck bed that was blowing around while I drove through the streets of Los Angeles. I had the distinct misfortune that day, to make it to the Beverly Hills Hilton Hotel in around 30 minutes and not two hours. There was absolutely no traffic whatsoever. When I arrived at the hotel and got out of my truck in the parking lot, I saw absolutely no sign of the Playboy party crowd at all. In fact, walking through the Hotel in my pajamas I was quite worried I might get arrested. I took a seat in the lobby and decided that I would sit there for the next hour or so while I waited for my friend. I am pretty self conscious; however, sitting around there in the lobby made me feel something worse than self conscious. There was a large wedding going on in the hotel and people were sitting around in tuxedos and very nice suits and I was sitting there in pajamas. The strangest thing happened, however. No one seemed to be acting like there was anything whatsoever out of the ordinary. No one seemed to be looking at me at all. While no one was talking to me, no one was really staring at me either. I felt like disappearing. It was a really bizarre experience. I decided that I was too self conscious sitting in the lobby of the Hotel in pajamas and that I would go downstairs in the Hotel and try and find somewhere else to hide out. I ended up finding a restaurant in the basement. I walked up the maitre de and asked to be seated. Without batting an eye, he sat me down in a nice table overlooking a bunch of men wearing suits. The biggest problem with the table I was in, however, was that I was seated directly in the middle of the restaurant so everyone there could see me. The same thing that had happened upstairs happened there: No one seemed at all concerned that there was a guy sitting in pajamas in the middle of a formal restaurant. At the time, it occurred to me that there was a lesson to this, but I was not really sure what it was. There are lessons here relevant to your career and I will discuss them shortly; however, at the time I was not sure what to make of it. When I had been a young law student working in New York City during the summers between my second and third year of law school (this is called “a summer associate”), I remember I was out to eat one day, when one of the older associate attorneys, who had been practicing for 8 years or so, started talking to me and other young attorneys about the importance of appearances. While the “elite of the elite” of the highest billing attorneys in New York routinely charge $1,000 an hour nowadays, back then [Read more]
Concentrate on Your Strengths
When you look at the people who are the most successful and who do the best in their trade, you often find a commonality: They are all doing something that they love, which comes naturally to them. In fact, the more you look at what the person is doing, the more you find that they are incredibly gifted at their chosen pursuit–in many cases to an extreme level. I remember when I was in college, I was taking a philosophy course that was about ethics. At the time Bono from the rock band U2 was very vocal [Read more]
Feral Children, Puzzles, Jews, and Filters
I remember growing up around kids with books of puzzles and games in elementary school and junior high school; these were always the kinds of kids that did not fit in. They also got beat up after school, were awkward during gym class, got pushed around on the playground, and sat alone or in small groups looking like outcasts during lunch. They would sit there all through the lunch hour screwing around with these little puzzle books. The kids doing the puzzles would draw the grimaces of other so called “cool” kids. On the weekends these kids [Read more]
