Learn to Confront Silence
A persistent fight that many couples have is that one may like to get out and do all sorts of things (meet people, dine out, and so forth) and the other may enjoy just sitting at home doing nothing. I read an interesting article some time ago about the breakup of Andre Agassi and Brooke Shields that discussed this. As I have heard of various breakups of other couples throughout the years, this same rationale for separating has emerged more times than I can count: One always wanted to be on the go and the other did not. [Read more]
Self-Esteem and Lunch Room Tables
From ages 13 to 17, I attended six different schools in a variety of cities and countries. I never found attending these new schools all that difficult. What I disliked, though, was penetrating the pecking order of the lunch tables. This was especially important in middle school. Here, there were rigid social distinctions between groups of kids and where they sat. When going to a new middle school, I figured out that I would need to sit at least for a week or two with the “undesirables” before being brought up the social pecking order a bit. This required befriending [Read more]
Mental Toughness
When I was practicing law, there was a guy who must have been in his early 40s who had broken with reality. I think he really might have gone insane. He desperately wanted to get ahead in the firm and worked extremely hard. He was the sort of guy who was working 18-hour days, sometimes more, sleeping on the floor of his office and so forth. I have no idea how long he had been doing this, but it had obviously taken its toll on him. There is no doubt that the guy was making the law [Read more]
Be Around Those With High Expectations of You
A few years ago, at a TED conference, I watched Bill Gates give a speech about improving education. Gates stated that of all the variables he had examined, he believed the most effective way to improve education was simply to have good teachers. Various studies have confirmed that teachers are one of the greatest and most important factors in the quality of education that students receive. In the 1988 movie Stand and Deliver, Edward James Olmos plays Jamie Escalante, a math teacher in a poor Hispanic neighborhood. He is convinced that his students have a lot of potential and ends up turning gang members and others whom people do not believe in into great students. In the movie (based on a real-life story), Olmos is able to turn the lives of the students around, based on his expectations of them. Because he expects people who normally would be rejected by society to succeed, they do. When you look at your life, your role models, and the people around you, ask yourself what their expectations of you are. Do the people around you expect you to do great things, or do they expect you to fail or not succeed? Whether you like it or not, you will be profoundly influenced by the expectations of people around you. When people are aware of others’ expectations about them, they usually perform in accordance with those expectations. The best quality for teachers to have is their belief in their students and ability to set high expectations for them. The best quality you can seek in your friends and the people close to you is that they have high expectations for you. The best addition you can have to the quality of the lives of your friends, children, and significant others is to have high expectations for them. The quality of your life and the lives of the people around you will be determined by expectations. The expectations of others around you can lead either to your improvement or to your destruction. Expectations that lead to destruction are some of the more dangerous things you need to avoid in your life and career. If you are fired from a job for doing something wrong and you go to a new job, you should make sure your new employer does not know about your past negative behavior. Why? Because if a new employer knows why you lost your job, he or she is going to view you as someone who might make the same mistake twice. I am not telling you to lie. What I am telling you is that you need to limit the amount of negative information out there about you and the number of people who have this negative information. People’s views of you will color their expectations of you, and if this view is negative the results you get in your career and life may also be negative. Expectations are communicated in a variety of ways. They are communicated by a person’s tone of voice, the language used, and many more subtle factors. These expectations influence us and our performance in ways that are both conscious and subconscious. Throughout my entire business career, I have maintained multiple offices throughout the United States. One of my businesses is legal recruiting. Here, I have had as many as ten offices throughout the United States at many times. Formerly, I had a student loan business and had three offices for this. In the job site business I am in, I have typically had at least three offices working on this. In reality, all of these businesses could be operated from a single location. There is no need for multiple offices. There is some tactical advantage to having all of these offices; however, in reality the businesses could operate with just one office doing all of the work. Why all the offices, then? The reason for so many offices has to do with market factors that can create horrible and devastating momentum and expectations for groups of employees when things in one business go bad. By having multiple offices, the business and its people are diversified and so are their opinions and expectations of one another. In the legal recruiting realm, for example, some markets are good and others are bad at various points in time. If the market is really bad in New York and good in Los Angeles, the people in New York may become bitter or angry, stop trying as hard, lose confidence, and share their lack of enthusiasm with others. They may say it is hopeless and there is no use trying. They will look at their peers and subtly (and not so subtly sometimes) believe that others will soon be experiencing the same negative results. In contrast, if the market is really good in Los Angeles the people in this office will be very excited. They will all be doing well, and with a group of people together all doing well, each of them will raise the others up. The enthusiasm will raise the spirits of everyone, and the group as a whole will do very well. Even average performers may be raised up to very good performers because group psychology is such that everyone will expect everyone else to be doing well. Since I run several businesses, I cannot be confident that any one of them at a given point in time will not suddenly experience a reversal led by market forces. All businesses experience reversals at some point. Groups of people that are in an environment that is not doing well do not experience a lot of happiness and enthusiasm. Have you ever seen people who think they may lose their job? They experience a drop in the output of their work, and their enthusiasm for their job is also likely to decline. Their fear and belief changes the way they act, and they ultimately do find themselves fired. Their belief in others’ expectations and opinion of them becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Your success or failure is a product of the expectations of those who are around you. For hundreds of years, people have escaped negative impressions and expectations of them in one area by moving somewhere else. To escape rigid class systems and other prejudicial views of them, people have continually moved to the United States from all over the world. In a similar vein, to escape the negative views of them in small towns and other areas, people have moved to large cities that are more anonymous. For many people, the large city is a refuge from others’ opinions of them in smaller and more provincial areas. If you lose a job in a small area of the country, or are marred by some sort of scandal, often the best medicine is to simply move somewhere else. You do not want a life governed by negative impressions of you. Similarly, if you experience great success in a given area, you should do your best to stay there. Others’ positive impressions of you will help carry you forward and buoy you up. When I was in college I met all sorts of interesting people who had been real successes growing up. One had been the president of his high school class, first in his class, captain of the football team, and more. The only problem was that he was from a small town in a remote state. When he got to college he got horrible grades because he was simply not prepared for the rigors of study at our school. Everyone around him started acting like he was not smart enough and was unworthy of being a student at the school. Within a few months, everyone thought he was a loser. He was locked up for hitting his girlfriend, began abusing alcohol, and was expelled from the school in less than two years. If this guy had stayed in the small town he was from or had gone to a local school, his life would have been different. People around him would have expected great things. He would not have gotten bad grades. He probably would have continued his pattern of leadership and achievement. The problem was that he put himself in an environment where he was over his head and others came to have very poor expectations from him. There is nothing unusual about the example above. I have always been really bad at chemistry, for example. I hate the subject and was lucky to make it out of high school after taking the class. If I put myself in an environment where all I had to do was study chemistry beside a bunch of chemistry geniuses, I would be in serious trouble. I would have low self-esteem, my classmates studying chemistry would not think too highly of me, and the odds are pretty good I would be depressed a lot of the time. In contrast, I have always been really good at other courses. In one discipline I was so good, I was offered a scholarship to go to graduate school for a PhD during my junior year of college. I never would have had that self-esteem unless I was studying that particular discipline. It is important to continually surround yourself with people who have high expectations of you. It is important to do things that you are good at so that you reinforce others’ positive opinions of you. Many people surround themselves with people who have low expectations of them and this ends up doing them a great deal of harm. You also often find yourself around others with low expectations of you because you are doing something you should not be doing or are associating with those you should not be. When you are around those who have low expectations of your abilities, then you tend to perform in the manner they expect of you. When you are around those who have high expectations, you tend to rise to this level as well. Nothing is more important than finding a place where you are around those who appreciate your abilities and have high expectations of you. THE LESSON When people are aware of others’ expectations, they usually perform in accordance with them. Outside expectations can lead to either your success or your destruction; [Read more]
Cheap Beer, Overpriced Chocolate, Being Visible and Approachable
For some reason, I have started receiving a number of invitations from local stores to go and spend an evening looking at stuff–”new fall collections,” for example. It could be women’s shoes, beds and bedding, or other wares; whatever the merchandise, the invitations just keep coming. They come by mail. The stores call our house. And, lest I think I am special, the stores advertise these events to the public at large through the newspaper and their websites. I have only attended one of these events so far, at a clothing store inside of the Palazzo Casino [Read more]
Detroit Car Washes, Cash, Drug Dealers, and the Character of Your Goals
Several years ago, I used to run an asphalt business out of Detroit, Michigan. I use the phrase “out of Detroit” loosely because in the eight years or so I was in the business, I only did a few asphalt jobs in the city of Detroit. Most of my work was in the suburbs. The reason I did so few asphalt jobs in Detroit then is that the city was in ruins and very few people could afford to maintain their asphalt. I did, however, keep my equipment in the city of Detroit because it was much cheaper to keep it there [Read more]
The Inner Voices, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Your Life
When you consider all that you are capable of achieving, nothing is more exciting than imagining who and what you can and will become in your life. To do this, you must first learn to ignore that voice inside your head that may tell you otherwise.
In fact, pretty much whatever you want out of life is yours for the taking.
Once You Achieve Success, Savor and Enjoy It to the Fullest
I have certain habits and ways of thinking about the world that are the right ways, at least for me:
I want to enjoy everyone I know, everything I buy, and every idea I come into contact with to the fullest. I feel that we need to really appreciate what we have to the absolute fullest. A few years ago, I was taking private pilot lessons and was very close to getting my pilot’s license–and then I stopped. It has been at the back of my [Read more]
Refuse to Acknowledge Setbacks and Intimidations, and You Will Never Fail
The police pulled in behind us the second we turned into my mother’s driveway, and turned on their lights. I was very frightened. I thought I might be going to jail that evening. I was not sure. I had assumed my mother and sister were staying in for the evening when we went joyriding in her car; however, I was wrong. She had walked up the street to the ice-cream parlor with my sister. When she returned home, she assumed that the car was stolen because it was missing from the driveway. She called the police. The [Read more]
Area 51 in Nebraska, Suicides, and the Danger of Comparing Yourself to Others
During my last year of law school, I was walking back from class one day and passed an old apartment I had lived in during my first year of law school. Wearing shorts and no shirt, a classmate of mine was crouched outside against a wall in the fetal position. It was cold outside and he was washing his pick up truck. I knew him from my first year of law school but had not spoken with him recently. He had been a fighter pilot before entering law school. He was small, very fit, and a smart guy. [Read more]
