The Importance of Environment
I have decided that I do not like exercising in the gym in our building in Las Vegas anymore. The facility itself is very nice and new, and it has excellent equipment. It is also very clean and well maintained; in fact, it is one of the nicest gyms I have ever seen. The window views of the stratosphere outside are also pretty cool. However, it is what is going on inside the gym that bothers me. Almost every time I have been to the gym I have seen men running with their shirts off on the [Read more]
Seven Reasons People Never Have the Successful Careers They Are Capable of
A lawyer told me last night that most of the other attorneys she knows are looking to do something other than practice law. Lawyers are one of the most fascinating breeds of people I know. The ones who go to the top law schools and start in jobs with the top law firms generally have been performing at a very high level for their entire lives; however, when they get out in the real world, a good proportion of these attorneys fail to have fulfilling and successful long-term careers. What this has taught me is that no matter how smart we are, how talented we [Read more]
Depression, Health, Boredom, Interesting People, and Self-Esteem
I remember my first encounters with the self-improvement industry when I was younger. In many areas of the United States, people look at self-improvement as something that is absolutely crazy. That is how the people around me viewed it when I was growing up. When I think about self-improvement, however, I think about people doing things like:
- …trying to improve their mood and level of happiness
- …trying to improve their health
- …trying to become interested in new things
- …trying to meet other interesting people
- …trying to improve their self-esteem
This is for the most part what self-improvement is all about–these five things mentioned above. It takes on different forms (and some people [Read more]
Marketing Yourself–Who, What, and How
In your career and life you need to be aware of (1) whom you are marketing yourself to, (2) what you are marketing, and (3) how you are marketing yourself. Each of these three things can make a major difference in the success of your job search. People who understand these three components can
- make tens of millions of dollars in a short time;
- get a job at a company that is not hiring;
- easily find positions in any economic environment.
Market to the Right People. When I first started working as a legal recruiter, it was early 2000 and the market for corporate attorneys in Silicon Valley was out of control. At the time, attorneys were leaving law firms to take jobs inside of Internet companies and were getting stock options in many cases. Some young attorneys made millions of dollars in less than a few years, and because attorneys perceived there was so much opportunity inside of young tech companies, they were “jumping ship,” leaving law firms as fast as they could. In response, law firms started ratcheting up salaries and hiring new corporate attorneys as fast as they could. I used to be a legal recruiter in Los Angeles and for the first six months or so that I was recruiting I did not place a single corporate attorney in Los Angeles. However, during this six-month period I placed probably 20 corporate attorneys in Silicon Valley. I placed corporate attorneys from small towns as well as firms in New Jersey within giant Silicon Valley firms. In many cases these were people who had been out of work for months. If a corporate attorney could make it to the interview and act with a modicum of professionalism in the interview, he or she would get the job. To say the market in Silicon Valley was incredible would be an understatement. At the same time, though, corporate attorneys were not in high demand in Los Angeles. Many of the corporate attorneys I was working with in Los Angeles waited weeks to get interviews, despite having stellar qualifications. The corporate attorneys simply were not having luck tracking down jobs in Los Angeles. It was the same thing in a few other cities around the United States. If you were a corporate attorney working in Los Angeles at the time, you might have become quite discouraged by the market and thought there was something wrong with you. In reality, there was nothing wrong with the corporate attorneys–it was all about the market trends at the time. The way the market works is among the most important things you can understand about your life and particularly your job search. You need to bring your product or service to the right market in order to succeed. If you put yourself in the right market, you will do exceptionally well. I met a guy my age not too long ago who attended the University of Michigan Law School. When he graduated from there, he had a difficult time finding a good job with a law firm in Detroit. He took a low-paying job with a company that was not that prestigious, because it was the only job he could get. Then, I think, he got fired and moved to the Bay Area. He was one of the first people hired at a major technology company and he got all sorts of stock options and made millions of dollars. After that he was one of the first few employees at another technology company and in less than a year, he made more than $50 million, when the company went public. He now spends his time traveling between multiple homes and investing in other technology companies. Do you think any of this would have happened if this person had stayed in Detroit, working his first lousy job? Of course not; he had to go to the right market, one that would make full use of his abilities and talents. It is all about where and to whom you market yourself. This morning I got a spam e-mail about a Russian bride dating site. I went to the site and then [Read more]
Character-Building Thought Power
In his book, Character-Building Thought Power, Ralph Waldo Trine draws a clear distinction between good and bad habits. In the process he raises questions as to whether we have control over habit forming and character building, or is it just a matter of chance? This book is extremely thought provoking and a “must-read.” Enjoy it.
–Harrison
Character-Building Thought Power By Ralph Waldo Trine The Book
UNCONSCIOUSLY we are forming habits every moment of our lives. Some are habits of a desirable nature; some are those of a most undesirable nature. Some, though not so bad in [Read more]
Garlic Olive Oil, Craigslist Massages–and Doing Your Homework
I’ve decided that I am never again going to have a masseuse come over from Craigslist. It’s just not worth it. A few weeks ago I was at a conference in Chicago. I was staying at a so-so hotel without a spa near the airport. I called the front desk to see if they had anyone they could recommend for a massage and the receptionist recommended that I find someone on Craigslist. Since I am in the career business, the only part of Craigslist I have ever spent any time on has been the job listings; however, Craigslist has a lot more than jobs listed. As I quickly realized, you can find just about anything there. I found a masseuse that seemed really good: She had a bunch of statements on her description about how she worked near the airport, and that there was no sex whatsoever associated with her services. After looking at the first few massage listings of other people I realized why she felt the need to have such an explicit sort of “NO SEX!” advertisement: Many of the pictures in the other ads were borderline pornographic, and it was clear that much more than massage would be occurring if you called certain people. In fact, it seemed like many of the people were not actually offering a massage at all. When the woman arrived for the massage, I saw that she was a very serious seeming, petite German woman who was ready for business. She brought sheets that appeared to have creases ironed in them. Everything seemed very much in order. Within a few minutes she set up a massage table and started giving me a massage. It was one of the greatest massages I had ever had in my life. In about 10 minutes I had completely dozed off. When she woke me up I could not believe I had slept through the whole massage. “How long was I sleeping?” I asked her. “Two hours,” she said. I was astonished that I had slept for so long. Shortly thereafter, the masseuse had packed up and was ready to go. She told me the cost of a two-hour massage. I paid her and tipped her for having done such an excellent job, and she was gone. To get all the oil off my body I took a shower. When I came out of the shower I glanced at the clock on the nightstand and realized that only around 50 minutes had gone by since the woman had shown up. It was only 8:50 and she had arrived at 8:00. So, I had paid for a two hour massage that had only been around 40 minutes. I could not believe I had been scammed by a masseuse. By the time I realized this, the woman was long gone. That was my first experience with getting a massage on Craigslist. I had my second experience a couple of nights ago. I have always enjoyed getting a massage now and then. For about five years I lived directly across the street from a Ritz-Carlton resort. Every few weeks I would walk over there and get a massage. Around three years ago, I moved away from that neighborhood, and I now live far from any hotels or spas. Unfortunately, the only place I have found nearby is run by a man in an office complex, who does something called “Rolfing.” Rolfing is not like typical massage and is instead a very painful sort of muscular manipulation meant to make you stand up straighter and improve your posture. It hurts while the entire process is occurring, but after the two-hour session, you feel pretty good. The practice is more of a medical/chiropractic sort of thing than a massage, but the end results are excellent. I have noticed myself thinking clearly and feeling much more relaxed after these sessions. It is much more effective than any other sort of massage I have ever had. Rolfing is meant to be a series of sequential sessions. For example, the first session concentrates on opening your chest, the next session focuses on your legs, and so forth. Following several sessions, you are supposed to feel a major change in your relationship with your body. Rolfers have to go to school to learn how to do it properly, and I believe one of the only schools for the discipline is in Colorado. Because of the duration of the schooling and other factors, there are simply not many people out there who do Rolfing. The man who does Rolfing near my house eventually made it big with investments. One of the last times I visited him, he was talking about a mine he had invested in. Also, from what I understand, he is pals with all sorts of celebrities, whom he has “Rolfed” in our community. He apparently pals around with these people, flying around to all sorts of places in his spare time. He does not seem that committed to his work anymore. A couple of years ago, he gave me a few Rolfing sessions then got injured and stopped working for a year. I remembered a few months ago that I had never paid him for his last session, which was a year ago (he only takes cash) and one day when I was near his office, I saw someone inside working. I stopped by and paid for the last session I had had, because I happened to have the money on me. The woman working in the reception told me that the owner had not worked in over a year, but that he “might” be willing to take on a few new select patients. He called me a week or so later and I started going to see him again. A month or so ago, he completely fell off the face of the earth–again. I have no idea what happened. Because I am eager to complete all of the Rolfing sessions, I asked my assistant to start researching to see if it would be possible for any qualified person to come by my house to do some Rolfing. Realizing from my experience in Chicago that there are “massage-type” people on Craigslist, we decided to look there. The only person we found was on Craigslist, and she had a listing of at least 25 different types of massage that she offered, in addition to Rolfing. “Are you sure she does Rolfing?” I asked my assistant as I looked at the list of all the types of massages the person supposedly knew. “Yes, it says right here on her Craigslist advertisement that she is certified in Rolfing,” she told me. Sure enough, it did. A few nights ago, the woman showed up at my house to perform a Rolfing session. She was in her early to mid-50s, I would guess, and quite normal looking. There was not anything unusual about her, as far as I could tell. She took a massage table and set up in a spare room in our house. I got undressed, put a towel around my waist, and walked into the room a few minutes later. My wife was putting my daughter to bed in the next room. “Okay, make sure all of your clothes are off and lie on your back face up. I am not going to put a towel over you, if that is all right, because I want to have access to your entire body.” The idea of lying on the table without wearing any clothes whatsoever, face up, was a bit more than I could handle. I had never seen this woman before in my life. When I had had Rolfing done in the past, I had always been in my underwear, so I did not understand why I was expected to be nude for this. “I am not sure I am comfortable with this,” I told her. She then said something that convinced me permanently to never ever call a masseuse from Craigslist again: “Don’t worry,” she said. “I am not going to do any ‘tantric release’ this session. While I do not need to, I generally like to sit down and discuss tantric release with my clients’ wives before doing this. People have strange feelings about sexual matters and I find this is best.” I was in a bit of a state of shock, and I decided to push a little further. “What is ‘tantric release’?” I asked her. “Genital manipulation,” she said. “Oh, of course. How silly of me,” I said. As she had correctly guessed, this was not something I wanted to experience. I told the woman I was going to go change and would be back in a minute or so. I put on a pair of running shorts and tied them very, very tightly around my waist. Once the “massage” started, I realized that the woman knew very little, if anything, about Rolfing. In fact, I could tell she knew very little about massage. She told me that she preferred to use water instead of massage oil, and started massaging me with water. I have a lot of hair on my body, and she kept pulling all the hair on my back. The entire process was excruciating. It was even worse because she was talking the entire time about her past lives and a bunch of other nonsense. She said something about being on a raw meat diet that was so effective it had made a bunch of warts fall off of her back. The whole experience was completely bizarre. Because the massage was so painful, at some point I had to ask her to stop and get some oil or something. “She was probably using water because she is too cheap to buy massage oil,” my wife said later. The woman did not seem happy about this, but she told me she would use olive oil instead of water. She started massaging me with olive oil and my eyes started to water. It smelled like garlic. I told her it smelled awful. “It’s garlic olive oil. It’s all I have,” she told me. I could not believe I was being massaged with garlic olive oil. I smelled like a bowl of spaghetti. Several days later the room still smells like a bowl of spaghetti. My shower still smells like a bowl of spaghetti, and so do I. In fact, I cannot get the smell of garlic off my body. She even used the oil in my hair to give me a scalp massage. Wherever I am I can smell that garlic. For example, I was sitting there watching television last night, and suddenly got a whiff of the smell. I hate the smell of garlic; just thinking about it gives me a headache. It has been days since the garlic massage, and even as I write this, my eyes are watering. The only way to keep my eyes from watering is to be on the move. “She probably purchased the garlic olive oil because it was on sale,” my wife told me later. My experience with looking for a massage on Craigslist is no different from someone looking for a job on any [Read more]
Your Career Is More Important to You Than Anyone
I went to high school in an area called Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, and lived with my father there during high school. Up until ninth grade I had lived in a city called Grosse Pointe, Michigan, which was about an hour’s drive away. Since I had grown up in Grosse Pointe, many of my friends still lived there and I spent many of my weekends there visiting. One day I received the most amazing telephone call from a friend of mine in Grosse Pointe. A girl who I (and just about every other guy I knew) had been [Read more]
Managers, Idea People, and Workers
I love watching Westerns. What fascinates me about them is that what typically occurs in these movies occurs in any organization–and the success of this process is what determines the success or failure of the organization. In most Westerns, the plot line revolves around a powerful force that tests the will of a group, such as an evil banker taking away people’s land, or a group of outlaws terrorizing a town, and so forth. The beginning of the story typically entails people being devastated by this evil force, and then an individual steps forward and says something [Read more]
Your Ability to Be Free Will Determine Your Success
A crucial part of your future success and happiness is having the ability to be free. The concept of freedom is difficult for most people to truly understand because hardly anyone is really free, in the deepest sense of the word. Most people are trapped by their own mental barriers, by obligations to others, by financial constraints, by habits, and in many cases by actual physical barriers. Moving toward true freedom is something that will forever change your life and career and will help you reach your full potential. The founding principles of the United States were largely based on the idea of freedom for all citizens, as exemplified by the First Amendment to the [Read more]
Being Nice Makes Good Business Sense
Several years ago I was getting ready to interview with a law firm in New York. It was my first interview ever as a law student and I was pretty nervous. I was trying to get on an elevator as the door was closing and I saw a woman rushing toward it. I reached quickly for the button to open the elevator and was able to get the door to reopen at the last second. The woman got on and told me which floor to push, and I did this for her as well. The woman was very heavy and was not particularly well dressed. We were going to a very high floor and [Read more]
