1. People are illogical, unreasonable, and self centered. Love them anyway.
2. If you do good, people will accuse you of selfish ulterior motives. Do good anyway.
3. If you are successful, you win false friends and true enemies. Succeed anyway.
4. The good you do today will be forgotten tomorrow. Do good anyway.
5. Honesty and frankness make you vulnerable. Be honest and frank anyway.
6. The biggest men with the biggest ideas can be shot down by the smallest men with the smallest minds. Think big anyway.
7. People favor underdogs, but follow only top dogs. Fight for a few underdogs anyway.
8. What you spend years building may be destroyed overnight. Build anyway.
9. People really need help but may attack you if you do help them. Help people anyway.
10. Give the world the best you have and you’ll get kicked in the teeth. Give the world the best you have anyway.

These commandments are valuable on many levels because they can drive you to do exceptionally well in everything you do. They were originally written by Kent Keith in a book called, The Silent Revolution: Dynamic Leadership in the Student Counsel. At the time he was only 19, a sophomore at Harvard. During his time as an undergraduate, Kent visited numerous high schools, lecturing young students about leadership and giving workshops. Many of the students wanted to change the system; however, Kent noticed that they most often gave up when they faced any sort of difficulty:

“I saw a lot of idealistic young people go out into the world to do what they thought was right, and good, and true, only to come back a short time later, discouraged, or embittered, because they got negative feedback, or nobody appreciated them, or they failed to get the results they had hoped for,” recalls Keith. “I told them that if they were going to change the world, they had to really love people, and if they did, that love would sustain them. I also told them that they couldn’t be in it for fame or glory. I said that if they did what was right and good and true, they would find meaning and satisfaction, and that meaning and satisfaction would be enough. If they had the meaning, they didn’t need the glory.”

Each of these commandments is about the importance of staying on course and really addressing the issue. People are illogical, unreasonable, and self-centered. Love them anyway. Most people out there are thinking only about themselves the majority of the time. If you do well at anything they are not necessarily going to be happy for you. They are going to think about how your success makes them look. They are going to think that if you are doing too well, you are not going to like them, and that you will not want to be friends with them anymore. These same people are going to discourage your ambition and everything you hope to accomplish because of how it is going to make them look. I read an interesting quote recently in a book called The Best Damn Sales Book Ever:

You know them. The coffee cup brigade are the sales people who walk around all day holding a coffee cup, telling anyone who’ll listen the right way to do things (according to them); what’s wrong with the company, the boss, and the product; and how, if they were running things, it would be different. The only problem with the coffee cup brigade is they never do anything, and because of that, they look to drag you down with them.

People are self centered. They think about themselves first–always. Do not worry about it, though. Love people; do not hate them. Their reasoning for being competitive with you, undermining you (or whatever) may be illogical, but it does not need to concern you or command your attention. I cannot even begin to tell you how many illogical and nonsensical people I have encountered in my career. I used to tell people that I thought they were completely off their rocker, yell at them, and so forth, but now I do not even allow problematic people to affect me that much. I have learned that a substantial portion of the population is completely off their rocker. I love them anyway. Rather than being negatively affected by how nuts so many people seem to be, I have just decided to embrace everyone. When you start doing really well you begin to see a lot of people close to you acting very irrational. A lot of this is due to the fact that your success is threatening them. Love them and do not fight them. This is the best way to deal with this. Allow them to be irrational but do not allow it to drive you nuts. You are going to see the worst side of people very quickly the more successful you get. Whether it is your parents, other relatives, your coworkers, or others around you–people will very quickly show their self centered side to you. Do not stress about it. Just love these people anyway. You can analyze it all you want, but just know that they are acting the way they are for reasons which are more about them than you. Love them anyway. Stay on track. If you do good, people will accuse you of selfish ulterior motives. Do good anyway. When I was in law school I used to attend church twice a week and I went on my own. My girlfriend would not go with me and I did this every week. On one Ash Wednesday I saw one of the most inspiring sermons I can remember. It dealt with the fact that if you do good you should not tell others about it. Meaning, you do not want to draw attention to the good you do. The purpose of your good act should be only to do good, not to gain praise or otherwise draw attention to yourself. Since hearing that sermon I have done a lot of secret charity acts that I simply do not talk about. My wife does not even know everything I do. I am simply constantly doing this or that and little charity things off the radar. I am very glad that I keep a low profile with my charity work, although it is not nearly as significant as it should be–but I keep doing it. What I notice is that this secret work that I do has never gotten “sidetracked” by other people’s negative opinions. Keeping out of the limelight has made it easy for me to continue my charitable work. The public work I do is different… However, one of the more interesting things I have seen is that the work I do publicly often gets attacked and criticized. For example, I like to write about how to get jobs, which I have been doing for years. Nevertheless, there are people out there who ascribe selfish motives to this. My life mission is to find people jobs. I have been doing this with an incredible amount of enthusiasm my entire career. Some people claim this is selfish too… In fact, in just about everything I do there are people who ascribe selfish motives to it. Notwithstanding all the criticism, I have continued doing everything I do because I believe in it. I will always continue, despite the criticism. I believe in who I am and what I am doing and I will continue to do good regardless of what the cynics may say. If you are doing something worthwhile then continue with it and do not give up. Who cares what other people say about you? What is the alternative they are offering? Who cares if the work you are doing provides you with economic rewards? This does not make you evil. Do good anyway and do not allow people to dissuade you. Stay on track. If you are successful, you win false friends and true enemies. Succeed anyway. I cannot tell you how many people will be there to be your “false friend” and “true enemy” once you become successful. This will amaze you. In most cases the “false friends” you meet when you become successful will be people you may admire and look up to. They will realize your success and very quickly start calling you “a friend” in a superficial sort of way. You will spend very little time with them and they will suddenly be your friend. Your friendship and their “false bond” with you will be based largely on your success and nothing more. There will not be a deep bond to go along with this and the friendship will most likely be based on what you can do for them, how you make them look, and so forth. You need to be incredibly careful. I cannot tell you how many stories I have read about boxers, overnight music sensations, and others being preyed upon by more powerful people the second they became successful. When you are successful, you are going to find yourself increasingly isolated in some respects, and you will have a difficult time telling your real friends from your fake friends. My wife’s family used to be very wealthy and then they lost all their money some time ago. My wife has told me numerous stories about how when this happened, many of the family’s former friends were suddenly no longer friends. The family was left with a small core of friends and not many more. Many people are superficial and this is a real shame. This is just the way it is. Realize you will have numerous false friends and leave it at that. The real danger of success, however, is that you are going to win a ton of enemies. People will become extremely jealous and simply not like you by virtue of your success. It is really odd to me how this works. You will suddenly have people around you who hate you. Former coworkers you were promoted over and other people who are threatened by your success. It is always interesting for me when I go to trade shows in the employment industry. I will be standing around doing nothing and competitor will walk up to me and say something like: “You think you are a big deal because your site has more jobs than ours but we still value relationships with employers. If you got off your ass and met more employers perhaps you’d see that your business model is ass backwards!” BOOM! Out of nowhere someone I never met will walk up to me and start hurling insults at me. When I look into it, it is almost always a competitor who is threatened by our company, or something along those lines. Who cares? Everyone has enemies. You are going to gain enemies when you are successful. In my case, my companies have employed literally thousands of people throughout the past decade. Not everyone has had a good experience working with me and I am sure some previous employees even dislike me. Our companies have had hundreds of thousands of customers. Not every one of their experiences has been the best. Try as you may, you are going to make enemies just by being successful. Do not take this personally and do not let it make you quit! It is the same process for everyone. Stay on track. The good you do today will be forgotten tomorrow. Do good anyway. For the most part, most people are not going to care what you did a month or a year ago. Most people will judge you on what you can do today and the most recent thing you did. One of the biggest ways this comes out is in helping people. For years I have helped people who were chronically unemployed, get jobs. I have taken a personal interest in numerous people throughout the years and have done everything within my power to help them get jobs. After getting these people jobs I rarely hear from them again, and they rarely credit me as the one who helped them get a job. I do not care. I help people anyway and continue to do so. In my companies I have helped numerous people by giving them massive raises, promotions, and so forth. Once people get this, the next step for them is often wanting more. Instead of being happy with what they have gotten, they very quickly forget everything you have done and want more. Who cares? It is important to do good anyway. One of the most amazing things to me is when I watch young attorneys. Some of them will work 100+ hours in a week rarely sleeping. Then when business slows down in the firm, they will lose their job within a few months. The good they did is quickly forgotten, or so it seems. I am sure you can come up with similar experiences you have had with your own previous employers. You work really, really hard and then people forget about it later on. You help someone, offer something, or make some sort of contribution and it is quickly forgotten, as if it didn’t matter at all. Do good anyway. When you are constantly focused on doing good and working hard, these attributes become part of your character. It comes across in how you look, the way you talk, and what others say about you when you are not around. No good that you do ever goes unrewarded. Continue doing good–there is no reason not to. Many people are constantly evaluating each good action they do, expecting to get a corresponding return. There is much more to it than that and you need to continually be doing good regardless of your expected outcome. You are not going to get an instant return and reward from every good act that you do, but you will be rewarded in your character and reputation. Do not get detracted from people who tell you that your efforts are in vain. Stay on track. Honesty and frankness make you vulnerable. Be honest and frank anyway. One of the biggest challenges that people have is continuing to be honest and frank. Most people want to remain strong at all times and to continually project an image of confidence, strength, and power. The truth is that the more honest you are, the more powerful you become. Allow me to explain: When you try to hide the truth, people do not know who you are. Being vulnerable is actually a positive thing because it allows you to be human, and for others to care about you, and identify with you and your weaknesses. No one expects you to be perfect. Admitting your failures and lapses is one of the more important things you can do, and not doing so can get you into trouble. I knew of an attorney once who had worked incredibly hard for over 8 years as an associate in two law firms. He was notified that he was a couple of weeks away from being made a partner in a major American law firm. One day a partner in the law firm asked this man if he had sent a letter to client about a matter. Knowing full well he had not, the associate wanting to look good said he had sent the letter the previous day. The associate then went into his office, drafted the letter, and sent it out postdated for the previous day. It was not a big deal and the letter that was sent late was not that important. Somehow, however, the partner that had asked him to send the letter found out it had been sent late, and found out the associate had drafted the actual letter after speaking with him. The associate was fired from the law firm on the spot. Because of his lie, I believe he ended up not getting another job for over a year. This talented and hardworking young man literally destroyed his career over this one incident. Tell the truth. Just be honest. People will respect you more, people will identify with you more, and you will feel better about yourself. Stay on track. The biggest men with the biggest ideas can be shot down by the smallest men with the smallest minds. Think big anyway. If you go around telling people you want to lose weight, improve in your career–or whatever it is you are trying to do, you will be absolutely amazed how quickly numerous people will appear to tell you what you are trying to do is impossible, it cannot be done, you cannot do it, you are not skilled or whatever. This has happened with every single thing I have ever done that has some significance. Do it anyway. The ideas you have are likely to threaten other people, who will come up with one reason after another why something cannot be done. A quote from The Best Damn Sales Book Ever is instructive in this regard:

If you let them, salespeople (and most people, for that matter) will come up with every excuse in the book why it can’t be done. Why? Because they have no vision. They don’t see themselves as successful, they only see themselves failing. In order to fulfill this prophecy they need a reason. So what do they do? They prejudge (most salespeople call it “qualifying”) almost every prospect they come in contact with and decide ahead of time he or she won’t buy.

People will do this with you too. They will prejudge and tell you why you cannot do well. Do not let people shoot you down or destroy your dreams. Small people attack other people’s dreams. You need to be strong; do not ever let others dissuade you. Stay on track. People favor underdogs, but follow only top dogs. Fight for a few underdogs anyway. Most people, you included, I am sure, favor underdogs. We do it in sports, we do it in work. Fighting for the underdog is a matter of character and spirit. You too are an underdog, or were an underdog. Appreciating the weakness in others makes you stronger and hoping and working on behalf of the good is something that adds to your character. Few people have the sort of character needed to not simply follow the crowd, which follows the top dogs. When you allow yourself to follow underdogs, you show yourself as a leader, and you strengthen your character. This helps you stay on track when people try and push you off the horse, as you take other actions to improve yourself and the world around you. Stay on track. What you spend years building may be destroyed overnight. Build anyway. I was in a restaurant several months ago and there was a man standing at the bar who was drunk out of his mind. He looked quite respectable but he was acting like a buffoon. He was telling the bartender how he had lost everything–tens of millions of dollars in property. He was upset and said he felt like everything he had worked for all of his life had not been worth it. He was complaining that this all happened because he did not get a certain bank loan. You can lose everything you have worked for in an instant. It happens. This is not an excuse not to keep trying. Life is based upon forward momentum. Just because something bad could happen in the future, or has happened in the past is not an excuse to give up. People spend years, or decades, building relationships with others and then inevitably, someone dies. It all comes to an end some day, but this is not a reason not to try. You need to constantly be building despite the fact that doom may lie over the hill. Never give up. Stay on track. People really need help but may attack you if you do help them. Help people anyway. One of my favorite shows on television used to be the show Intervention. In this show, people with drug problems, eating disorders, and others would face interventions, wherein their families and others would intervene–often saving their life. You want to help people even if they attack you for it. I have been attacked by people I have helped get jobs and others. Who cares? I help people anyway and keep doing my job. Stay on track. Give the world the best you have and you’ll get kicked in the teeth. Give the world the best you have anyway. If you look around you’ll see the most successful people are the most criticized. All you need to do is pick up any newspaper or magazine to see this. The better you do, the more opposition and criticism you are going to face. This is what happens. You need to always give your best anyway. Stay on track. Yesterday one of the most remarkable things happened. Our maid announced that she needs part of the day off today because she is running the Los Angeles Marathon. This in and of itself may not sound unusual; however, this woman is in her mid-50s, quite overweight, and recently had a gall bladder operation. I have also never seen her exercise a day in my life. Right now as I write this she is vacuuming and later she will be running the race. My first reaction was that the idea of this woman running in a marathon was insane. But, of course, I did not tell her this. Everyone has a spirit within, which drives him or her to do great things. It is those naysayers around us, and the prospect of something bad happening that often keeps us barred back, and on the sidelines. But there is nothing glorious, fulfilling, or memorable about spending your life on the sidelines. You need to run the race, and once you start running you need to stay on track.

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Dissonance can be reduced by removing dissonant cognitions, adding new consonant cognitions, reducing the importance of dissonant cognitions, or increasing the importance of consonant cognitions. The likelihood that a particular cognition will change to reduce dissonance is determined by the resistance to change of the cognition. Cognitions that are less resistant to change will change more readily than cognitions that are more resistant to change. Resistance to change is based on the responsiveness of the cognition to reality and on the extent to which the cognition is consonant with many other cognitions. Resistance to change of a behavioral cognitive element depends on the extent of pain or loss that must be endured and the satisfaction obtained from the behavior. An example used by Festinger (1957) may assist in illustrating the theory. A habitual smoker who learns smoking is bad for his or her health will experience dissonance because the knowledge that smoking is bad for his or her health is dissonant with the cognition that he continues to smoke. He can reduce the dissonance by changing his behavior. That is, he could stop smoking, which would be consonant with the cognition that smoking is bad for health. Alternatively, the smoker could reduce dissonance by changing his cognition about the effect of smoking on health and believe that smoking does not have a harmful effect on health (eliminating the dissonant cognition). He might look for positive effects of smoking and believe that smoking reduces tension and keeps him from gaining weight (adding consonant cognitions). Or he might believe that the risk to health from smoking is negligible compared with the danger of automobile accidents (reducing the importance of the dissonant cognition). In addition, he might consider the enjoyment he gets from smoking to be a very important part of his life (increasing the importance of consonant cognitions).

If you are an attorney practicing law, or one looking for a position, when you are not grateful and are continually looking for negativity, you will find it. In fact, you will almost always find it. In 2001 and 2002, the market was catastrophically bad for corporate attorneys (especially junior corporate attorneys in the United States). Most corporate attorneys knew how bad the market was, and were very aware of the complete lack of opportunities. Many corporate attorneys faced with such dire prospects and knowledge about the market simply gave up. I saw many enormously capable attorneys walk away from the practice of law completely. In terms of cognitive dissonance, these attorneys were simply looking for information that supported their belief system, which asserted the market was bad. Everywhere they turned they saw evidence to support their belief the market was horrible. This ultimately led many of them to leave the practice of law. However, I saw many other attorneys keep going, despite the slow market. In fact, these attorneys seemed grateful they had a chance to look at new opportunities in the market. Some of these attorneys said things like, “Well, I am not sure if I want to work in Hong Kong or in New York. I’m going to have to think about this.” I remember thinking to myself while listening to these attorneys, “Are these people insane? They think they have a choice?” Looking back, though, I realize there was something very powerful in the psychology of these attorneys. They believed they would consistently have good and exciting careers, and they looked for information in their environment to support this belief. What ended up happening, of course, is they consistently found good positions and their careers actually improved during an otherwise horrible time. In order to be happier, to do better in your current position, and to find new positions effectively, it is essential you learn to be grateful. Gratitude has to do with the sort of emotional energy on which you choose to focus. People who focus on negative emotions and are ungrateful will likely attract more unsatisfactory outcomes. Whether you feel you do not make enough money, resent others, or are dissatisfied with your work, negative emotions will not take you forward. In fact, these emotions will build upon themselves as they attract more of the same negativity over and over again. Cognitive dissonance theory says if you are upset with the world and your job, you will look for evidence that supports your views. Is this what you do? If so, you should immediately begin focusing on something positive. Like attracts like. People who do well are able to focus on positive emotions, and are generally grateful. As you begin to focus on what you are grateful for, you will be amazed at how much there is to continually be grateful for. If you are an attorney, you should be grateful you have come as far as you have. You should be grateful for the opportunity to work on other peoples’ problems. The process of being grateful and looking for the positive is never-ending. Being happy with what you have and who you are is a very powerful feeling that will enable you to consistently improve and advance. When you view the world and your job positively, others will feel good when they are around you. Your employer or potential employer will feel appreciated. You will be excited about your work and will look to make a difference. Clients will pick up on your enthusiasm and gratitude and will want to give you more work. The more you focus on being excited and charged up about your work, the better your work will look to you. Instead of focusing on what you do not have, focus on what you do have and what is positive about your career. Your career has tons of potential, and so do you. Make lists of what is right about your career and what you are doing well. Make lists of what is good about your employer and why. Make lists of colleagues you like and why you like them. By focusing on the positive you will draw more positive elements into your life. In addition, focusing on the positive will improve your outlook and how you feel about the world and your life. While I have always been interested in studies that focus on the reasons attorneys supposedly have so many difficulties, I also know they wouldn’t experience most of them if they kept their focus on being grateful. Being grateful for what you have now will lead you to enjoy success and fulfillment in your career and life.

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Contemporary practitioners, both clinical and organizational, are faced with the pervasive presence of narcissistic disorders in those who consult us. It is a disquieting encounter, because–even as we recognize that our work to understand and assist persons and organizations with narcissistic pathology has increased the reach and efficacy of our interventions, and the lessons of this work in turn have transformatively impacted psychoanalytic theories-there are particular qualities at work with narcissism that are painful to work with analytically, perhaps in significant part because they militate against a defensive introduction of non-analytic methods into analytic work. It is in the nature of narcissistically organized persons, and perhaps also, I will argue, narcissistic organizations, to deny the reality of the other (i.e., the analyst), to wrench the analyst into playing a hated but necessary part in the patient’s internal drama, to try to disable or destroy the analyst in the service of a soothing return to a narcissistic self-sufficiency, and to project onto the analyst, with resentful hatred, a whole internal world of persecutory and toxic part-objects, as the first step toward eventual understanding, health, and wholeness.

While this quote may seem overly complex, it does elucidate a final characteristic of NES that I believe merits consideration: That a person with NES will not confront his or her weaknesses because doing so would interfere with his or her inflated sense of self. Instead, institutions and individuals that call into question that sense of self of the person with NES are perceived by the person as toxic objects. As a final point, this explains why people with NES may change employers frequently or leave their chosen profession. I realize that the picture painted above of NES may appear extreme, however it is important to note that NES is s quite common, especially among the highest performing people inside most organizations. Again, I would estimate that over 10 percent of people starting their careers in major firms have NES and will have more difficult careers for that reason. People with NES are generally the people who have come from the very best schools and have had a historical pattern of academic achievement that is nothing short of extraordinary. NES is something that can actually create the sort of super achiever who shows up to work and truly excels. In a scholastic environment, where such persons have the luxury of choosing most of their courses, working hard, and getting immediate feedback via grades, and in conditions that demand performance at a high academic level, persons with NES are likely to thrive. It is very easy for me to pick up the signs of NES when speaking with young people in the job market and others. People with NES generally believe that they should be given the type of work that they want. They also tend to believe that they are extremely intelligent and valuable to their employer. In addition, these sorts of people tend to be very calculating, analyzing most situations vis-à-vis whether or not they are getting the upper hand. If they are criticized by their employer, they may simply leave, rather than facing the possibility of any shortcomings in ability or performance. As a recruiter I can tell you that I see this occur frequently. Because our firm solicits telephone calls and interest from the highest caliber people on a daily basis, the NES person is one of the types of people we often speak with. The following similarities generally define the people with NES, whom I speak with: -They generally have not worked at a “real job” before starting as a first-year associate inside a law firm; -They generally did exceptionally well in college and attended a top 10 law school (NES, in fact, appears to be more likely to occur in a person who has attended better law schools); -They generally come from a sheltered, upper middle-class background, or their parents are academics; -They generally believe they are smarter than the people they are working with. In essence, people with NES would likely never have made it into a prestigious law firm had they not been sheltered by school, parents, and others for so long. The artificial academic environment, the home environment of privilege, the constant positive feedback from academic institutions (where social dynamics are not as emphasized as much as common academics might have been), and the lack of prior work experience all serve to isolate the person with NES, allowing their condition to grow in the absence of a “real world” environment. While I would be the first to argue that a law firm is not necessarily a real world environment, it is much more like the real world than a school or a sheltered upper middle-class upbringing is. The issue with NES inside a law firm and other organizations is that the persons with this disorder are primarily in service of themselves. For the most part, working for an organization is something that is not going to quickly lead to massive glory, riches, or fame. Instead, employees are hired to work hard to make money for their firm. There may be little opportunity for the sort of continual positive feedback and the kind of reassurances the NES person needs, and may be used to from his or her upbringing. What usually happens to the NES persons is that he or she does not hold up well against the initial criticism that all new workers in most companies receive–no matter how constructive the criticism may be.  The person do not take orders well, nor do they understand why others are considered to be their peers. Such people most often leave the employer quickly with fantasies about achievement in a much higher caliber work environment. Or, they may switch between firms for a few years. Some start their own businesses-most of which fail. A few stick with it and become better employees. While this topic has gone largely unexplored, it is very real and it affects numerous people-especially the ones who appear strongest on paper. I do not pretend to know the answers. Certainly, the inability to find a balance between one’s self and others is a serious condition. Recognizing the presence of a problem like this is usually the first step. The second step, then, would be correcting the problem by getting help. The biggest challenge in dealing with this condition, though, is that those who need help are not likely to ever realize or admit they have it. If you have completed reading this article, you most likely do not have NES because, if you did, you would not confront it by reading all the way through. You would have stopped several paragraphs ago. What you should understand, though, is that the people you work with who have NES are likely on a dangerous collision course with failure. If the NES person does not fail within your organization, the chances are great he or she can negatively affect you if you work with him or her. Do your best to avoid NES people.

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• The salesperson who is making $100,000 a year is using the facilities of the business such as phones, buildings, showrooms, photocopiers, conferences, demonstration models, databases and so forth, which the business must pay for.
• The business needs to pay managers to manage the salesperson, people to answer the phones and more.
• The business needs to pay someone to do accounting and payroll, and needs to pay others to get things done, in order to support the salesperson.
• The business needs to advertise, make contributions to healthcare and do other tasks that every business is involved in.

This is why any job that you do for an organization requires that you make a far greater contribution than the value of the money that you are paid. You must contribute more than you take, in order for the organization to survive and thrive. Being able to do this will greatly aid in your job security. Furthermore, to increase your odds of long-term employment it is also vital that you become part of a group or company wherein everyone is expected to contribute more than they take from the group. I have run some very successful companies in my career and every time a company starts to become successful, job seekers start appearing out of the woodwork. There are numerous people out there who sniff out successful companies, who show up like leaches and try to make as much money as they can as fast as they can. These people are usually brilliant interviewers and incredibly impressive people. The danger these people pose to growing companies, though, is that they will often take far more than they contribute. This is an extremely hazardous sort of hire for any organization. I interviewed a guy recently who is currently unemployed, but in his previous job made $500,000 a year. I was interviewing him for a job paying $100,000 a year. He had a very good record, with an excellent legal and sales background. Every single company that this guy had ever worked for over the past decade had gone out of business. He may have made a lot of money in each of his previous jobs, but for one reason or another, none of the companies were able to stay afloat. I am almost certain the reason all of these companies ended up going out of business was because, while they may have been successful at one point, they ended up getting choked by a massive payroll, which included many people who were not adding sufficient value to the operations of the company. As I spoke with this man, I could see he probably would want various secretaries helping him out. He would be taking long lunches and go on unnecessary meetings. As more and more money goes towards salaries, benefits and so forth, a company stops investing in its product; a culture of waste and inefficiency sets in and the company or organization soon thereafter dies. In the case of a smaller company this can happen quickly. In the case of a larger company like General Motors the process could take decades. Think of the massive bureaucracy that exists in many organizations, and how unnecessary much of this is. A man like the guy who used to make $500,000 a year spends his time looking for an employer who is willing to compensate him more highly than he is justifiably worth. This sort of strategy can work for a time but it is not a path towards security. It probably does not work in a bad economy either. If you are seeking to really excel in the world and in your career you need to be always perceived and known as a person who contributes far more than you take. One of the most interesting things I have seen about the most successful people in any organization is that they make sure they are contributing more value, contribute as much as they possibly can, and leave it at that. People who fail inside of organizations are often doing everything they can to measure and quantify how much value they are adding, and then they demand a raise at every turn. Of course, they will not come to management with a request for a raise when their productivity is down, but they do so when it is up. This is a dangerous strategy if you want to be viable for your organization in the long run. People who act this way show that they are out for themselves, not the group. If you want to be considered a productive member of a group, the smartest thing you can do is to keep your head down and contribute everything you have got. The cream always rises to the top and, with the right amount of effort, so will you. Your coworkers will respect you for your efforts; your supervisors will respect you; their supervisors will respect you; the market will respect you. You can talk your way into a high paying job, but you will never stay there long unless you are contributing far more than you are taking. Whenever you encounter a situation in which there are several unproductive members in a group, many problems can occur. If you are part of a company where you see a lot of unproductive people, and if this continues for some time, my recommendation to you is to find another job. An organization cannot and will not survive if it has many unproductive members working in it. How could it? If, however, there are some extremely productive members and others who are not, this means that the productive members are supporting the unproductive ones. If you are a producer surrounded by nonproductive people, you should know that you are supporting those nonproductive people, and an organization that tolerates this over the long term is not a strong one. The non-producers will drag down your income and potential to advance in your job. Similarly, people who bad mouth an organization that you are part of, absorb the potential you have in your job. You need to make sure that the people inside your organization are supporting it and not causing it problems. This type of behavior hurts your own performance and makes the products of your effort less effective. One summer several years ago my asphalt business grew to be very large. I generally had more than one crew doing asphalt work in various locations around Detroit in any given day, and each crew consisted of many people. At the time, I thought it was a good thing to have so many people working for me. I was basically hiring as many people as I could to help me get jobs done, because there was so much work coming in. Some things people have always asked me about every company I have ever run are questions like: “How many people do you have working for you?” or “What is the company’s revenue?” People seem to believe that the number of people working in a company, or the size of its overall revenues are indicative of its success. Back in my days in the asphalt business, when I had multiple crews operating and more people than I knew working most days, I thought that bigger was better as well. There are problems with a big crew though, which are not present with a small crew:

• With a larger crew there are more people to watch, to make sure the work is going on properly.
• With a larger crew you need to make sure that everyone is consistently being productive and adding to the final product.
• With a larger crew there are more people to disagree and slow the final product down.
• With a larger crew there are more people who can get injured.
• With a larger crew each project costs more money because there are more people doing it.
• With a larger crew, if a piece of important equipment breaks, you have 20 people standing around doing nothing and getting paid, instead of just one person.
• With a larger crew it takes more time to get everyone on the job after a lunch break.
• With a larger crew the workers typically socialize and goof off more than with a smaller crew.

My largest summer in the asphalt business in Michigan in terms of the number of people I had working for me was (by far) my least successful summer. The reason was due to all of the variables I just listed above. With so many variables, there were just too many things that could (and often did) go wrong, and all of these things going wrong made the entire business much less profitable. In subsequent summers, I tried avoiding having so many people working for the business. There was a certain degree of pride in having a large workforce; however, I was smart enough to realize that having more people was actually slowing everything down, and making the jobs too expensive for the company. The fewer people I had on the job, the better work we did and the more money the asphalt company was able to make. The more revenue a company brings in, the more problems it often has as well:

• With higher revenues a company will often hire more people to do the same amount of work.
• With higher revenues a company will often pay many people more money than they are worth.
• With higher revenues, more people will create problems for the company through lawsuits and so forth.
• With higher revenues a company will try and provide more benefits for its employees.
• With higher revenues a company will have a higher cost structure.
• With higher revenues a company will generally try to maintain its revenues and productivity, rather than innovate and grow.
• With higher revenues a company will pay less attention to various expenses, and is likely to become wasteful.

None of this is to say that high revenues are a bad thing: Of course they are not. However, at the same time, the more revenue a company earns, the more problems come into play. When expenses, employee performances and so forth are not watched very carefully, a recipe for disaster very quickly is created because there is likely to be excess “waste” in the system; that is, there are likely to be lots of people who are not carrying their weight and adding high value. The more people there are who are not adding high value, the more an organization or business is likely to be in trouble. When value (money) is paid to people who are not producing and adding high value, a company or organization is set up for severe problems. When groups or organizations demand benefits, increased wages and so forth from an employer, without creating higher value, they are setting themselves up for a whole host of problems, and possibly the employer’s demise. When every individual in an organization efficiently produces quality goods and services the organization is likely to thrive. Success in your career demands that you contribute more than you take and that the people you are working with do the same.

Related posts:

1. Weight Loss, Security Guards, Hard Work and Your Career

• The ability to get along with people can be a commodity.
• The ability to perform exceptionally well at a given athletic activity can be a commodity.
• The ability to do given tasks and achieve specific goals, like sales, is a commodity.
• The ability to cut hair is a commodity.
• The ability do hard manual labor can be a commodity.
• The ability to wait tables can be a commodity.
• The ability to write legal briefs can be a commodity.

Whatever it is, your ability to succeed in the world and in your life will be directly proportional in most cases to the perceived value of the product/commodity you are offering. So many people lose track of this idea, and this creates incredibly unhappy lives for so many people. If you do not have a valuable skill like the doctor does, the world is probably not going to have much interest in you. The example I shared with you of the graphic artist above is the best-case-scenario example. However, most of the examples of artists I have encountered in the past are not good examples like this one. Most of the artists I know are the children of rich parents; these are kids who never really worked hard in school and applied themselves. They decided that they would be artists when they realized this was something that they could do that did not require much academic acumen or other skills. Whether a singer, a potter, or a sculptor, most of the people I have known who became artists had parents who were able and willing to pay for their children’s artistic pursuits, in some cases supporting their children right into their 30s, as they moved from country to country in Europe, painting on the hillsides of France, or singing in obscure nightclubs. Since art is subjective, it is very difficult for people to judge bad art from good art and so we typically just say “they’re an artist” and do not judge the artist as being a good, or bad artist–the way you might judge a salesman’s performance, for example. I love music and I love art but the truth is that most artists I have known do not have the skills to do what they are doing professionally. In fact, they have nowhere near the skill to do what they want to do professionally. Accordingly, what ends up happening to these people is that they get into their 30s and they become resentful and angry that they do not have the skills to get where they would like to be.

• They become angry at society and do not understand why people are not buying their paintings or showing up en masse.
• They get angry with their parents for not supporting them with more money.
• A part of them often resents the path they took to become artists, as they see their friends who have skills purchasing houses, nice cars and so forth.
• They start making all sorts of attempts to improve their product, but nothing changes for them professionally.

These are not nice things for me to see, but I have seen this situation repeat itself since I was young. The high school I went to, Cranbrook Kingswood School, even had a graduate program art school, and my grandmother worked in the library there for 20+ years, so I have had enough exposure to this stuff to know that failure is epidemic with artists, and it almost never works out. The problem with it “not working out” is that the artists never have money, rarely have health insurance and many of them are just waiting for their wealthy parents to die so they can inherit some money and become “independent”. In fact, a large part of the “identity” and sense of importance derived by many of the artists I have known throughout the years, seems to relate to the fact that their parents are wealthy. If they had some kind of valuable skill none of this would matter. Do you think the girl who became a podiatrist at the insistence of her father is sitting around talking about how cool she is because her father was wealthy when she was growing up–while waiting for him to die? She probably never looked back once she became a podiatrist. She had a valuable skill and it has served her well. Having a valuable skill means everything to your survival and ability to enjoy a successful life. Fraud is when someone purports to be offering something of value (a high return on an investment, in the case of someone like Bernie Madoff)–but is not really furnishing anything of value at all. Criminal acts such as robbing a house, or setting fire to a building, are crimes because they involve taking something of value from someone without giving the person a corresponding payment, good or service. When you are interviewed for a job, the employer is trying to decide how much value you offer and will furnish to the company. This is the essence of any job interview and it is exactly what goes on in the hiring process. The employer wants to know what skill you are offering, whether it is a strong or a weak skill, and whether or not it can be purchased for a good price. Your career will survive and thrive in direct proportion to the perceived value of the product or service you are offering. Sending out résumés and promoting yourself is all in vain if you do not have a valuable skill that you can sell to the market. Companies, individuals and others will only pay if you are offering something of value. You need to find where the value is in what you are doing, and what you have to offer that is unique. There are people out there who have unique and valuable skills that would boggle your mind. One of the most disturbing shows I saw recently was of people who clean up accident scenes after suicides and murders. This is a huge business and something that a lot of companies out there do, and it pays very well:

­The police, the fire department and the crime-scene investigators who arrive at a crime scene perform crucial tasks in the aftermath of a violent death. But they don’t, as a general rule, clean up. Mopping up­ after someone who dies violently is the responsibility of that person’s family. And until recently, there were ­very few cleaning companies ­that would ­handle that kind of job, ­so the family members ­ended up having to do it themselves. If ever there were a situation begging for capitalism to step in and take over, this was it. Crime-scene cleaners charge up to $600 an hour for their service, and most people would pay a lot more. In this article, we’ll find out what crime-scene clean-up involves, what special knowledge the cleaners need to have and who in the world would be able to do this job. http://science.howstuffworks.com/crime-scene-clean-up.htm

Six hundred dollars an hour is pretty good pay. The show I saw about these people talked about what a good business this is and how great it pays. This is a skill. It is not a skill I would want to have, but it is something that supports people and provides them a good living. I had a professor in law school who knew someone who had started a bunch of Swisher Franchises and became very rich. Swisher Franchises are the ones who clean toilets in restaurants. This is not something I would be interested in but, again, it is a valuable skill and a service that people need. Not even the restaurants are interested in cleaning their own toilets. In the newspapers these days there is one story after another about towns around the United States that have been devastated by various factory closings. When an automobile plant closes, for example, the reason it is closing in most instances is because it is not offering a product that the public is willing to pay for. In the event that the plant is closing because it is relocating overseas, since American workers are too expensive, this simply means there are other workers willing to offer the same product (their labor) at a better cost than the American workers. I cannot tell you how many people I have met in my career and how may stories I have heard about people who lose a job in their 40s or 50s and suddenly have nothing to offer the world. One of the most astonishing instances of this came about when I was a legal recruiter in 2000. An attorney from a stellar New York law firm called me one day and wanted help switching firms. At the time he was earning around $275,000 a year, but now he was losing his job. The reason? The IRS had recently outlawed a certain type of financial transaction that this attorney had literally spent his entire career working on. He was over 15 years into his legal career and suddenly he did not have a marketable skill. To me this entire thing seems crazy, but the guy ended up not finding another job and moving back to England, where he was from, to do something else. He had a skill which suddenly became unmarketable. What does all of this mean for your career and life? You need to have a product, something of value that you are offering the world, which people are willing to pay for. You need to have a skill–and a good skill, which you keep getting better and better at. Your product should have numerous characteristics such as longevity and marketability. The ninety year old doctor is still working because people are willing to pay for his product. Your product can be morbid and unusual (like being a mortician) or it can be beautiful (like being a professional flower arranger). But whatever your product is, it must be something the world needs and is always willing to pay for. Once you have your product, the more of your product you can offer, the more efficiently you produce your product, the higher quality your product and the better you market and sell your product–the better off you will be. However, before you do any of this you need to find and develop your product. If you do not have a product you cannot succeed. So many people spend their lives and careers never settling on one thing. You need to pick something and focus on it, and go forward doing it to the very best of your ability. The better your product, the better your life.

Related posts:

1. Concentrate on Your Product
2. The Milgram Experiment, Submission to Authority, Your Life, and Career
3. Criticism, Your Career, and Your Life

• They sign up for a course in school, forget they are enrolled and get an ‘F’ in the class–crushing their chances of getting into a good graduate school.
• They constantly have strange health problems.
• People around them seem to constantly be dying or having accidents for no apparent reason.
• They are robbed and beaten up, even in good neighborhoods.
• The sewer pipes explode in their house and destroy their home a week after they forget to pay their home insurance.
• They get fired and dismissed for jobs after being accused of things they did not even do.
• They touch a microwave oven to heat up some food and the microwave breaks.
• Their cars keep breaking down–even new ones, and they are always late and missing out on this or that.
• They have strange auto accidents, like being directly behind a truck making bottled water deliveries, which suddenly discharges its load onto the freeway, causing them to drive into a ravine.
• They have a couple of drinks and go for a bike ride, then get arrested and thrown in prison for drunk driving.
• The companies they join always seem to go out of business.
• They lose an important sporting competition because they have a bizarre accident right before they are to compete.
• They constantly lose purses, keys and other personal articles.

I could go on and on about various people like this who I have seen bad things happen to over and over again. However, the most interesting thing about these people is that they just seem to swim in a constant stream of bad luck. Like clockwork, one issue or another continually affects them in a negative way. As these issues affect these people they become resigned to a belief that the world is an unfortunate place, and that it is just difficult to make things work. In the job and career realm, these people always have a difficult time. Rather than getting ahead, they are always plagued with one thing after another that seems to make the workplace extremely difficult. If you think that none of the above (extreme) examples relate to your own situation, or that you cannot learn anything from the examples above, you are wrong. Your effectiveness in the world is largely based on the level of control you are able to exert over your surroundings. Some people are controlled by their surroundings and others control their surroundings. Your sanity, success and happiness in the world will come in direct proportion to your ability to control your surroundings. The person who is affected by one negative occurrence after another is typically someone who is unable to control his surroundings. The person who thrives in any environment is one who is typically able to control his surroundings. What is competence? When we say someone is ‘competent’, what we are essentially saying is that he has the ability to control his environment and what happens around him. A competent surgeon is able to control his instruments and to perform an effective surgery. A competent proofreader is able to proofread work and correct any errors that may occur. Competency means being able to control the outcome and effectiveness of our work, rather than being controlled by external factors. When we call someone ‘incompetent’, what we are essentially saying is that he cannot control the outcome and effectiveness of his work. An incompetent individual is someone who is unable to do a good job. The idea of incompetency is that the person’s work and environment dominates him, not the other way around. Over the years we have had lots of people work in our various companies whose jobs were to fix computers, phone systems and so forth whenever they went down. Right now we have someone doing the job who is absolutely fantastic. Computers, phone systems and so forth hardly ever break down around this guy, and when they do he fixes them instantly. Before he joined our team, we had another person in his position, and the computers always broke down. There were viruses on the computers. The phone system was always having problems. With this new person, everything works perfectly and almost all the time. The reason is due to competence. This man has taken preventative measures to make sure that everything is working all the time. He is aware of what could or might potentially go wrong at any given time–before it actually does. When he fixes something he puts it back together and does not leave any aspect of his work unfinished. If he does not understand something fully, he speaks with as many others in the field as he can, and makes every effort possible to fix the problem. This person is, in a word, ‘competent’ at what he does. His work area is clean. There are no unfinished projects. He knows his business and does not take on work he does not understand. The opposite would be if he did not finish assignments completely, and let his work pile up. If he disassembled a computer and then did not reassemble it, and just moved on to something else. If he failed to read up about the latest developments. If he were not out there networking and exchanging information with other computer engineers. What would happen to him in this case is that his work would eventually take control over him, not the other way around:

• Phone systems and networks would be going down all the time.
• People would be yelling at the person, and he would eventually be at the mercy of his work and the world.
• He would not receive any pay raises.
• He might lose his job.
• He would be agitated all the time.
• He might start drinking too much.
• He would make justifications for the problems he was having at work due to old computers, or phone systems and use these excuses in discussing his performance with management.
• He would begin searching for another job to relieve the pressure–and then another one after that.
• The process would repeat itself at each new job.
• He might yell at his wife and kids at night.
• He might be angry with his employers–and the world at large.
• He might sue an employer for firing him.

You see, all of this would be caused by this person’s inability to control his environment. Controlling your environment is among the most important things you can do. People who are exceptional at their jobs and in their lives are generally able to control their environment and to resist being controlled by their environment. When I joined my first law firm with a group of around 15 other recent law school graduates in 1997, there was a young partner in the law firm who was a little bit insane, I think. I suspected the partner was a coke-head but I was not sure. You see, this guy rarely came into the office, and when he was there he would grab an associate and give some cryptic instructions to do this or that. He might tell the associate it would take “at most 3 to 4 hours”–when in reality it was a 25 hour job. The associate would do the work and might find himself being berated or humiliated by the partner for not doing some task that was not part of the original assignment. The partner would then lie about having assigned the task, when he had not. The entire process of working with the guy was quite exasperating for everybody in the firm, because of his outrageous behavior. As a young attorney starting out in a law firm, the most important thing you can do is complete assignments and impress the partners you are working for. I remember that a very talented young associate was given a workload by this particular partner, and after a few days the associate flat-out refused to work with him anymore. He made a point of going to the head of the law firm at the time, John Quinn, and telling Quinn that he would no longer be able to work with this particular partner. This was something that people just did not do, and everyone in the office was very impressed that the young associate had done this. The guy who refused to work with the partner was one of two people in this class of 15 people who ultimately ended up making partner in this law firm. He never got flustered and was always respected by his peers. I think that the reason he was so effective and able to do so well was because he knew the importance of controlling his own work. He refused to work with a partner who did not allow him to control his own work. A few years ago I had a very talented assistant working for me. She had gone to an excellent college and had finished near the top of her class. Her work ethic was exceptional and she did a really good job in everything that she undertook. She was working on a real estate matter with me and the real estate agent she was dealing with kept lying, not showing up for appointments and telling me and others that the young woman had said things she did not. It was a bizarre situation, and the real estate agent eventually ended up losing his license for similar behavior. I remember one day my assistant took a stand and refused to work with the agent. “I’ve had it. I am not going to work with someone who lies and changes things around. It makes it impossible for me to do my job. You can fire me if you want, but I simply cannot continue like this.” This girl was controlling her environment. By controlling her environment she was able to make sure that she could do her work effectively. Because the lying, scheming and so forth of the real estate agent was making it impossible for her to control her environment she refused to have anything to do with him. You need to control your environment at work. This means lots of things–like not taking on more work than you can handle and making sure you do everything with competence. One way of not controlling your environment is by just being plain lazy. Being lazy means letting work pile up, not doing your job, being preoccupied with things besides work and so forth. I do not have a lot of sympathy for lazy people, and neither does the rest of the working world. Lazy people never end up doing all that well at anything. These sorts of people are let go from organizations rapidly and frequently. Darwinian forces in most organizations typically take over quickly, and the lazy end up having major problems. The lazy and the careless are people who perpetually fail to control their environments–probably because doing so requires energy and focus. These people can create major problems for organizations. Another, more unfortunate example of failing to control your environment is taking on too much work, or doing work you do not really understand. This is a huge problem that affects countless individuals in the workplace. When you are good at something people may give you more and more work. You need to know when to say ‘no’ and you need to develop a keen ability to politely decline any assignment that is beyond your scope of expertise. Many people come into jobs and soon get in way over their heads–trying to take on too much work. I have seen this time and time again. When you have more work than you can handle, or you are doing work that you do not understand, you are not controlling your environment; instead you are being controlled by it. When I started the same legal job I mentioned earlier, there was a girl a few doors down from me that had recently graduated from Yale Law School. The girl was absolutely brilliant and a very hard working. We both shared secretaries who worked at the same station, and I used to see this woman’s time sheets, which she would turn in every day. After I had been at the firm for around 6 months I started noticing that the time sheets she was turning in each day were adding up to a full 24 hours. This meant, effectively, that she was working entire shifts of 24 hours without a break. I would notice these hours adding up to 24 hours at least a few times each week, and it was astonishing to me. I could not imagine, at the time, working this many hours on anything. Within several months of this woman’s starting these 24 hour shifts she had left the firm and gone to work for the government. I do not know why she did this; however, my guess is that she did this due to the fact that she simply had taken on too much work. She had become unable to control her own work environment. Had she been able to turn down work and refused to work such long hours, she would have been controlling her environment–and she might not have burned herself out of what promised to be an illustrious law career. Control of your environment starts with you. I know of employers who will not hire people who are grossly overweight, drink too much, or smoke. I have actually heard people say this to me before. Why? The reason is that the employer figures that the person who is grossly overweight, drinks too much, or smokes is unable to control themselves, their urges and their body and therefore will be unable to control their work. I knew of an attorney once who had a job offer from a major law firm and was invited out for drinks with an important partner a few weeks before he was supposed to start. The partner ordered two drinks over a few hours and the prospective new associate ordered four drinks. He was not hired on account of this, for the reasons mentioned above. I will never forget that one. You show your ability to control your environment by the way you dress and carry yourself. I have heard of people not being hired for important jobs due to their collars being frayed. I know of contractors who will not hire people who do not organize their tools well. All of this translates into an ability to control your environment. The person with the frayed collars is showing that he does not care about having a professional appearance, evidenced by his refusal to update his wardrobe or to get new clothes. Having a professional appearance is important in many lines of work. The contractor who is unable to keep his tools organized is not controlling the tools of his trade; therefore he looks weak to the potential employer. If you have ever known someone who seemed a little crazy, it is likely due, at least in part, to an inability to control his or her environment; chaotic surroundings often lead to a chaotic state of mind. The stresses of the world impact this person over time and to an extraordinary degree, and things are constantly going wrong in this person’s life, all because they are acted upon by the environment—not the other way around. People who are chronically stressed out and upset are typically being acted upon by the environment, not the other way around. One of the greatest dangers (and opportunities) out there is when an individual gets a promotion, or a company starts to expand when things are going well. This is always a giant opportunity for the individual or group to move to a higher standard. With more responsibility and growth often comes the challenge of controlling more variables in the work environment. In this case your standards, your attention to detail, your desire to do a good job, and your ability to exert control over your work environment all determine if you will succeed. If you have watched films about the military, or if you have ever been in the military, you know that there are countless procedures that are in place. People are always communicating back and forth seeking clearance for this procedure or that procedure. Certain high level military personnel may even call the President to seek clearance for one thing or another. The reason so many procedures exist in the military is that it would be impossible for the military to control their environment without the procedures. An absence of procedure would equate to complete chaos. The larger a company or organization is, the more procedures you are likely to see. There may be multiple levels of management, legal divisions, marketing teams–and all sorts of procedures in place for every one of these groups. All of this enables the company to control its environment, so that it is, ideally, optimized for continued growth and expansion. Organizations cannot function without numerous procedures and various methods to assist them in controlling their environment.

• A lack of procedures, standards and ways of controlling incoming work can lead to major difficulties and problems, and often lead to individuals having stress, emotional problems, career difficulties and more.
• A lack of procedures, standards and ways of controlling incoming work can lead to major difficulties and problems, and often lead to companies having stress, organizational problems, severe business difficulties and more.

An interesting trend is always happening in the economy: There are “booms” and then there are “busts”. During a boom cycle lots of people are being hired in a short amount of time. In short, there is a lot of opportunity. During a “bust” the exact opposite starts occurring. People are let go and fewer people are hired. The people who remain inside of organizations are given more and more tasks and their work is made more efficient. Productivity typically increases during a “bust”. All that is occurring here, essentially, is that the organization is exerting more control over its environment in order to survive. Control means having fewer workers, monitoring what each worker is doing, and having higher hiring standards and so forth. Those who are the most efficient at their work are generally kept on and are not laid off. When a group is rapidly expanding during a “boom” a lavish and decadent sort of culture often sets in: expenses are not overseen very carefully, and there is a great deal of unnecessary spending. Things get out of control, and the company starts to lose profits. When the bust cycle occurs control is brought back. The ability of an organization to exert control over its workers, expenses and so forth has a direct connection to its ultimate success in both good and bad times. Poorly run organizations are unable to control their workers, they are unable to control their expenses and they are unable to control their products–and they ultimately go out of business. Everything in terms of an organization’s success is about control. Just as an organization’s success depends on effective control, your own ability to succeed in your career and life depends on your ability to control your environment, and to not be controlled by it.

Related posts:

1. The Importance of Environment
2. Harmonize With the People in Your Environment
3. You Need to be in the Right Environment

Not only did Hutchins buck the dominant trends in philosophy and instruction, he also challenged higher education’s emphasis on intercollegiate football. Hutchins abolished the university’s football team in 1939 because he believed students needed to focus on scholarship and Chicago should play football only if it could remain competitive with major athletic programs. This was a momentous decision as the Maroons were a founding member of the Big Ten Conference and once a national powerhouse under the famed coaching of Amos Alonzo Stagg. In fact, Stagg, who had retired from Chicago in 1933, had been the first coach in the nation to be a tenured professor, and his large athletics’ budget was exempted from normal institutional review. Even as late as 1935, Chicago’s Jay Berwanger became the first Heisman Trophy winner, but by 1939 Chicago’s scoreboard indicated that the glory days had passed, including a 61–0 loss to Harvard. Therefore, despite the legacies, and partly because of them, after much debate the university dropped football. http://education.stateuniversity.com/pages/2520/University-Chicago.html

Today, there are few people who would think of the University of Chicago and not think of academics and scholarship. This happened because President Hutchins looked at the school and what its product and image should be, and decided that the emphasis needed to be on academics rather than sports. Every school produces a certain sort of product. For example, there is a high proportion of professors and others that come out of the University of Chicago. Michigan’s product is almost certainly more likely to be a football fan, or great athlete, than a professor. Because Michigan’s predominant product is football, a lot of the school’s reputation rests upon having a solid and good football product.

• What would happen if Michigan suddenly had no football team?
• What would happen if Michigan’s football team started losing all of its games?
• What would happen if there were a huge ethical controversy surrounding Michigan football?

If Michigan football went to hell a lot of things would change within the school. There would probably be decreased alumni contributions and all sorts of other issues. The school would no longer be known for the same sort of product, which would have a corresponding impact on the school. Similarly, imagine if Chicago decided it were going to have the best football team out of any college in the United States, and went to extraordinary lengths to recruit players and promote this goal? What sort of effect do you think this would have on the school? I am pretty sure that the academic people at the institution, as well as all the alumni would be pretty upset about this. It would not go over well. The reason I use this example is because every company, every person and most schools have a particular product that is very strong, for which they are known. Companies and other organizations thrive on their ability to have a strong, defined product. In most instances the successful organization becomes known for one specific thing, and for doing this one specific thing especially well. When an organization tries to have multiple products that are beyond their sphere of influence, things usually end up going badly. For example, what if Apple, the maker of the IPhone, MacBooks and so forth suddenly decided that it wanted to get into the business of manufacturing All Terrain Vehicles with the Apple logo on them. Say, in addition, that Apple decided that ATVs were where its future was, and that it was going to put a lot of energy into manufacturing ATVs from this day forward. First of all, the ATVs would probably not be very good because Apple does not have decades of experience manufacturing these machines, like it does making computer devices. In addition, its core customers would suddenly be quite alienated, and would likely stop buying many of its core products, so the company would suffer in this way. Apple would be guilty of manufacturing the wrong product and forgetting what business it was in. When I was in college I had a girlfriend who was one class year ahead of me. She was exceptionally creative, smart and funny, and had a great overall personality. In her final year of college she interviewed with major advertising agencies and did very well. It was difficult to secure these interviews and call backs with major advertising agencies, but she was able to easily pull it off. The advertising agencies loved her. She ended up taking a job with CBS in the summer, instead of a job with an advertising agency. What the advertising agencies saw in this woman was her creativity, sincerity and the ability to relate to all sorts of people, while being nonjudgmental, and constantly coming up with useful new ideas. At the same time, she was also interviewing with investment banks and other similar employers. Her friends were all getting jobs with investment banks, and she was getting the cold shoulder from the investment banks. The interviewers would come in very well dressed, professional and so forth–and always be rude to her. The advertising agencies, on the other hand, were very nice to her, and they would come in much less judgmental and even a bit frumpy.

• The advertising agencies did not like my girlfriend’s friends, who secured jobs with investment banks–but they really liked my girlfriend.
• The investment banks really liked my girlfriend’s friends–but they did not like my girlfriend.

“They do not like me because I am too vulnerable and not bitchy enough,” my girlfriend told me one day. “I need to change,” she said. She was visibly upset about the fact that the banks would not even invite her back for an interview. I knew why this was occurring: She was too much of a free spirit, and too likable. She did not project the sort of authority and confidence that a banker needs to project. A banker is just a different person and a different product than my girlfriend was. She was perfect for advertising because she was flexible, creative, fun loving, and the sort of person who would come up with all sorts of creative ideas and concepts for the advertising agency. Her friends were the exact opposite. They were uptight, inflexible and suspicious of creative thinking. They would have been horrible fits for an advertising firm. My girlfriend did decide to try and change. She turned from one of the nicest people I had ever known into a “bitch” virtually overnight. It did not suit her at all because deep down she was not the sort of person she was trying to be. She was trying to be a different product–and more like her friends who got jobs in the investment banks. When she tried to be bitchy it just did not work out right. Because it was not part of her natural personality, she was often incredibly rude to people and burned bridges. Unfortunately this whole transformation ended up alienating me too, and a wonderful relationship that had looked like it was headed for marriage was soon over. All because she tried to change her product–and who she was. The worst thing a person or a company can do is lose sight of what its product is. My girlfriend, for example, decided that she wanted to be a different product and it simply did not work. Organizations and people lose sight of what their product is all the time. The idea of what is your product is something that is of profound significance to your career and life, and losing sight of your product is one of the greatest causes of failure. For several years I have run a legal recruiting firm, and I have hired and managed close to if not more than 100 recruiters over the years. In the legal recruiting field the product is the candidates that the recruiters represent and send out to law firms. There is really no other product besides the people that the recruiting firm represents. Due to this product being a person, in order for the recruiters to earn money they need to:

• have good products and
• have a lot of high quality products and
• have customers (in this case the customers are law firms who are willing to hire the candidates)

In order to be a successful recruiter, the recruiter needs to have a product, and to have many products they can sell. As long as the recruiter ensures this, and nothing more, he or she will generally be in good shape. However, it is very common for recruiters to forget what their product is. They may spend their days talking on the phone, and not sending candidates out to law firms. Or they may go out to numerous lunches and have all sorts of meetings with attorneys and others, but never send out a product. None of what they are doing is really related to what their business is really about–even though they may think so. They get incredibly distracted and stop concentrating on their product. It is very easy for me to tell when a recruiter is going to fail. All I need to do is examine how many products they have (i.e., candidates), and whether or not they are doing anything with these products (i.e., sending the candidates out to law firms). Assuming the recruiter is doing this, the person will rarely have problems making placements–and a good living. It is as simple as this. One of the most unusual cases of a recruiter failing I ever observed was of an extremely talented recruiter at our firm several years ago. He related well to the people and candidates, who liked him very much. However, this recruiter never sent a candidate out to a law firm unless he was nearly 100% confident that the law firm would interview his candidate. He did not want to get rejected by the law firm. Because of this one characteristic the recruiter probably only made 20% of the placements he could have made. In this case, the recruiter’s failure to produce was more related to his ego (his not wanting get rejected) than anything else. Because the product of his efforts was so strongly tied to his ego, this particular recruiter did far worse in his job than he could have done. You need to keep your product in clear view at all times. There is nothing more important than the product you are offering and you need to know what that product is. Imagine, for example, if you were a professional rock star and then you decided that your true calling was also to be a painter and a public speaker. The odds are that these other products would unnecessarily occupy your time and also make your original, highly valued product (a rock star) suffer. This exact sort of thing is extremely common and happens more often than you might think. You need to know what your product is. You also need to be working for an organization that has a product and knows what it is. I personally have made a number of mistakes in terms of not understanding our companies’ products in the past, and this has hurt me and the people inside the organization. Several years ago our company was doing incredibly well in the student loan business and I hired all sorts of people for money losing products that were unrelated to student loans, such as educational seminars and other things. The new products were unrelated to what the company’s strength was at the time, and they did not endure. Every company and organization needs to know exactly what its product is and make sure it is promoting the right product. Our strong product in this instance was “student loans”–and we should have stuck to promoting this only. An organization, or person, cannot be strong when it is trying to promote the wrong product. Random products or a lack of concentration on the right products leads nowhere. Everything is about supply and demand: What products can be exchanged that have economic value? The money coming into a company generally comes in due to some sort of product or service being offered, which must be of some value. The money does not flow in due to the gossip at the water cooler, the long lunches, the screwing around with ideas that the company will never use, the Internet surfing and so forth. The product itself comes from something that is important–a need that people have, which the company can fulfill in a unique way. You cannot succeed without a product, or without offering a product that people want. Never lose sight of what product you are offering, what your strength is, and what makes you unique. Concentrate your efforts on delivering the product, and delivering it effectively–not the distractions that will inevitably emerge along the way.

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2. Concentrate on the Process, Not the Results
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• The person spoke in depressed tones.
• Everything that came out of the person’s mouth was about something negative.
• The person did not make me feel good, and acted like I was a loser for spending my summer working.
• The person told me bad news about various other people.

I could go into further detail but, it should suffice to say, I had not realized how negative this person was, or made me feel, until I put down the phone. When I put down the phone, all the enthusiasm I had for my work–as good as I felt about myself, my job and everything else in the world that I was excited about, seemed to suddenly fade into the background. I felt a deep sense of lack and sadness deep in my soul. It was a feeling I will never forget because it was like running into a brick wall. It took me hours to overcome it and to feel better about myself. The entire experience was depressing in a monumental sort of way. The reason this experience was so depressing, I think, was because it contrasted with how I had been feeling at the present time and over the previous few weeks. I had been away from this person for some time and had never realized before how negatively he had been affecting me day-to-day. My conversation with the person was really no different from the conversations I had with him in the past–it was only the contrast that made it so glaringly different this time. A short time later I decided that it was not in my best interest to remain friends with this person, and I am sure I was better off for it. I am sure you have had similar experiences as well:

• You may be feeling very good and then encounter a very depressed person, and suddenly you too become depressed.
• You may be feeling very bad and then encounter someone who is very happy, and suddenly you too become happy.

Moods are quite contagious and they can often instantly affect us in a positive or a negative way. When I was in my first year of high school I was a competitive tennis player. I would play tennis against pros and other very good players. While I was nowhere near as good a tennis player as a professional, I would always make for a challenging match against my opponent, and we would have long volleys and somewhat competitive games. I always felt I was playing much better tennis when I played with the best players than when I would play against average or poor players. When I played against average or poor players I would find myself moving more slowly, hitting more balls out of bounds, missing more serves and not having as much fun. The poor players I played against often destabilized my game. I would hit ridiculous and stupid shots where the ball would fly from the tennis court into the road and hit cars, for example. It was embarrassing. The company you keep can either make you rise, or bring you down. One of my favorite quotes is from John Steinbeck who wrote: “A sad soul can kill you far quicker than a germ.” Do you associate with people who improve your game? Or do you surround yourself with people who destabilize your career and life? Who you call your friends and acquaintances tells a lot about who you are. In order to be happy and successful it is important to surround yourself with other people who are happy and successful. You need to be very careful in terms of who you let into your sphere of influence. Positive energy spreads quickly–just as negative energy does. One of the greatest characteristics I have found in the best legal recruiters I have worked with is the ability to be continually positive. Over the years I have hired and worked with a large number of legal recruiters in our company and one of my greatest concerns has always been making sure I have positive people working for us. I would rather have 10 positive recruiters working in our company than 100 negative recruiters–even if the total financial cost were the same. Negative people infect others and bring an entire group down. One of my favorite movies is 300, which is about a group of 300 Spartans who fight against thousands of Persians. The Spartans have an incredible positive spirit that empowers them to do well. 300 is a great movie because it shows what a small group with the right mindset can do against a much larger force. I believe the Spartans’ strength in the film comes from their ability to remain positive. Have you ever attended a meeting in which there is someone throwing out a long diatribe of doubts and fears about this or that? People like this typically drag down the whole group, and make things extremely difficult for everyone. It is hard for groups of people to get motivated when there is even one extremely negative person in their midst. You life is valuable and your time is as well. It is challenging enough to remain positive and continually enjoy our lives, while feeling good about yourself. The last thing you need in your career is to deal with another person’s constant negativity. Your career and life will change for the better when you learn to surround yourself with positive people–and keep the negative ones away.

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1. You Need to be in Favor with the Right People
2. Harmonize With the People in Your Environment
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• I had read about the fact that there are staged accidents but I certainly never thought I would be part of one.
• I had heard about phony racial discrimination lawsuits but I certainly never thought I would be part of one.
• I had heard about people abusing the judicial system but I certainly never thought I would witness it firsthand.
• I had heard about people telling horrible lies to make money but I certainly never thought I would witness it firsthand.
• I had heard about corrupt state officers but I certainly never thought I would witness it firsthand.
• I had heard about people abusing the medical system, getting doctors and others to give phony diagnoses–but I certainly never thought I would witness it firsthand.
• I had heard about people making up lies about other people to try and destroy their careers but I certainly never thought I would witness it firsthand.

Why would one person and her friend feel the need to stage a phony accident?  Why would one person and her friend lie and create all sorts of problems for others?  Why would one person and her friend feel the need to accuse people of racial epithets and so forth, when none of this ever actually happened? I was simply accused of hitting a car.  The officers involved were accused of something much more serious however, which could very well have ruined their careers and tarnished their reputations forever.  The driver and her friend had created this giant story about racial discrimination for nothing other than to extract money from the Los Angeles Police Department.  I know how deceptive these women were because I was there the entire time the event was unfolding. What does this story say about the world that we live in?  And how is this story relevant to your career and your life? What this episode made crystal clear for me is that there are a lot of people out there who want to try short cuts to get ahead–at any and all costs.  A fraudulent lawsuit, or damaging someone, an insurance company or others in some unethical manner is a real cheap shortcut, and a pathetic attempt to get ahead. Any sort of short-term gains these actions may bring forth will never produce any long-term results or success on any level. I have heard of many people who have filed phony lawsuits and who have done other unethical things in the past.  I never respect these people and never trust them.  Creating a life of meaning and having a profitable career and life cannot be created at a stop sign in downtown Los Angeles by creating a fake accident.  It simply requires work and lots of it. You can never cut corners and have a valuable career and life. The Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus once stated: “Never esteem anything as of advantage to thee that shall make thee break thy word and lose thy self-respect.” You need to build your life and career upon doing good, and through doing things the right way.  In this you will find the path to sustaining real success and a happy life.

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