The Dangers of Getting Jobs Through Friends

Men are more ready to repay an injury than a benefit, because gratitude is a burden and revenge a pleasure. “Oh, I already have a friend there. I’ll just contact him.” In the job market, it’s one of the more common things we hear after informing a job seeker that a certain employer has a job opening. There is a lot you need to consider before you decide to apply to a job through a friend or relative, or take a job working for a friend or relative. First, it is exceedingly rare that a friend or [Read more]

Do Not Be Vengeful: Let Hurt and Anger Go Through You

He who conquers the mind, conquers the world.    -Guru Nanak Dev

In today’s economy, a lot of people are losing their jobs.  People are being fired and let go from companies at an alarming rate.  There is a huge sense of betrayal people feel when they lose a job.  People are incredibly angry at their employers and often life itself.  There is also a tendency for people who feel they have been wronged to want to “lash out” at their employers who have fired them.  Many of these people become angry, not just at the employer where they have lost their job, but at all employers.  They take on [Read more]

You Need to Bring a Singular Focus to Everything You Do

What makes a person really good at something? The answer to this question is identical to the reason for exceedingly high success in any profession. There are people who are really good at finding jobs. People who are good at finding jobs bring an incredible level of focus to their search. This is the level of focus I want you to bring to your job search as well. In order to get the position you are seeking, you need to be focused and follow one very simple rule. In order to be good at your job you need to be focused as well. No one becomes good at something and stays that way without focus. If you understand the rule I am about to share with [Read more]

Love Your Work And The People Who Give It To You

From the time I was 19 until I was about 27, I spent a good portion of my summers doing asphalt work around Detroit. That included asphalt sealing, hot tar crack filling, and asphalt patching. It was seasonal work and most people in Michigan only seal their asphalt once a year. ”Around Detroit” is a blanket term because I was working in three counties and in an area encompassing hundreds of miles. Essentially, I would travel to areas where people could afford to maintain asphalt. Seven days a week, I would get up as early as I could and go out to start the day at one of my jobs. Sometimes my drive was about an hour. Sometimes it was 15 minutes. Most of the time, I drove about 30 minutes. I made this drive each day because I had work to do. Every day I had work to do was an extremely exciting day for me. Once I got to a work site, I would count on the people around the area – neighbors, other businesses, and passing traffic – to see the work I was doing. I would stop cars and tell them I was in the neighborhood and willing to work. If I was in a residential area, I would knock on doors and tell them I could do work for them. I would do everything within my power to get work, and I always got business. I worked seven days a week. I worked so hard some of my employees would quit the job from exhaustion only after a few days. There were, however, people who lasted. In addition, while doing this work I maintained a profound respect for the people for whom I was working. I did everything in my power to do the work to the absolute best of my ability. I took the work incredibly seriously. I loved my job. The worst thing that could happen to me was not getting work. I knew if I did not do a good job one year, the next year I would not get the work again. I knew people talked, and the better I did in one area, the more work I got. I remember one year I showed up at a house in a certain neighborhood where I’d worked for several years, and a widow answered the door. She told me her husband had died and she could no longer afford the service. Although it was a nice house in an [Read more]

The Importance of Sharing Ideas

When I was in law school, I went into the library one afternoon and took a seat at a desk across from a guy I knew quite well. We were not great friends but I had been over to his home a few times and he was a likeable guy in all respects. Both of us were in the same Property class and we had an exam coming up in about two weeks. In your first year of law school, Property is one of the more difficult classes and requires a lot of study and preparation because it is a different way of thinking. In law school, the way people typically study is through outlines. An outline is essentially a distillation of the reading in class and insights from the Professor. Because there is so much to learn, what typically happens is groups of students get together to create them over a 15 week semester. For example, 15 students will get together and one week one student may do the outline and the next week another student will do the outline. After about 15 minutes, I looked up and realized that the outline he was studying from was absolutely incredible. It was incredible because it was very well organized and was tracking both the Professor’s comments and everything that had happened in the class very closely. It appeared to be something that was made in a prior year and had distilled the same class the professor had taught over and over again in a really good way. I asked my friend if I could see the outline. When I asked him this he hesitated a little bit and I could tell it was not something he really wanted to show me. Before he showed it to me he looked around the library to see if anyone was watching us. When he realized we were alone, he handed me the outline but not before telling me that if anyone walked up to not let them see me looking at it. I thought this was unusual but agreed. As I looked through the outline more closely I realized this was something that would really make my study of Property go a lot better. The outline was exceptionally well done in all respects. I immediately realized I needed this outline. “Can I copy this outline?” I asked. “I promised the people I got it from I would not let anyone copy it,” he said. “Are you kidding?” “No, I’m sorry. I can’t.” This sounded absolutely ridiculous to me. For the next 10 minutes or so I sat there and eventually talked him into letting me copy the outline. In order to copy the outline he made me promise to drive to a city called Culpepper, that was around 30 minutes outside of  Charlottesville, Virgina where I was going to law school. He was absolutely paranoid that someone who had given him this outline would see me with it and then blame him for giving me the outline. “These people are vicious … ” he told me. A few hours later I had copied the outline and drove over to his home and dropped it off. I chatted with him for another 10 minutes or so about where he had gotten this outline and who else had the outline. Incredibly, he informed me that he had gotten the outline from the same group of people who were in my outline group for property. He did not name all of the people, but he did name around 10 of the 15 people who were in my outline group as all having it. They had been having a “study party” or something along those lines that he had showed up at, and they had all been using this outline. They allowed him to copy it but made him promise never to give it to anyone else. As far as he knew, only these 10 people had a copy of the outline. The reason these people did not want others to have the outline was because the outline was so good. They believed that this outline was something that gave them an advantage and would enable them to perform much better in the final exam in the Property class. Essentially, the idea was that if they had this and others did not then this “artificial advantage” would enable them to do better, get a better job and be more successful. The next day in Property class, I looked around when the class began and watched those 10 people very closely. The classroom was a podium and I always sat at the very back of the classroom, so I could see everyone in the class and also look down. About 10 minutes into the class, those 10 people all had this “secret outline” out and were taking notes on it and so forth. A couple of days later, before the class started, everyone was [Read more]