Find Joy in Your Life’s Work–and Never Be Without Work

In my work as an advocate for people to find jobs, I insist that the people who work for me enjoy their own jobs, and this includes the recruiting team. I expect the recruiters I work with to thoroughly enjoy, appreciate, and respect the people they are helping to find work. Everything we do is affected by our mindset. Your mindset needs to be in the right place with regard to your work. A good mindset is a foundation for success. A poor mindset makes for job dissatisfaction, frustration, and long days, and, ultimately, can bring about failure. This is why enjoying what you are doing, and enjoying it immensely, is key. Many people cannot seem to grasp this simple but powerful perspective, so I would like to elaborate on it a bit. I think it is one of the most important perspectives one can have. It will change the way you look for a job, and if you really get it, it can really help you achieve success in your life and career. After my first semester at the University of Chicago, I had a mandatory meeting with a counselor. I had gotten a 3.3 average for that semester despite taking a difficult calculus class and several advanced classes that had made me study harder than I ever had in my life. I was feeling pretty good about myself for getting these kinds of grades. In the meeting, the counselor asked me what profession I wanted to go into after graduation. I [Read more]

Are You Here? The Importance of Being Present in Your Job and Job Search

What makes someone successful in his or her career? When it comes down to it, I believe one of the greatest determinants of success is whether or not you are “here.” “Being here” takes two forms. The most obvious is to be here physically. Coming into the office each day and going through the motions is the most basic way to be here and the minimum requirement for success. An example of being here for a salesperson would be coming into the office and making a certain number of cold calls each day. If this is done, and nothing more, [Read more]

Your Ultimate Goal: How You Can Find Job Security

One of the worst things that can happen to people is getting fired from a job with no notice whatsoever. It can be devastating to lose your source of income unexpectedly, especially in a contracting economy. Losing a job can color our perspective on the world and our future. Going forward, we have a difficult time allowing ourselves to ever feel secure again. We believe that things can change in an instant and that we might be suddenly out of a job again. This fear of sudden job loss is something that many people who have been terminated from jobs [Read more]

Your Job Is a Game. Make Your Opponents External

After being in the workforce for many years, I’ve come to realize that all of our jobs are, quite simply, games. In every job you have ever had, you are part of a game. Your ability to play the game and be part of the team will determine your success or failure. The ability of your employer to externalize the game and the opponent will determine the success or failure of the enterprise. Games consist of rules, freedoms, barriers, and opponents. Every organization has a certain set of rules by which it operates. These rules determine how [Read more]

Are You More Motivated by the Opinions of Others–or Your Own?

When I first moved to Los Angeles, I found myself spending the occasional Saturday or Sunday going to Beverly Hills with a girlfriend to look in clothing stores. One of the stores that I usually ended up in was a store like Barneys, which carries both men’s and women’s clothing. Instead of sitting idly on couch near a dressing room, reading fashion magazines with the other occasional bored male, I typically would go upstairs and look at men’s clothing. What always fascinated me about the menswear I saw during these trips was that it seemed drastically different each year. One [Read more]

Are You Motivated by Information, People, Activities, Things – or Places?

Most people are motivated by either information, people, activities, things, or places. You are probably focused on one of these as well, and this explains why some people interest you, and others you find boring. This also explains why you hit it off with certain types of people and do not hit it off with others, and why you are attracted to certain jobs and activities more than others. The rarest sort of person is the one who is interested primarily in information. For most of his life my grandfather woke up every morning and studied the [Read more]

Are You More Interested in the Intangible or the Tangible?

Several years ago, I started a business called Law Firm Staff, which is a staffing business for attorneys, paralegals, and so forth. Because it was a relatively new business and I had hired a manager, I felt that it was extremely important that the business had a strong self-concept and was well branded. At the time, our other companies were going gangbusters, and I solicited bids from various “branding agencies” that would help us to come up with various concepts for branding our business in the eyes of customers. When the bids started coming in, I realized [Read more]

Are You More Specific–or More General?

One summer I was working in New York City for a big law firm and was told to go see an important partner about an assignment. I went into the partner’s office and was handed a file: “We have a deadline of next Thursday. Make sure we have filed the proper form with the SEC.” “What sort of file are you talking about, and what is the deadline?” I asked. Keep in mind that I was a law student and had no legal experience whatsoever. “I do not have time for this [Read more]

Are You Visual, Auditory–or Kinesthetic?

You have probably heard before that people tend to be visual, auditory, or kinesthetic. In my experience, this is true and it is something you can generally pick up on within just a few minutes of meeting the average person. Understanding whether or not you are one or the other is something that can help you understand what sort of work you should be doing, the sorts of people you should be working with, the people you should be spending your time with, and the type of environment that will make you happy. In addition, you will make decisions and [Read more]

The Importance of Your Sense of Self

Once, when I was around 17 years old, I was sitting in a car with a friend of mine, waiting for another group of kids. My friend was very wealthy and by this age had already inherited several million dollars–and he was very arrogant about this. In addition, he had been raised to think very highly of himself. He seemed to believe he had done the absolute best in everything he did. Even though he was not a great student, he reasoned that this did not matter, since the best students would one day be working for him. He had [Read more]

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