Choose Your Frames of Reference Wisely

I spent the summer following my first year of law school working at the Department of Justice (the “DOJ”) in Washington, DC. The entire summer and the events leading up to it resulted in one of the strangest experiences I have ever had. After I got the job with the DOJ, I was required to undergo a security clearance with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. After contacting and questioning many people I knew in the past, the FBI also required me to take a physical and a drug test.

In late spring, I went in for the physical when I was studying for my final exams. It was like something out of a Frankenstein movie. There was a skeleton hanging by a wire inside the doctor’s office and the whole place was very disorganized. He started telling me strange stories about grisly things like a decapitation case he had been involved with at the morgue, for example. The doctor looked like a mad scientist—his hair was disheveled and his comments were bizarre.

I was the last patient of the day on a Friday afternoon. The doctor had to let me out of the building because everyone was gone for the day. On Saturday I went to the library around 5:00 pm and did not return until around 1:30 am. When I got home there was a message on my answering machine. The machine said it had been received about 45 minutes previously, at 12:45 am:

“Hello, this is the doctor who did your physical on Friday. It is important that I speak with you right away… please call me immediately! Your exam was fine. This is about something far more urgent!” He left no number, and I searched frantically for the number of the clinic. I could not imagine why the doctor would be calling me at such a strange hour. I called the clinic and an answering machine picked up. I did not leave a message. On Sunday I called again and the machine picked up again. I still did not leave a message.

On Monday I came home from the library around noon or so and called the clinic again. This time someone did pick up. I asked to speak with the doctor.

“Who is this!?” the person on the other end of the line demanded.

“He left me a message early Sunday morning,” I replied.

“That’s impossible,” the person said. “He was found dead this morning in the office. He had been dead since Friday night.”

This was the start of my bizarre summer at the DOJ.

A few days into my job at the DOJ, my boss (an important government official who had been appointed by the president) came into my office and told me he had heard I was living in a skid row hotel and that I could stay at his house if I watered his lawn and fed his bird. At the time, I was paying $100 or so a week to stay at the hotel – the cheapest place I could find at the time.

My boss wanted me to live in his home while he and his family traveled throughout Europe for the summer. I took up residence in his basement, where I was surrounded by boxes and a collection of hard liquor bottles. Despite the surroundings, the living conditions in the basement were much better than the skid row hotel.

There were lots of things I did not enjoy about working with the DOJ. In addition to the supernatural death experience with the doctor a few weeks before, and the time I spent in the skid row hotel, I was now living with a bird in a basement surrounded by liquor bottles and boxes of old albums. My job was strange as well. I was working in a huge building with hardly any windows. The pay was low and the people I was working with did not appear happy. (There are numerous different divisions within the DOJ, so my experience was perhaps not the norm; however, I found the entire experience thoroughly unpleasant.)

One of the strangest things about my experience working with the DOJ was the group of people with whom I shared an office. Every day a very large woman would come in with a man who looked no more than 20 and they would sit in the office with me all day. They would do nothing but spend the majority of their time eating and looking at me. There were no computers on their desks and I never saw them on the phone. As far as I knew, they did nothing.

When I would type, they would seem annoyed. “Gotta hit those keys,” one would say. “Yep, hit ‘em up!” the other would chime in.

I was involved in research projects that made no sense to me. One of them involved a bunch of hypothetical questions about nuclear powered airplanes exploding over subdivisions in North Carolina. The job, the people, Washington, DC… none of it was very appealing.

Many of the people I was working with seemed like zombies.

I remember the phone ringing in the house late one evening, and I rushed upstairs from the basement to grab it. It was a relative of mine I had not spoken to in some time who was working overseas. There was a delay in the communication because he was in Poland at the time (I think for the CIA) and he was calling on what sounded like a satellite phone.

I told my relative I was not interested in working for the government, the pay was low and that the work was not that exciting – and was, in fact, bizarre. This was, of course, due to the division I was working in at the time, not just the government affiliation. I will never forget what my relative said to me.

“Isn’t this the most you can expect out of your life? If you do this, you will have really succeeded.”

For me, this was not what I wanted in my life. At that moment this person was trying to provide me a reference claiming this was what I should expect out of my life and was the best I could do. This was not the reference I wanted. My idea of what it meant to be a lawyer was much more than this. Had I chosen to believe this relative and accept that assessment, I may have spent my life doing something I did not enjoy.

I have provided you so much detail about my experience because I quickly created a reference for myself that the worst possible thing that could happen to me was to work for the government. I had such a strange and bad experience I came to believe I needed to expect something far different for myself. Working for the government had gone from being my dream to my nightmare.

This makes no sense, of course. Working for the government offers incredible opportunity, but our references are what control how we think about things. People (like my relative) provide us with references as to how we may choose to view our lives, and we can either accept them or deny them. Here, I reacted with rage.

“Are you kidding? This is the last freaking thing I’ll ever want for myself!” I think I may have hung up on the relative and not spoken to him for weeks afterward.

I know my relative must have been perplexed by my reaction. His implication that this was the best I could expect made me furious. I did not want to be judged as being part of the government world.

When I got back to law school in the fall, I made sure I did everything I possibly could to get a great job with a law firm. I tried to get as far away from a government career as I possibly could.

How has your career been shaped?

Have you allowed yourself and your career to be shaped by early experiences you have had?

Have your early interpretations of the world and what has happened to you made you a better or a stronger person?

In your career, have you been so turned off by certain early experiences that your version of the world and your place in it is different from what it needs to be?

Are you allowing early interpretations of the world to shape and control your destiny?

We need to take what we experience and frame it in a way that makes us stronger and makes life work for us the way it should work.

At the age of 21, Billy Joel had been playing in bars for seven years. The life he saw in front of him was something very depressing to him. He was not always treated well in bars and, according to one account, drunks had actually spit on him when he was playing the piano. He had a series of misfortunes, was drinking too much, and simply wanted to die. He was not even making a very good living playing piano. In a 2002 essay in Time magazine, Joel wrote:

“The band thing wasn’t working. I had no money. I had had a series of jobs like oystering, landscaping, pumping gas. I was homeless. I slept in laundromats or in cars. I was crashing at friends’ houses. I’d sneak into my mom’s house and sleep there. I didn’t want to move back home; I didn’t want to admit defeat.

I actually tried to commit suicide at 21. I drank furniture polish. I had no purpose in life, and I thought it was all over. I checked myself into an observation ward [in a hospital] for a while because I knew I was suicidal. I wanted to get some help, and I had an epiphany. I saw people who had profound emotional problems. These people were manic-depressives and paranoid schizophrenics. I looked around and said to myself, I don’t have any problems. I realized all I was doing was being absurdly self-absorbed and giving in to self-pity, and I wanted to just get out. So I told them what they wanted to hear. I took the medicine. I walked around with the bathrobe open in the a__, like in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. People were moaning and groaning all night, and I thought, please, just let me get out of here, and I’ll never be that stupid again.

This experience was one of the best things I have ever gone through. I have never given in to any kind of self-pity for longer than two minutes since then. I realized I can solve my own problems. It showed me that what I thought was my own hell was nothing compared with the hell of others. I have taken that 21-year-old with me throughout my life. He has helped me through the deaths of friends, family matters, personal-relationship issues, minefields of the music business, writer’s block.”(Time, Jan. 21, 2002)

The most important things we have in our lives are references. What determines the quality of our lives is how we evaluate our situations. When I think about Joel, I also think of my early experience with the government. I formed beliefs about what the government was like and used this to propel myself away from it. Joel used his experience “going crazy” to propel his mind away from feeling sorry for himself and towards being grateful for what he was and the life he could have. The reference and association he made in his mind made him change the way he approached life and his place in it.

Years later, of course, Joel would go on to be one of the most famous musicians in the world, become fabulously wealthy, and marry one of the most beautiful women in the world, Christie Brinkley. How can a man go from drinking furniture polish at the age of 21 to the heights of stardom and greatness that few ever experience? According to Joel, having seen people who were really suffering made him realize there was no reason why he should ever feel sorry for himself again. By having seen the other side, he very quickly realized how much his life meant and how much he had to look forward to.

I have never used drugs, or even tried them. There is a reason for this. When I was growing up, I saw numerous lives practically destroyed by recreational drugs at a very young age. A drug-crazed maniac shot and killed my stepsister when I was in second grade. My school also had a program where the police came around a couple of times a year and showed people in our class pictures of drug related deaths. Speakers came to our school and talked about the dangers of drugs, how people died or had their lives otherwise destroyed by them. From the time I was seven or eight years old until now, I have always been terrified of drugs – my reference to drugs.

The references you have for the way the world is will impact everything that happens to you. These references will shape your life. The people who achieve the most in the world are the people who are empowered by, and not dragged down by, references. One of the best things you can do is allow your references to empower you in a positive and not a negative way. So many people create negative references from their experiences, and their lives are paralyzed and hurt forever by these references.

One of the saddest things that can happen to a person is to be sexually abused when they are young. While growing up, I knew two girls who had been sexually abused by their own fathers. Each girl reacted differently to the experience. One gained a lot of weight so she would not be attractive to men and became angry, hateful, and bitter. The other girl became incredibly attractive and also promiscuous. After years of therapy, the promiscuous one told me she had used sex as a control mechanism over men to prove she owned her body and her father did not. She viewed sex as a way to have control instead of something that was about bonding. Both of these women allowed a bad experience and reference to control the course of their lives and affect how they saw themselves in the world and interacted with it. I often think about these two women because the contrast is so remarkable.

People use their experiences and what happens to them in different ways. Some people use their references for good and others for bad. People who achieve the most in the world and in their lives do so because of the references they hold in their mind.

Your references do not need to be things that have happened in the past. They can also be references you set up for your future and what will happen in your future. When Sony first started marketing radios in the United States in the middle of the 1950s, Bulova offered to purchase 100,000 units, but insisted they be marketed under the Bulova brand name. This was to be the largest order Sony had ever received and would give the floundering company money to grow and prosper.

At the time, Sony co-founder Akio Morita barely had any money. With some of the last money he had to his name, Morita called Sony headquarters in Japan from the United States and told them about the order. They encouraged Morita to take the order. Morita was firm he did not want to accept the order and told headquarters that he was not going to take it. Headquarters thought he was crazy.

When Morita told Bulova about his decision, they stated, “Our company name is a famous brand name that has taken over fifty years to establish. Nobody has ever heard of your brand name. Why not take advantage of ours?”

Morita remained steadfast in his views and refused to accept the order.

His rejoinder to Bulova: “Fifty years ago, your brand name must have been just as unknown as our name is today. I am here with a new product, and I am taking the first step for the next fifty years of my company. Fifty years from now I promise you that our name will be just as famous as your company name is today.”

The references you create for yourself about what you will be and what you can be control your destiny. The filters we view life and the world through have a stunning effect on what ends up happening to us and shaping our futures. Your beliefs and values come from the references you give yourself. We use references to give us certainty about the way things are.

When Thomas Edison was designing the light bulb and failing again and again, he did not say “Aw, what’s the use?” Instead, he told himself he was one step closer to creating the light bulb each time he failed. He used failure as a reference to show he was getting closer to his goal. How do you interpret the world around you?

You succeed in life by creating references that empower you rather than dragging you down. In my job with the government, I could have taken my early experience to mean there was something “supernatural” about me working there and that people would “come to my aid,” such as my boss who offered me a free place to live. I could have decided I was working on the most incredible projects of all time, projects that would shape national policy and what happened in the world. I could have told myself my experience was something that could lead to me being the President of the United States and to helping millions of people both in our country and around the world. I could have easily given my experience that meaning.

You can do the same thing with your work and life experiences. Let your experiences empower you. Give them positive, not negative, meaning. When you look at your past in a way that empowers you, every single day is a new opportunity for growth. When you look at your past in this way, you may realize the worst days of your life were actually your very best.

Link a different meaning to your experiences so you can be stronger. Billy Joel took a horrible event and linked something incredibly positive to it. The transformation of this experience made him strong and gave him a life that would empower any one of us. He also used this experience to empower the world through his music. You can rationalize any experience you have the same way Joel did.

When I was growing up, I was exceptionally good at soccer. At one point I was so good I was not allowed to play on regular teams. Instead, I was on a special team for all of Detroit that traveled around playing different teams in other parts of the state.

After a couple years of this, however, I rapidly lost all interest in soccer and sports in general. It was too much pressure. Too much was expected of me, and the game was no longer fun. It was so competitive and brutal I would feel badly about myself after virtually every game, unless I got a “hat trick” (three goals). Because I had great talent, I was expected to practice all the time.

After a while, I intentionally stopped doing as well as I could at soccer and instead sabotaged myself. I did not play as hard as I could and started to fail at the game.

My life was never the same.

Although I played varsity soccer my first year of high school, I stopped playing after that and was no longer interested. I did not want the pressure. I made different kinds of friends and dropped out of the game forever. I became friends with the sorts of kids who did not play sports and got into trouble. I was escaping life as an athlete. It made no sense.

I formed the wrong references and made the game represent something other than what it was. The fact is we give things the meanings we choose. Have you ever stopped doing something at which you were talented? If so, the chances are very good you stopped doing it because you allowed yourself to form a different meaning of what it was. We view things through the lenses we choose. Everyone looks at the world based on the experiences they have had in the past and what they mean.

Different religions view the world in different ways. If you were to eat a steak in India, a Hindu would be horrified. If you tried to shake the hand of an Orthodox Jew of a different sex, they would pull their hand away in shock. If you tried to take a practicing Mormon to a bar and have a drink with them, they would be repulsed. We view the world based on the sorts of experiences we have had and what we tell ourselves the world and different things mean. We view the world through filters, and it is important we realize the filters we are using are not always the correct ones. We use references to create the filters we use to see the world.

I want to encourage you to stand guard at the door of your mind. Do not let your past represent something negative that can hurt you now. None of us have had perfect life experiences. There is something inside of you, however, that is holding you back from reaching for the stars in your career. You are capable of so much. How different would the memories of high school been for me if I had allowed myself to be a star soccer player? How different would Billy Joel’s life have been if he’d allowed himself to stay depressed? How different would your life be today if you allowed your past to empower you? How different would your present be if you knew you were capable of greatness and accepted nothing but the best for yourself, like Morita of Sony?

There is no limit to your life except the limits you impose on it. Your career and the world are wide open to you. Try to look at everything you have done in the past as a powerful lesson that is making you stronger and better today. Never allow yourself to be limited by your own mind. Allow your mind to interpret the world for your benefit, and not your detriment.

Never Measure Yourself against Perfection

When I was in high school, one of the happiest kids I knew was an excellent athlete who I’ll call Bill. He was very intelligent and always had the best looking girlfriends. He eventually ended up marrying his high school sweetheart.

Bill was from a relatively small town in Michigan, and he ended up going to our private boarding school, where he was surrounded by a lot of very high achievers. I think the type of people he met there really must have changed his perspective. Some of the kids he played baseball with in high school went on to play baseball in college. Some of these kids went on to Ivy League schools and planned on doing things like becoming doctors. I remember one of his friends went to Stanford. I don’t think Bill went away to college and he stayed home and attended a local community college for a year or two. After high school, his life did not appear to blossom the way the lives of others around him did. That’s not to say there was anything wrong with his life – he just didn’t appear interested in taking over the world.

When I’d first met Bill he’d been among the happiest people I had ever known. His happiness was very pure and deep. But something horrible happened to him, and I will come back to that in a moment.

What I am about to share with you is one of the most profound ways I know to look at the world and your place in it. If you consider yourself even slightly motivated, this may be one of the more useful things you will ever read. What you are about to read could change your life forever, and it could even save your life.

A few years ago, I was at a Tony Robbins conference in Palm Springs, California. Tony told a story about how his stepson had attended one of the most prestigious boarding schools in the world. An important person from the Middle East was apparently so happy with the assistance Tony had provided him he told Tony he would get his stepson into this ultra prestigious school, which was in Switzerland, as a gift. Tony accepted the offer and sent his stepson off to the school.

Tony made the point of saying before sending his stepson to the school, he’d been a very fit kid, and was also extremely happy. The boy had a positive disposition and lots of friends. He never seemed to care what other kids around him were doing and was mainly interested in just enjoying his own life.

Although Tony didn’t know it, once his stepson started going to this school he started requesting thousands of dollars a month in spending money from his mother. Apparently he felt he needed new clothes and various other things to keep up with the other kids at the school. These kids were the sons of prime ministers and princes from Europe, famous actors, and other titans of industry – the children of some of the most important and well known people in the world.

After Tony’s stepson had been at the school for about six months, Tony traveled to Switzerland to visit him. He immediately noticed his stepson had gained at least 30 pounds. He hardly recognized him. His stepson insisted they go to a certain sushi restaurant for lunch, and the bill was several hundred dollars. Before, his stepson had never been concerned about restaurants and spending a lot of money. Aside from this, what Tony noticed most about his stepson was he now seemed very unhappy. He kept comparing himself with the people around him, and did not seem to feel good about himself.

His stepson had started comparing himself to others and felt like he came up short in every category. The boy simply did not feel good about himself or his family any longer. As Tony was speaking with him, the boy would say things like:

-This person was better than he was in this category.

-This person was better than Tony in this category.

-This person had a newer this or that.

-This person had more important parents.

-Tony was “new money,” and this was not good.

-This family was better than his because of this reason.

According to Tony, it was as if the school had given his stepson reasons to no longer feel good about himself. He compared everything in his life against something or someone else. Consequently, the boy gained tons of weight and became very unhappy with himself. Tony felt the damage was so severe he pulled him out of the school a short time later.

When you’ve achieved a high level of success and are around people with the most privileges and advantages, you often find the people who are the unhappiest with themselves. I think there is some truth to the idea the most successful people are often the unhappiest. The reason this may be true is they constantly measure themselves against ideals they simply cannot attain.

People who want to get very good grades may say to themselves, “nothing less than an ‘A’ is acceptable.” When they fail to get an A grade, they feel badly about themselves. Even if they get all As, if they get one A+, they might feel angry their other grades are not “A+” as well. A thinking process geared towards an ideal leads people to see they are failing to be “perfect”, and to meet a certain ideal in numerous other areas of their life:

-Their relationships with others
-Their wealth
-Their athletic ability
-Their health
-Their attractiveness
-Their popularity
-Their material possessions
-Their social status
-The social status of their parents
-Their weight
-Their natural intelligence
-Their talents of every kind

This list could go on and on. When people see others who are better than them, they often feel a sense of inferiority.

When many of us hear about stars overdosing on drugs or having other severe problems, the reaction often is, “Why would someone with so many advantages do this?” Stars are so programmed to achieve success they often simply feel they do not measure up in a variety of areas. In many cases, it is the people closest to the star who make the person aware he or she does not measure up.

When I started seeing headlines about Britney Spears hanging around with Paris Hilton, I knew it would not be good for Britney Spears, and instinctively knew Britney was likely to start having severe problems. Paris comes from a different background than Britney, having grown up among the upper class, and she has an awareness of society I am sure Britney lacked at the time. In short, Paris’ insight into society could surely make Britney feel as if she were not measuring up, despite her massive fame and fortune. Paris knows what it is like to be from money; Paris knows about the social pecking order better than Britney.

Sure enough, very shortly after the two were announced to be friends and were seen frequently together, all sorts of horrible things started happening to Spears, which were of her own making. She shaved her head, was carted away to a psychiatric ward on a stretcher, and more. I am sure a lot of what happened had to do with Paris showing Britney how she did not measure up. Paris’ influence on Britney might not have been direct, but the effect occurred nonetheless.

There is a real danger in the way most of us have been taught to think about ourselves and the world. This way of thinking about ourselves and others never allows us to measure up. Instead of appreciating where we have come from and what we have achieved, most of us compare ourselves to an impossible ideal. All around us there are ideals we think we need to measure up to. We never can.

I want to propose a way of looking at the world and your place in it that will virtually guarantee you happiness and success throughout your life: you will never achieve the “ideal” in anything. You can keep trying, but you will never, ever be the best at everything. There is always going to be someone better than you.

Compare yourself only to the person you were before. Measure yourself against your own progress in various categories and do not compare yourself to others. Forget about others.

If you can understand this idea and apply it, your life will be changed forever. When you measure yourself against where you have been in the past, you are always going to feel a sense of progress. Each new success you achieve is going to give you a greater sense of satisfaction and push you forward with more positive energy. You can always improve on where you have already been, and what you have already accomplished. If you want to make improvements in any area, write down where you are right now and set out to improve. Measure yourself against where you have been, not where others have been.

Our brains like to set goals. Goals are absolutely necessary to drive us forward and make us achieve in life. But we cannot measure ourselves against others. We need to measure ourselves against ourselves, and gauge our progress in that fashion.

People who measure themselves against an ideal always feel disappointed. It is impossible to achieve every single goal you set for yourself. When you do not reach your ever-elusive goals, you end up feeling like a loser. You cannot possibly achieve every goal you set for yourself. What you can do, however, is constantly improve. This way you will continually feel a sense of victory as you move forward in life.

For example, if your goal is to lose weight, you can look at the scale a week from now after dieting and see that you have lost some weight. You have achieved something and have a reason to celebrate. This small victory will improve your self esteem and help you feel better about yourself.

Now, if you want to weigh 115 pounds like a star you read about in US Magazine, the reality is that you might never be able to achieve this. This is not how you should measure yourself.

I am sure you love watching television as much as I do, but most of the time what we are seeing is not the way the world really is. Nevertheless, many people are led to believe that the outside world is very similar to what they see on television, or read about in books and gossip magazines. There is an ideal that everyone aspires to attain. This ideal is a fantasy that simply does not exist. Comparing yourself to a fantasy world is a recipe for disaster and continual frustration.

Many people believe they can only be happy if their lives match a blueprint of what they believe a perfect life should be. When you really think about this, it is their model of the world that consistently makes them come up short. You need to compare yourself to where you have been and not where you think you should be.

You will start to feel fulfilled when you start comparing yourself to where you have been. You will be experiencing the life that you want. You deserve to feel fulfilled in life and to feel good about yourself.

Growing up, I had the privilege of having relatives who lived out in the country on farms, who did things like drive trucks for a living. In spending time with this family, I also met many of their friends who had far different expectations for their lives than the sort of people you meet in big cities. The people I met from the country typically had very low expectations for themselves and their lives. They were mostly concerned about things like putting food on the table and having a family. They did not believe they would ever be rich, or their children should be attending important schools. This simply was not part of their blueprint.

These were also some of the happiest people I ever met. The fact their expectations were so low meant there was very little to disappoint them. Things we might take for granted (like new tires on a car, for instance) were things that gave these people a great deal of satisfaction.

Conversely, I also grew up with people who had extremely high expectations for themselves. These were the people who went to the private high school I attended. Some of them were continually disappointed in themselves and the world around them, and they often turned to drugs in order to feel better about themselves and their lives. These kids were very intelligent and extremely capable. Many of them ended up going to the very best colleges and today are living in big cities, doing things like working for investment banks. They are also still very unhappy.

One of the kids I went to school with was Bill – the baseball player I mentioned at the beginning of this article. He was from a small town background of lower expectations, like my relatives, or even Britney Spears, who grew up in rural Louisiana. This young man was thrust into a high-expectations environment of a private school, where I am sure he learned to compare himself to numerous ideals:

-It is important to have parents who are rich.
-It is important to drive a nice car.
-It is important to get into the best college.
-It is important to get the best and highest paying job possible.
-It is important to score in the top 10 percent on your SATs.
-It is important to be the best athlete.
-It is important to impress others.

He was a happy kid when I first met him. After college, his first day of work in an “official job” was going to be for his wife’s father. That night, he went to sleep with his wife just like any other night. At least, that’s how it appeared to his wife. In the morning, she woke up and did not see him anywhere. A short time later she checked the basement and found him hanging by his neck from a noose. He had committed suicide.

Who knows what was going on inside his mind or why he ended up killing himself? No one around him ever expected anything like this would ever happen. When I think about this, I bet the young man simply did not measure up to his ideals, or whatever he thought he should be doing with his career. There must have been something in his mind that made him feel like he did not belong on this earth and that he wanted to escape.

You have already achieved so much, and you will continue to achieve great things in your life, step by step. Let yourself be carried forward by the knowledge you have improved and are continually improving. Use your past as a yardstick, and never use an ideal. You are capable of greatness. Just be patient and let your life unfold – and enjoy the process.

Life Supports What Supports Life

What You Will Learn It is of prime importance to be supportive of others around us. You need to nurture and support the things that nurture and support you. Similarly you need to adopt a proactive approach and use your learning to constantly look for new ways of revenue generation and support the growth of your company.

A few months ago I was invited with my wife to a couple’s very nice home. I am sure the home cost at least a few million dollars, and I remember speaking with the owner of the home as we listened to some music. The man was telling me that he was in the legal industry, and there was a possibility he was about to lose his job. He told me that his income was down substantially, and that he was fairly frightened about the future. I was not sure exactly what to say because it did not seem like there was a lot of good news for him to look forward to. Moreover, he had just recently purchased this home, and I am sure that the massive downturn in the financial industry and the expense of the new home was not something he was all that excited about. So I decided to change the subject.

Sitting in his driveway was a beautiful Bentleythat did not appear to be more than a couple of years old. I told him I thought it was a beautiful car. We spent the next several minutes discussing the car, and he told me how much he enjoyed driving it.  He seemed very happy talking about this, and I was glad to have changed the course of our conversation to something more uplifting. Then the man said something I could not believe:

“I really enjoy the car, but a friend of mine at work really likes it, and he has been really good to me. I actually gave it to him a couple of days ago. He is going to pick it up in a couple of days.”

“You mean you just gave him the car?” I asked.

“Yes, he’s a really nice guy and has treated me very well. He’s very supportive and we’re great friends.”

“You did not charge him for it?”

“No, of course not.”

I am not someone who is in the market for expensive and exotic cars; however, I am assuming that this car must have been worth at least $100,000 or so. This was an incredibly generous gift–especially for someone who did not have a lot of income coming in, who might also be quite close to losing his job.

What was even more strange to me is that this was the second gift exchange involving a very expensive car that I had seen occur in the past several months between people at work. My previous assistant showed up at my house one day in a brand new BMW that must have cost at least $45,000. While her wages were not meager, this still seemed unusual to me. She was not married and she lived with her boyfriend, who worked for a relatively small company that made software. I imagined the company probably was not doing all that well because it made software for the recruiting industry, which was not doing well at the time. So many companies were letting people go, and so few were recruiting.

“That’s a great car,” I told her.

“Thanks. My boss’s wife gave it to me. It’s brand new. She thought I would like it more than she did, so she bought another car.”

“You mean she just signed over an expensive BMW to you?”

“Yes. Isn’t that the nicest thing you’ve ever heard?”

Within a few months of each other, I had encountered two separate instances of people giving away expensive cars–with no strings attached. The givers of these cars, to my knowledge, were not experiencing overwhelming abundance; however, this sort of giving away of things of huge significance is something I have seen over and over again. It is not just confined to cars. People support financially, and otherwise, people they perceive and believe are helping and supporting them. In both of these particular instances, these gifts were between people in a work situation. A financial trader gave a car to someone that he believed had helped him tremendously at work. The wife of the owner of a company had given a car to a valuable employee.

I once sold a house to a relative for much less money than the offers I had received–because I believed that the relative had been supportive of me. I gave the house to him at a very special price with no strings attached. We do things like this for people who are close to us and who support us. The biggest example is the fact that we give so selflessly to our children with no expectation whatsoever of a reward. Our children are tasked with carrying on our DNA to the next generation, giving us emotional support in our old age, and more. This kind of support is invaluable.

Life supports what supports life. In each of these instances of giving away cars, what was happening is that people were supporting those around them with extravagant gifts because these were people who supported them–even if it was in a remote way. It is no different than watering a seed of something that may feed us later. Smart people nurture those things and the people around them that help them grow. When you develop this mentality of nurturing the people and things around you that help you grow, you are much like the farmer, who feeds his chickens, and waters and fertilizes his crop. You are taking care of the things around you that give you life.

I was witnessing these “car giveaways” among people who are very wealthy. I am sure that their attitude has always been to give things away and nurture those around them in any way that they can. You need to be doing the same thing with the people around you and the things that help you grow. If you go out to the street and you speak with the most impoverished people, they will almost invariably be the people who are the most selfish, who do not know how to give or contribute to the people around them–people that could help them thrive. Most of them are isolated from their families and friends. They are isolated from the economy because they cannot work consistently to provide value to businesses and organizations. They do not support the growth of others and, consequently, the world does not support them.

In order for you to succeed in your career, no matter what you are doing, you must be in some sense or form supporting and furthering life. The more you support others, the better you will do. The world around us is built to support and encourage life. Do not hold back life; instead, nurture and support the things that nurture and support you.

The entire world around you is based on life pushing forward. A seed is planted and grows into a plant, which sprouts more seeds. People are born; they live and die, and then new people are born. This is a continual process of life, and it is all around us. The people who provide the most value in the world are the ones who are the most supported and have the most money. The reason for this is due to the fact that they are supporting, in some sense, the lives of others. When you give to the world, the world gives back to you. The more you give, the more you generally will receive. Resources are directed towards what is giving others life and sustenance.

What does this mean for you and your career?

When you are working in your job, you should always be giving more than you are taking. You need to direct your work towards things that are providing your employer value–not just towards things that provide you with something of value. I had a very interesting experience yesterday with one of our company’s employees. For weeks I have been telling this particular employee that he needs to move beyond simply mechanically doing tasks to being proactive, using the information learned from doing various tasks to create value and find new ways to create revenue. One of the tasks our company does is send out job alerts to our former job wire subscribers, notifying people of market activity taking place after they have canceled their memberships. Our hope, of course, is that the people will come back as subscribers to the service. Yesterday, I had a meeting with this programmer about a separate task, and he had numerous suggestions as to how we could make these job alert emails more effective in converting former subscribers into current subscribers. This is an example of value creation. I would not have seen this value without his insights. Instead of mechanically doing a job, this fellow moved into the role of someone who creates value. By creating value, he is supporting the growth of the company and, in a sense, “creating life” because his actions will result in more revenue for our companies, which keeps people employed.

Everyone needs to constantly be spawning value and life around them. The more value you create and the more you are a life giver, the more likely you will be to survive.

Look to create value, wherever you are. When you provide value and growth for a company, you will never lose your job. An employer would have to be insane to let you go. But the value you provide must lead to growth. Growth is the ability to free up cash, create cash, improve a corporate reputation and more. When you create growth, the natural force of “life supporting life” will take over. This will bring you the success you seek.

In every company there are generally groups of people whose focus is on “being down” about the company or their jobs. These people spread negative rumors and thrive on bad news. While this sort of attitude has a place I suppose, it is generally not something that is supporting life and growth. If you spend your time focusing on negative issues, you are doing the opposite of supporting life; you are destroying life. Hence, when companies want to let people go for financial reasons or otherwise, the first people they generally look to dismiss are these “negative souls”.

In order for you to grow, you must support others. You can do this emotionally, through your work, through money, or in other ways. However you accomplish this, know that supporting the growth of others will drive you forward in your career and life. The more you nurture others and the more you support life, the more life will support you.

Use the Power of Contrasts to Drive Yourself Forward

What You Will Learn Compare yourself with people much superior to you and never with average people. Come out from within your comfort zone and face the real world. If you do not use the power of contrasts, you will never become the person you are capable of becoming.

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.

Richard P. Feynman, Noble-Prize Winning Physicist

When my father was growing up, his father used to spend occasional Sunday afternoons driving him through expensive neighborhoods around Detroit and showing him the expensive houses in these neighborhoods.  My grandfather was a newspaper man and never made a lot of money.  When I was growing up, my father also didn’t make a lot of money and did the same thing with me.  It was often uncomfortable cruising three miles an hour down these streets.  A lot of the reason I was uncomfortable with this had to do with the fact that I knew a lot of the kids living in these houses.  Although It did not happen often, when I would spot one of these kids, I would invariably slump down in my seat so I would not be seen.

“Wow, look at that!” my father might exclaim while looking at a particularly large home.

I can remember being driven down these streets at slow speeds probably at least once a month for several years while I was growing up.  I never really understood the purpose of this exercise because it seemed as if the whole point of it was to feel envious about what someone else had and we did not.  It was always mildly depressing returning to an apartment or wherever we might go after these drives.  There was never any hint or hope that we would live like this.  It was just a drive down prosperity lane to look at a bunch of nice homes that our family would never, ever be able to afford.

At the same time that I was being paraded by the homes of the rich, I was always being told to work hard in school because this was something that was open to all.  The competition to get into Ivy League Schools, for example, was just as competitive as it was for the rich as it was for the poor.  At least this is what I was taught growing up.  I learned later on that for various Ivy League schools, a lot of what happens has to do with connections and wealth, as well.  But in some respects, what my father had taught me about the democracy of most learning institutions was true.  This emphasis on education was almost to say:

“People in our family have never known how to compete with the rich in making money, but we can be equals academically.”

One of the saddest moments of my father’s life, I think, was when I did not get into Harvard College.  There were a lot of schools I was interested and people from that school had never been too nice to me anyway so I was not that concerned with it.  In fact, my first choice college was actually University of Hawaii and I was talked out of that by a legion of concerned school officials in the private high school I was attending. I had thought that applying to the honors program at Hawaii would make some sort of different but no one seemed to care.  I was really looking forward to going to Hawaii and because of my dad’s work with Harvard I actually was given the treat of learning weeks before Harvard decisions went out that I would not be admitted.  My father had been involved in admissions work for Harvard and had seen the sons of other rich and influential men he knew get in with lower test scores than I had.  He must have realized that this idea of democracy did not completely hold true as he had preached.  My father was someone who had spent a lot of time in the military.  He got up at 6:00 a.m. each day and came home from work at exactly the same time, as well.  The day after I did not get into this school, I remember coming home from lunch and finding him sleeping at 12:00 in the afternoon.  I knew he had been so depressed at work that he had actually come home from work to take a nap.  The idea that there was not perfect democracy, that wealth and influence mattered and more, must have really shook him to the bone.

One of the easiest things for each of us to do is to believe that things are different than they in fact are.  We all have a model of the world and want to look at things in a certain way. In many respects, this is a protection for us against the pain we will feel if we need to change and step outside the box of comfort we are currently standing in.  One of the largest and most persistent hallucinations that we all experience is the hallucinations we create about ourselves and the lives we are living.

• We believe that our careers are different than they are.
• We believe we are more important than we are.
• We believe we are contributing more than we are.
• We believe that our careers are safer than they are.
• We believe we may achieve something that we never will achieve.
• We believe that we have made the right decisions.

Life, for many of us, becomes an unconscious process where we exist almost as if we are on “autopilot” and end up going through the motions each day while making very few changes in our own lives. In fact, we do everything we can to insulate ourselves against any form of change and protect our own beliefs about the way things are.  This allows us to perceive the world in the way we choose without any interruption of our fantasy of the way things are.

What I am talking about is a “comfort zone” that many people spend their lives in that never allows them to realize what lies outside of themselves.  People need to know what they can, in fact, end up doing if they allow themselves to step through this comfort zone to an area which is uncomfortable.  People also need to show themselves what reality in fact is.

One of the best ways of experiencing reality is when you are looking at homes and cars.  A couple of years ago, I was looking at new cars in Pasadena, California.  I initially went to the dealership to look at Audis.  You can buy a nice Audi for around $40,000.  However, the particular dealership I was in also sold Porsches, Bentleys, Jaguars and Rolls Royces.  When I looked at the Audis, initially I was amazed.  I had not purchased a car in years and could not believe how advanced the cars were.  There was satellite navigation and all sorts of other things that really made the cars special.

After looking at Audis, I went over to the Bentley and Rolls Royce dealership.  I started looking at the Bentleys and was very impressed with them. I noticed, however, that they seemed to be very similar to the Audis.  I test drove a Bentley and could not believe how well the car drove.

“It is actually an Audi all dressed up,” the salesman explained to me about the Bentley.  Since Bentley and Volkswagen were the same companies, all that Bentley had, in fact, done was take an Audi and redo the engine and interior to create a different car (and charge 5x as much).  This was fascinating to me.  I then looked at the Rolls Royces.  Compared to the Audi and Bentley, the Rolls Royce was much nicer.  In fact, after test driving the Rolls Royce, the Audi and Bentley seemed like junk.  Suddenly, I noticed how much plastic was used in the Audi and Bentley.  I noticed where there wood was and was not used on the two cars.  I admired how quiet the Rolls Royce was compared to the Bentley and more.

The idea I am trying to make to you is that the contrasts between the cars made me realize that what I wanted to perceive (a $40,000 Audi as “the ultimate car”) was, in fact, not at all true.  Instead, the $40,000 Audi was actually a piece of crap because there was something far, far different out there.  When you see the contrasts between what you want to perceive (the Audi as the ultimate car) and what in fact is (the Rolls Royce is much better), then you start to realize that you are fooling yourself when you perceive one thing.

The crazy thing about living in Los Angeles is that there are so many “open houses” every Sunday.  When you drive down the street in virtually every neighborhood, there are open houses.  You can just as easily go to an open house for a $500,000 house as you can go to an open house for a $20,000,000 house on a Sunday afternoon.  They will open up a $20,000,000 house to the public no matter where it might be, and you can just walk right into it and look around.  This is an incredible exercise in contrast, as well. Seeing what could be is an exercise that can also show us what is possible.

In order for you to really be the person you are capable of, you need to give yourself contrasts between what you are and what you can become.  Just as there are contrasts that exist between various materialistic things (cars, houses, watches, etc.), so too exist vast differences between people and their careers.  The only way you can understand these differences is to allow yourself to become aware of contrasts out in the world and start seeking out these contrasts.  If you are interested in really reaching your full potential and understanding what you are capable of, you need to seek out people who are working in the careers and living the lives that you want to live.

Several years ago I was making the transition from running a fairly traditional recruiting company to running a recruiting company that also existed on the Internet. Instead of simply saying something like “I need Google!” and advertising online, I started going to all sorts of technology conferences. I will never forget going to the first technology conference and being absolutely amazed and blown away by what was possible and what other people were doing on the Internet.  I was being introduced to an entirely new world in terms of the way things worked.  This contrast helped drive me forward and motivated me to incredible action.

How do you do the same thing with your career?

One of the most useful things you possibly can do is to seek out and research other people who are doing something similar to you in different companies.  Do not simply seek out people who are average.  Seek out people who are the best in the world at whatever you are doing and try and spend time with them or read about them.  When you investigate the histories of most great business people, current and former American Presidents, and others, you will usually find that they have studied in depth the biographies of countless other successful people in their field.  In the case of American Presidents, they often studied these biographies while they were in college, in their first jobs as politicians, and all along as they rose way up the chain to finally become President.

Great people, in any field, have generally studied their predecessors at great length to learn what made them successful.  They never allowed themselves to feel content with who they were or what they had achieved and continued to fill their minds with images and stories of people who had achieved great things.

Where do you want to go?  What do you want to happen with your career?  The most wonderful thing to understand is that the roadmap to get you where you want to go already exists. It is in the biographies of other successful people who have risen to the heights you too want to go.  The biography may not be written, and it may be something you can learn about simply by asking, but it is something that you need to know about and need to learn about.  You should be consistently filling your mind with the images and stories of people who have managed to do incredible things with their careers and lives because this is going to motivate you to make the impact you are capable of making.  If you do not use the power of contrasts you will never become the person you are capable of being and have the career you could otherwise have.

How You Deal With Problems Will Determine Quality of Your Life

What You Will Learn The more you delay dealing with problems the more they build up. Do not see problems as problems – see them as ‘challenges’, ‘lessons’, or ‘opportunities’. Whatever does not kill you can make you stronger. The people who are best at solving problems in their jobs typically have the longest term success.

One of the things I have learned over the years is anyone can be up when things are going well.  However, the real challenge is when things are not going well.  All businesses and all relationships go through problems.  There is no such thing as an absence of problems.  How you deal with problems will determine the quality of your life more than any other single thing.  Far too few people know how to effectively deal with problems, and they end up having their lives sidetracked by these problems.  The more you delay dealing with problems the more they build up.  The more problems are allowed to build up the more difficult your life ends up becoming.

Last night my wife and I drove by a furniture store that’s going out of business.  It was a beautiful furniture store and used to be the nicest one in Pasadena, where our company’s main office is.  I went inside and saw markdowns so extreme I could hardly believe my eyes.  Various pieces of furniture were marked down 90%. This was extremely surprising, but even more surprising was the sale had been going on for several weeks and the store still had an incredible amount of inventory. I attribute this to the fact that Pasadena’s economy is so bad no one can be persuaded to spend money even when things are being given away for pennies on the dollar. 

A year ago I remember going into this same furniture store dressed in jeans and a tee shirt and couldn’t  get anyone to help me.  The people in the store were so “snooty” when someone finally asked to assist me, I felt self-conscious because I knew everything in the store was so expensive. 

“It’s like the end of the world in here, eh?” I said to one of the sales people who was following me around trying to sell me anything and everything. “Have you ever seen anything like this economy?” I asked her.  She looked like she could be in her late 50s.

“Never,” she said.  “This is the worst I have ever seen.  People just need to stop spending and get caught up.  Then everything will be fine.”

What she said was an excellent approach to problems.  For example, now that people are maxed out in their credit cards and are losing their homes and jobs, they finally have the opportunity to get caught up on their bills and improve their credit ratings.  Despite a horrible economy and so many problems, there is a silver lining to what is going on in the economy today.  I liked hearing that.  There is something helpful and beneficial about every single problem we have. It is how we deal with problems that makes the difference.

Instead of looking at problems in a negative way we can call them “challenges” or “lessons” or “opportunities.”  There is no sense calling a problem a problem.  We need to look for the silver lining in every problem because it is the silver lining that will allow us to grow.  Whatever does not kill you can make you stronger.  The woman in the furniture store asked herself , “What can we learn from these dire economic conditions?” and she found a solution.  This is a way of thinking that really makes a difference.  She asked herself what kind of opportunity this economy held for people.  The opportunity is that people can clean up their accounts and balances.

How you manage the problems in your career will also determine your success and failure.  The people who are best at solving problems in their jobs typically have the longest term success.  Those who keep avoiding problems typically have the least.

In my years in business, I have run numerous companies and some of them have been runaway successes at various points in time, while others have experienced turmoil when hit with forces beyond their control.  One of the most interesting companies I was ever involved in was a student loan company that went from zero dollars to millions of dollars in monthly revenue almost overnight.  When a business is a runaway success and the people working for the company are traditionally doing very well financially, the company has lots of extra money to spend.  The company advertises all over the country and it is creating lots and lots of jobs.  When a company is a major success like this, everyone wants to work for the company and all sorts of people appear on the scene ready to give the company whatever sort of assistance it needs. People are referring their friends and relatives to work for the company and it becomes ‘the’ place to work.

The biggest change I noticed when the student loan company took off was the fabric of the company began to change.  People began showing up at the company who were different in many ways than most of our long-time employees.  They were more polished and sharper.  They were more worldly. They came from large, well-known companies and had worked for numerous well-known companies before.  In contrast, most of our staff had been with us for years before the student loan company even started.

Last night I was having dinner in Los Angeles in a club that’s been open since the early 1900s.  During the dinner a man came up and started talking to us about the club.  He was an old man and today actually lives at the club and takes all of his meals there.  He started talking to me about a different time in the club and how the managers who worked there used to stay for at least 30 years.  Now, he told me, most managers are lucky to stay at least five years.  He told me things have changed all over and people now will leave at the drop of the hat.  He was, of course, speaking about things like loyalty to an employer. These days people will leave a company at the first sign of a problem. He implied today people do not know how to deal with problems in their jobs.

What ended up happening in my student loan business was the criteria to issue loans became increasingly strict and, as they did, more and more people began to leave because the job became more difficult.  Incredibly, after several months the people who remained at the company were the people who’d been there when it started.  The people who had left went looking for another easy job.  I am not angry about this and I wish all of these people the best. Many were quite talented. However, there is something wrong with this in many respects because this sort of attitude is something that holds back development.  This sort of attitude can hold back your development, too.

One of the largest businesses I run is a commission-based business.  Six months ago most of the people working in this business were all doing very well.  What has happened over the past several months has been amazing.  The market in this commission-based business has become much more difficult than it used to be.  Now, what used to be a fairly easy job has become much more difficult.  When things were going very well, many people were taking certain shortcuts and not doing things the hard way.  In today’s market, however, you need to work hard.  People need to put in extra hours and go all out.  They need to be available all the time.  They need to make extra calls and meet with extra people.  This is just the way things are.

Incredibly, the people in this commission-based business who were performing so well a year previously have continued to do so, even in a poor economic climate.  They are literally making as much money and working the same amount as they were a year ago.  The people who were performing the worst a year ago are also working the same amount.  They are performing badly, if not worse.

What is going on?  Why do the best stay at the same level and the worst sink to new lows?  The same thing is happening with the average workers.  They, too, are sinking to new lows.  This, in my opinion, has a lot to do with how different people choose to deal with problems, and the way they’ve been dealing with problems their entire career. The more problems you face with discipline the stronger person you will be in the long run.