The Peter Principal and Being Ready for More Responsibility

The most important thing you can do in your work and in your career is to do what you know. It is fine to try new things.  However, when you try new things, you need to be very careful that you remain focused on the things that you know and understand.  If you venture outside of what you understand, you are likely to get into massive trouble and this trouble can come quickly. People who do well in their positions are typically rewarded with more responsibility and a better position.  Eventually, however, this position will exceed a person’s level [Read more]

Flow, Your Ego and Your Career

Aristotle believed that more than anything, we seek to be happy.  There are some individuals who do their work and continually find happiness in this work, and for whom work takes on a meaning that transcends what most of us experience in work.  These people feel completely involved in the work they are doing and are completely focused.  They do not experience emotional turmoil when they are doing their work. In Mihhaly Czikszentmihalyi’s book “Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience” (1990), he described a state of “flow” where people involved in an activity “forget themselves, the time, their problems.” Flow [Read more]

How to Count in Your Career and Life

Most people do not count in the world. In fact, almost all people in the world do not count. They are born, they grow and they die. Their lives are quickly forgotten after they die and the world is no different for them even having been there. Have you ever been to a cemetery? When you walk around the cemetery you will see numerous headstones and most of these people did not count. They may have loved others and been loved; however, they did not really matter to the world. These [Read more]

Consistency and Commitment Beat Brilliance and Talent

When I was growing up in Detroit, I went to school with kids whose parents were the Chief Executive Officers of major auto companies and were in other high level roles. Sometimes I would turn on the television and see the same men I’d eaten dinner with at a friend’s house on the nightly news giving a press conference in Washington, or speaking about an issue of national importance. Another one of my friend’s father was the CEO of a major national bank and, by the time I was 13 or 14, I was smart enough to realize I could learn a lot from these men. I figured they must all be enormously gifted intellectually and have other skills which I could learn. In my spare time I read books such as Iacocca, about Lee Iacocca, and when the Publisher’s Clearing House mail came to my mother’s house I ordered Forbes, Business Week and a ton of other business magazines so I could impress these nationally important men and talk to them about their careers and [Read more]

You Need to Sell, Sell, Sell

A strange misconception among many people, especially professionals, is that there is something wrong with selling. When I talk about selling, I am referring to any number of sales activities: -Selling yourself in an interview -Selling yourself in a cover letter to an employer -Selling yourself to a client -Selling yourself to any other person -Packaging yourself in a ”sellable” way In every single interaction we have with others, we are selling. The more you sell, the better you will do in [Read more]

Treating Your Career Like A Small Business

No one seems to take the time to consider that their careers are businesses. Your career is no different than any small business. You have a product (you) that you are selling to your audience (your employer). You need to run your career exactly like a business person runs a business. There is no greater skill to have with your career than to run it like a business. As a business, your goal is survival and to sell your product for as much money as possible. So too it is with your career.

Be a good business person and your career may go far, ignore the business realities and you are likely to run into trouble. I have been a recruiter for several years and have [Read more]

Your Life Is Controlled by Your Decisions and Your Commitment to Them

Over 20 years ago, I was at a relative’s house in the country, and he made a crazy statement (which he appeared to believe) that all Japanese were Jewish, and that was why they were in the process of controlling all the car manufacturing in the world just like they were controlling the entertainment and banking industries. My relative was a truck driver in his 50s, and he made this statement as if what he was saying had a certain level of profoundness to it. Under normal circumstances, when not involved in “intellectual” debate, he was a very nice man and good father. The statement was offensive [Read more]

Communicate With Relevance and Connect With Your Audience

One of the biggest secrets in marketing is the more relevant your communication, the more willing people are to respond. You can read and study everything you want about marketing, but if you are not communicating with relevance to your audience, nothing else really matters. When you apply for a job, or when you work for someone, you need to make your communication as relevant as possible. I’d like to tell you a quick story about someone I hired four years ago who communicated to me with relevance. One day, I received a phone call from a man in Europe, telling me he intended to move to the United States for work. He told me he’d researched our organization and was impressed. He told me what areas of the organization needed work. He communicated in ways that were relevant to me and despite the fact I didn’t know this person, I opened up and began speaking about our company. He then told me if I would like to speak further with him, I was welcome to fly him to the United States for more discussions. When I took him up on his offer, he discussed with me what he felt the organization needed, and he continued to communicate with relevance. I ended up having this person come to work in the U.S. I had him live in my house for six weeks of training, and even paid all sorts of immigration and other expenses to bring this person over. He now manages one of my most important companies. Since he started with the company, his salary has doubled. This person never sent me a resumé. This person never applied in response to an advertisement. This person contacted me, the CEO of the company, by calling and doing everything he could to make a connection. This person never would have been hired had he simply sent a résumé or gone a more traditional route. He might not even have been hired had he volunteered to fly himself over. Making our organization pay for the flight got the company invested, and certainly made me pay attention. This person probably never would have been hired had he not researched exactly what our [Read more]

The Importance of Disconnecting from Your Work

Some of the happiest, most well adjusted, and most effective people I know are also people who have a profound ability to disconnect from their work. They can disconnect rapidly and put themselves in another state of mind which does not involve work. People who come to mind include Richard Branson, who set records in balloons, captains of industry who leisurely golf their days away, men in bars who slap each others’ backs while drinking martinis and making deals, or CEO‘s of companies in their early 60s who run marathons. One of the most important things you can do for yourself is learn to disconnect from your work. Many people never do this, or don’t know how. You see these people walking around with telephones in their ears wherever they go, getting up from dinner to talk on the phone, screwing around with their Blackberries at any given moment, and, in general, working every second of the day. I have a secret for you: The most important and successful people never behave like this. The most important people simply do not work when they are not working. If you are working all the time, you are not being nearly as productive [Read more]

Remain Calm

For a portion of one summer when I was younger, I had a valet job at the Grosse Pointe Yacht Club outside of Detroit, Michigan. I worked during the lunch hour and spent most of my time sitting in a small air conditioned shed in a corner of the parking lot waiting for cars to pull up. When a car would pull up, I would fling open the door to the shed and run over to the car, hand the person a ticket, and park the car. One day, I was sitting in my little shed and [Read more]

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