The Most Important Thing You Can Have Is Faith
February 20, 2010
Several years ago I was practicing law, and over Christmas I went home to Michigan from Los Angeles for a one week vacation. At the time, I was also a law professor and I had brought a stack of papers to grade with me. For several days I read paper after paper. After about a day, it occurred to me I was unhappy with my life. I was unhappy with my job. I did not like where my life was headed and what my career was like. At the time I was making a very good living and doing everything I thought I should be doing. But I was not happy.
For the next few nights I had a lot of difficulty sleeping. Then I made a decision. What was making me unhappy was not just my job but the practice of law. I did not want to be an attorney anymore. I simply did not want to do this.
I had gotten married just a few months before. I had also bought a house around the same time with a pretty decent-sized mortgage. By all appearances, my life was on the right track for someone in his late 20s. I had done everything I thought was right up until that point in my life. But my job did not make me happy. I did not like the constant confrontation. I did not like where I worked at the time. I did not feel my talents were being utilized as much as they could be. I knew this was simply something I did not want to do any longer.
I went back to work on January 3rd and gave my two weeks notice. I knew this was not what I wanted and I simply needed to have faith that everything would work out. I had no savings to speak of and my wife was not earning very much money. I needed to trust that everything would work out – although at the time I had no idea what was going to happen. I knew deep down, however, that if I was happy I would do much better in my life than if I wasn’t.
Your ultimate resource in your job search and in your life is faith. Faith is the most important thing in the world. Faith is what enables you to move forward and find a new job, to get into a new relationship, to move to a new city, to start a new life, and to take chances. Similarly, a lack of faith causes people to feel trapped in bad relationships and never leave them, work in jobs they hate, and stay in circumstances which do not make them happy. The most important and forward-looking thing you can do is have faith.
Similarly, the worst thing you can do is spend time around people who shake the faith you have in yourself. When we are driving, we have faith the cars across the median will not cross over and hit us. We have faith when we are walking down the street we will not get shot. We have faith when we get home at night, our spouse will still be there. We have faith our children will always love us. When you get on an airplane, you generally have faith the plane will take off and land safely. You should. Statistically, you are 10 times more likely to get hit by lightning than die in an airplane crash. Nevertheless, after September 11 numerous people became afraid of flying. The goal of the terrorists was to shake our faith in our daily lives and, for many, it worked. Is there anyone around you who shakes your faith?
Faith gives people the will to live even when it looks like there is no reason to go on. I remember when I was a young boy my stepfather had to undergo a surgery that lasted almost 36 hours to remove all sorts of cancer from his body. The surgeons said before they took him there was a 99 percent chance he would die in surgery. Before he went into surgery, he told my mother he would be fine and not to worry. When he came out of surgery, the surgeons said the only thing that kept him alive was his faith and without it he never would have survived. I have heard others tell stories about faith like this before. Faith is something that is real and makes a giant difference in peoples lives. It can change your life, too.
Faith is the key that opens the doors of possibility. If you had faith that you could do anything, what would you do? Would you walk right up and talk to your dream mate? Would you embark on a new career? What would you do if you knew you could not fail? If you knew you could not fail, you could do anything in the world. I once saw the most ridiculous thing and it stuck with me. For years I used to go by a certain man’s house in Detroit to seal his asphalt. The man was a printer who did the same job day after day, and he did not seem particularly enthusiastic about it. After six or so years of working for him, I went by his doorway and saw him wearing a Hawaiian shirt and sunglasses – not the sort of blue-collar outfit he usually wore.
“What are you doing?” I asked him.
“I sold my printing business, sold my house, and bought a deli in the Bahamas. I’m leaving tomorrow,” he told me.
Now that’s faith – taking control of your life, following your heart, and doing what you want to do.
It is far better to make mistakes and fail than it is to not try something. You are almost always better off taking steps in the direction of the life you want than not taking any steps at all. You will always be better off from having learned lessons and exercised your faith.
The most important characteristic of any leader is faith, specifically faith that they can bring the people they are leading the result they are seeking. The greatest business minds have mastered the art of having faith. For example, when Bill Gates was at Harvard, he decided he no longer wanted to go to school. He was more interested in computers. Having faith and nothing more, he dropped out of school, found someone who had invented a computer but had no operating system for it, and purchased the rights to the DOS program. He knew making a computer work would create profound results, and he had faith in the future. He ended up becoming one of the richest men in the world and changing the world through his contributions.
When Sam Walton opened his first Wal-Mart, it was a disaster. One of the first days he was open, he had a watermelon sale and stacked hundreds of watermelons in front of the store. It was so hot, however, that all of the watermelons were exploding, and when people pulled up to the store it looked like there had been a mass murder. Nonetheless, Walton had faith in his idea and pursued it.
It is not just businesses which require faith, however. It is you. You need to have faith in who you can become. You need to have faith that you will get the job you want and live the life you want. You need to have faith in your future. There is something remarkable about the power of faith: the power of faith changes everything. Faith is not logical. You cannot live your life with logic alone. Faith is what drives people to do things when they have no idea what the end result will be. When you have faith you act because you know the universe will take care of you. You do not act because you are certain of the result.
There are lots of people who live their lives certain of the results they will achieve. Not much ever happens with these sorts of people. They never even come close to reaching their full potential. You can live your life with certainty but, if you do, you will never know how fulfilled you can possibly be and how much you can achieve.
The present is not the future. Faith is what gives us a future that is different from the present we have today. Step into the future and decide what you want from it. Once you have decided what you want from the future, it is important you have faith and set about going after your dreams. You need to put yourself on the line. You need to see a better tomorrow.
After quitting my job, I still did not know what I was going to do. My law firm told me to stick around for three months and look for another job because they did not think it sounded rational for me to just leave. So this is what I did. I went out and interviewed with other law firms, but I did not take any jobs because I was not interested in practicing law. I spoke with recruiters while I was looking for a job, and the more I spoke with them, the more their jobs looked interesting to me. What ended up happening, of course, was that I chose to start recruiting.
I remember about three months after I began recruiting a few of my wife’s friends were at the house. At the time, my wife had started to think I was insane. I had left a job paying over $150,000 a year and was now running a recruiting business out of our family room. The problem was the business was not doing all that well. In fact, I had scarcely gotten any candidates interviews and had been at it for three months. In addition, I had hardly any money left. I had taken out a home equity loan during my final weeks of practicing law and this money was almost gone. I had long ago maxed out my credit cards. My wife’s family used to call her and she would walk out to the front lawn to talk on the phone. We had only been married a few months at that point, and I think she thought she must have made a real mistake. In all fairness, she had signed up to be married to a lawyer, and that was not what was going on at the moment.
In a manner that implied some concern, a couple of my wife’s friends walked up to my desk and asked me how I was doing. I started telling them about how I had recently gotten a new candidate and how wonderful the candidate was. I told them I was in the middle of putting together a long letter about the candidate and the more I learned about the candidate, the more impressed I was. The funniest thing happened after I told them about the candidate. I was sitting there with probably 10 Diet Coke cans spread across my desk and piles of paper on the floor. I had not shaved in a couple of days, and I was very involved in the work I was doing. I remember I looked away for a second and, when I looked back, one of my wife’s friends was looking at the other friend with his finger pointed at his head moving it around in circles like I was crazy. I must have looked crazy. Everyone thought I was crazy for pursuing my dream like this. But I had faith.
The entire basis of Christianity, Islam, and most major religions of the world is faith. The greatest accomplishments in the world are achieved when people have faith. When you have faith in yourself and faith in an idea, anything at all is possible.
One of the most exciting places in the world is Disneyland. There is an institute there where employees can take classes and learn about the founding of the company. The story of the founding of Disneyland is one of the greatest stories of the power of faith there is. According to one account:
With Disneyland, Walt Disney envisioned a place where parents and children could go to enjoy themselves and see fantasy become real. Disappointed with the quality of amusement parks he visited with his children, Disney wanted his park to be clean, well-organized, and family-friendly. He first planned to build the park on a lot in Burbank, but he soon realized that he needed more space, so he bought an orange grove in Anaheim, California.
No one thought his idea would work. He was advised by other amusement park officers the park was doomed to failure. He could not convince financiers to invest in the park because his dreams offered “too little collateral.” Even his brother, who handled the studio’s finances, refused to spend company funds on the project.
In spite of the opposition, Disney refused to give up. He cashed in his life insurance policy and sold his family home to raise the $11 million required for the park’s construction. When more money was needed, he signed a contract with the American Broadcasting Company to air a weekly show in exchange for ABC’s investment in the park. He bet every penny on the success of the park and remained determined to make it a reality. Driven by his zeal, construction of the park began July 21, 1954, and it opened almost exactly a year later, on July 17, 1955.
It appeared the doomsayers had been right. Opening day was a disaster. Worse, there was national TV coverage. Tickets were counterfeited, resulting in 28,000 guests instead of the 11,000 invited. Rides broke under the stress of operation. Plumbers were on strike, so bathrooms and drinking fountains were not working. The asphalt roads, having been poured the night before, were still soft and trapped ladies’ high-heeled shoes.
Disney was not swayed by the park’s disastrous opening. He fixed the problems and continued to plan and build better attractions. He continuously found new ideas that kept people coming back for more. After 10 years, more than 50 million people had visited Disneyland, and today it remains a national attraction. More than that, as historian Larry Schweikart has observed, “Disneyland set the standard by which future parks were judged.” Against all odds, Walt Disney had built an amusement park that had become an amazing success. (Source: http://www.mackinac.org/article.aspx?ID=7164)
When you have faith in yourself the impossible can happen. Disney, for example, has left behind a huge and lasting legacy with Disneyland and his company. He put his faith and mind behind the power of an idea and stuck with it. Faith is what changes the world, and faith can change your life as well. The more you believe in something and the more faith you have in it, the more your mind will attract similar thoughts. These similar thoughts will build upon each other, get stronger and stronger, and get you closer to what you are seeking. This is the power of faith.
Your life and your future begin with thoughts. Faith is the most important thing you can have. When you have faith you can do absolutely anything. Regardless of what is going on in your career, or your life, you need to have faith.
After four months of recruiting, I still had not made a single placement. My credit cards were maxed out, my home equity loan was maxed out, and my wife was beyond freaked out. One Monday morning, I answered the phone and it was a law firm. They told me they were making an offer to one of my candidates. The next day the same thing happened and on Thursday and Friday it happened again.
In less than one week I had made four placements and the business was up and running. It was one of the most wonderful weeks of my life and really taught me the power of faith. When you believe in yourself and what you can do, anything is possible. You need to start believing in what you can do right now.
Plato’s Allegory of the Cave and Taking Your Thoughts and Life Out of the Shadows
March 19, 2009
What You Will Learn
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One of the largest challenges to finding a job, changing direction in our lives and becoming the people we are capable of becoming, is learning to see the world in different ways. Several years ago I was on a jet with one of the wealthiest men in the country. This guy had recently purchased a jet that I estimate was probably worth at least $25,000,000 at the time. He used the jet to hop around the United States for leisure purposes. He really did not do any business at that point anymore, and had been retired for a few years.
I had been brought along as a passenger with him at the last minute because we were both traveling to a wedding together. I want to be clear with you at the outset that this is not the sort of society I normally travel in. However, on this day I had the opportunity to spend a few hours with one of the richest men in the United States, and someone who by the time he was in his mid-40s was worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
What I am about to tell you right now is not about how this guy got so rich. What is most interesting about this particular guy is how he thought about the world and the opportunities in it. I spoke with him during the flight that day and then I spoke with him for several hours once we arrived at the wedding. This was some time ago and I was just starting out in some respects, and was very eager to learn the secrets of someone who was so successful. In fact, I thought this person had a tremendous amount to teach and the more I spoke with him and asked him questions, the more I realized that he had a way of looking at the world that was much different from mine.
A few weeks before traveling with this mogul, I had been to a party at one of his friend’s houses. His friend was an electrician. The two of them had gone to high school together and stayed best friends ever since then. His friend was uneducated and had not gone to college, but was someone who worked very hard. The house I visited for the party was the most unbelievable house I ever saw. They guy had done so well as an electrician that he had actually had gold laid between the cracks in marble on his floor. The home must have been at least 20,000 square feet. I had never seen anything like it. On the airplane that day the guy started telling me about how his friend had gotten so rich.
“When I made all this money I started getting disappointed that all my friends were uncomfortable around me. If I ordered a $300 bottle of wine at dinner, they would be worried they would have to contribute to the bill and then would not order entrees . It was very uncomfortable. People did not want to travel places with me because they were uncomfortable with me paying for their hotel rooms. So at some point I decided that my best friends needed to be ridiculously well off as well, and I made sure they were.”
“What did you do?” I asked him.
I was expecting him to tell me that he gave them the money they needed. Instead, he really opened my mind about how some of the wealthiest people out there think.
He explained that his friend who was an electrician had spent 20 years with a little ad in the Yellow Pages driving around doing electrical work in the blue collar area of Los Angeles he worked in. The guy had one helper and they worked Monday through Friday traveling around doing some work, giving estimates and so forth. When the electrician’s friend got really rich he sat him down because he realized they could not be friends if they were not both obnoxiously wealthy.
“How much do you make a day?” he asked him.
He explained how he billed out at $65 an hour, his helper at $32.50 and hour, and how the two of them spent about half an average day giving estimates and the other half actually doing work and making money. When the tycoon listened to this, he thought the solution to the problem sounded really easy.
“All you need to do is get 200+ guys like you billing $65 an hour, seven days a week and not have to give any estimates and you’re going to be fabulously wealthy!”
“That’s impossible!” the electrician said.
“Absolutely not. We’ll figure it out.”
A few days later tycoon took the electrician to Beverly Hills, got him a haircut and bought him a $1,500 suit. He paid someone $500 to put together a little write up about the electrician’s company on expensive stationary. Without being dishonest, he made sure the write up sounded like the electrician had one of the largest electrician outfits in the country. A week later the electrician was sitting in a conference room at a major cell phone company in his new suit, after having been coached by the tycoon.
“Our company is one of the most established electricians in California. We can service and do all the electrical maintenance on all of your cell phone towers in California, Arizona and Nevada …” was something along the lines of what the electrician told this company.
“You need to look the part to get the job!” I remember the tycoon telling me about why he bought his friend such a nice suit. “You need to go for the moon. Show up ready to do the most outrageous and highest paying thing imaginable, and deliver. That’s all you need to do.”
Within a few weeks of his friend sitting him down, the electrician had landed a contract to maintain and do all the electrical maintenance for all of the cell phone towers in several states for a major cell phone company. Within a year his company had gone from two people to several hundred, and the electrician was making more than a million dollars a month. Aside from some coaching from a tycoon, he did this all on his own. Now he travels around with his friend to vacations on private islands and so forth, and pays his own way.
Is this story incredible? Yes. But this is the sort of thing that happens all the time. There are countless people out there who live lives in obscurity because they cannot see the opportunities that are right there in front of them. How many electricians out there are taking advantage of the opportunities that are out there like this guy?
Are you taking advantage of the opportunities that are in front of you? I refer to ideas like what we see with the electrician as “people discovering the truth.” There is “truth” out there, and this truth is that you can be whatever you want to be and become. But you need to see the truth first. So many peoples’ lives are held back forever by their complete inability to see the truth. The truth is that most of the obstacles out there are in our own mind and and this is something that holds us back. Most of us are in the dark figuratively, and cannot see everything that we are capable of becoming.
In Plato’s, The Republic, he writes:
See human beings as though they were in an underground cave-like dwelling with its entrance, a long one, open to the light across the whole width of the cave. They are in it from childhood with their legs and necks in bonds so that they are fixed, seeing only in front of them, unable because of the bond to turn their head all the way around …
This passage is well known both for its simplicity and the profoundness of the message that it contains. This particular passage of The Republic is written as a dialogue between Socrates and his students.
Men trapped in a cave sit with their backs to a fire and are not allowed to turn around to see what is behind them. They are chained in the cave their entire lives and all they can see is a blank wall. The only thing they can see is the shadows of objects that are held up behind them. When objects are held up to the fire, they project shadows and the men identify these shadows. But the men can only identify objects by the shadows, and they cannot see the objects themselves. The shadows are as close as the people ever get to seeing reality.
Between the fire and the prisoners there is a walkway that is raised. Along this walkway various animals, plants, puppets and other things are moved. The prisoners see these shadows. There are also echoes that come off of the wall from the sounds on the walkway, so the prisoners are not even hearing reality. Socrates implies that it would be reasonable that the prisoners would see the shadows as real things and the echoes as real things as well. Hence, the prisoners would see the sounds and sights not just as “reflections” of reality, but as reality itself. The entire group of men and their society would become dependent upon the shadows on the wall. Thus, the men would praise the men who were able to guess the next shadow and these would be seen as among the most intelligent prisoners and as people who understood the true nature of the world.
Socrates then introduces another idea to the scene and the cave. For example, what if a prisoner is allowed to stand up and someone showed him the things which cast the shadows. The prisoner would not be able to recognize the objects because all he understands are shadows. He would believe the shadows on the wall to be more real that what he is actually seeing.
Socrates also asks about what would happen if a man were forced to look at the fire. He would likely turn away and look back at the shadows, because this is what he perceives to be real. If the man were dragged out of the cave, would the man would the man be angry for this being done to him? He would be at first pained by the Sun and confused by the objects around him. However, when he eventually came to understand what the world really is, he would be sorry for the men whose lives were spent in the shadows. When the man tries to describe the truth to the men in the cave, they resist learning the truth and think their friend is crazy for doing so.
In the cave allegory, the men who are in the cave represent most of the world. They do not see truth and only see representations of objects and things. They are the majority. The man who escapes the cave and sees the true nature of things is the minority.
What the cave represents to me is that there are few people out there who really see the true nature of things in the world. Instead, they are interpreting the world through reflections, shadows and echoes. For example, why did the electrician in the story I told you take out a little advertisement in the Yellow Pages and travel around from house to house giving estimates and doing small jobs throughout his career until advised otherwise by the Tycoon? Probably because this is how he believed the work should be done. Everyone else did things this way and he saw this and followed the crowd.
What does all of this mean to you, your job search and your life? I would submit to you that if you are like 99% of all people, you are operating by interpreting shadows and sounds. You are not seeing reality and what opportunities lie before you. You are not seeing what you are truly capable of, and what you can do. You do not realize the incredible number of opportunities there are.
When you are operating in the shadows you are not seeing the true nature of things. There are powerful and penetrating insights into the world and the nature of things that are available when you start to think very carefully and closely about things. These insights are what are separating the people who are going to really get the results they want, from those who will not.
I have heard numerous stories about people over the years who achieve incredible success in their careers and lives. In every case, these were people who stepped out of the shadows to see some new way of doing things. They opened their mind by challenging an assumption or something along those lines about the way they have done something in the past. The rewards for stepping out of the shadows are huge. When you see the truth out there, you can accomplish far more than when you are simply in the shadows.
The idea that Plato is attempting to make clear is that people who are trapped in a cave can only see the shadows of objects projected on the wall.
The Kick-Ass Marketing Secret of the Most Successful Job Applicants and Employees
March 13, 2009
What You Will Learn
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I have been going to conferences about one thing or another at least a couple times a year for the past several years. I have spent thousands of dollars attending marketing-related conferences. If I go to one more conference where someone talks about USPs (Unique Selling Propositions) I will probably get up and leave. I am going to teach you in the next few minutes what the best marketing minds in the world would charge you thousands of dollars to tell you about how to market yourself.
You are going to know how to position yourself for incredible success—in life and in your job—in the following way:
First, I am going to tell you how to get jobs that more highly qualified competitors do not get.
Second, how to get jobs you are not even qualified for.
Third, how to appear to be the most logical choice to be interviewed when you apply for a job.
Fourth, how to make every interviewer talk about you enthusiastically after interviewing.
What You Will Learn
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Sound impossible? It’s not. However, it requires that you know something about marketing and that you really understand one marketing concept: the USP, or whatever you want to call it. It is not hard to understand, but you do need to think through the idea a bit to really grasp it.
I have been getting up and leaving lots of conferences lately. I left one last weekend, and I left one a couple of months before that.
The reason I am leaving these conferences is because very few of the people at conferences have any idea what they are talking about. What these people typically do at the conferences is learn some marketing ideas about this or that, create a horrible course, and then try and get people to pay hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars for them. In addition, most of these people are not just clueless; they’re completely clueless. I usually end up leaving when I hear them pronounce some famous marketing person’s name incorrectly or call some marketing concept by a name it should not be called.
The reason people keep showing up to these marketing conferences and paying all these gurus money to listen to them bastardize marketing concepts they do not even understand is this: When a marketing concept really works it can be incredibly effective.
- I know one guy in his twenties who came out with a brand of liquor and created some buzz around it and a couple of years later sold it to some giant liquor company for hundreds of millions of dollars.
- I know of another guy who did the same thing with a stuffed animal. I represented him when I practiced law. He made several hundred million dollars.
How effective is this marketing stuff? People who really understand it at a deep level can make hundreds of millions of dollars. If people can make hundreds of millions of dollars with a simple marketing concept pitching a bottle of booze or a stuffed animal, imagine what you can do with this stuff in your career.
The most effective of all marketing weapons out there is the USP. The term USP has been around a long, long time. I would define USP in the following way:
Your USP is that unique aspect of yourself that sets you apart from every other “me too” employee and job seeker in the market.
Your entire career can be built almost exclusively around your USP. The key word for your USP, however, is “unique.” Your USP is what differentiates you from your competition and makes you a must-have hire and employee in the job market.
You should be able to explain, in a single phrase, why someone should hire you and want to work with you and not someone else, or why they need to hire you at all.
For job seekers, the USP is among the most important things you need to have, even before having a resume, in my opinion. Your USP is what you are offering, and it is what you want to stick out and be memorable about your candidacy. Your USP is that important. The possibilities for creating your USP are unlimited; however, it is best to adopt a USP that dynamically addresses something that a potential employer is probably not getting that you can give them. (Be careful, though, because you need to be able to fulfill whatever it is you are promising in your USP.)
Before telling you how to go about creating your USP, let me first describe something that characterizes most job seekers. First, when I ask people I am interviewing why I should hire them and not someone else, most of them have no decent response. Why? Because most people have never thought through their own USP. Most people have no USP and instead, have only a rudderless, nondescript candidacy that depends only upon the momentum of the market. For example, if the market is doing well and there are lots of jobs available, they may get hired. If the market slows down and these people need another job, then they will wait for the market to pick up again. Most people offer no real benefit to employers and nothing distinct or unique. No great service or value is promised either implicitly or explicitly—just “hire me,” for no explicit reason.
It’s no surprise, then, that most careers are merely average and not exceptional. People accomplish only a small share of what they could accomplish in their job searches and careers due to not fully developing their USP. Why would you want to hire someone who is just average with no unique benefit? Or would you prefer someone who is the absolute best at what they do?
Let me tell you two quick stories.
Some time ago I hired an assistant whose former job had been to be an assistant to uneducated, has-been movie and rock stars and others who were on tight budgets and needed to keep their secrets out of the limelight. I reviewed her resume and saw all of the famous people she had worked for over her career and felt very privileged to have this person working for me as well. However, she had never actually been hired by these people. She had been hired by their business managers. The job of business managers of stars and others when their clients get late into their careers is to make sure they (1) do not run out of money and (2) are not featured in the press in unflattering ways. This is what they looked for in her when they hired her.
Her job had been to be an assistant; however, more than this, her job had been to babysit these people and make sure they did not spend too much money or get into trouble in various ways. In addition to this she was an assistant; however, her real skill was running peoples’ lives and keeping costs down.
Her USP on her resume when I interviewed was something along the lines of “effective in controlling confidential clients’ spending and keeping them out of media in a variety of challenging circumstances.” I found this bizzare at the time, but she was extremely personable and interviewed exceptionally well. In fact, I hired her during the interview.
Once she started work she started shaping up everyone around her. She demanded that they not gossip and recommended in the harshest possible manner that I fire certain employees who were gossiping. She looked around the office and determined everyone from the person who came in to water the plants to the cleaning woman should be fired and replaced with cheaper alternatives. When I travelled she rented me ridiculous little Asian cars I could scarcely fit into and put me into the cheapest hotels she could find, that were miles from where I needed to be, just to save money. I did not like this.
When I protested she would talk to me like a child.
“It only costs an additional $3.00 a day for a regular size car,” I might protest.
“Now, what did I tell you about behaving?” she might respond.
She was incredible at what she did, but it was not for me. Had I been a spendthrift, out-of-work actor on a fixed income, this would have been exactly what I needed. The people around me would not have gossiped about me to the press, and I would not have run out of money
This woman had a USP and she stood for two things (1) saving money and (2) keeping the person she worked for out of the press. She did this instinctively, and this is why she is someone who was probably never unemployed in Los Angeles for more than a few days. Ever.
The reason for this is due to the fact that she had an incredible USP and it was exactly what business manager and others wanted in someone doing a job like she did. She was absolutely perfect in every way for the particular job that business managers needed for older, non-working entertainment clients.
This is the example of a USP in action. Imagine if you were managing a former movie star and had the two goals of keeping the person’s dirty laundry out of the limelight and also making sure that the person did not spend money. The person I hired would be the absolute first person you would hire. This person stood for something and followed through on what they stood for. I am sure she will never have a difficult time finding a job in Los Angeles, no matter what the economy is like, as long as she has this particular USP.
Can you see what an appealing difference a USP can make in establishing someone’s image to a potential employer? It is ludicrous not to have a clear, carefully crafted USP that is in the very fabric of your candidacy with any firm.
The next story I am going to tell you about USPs is so ludicrous it is hard to believe. But it’s true.
When I was growing up there was a guy down the street from me who was incredibly wild. He once got suspended from elementary school for throwing a desk at a teacher. As he progressed through high school and then college he continued to get more and more wild. One time he was over at a friend of mine’s house, and he had used so many drugs that he sat on a chair for what I understand was something like 36 hours staring at a wall. He was a wild guy, and he still is pretty wild.
However, despite all this wildness he is actually extremely uptight. His mind works like a vice grip, and he is so detail oriented it is hard to believe. When you are around this guy when he is not spaced out on drugs it makes you uncomfortable. He perceives every little detail about everything, and these details make him visibly agitated if anything is ever out of place. He starts sweating sometimes if anything seems off too much. His face turns red. This guy is way, way too wound up and always has been. He almost flunked out of college because he was using drugs and partying all the time. However, he still ended up getting tons of jobs.
Employers meet this guy and they know that absolutely nothing whatsoever will ever slip by him. It is difficult for me to even describe how uptight this guy is in words. His mind is like a trap. This guy has never been unemployed. His resume says something like “unbelievably detail oriented” and it is absolutely true. The guy is considered one of the top quality-related guys in the United States. He works for a big company and makes a hell of a lot of money studying something like quality control. He gets calls from recruiters all the time. He was rich by the time he was 30. He works in a labcoat in ridiculously expensive production lines that make things like computer chips. He is an absolute star at what he does.
This guy’s entire identity is based around being incredibly detail oriented on the job. He is incredibly detail oriented, and people truly understand this around him. This is what this guy does. He does this well, and everyone who comes into contact with him knows this.
The point is that you need to focus your USP on one gap, niche, need, or segment of the market that the market needs. The market needs guys who are detail oriented and assistants who control the spending and public perception of people in the entertainment industry.
You need to come up with a USP and have something that sets you apart in the market. Before you can incorporate your USP into your resume and interviews and work style, however, you need to figure out what it is (or what you want it to be) and then refine it and make sure you focus it as cleanly and directly as you possibly can. You should be able to articulate a crystal-clear USP in less than a paragraph.
Your USP is the nucleas around which you will get a job and define your career, so you better have one and you better be able to state one. If you cannot state a USP, the people you work with and/or whom are interviewing you will not be able to define it either. Clearly conveying and marketing your USP will make your success in the job market close to inevitable if it is a strong enough USP. But you need a USP before you do anything.
When you create a meaningful USP you are taking the vast details of all of your experience, education, and character and putting in one or a few sentences. More importantly, these sentences typically have the force of salesmenship in practically every single word. You do not need to care how this USP reads, either. It does not have to sound good. What it needs to do is stand out and create positive tension in the employer’s mind.
The biggest test if you have adopted a really good USP or not is if it could be adopted by another job seeker without being modified. Here are some examples of meaningless USPs:
- Well-educated educated teacher.
- Hard-working employee.
- Team player.
These USPs do nothing to separate one person from another in the job market. Lots of people are well educated and professional. Lots of people are also hard working. Lots of people are also team players. None of these things are really that unusual. If an employer puts and advertisement out for virtually any job they will receive applications from people claiming to have these various “unique” qualifications. The truth is, however, none of these qualifications is unique at all. None of these things is really going to make you stick out in the employers’ minds when they are reviewing your resume, interviewing you, and considering hiring you.
You are well educated? What does this mean? You are hard working? What does this mean? You are a team player? What does this mean? You need to go deeper and deeper. You need to push harder and find something that make you stand out. How about:
- “Students in my classes get so enthusiastic about learning they often come to me for extra reading assignments to learn more,” “Oxford educated teacher,” “Former high school valedvictorian teacher who speaks Latin and four other languages and makes students incredibly enthusiastic about learning” (for well educated teacher).
- “My supervisors always tell me not to work so hard,” “Known at every employer I have ever worked at as the last one out at the end of the day,” “I am the guy supervisors tell to take a vacation” (for hard working).
- “Am I too friendly and well liked by other people at work?” “When employer’s hire me morale rises because I am always the guy who organizes softball leagues, basketball teams, and so forth for the employees,” ”Pizza parties at my house are a regular occurrence” (for team player).
I am showing you these examples and want you to think about them. Each of them is memorable because each of them makes the person stand out. The imagery is vivid, and we can sense and understand what is being talked about and referred to in the statements.
My greatest and most favorite skill is being a legal recruiter. As a legal recruiter I have written hundreds of profiles for various attorneys out there that I use to help them get in the door at various law firms. At first glance, every attorney is pretty much identical to the others out there in the market. For example, they all go to good law schools, they all work hard, and they are ball very ambitious. I have to work pretty hard to differentiate each attorney I work with out there from the rest.
I am not going to tell you I am the best legal recruiter in the United States; however, I may well be. I’ve made more than $1,000,000 in fees personally from doing this sort of work virtually every single year I’ve done it. I can honestly say that nothing I do to help my candidates get jobs is more important than helping them have a strong and incredibly persuasive USP. That is why I sit on my ass at all those shitty marketing conferences: I know that the more I learn and understand this sort of stuff, the more I can help various people get jobs. I have been able to change people’s lives by crafting powerful USPs for them and sending them into interviews. One year I actually placed every single candidate I worked with and I can say it is almost entirely due to having a good USP for them.
Every attorney and every person has a USP that can be used with employers.
Sometimes it is the obstacles the person has overcome.
Sometimes it is their unique writing ability.
Sometimes it is their passion.
Sometimes it is their character.
The point is that everyone out there has a particular USP. You are different from other people and there is something different about your candidacy and experience than everyone else’s out there. You need to say so, and you need to be as upfront as possible about this. Have something in your USP that no one else out there offers.
And tell your story. ”I learned the importance of hard work because I grew up on a farm and got up at 4:30 am to milk the cows from the time I was 7 years old until I went off to college at the age of 18 and never missed a single day. If you are looking for an attorney who works hard ,you are never going to find someone more dedicated, hardworking, and consistent than me.”
Persuasive, right? Who would you hire to be an attorney? Some four-eyed, upper middle-class arrogant law school graduate, or a guy who came in with a story like that? I think you would interview the kid of a farmer just for the novelty, and hire him as well.
This is the power of an awesome USP.
Why are you the right choice among all the other choices employers have out there? If you truly want to get a job, you will get in touch with your USP and start standing out to employers. You will be a standout person whose resume and so forth sticks out to the employer and who is memorable. People will be buying you as a concept and not just hiring an employer.
When you interview with employers, everything you say should clearly reinforce your USP. Think about your own past buying examples. When you are in the market for a product or service don’t you tend to favor the businesses that strongly presents a USP? Of course you do!
You need to understand one thing, though: You are not going to be able to appeal to everyone out there. In fact, certain USPs are only going to appeal to certain employers and not others. However, this is part of what a USP is: It is a market differentiator. Differentiate yourself in the market, create a USP, and you will never have a difficult time finding a job.
Hypnotists, Worry and Living Your Life Today
February 24, 2009
What You Will Learn
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I took my wife to Las Vegas about a year ago and we decided to go see a hypnotist show. I had gone to see a hypnotist who had performed for the entire university when I was in law school and had really enjoyed it. The most amazing thing about the show I had seen in law school was when a large man I believe was a football player, had voiced a strong attraction to another man while under hypnosis. It was funny at the time. However, I cannot imagine that coming out in front of 3,000 people was what he had in mind when he was hypnotized. In retrospect, I guess this was probably not that funny. This show was fascinating to me, though, and really drove me to a further study and interest in the subconscious mind–something I had been studying on an off since the age of 16.
If you have not been to a hypnotist show, they are a lot of fun. At the beginning of the show the hypnotist typically stands up in front of the audience and tells some joke. Then he proceeds to bring several volunteers on stage and starts trying to hypnotize all of them. When my wife and I were in Las Vegas, we were the first to volunteer to be hypnotized. This was something that we were very interested in doing–especially in front of several hundred people. After around 5 minutes the hypnotist started tapping various people and asking them to leave the stage if he believed they would not be hypnotized. I was one of these people and was sent down off the stage.
“You’re not even trying,” I remember the hypnotist said to a guy sitting next to me who was also sent down off the stage.
My wife was not sent off the stage. Instead, she seemed to be in full blown hypnosis. I sat down and grabbed a Diet Coke and started enjoyed the entire show. I was very into the show and watching people make fun of themselves, until they sent my wife into the audience with a group of about 20 other people who were hypnotized. The hypnotist had led her to believe she was a gorilla, so he was jumping up and down in the aisle. This was too much for me. I grabbed her and started shaking her as she was going down the aisle on all fours.
“Wake the hell up! You are hypnotized!” There was so much going on that very few people saw this because they were busy laughing at the other people in the audience. I do not know what I was afraid of, but the last thing I wanted to happen to her was something similar to what happened to that football player in law school. It was a good thing that I stopped this. She did wake up and the hypnotist made her sit down. Right after that he had all of the people under hypnosis start telling the audience about their various sexual fantasies. It was very funny–I am just glad my wife was not there for that. I probably would have rushed on stage, punched the hypnotist, and gotten arrested.
I was so fascinated by this hypnosis demonstration that when I got home from Las Vegas I read another book or two about hypnosis, and then decided to find a local hypnotist who would hypnotize me. I found one right across the street! For a couple of months, for about an hour ever Tuesday, the woman would hypnotize me. This is not typically the sort of stuff I do, however, at the time I was under a lot of stress and had been doing a lot of reading about the subconscious mind. I have actually been studying the subconscious mind on and off since the age of 16, and when I learned there was a well known hypnotist right across the street I decided to stop by and give her a try. I had never been to a hypnotist so I was very interested in what I would experience.
It was an enjoyable experience. I would go into her “office” (which was a spare bedroom) and sit down on a lawn chair, put a blanket over me and she would start talking. In the background she would always have on “spa type music” that would make me quite sleepy. Within about 10 minutes of her starting, I would fall asleep and I would then wake up around an hour later. I do not remember much of what went on with the hypnotist because I was hypnotized. But one of the more interesting experiences was when she would make me be a caterpillar and I would be lazily climbing through the trees and so forth. This was a lot of fun until I fell asleep. Each session would last an hour. I decided that going to sleep during the middle of the day for an hour was not really productive for me and stopped seeing this hypnotist after a few months. However, more so than the hypnotism, the most beneficial thing that this hypnotist ever taught me was when I started talking to her about her profession and what she did. She told me that almost all of the people who use her are doing so because of worries that they have. They are worried about things like:
- Quitting smoking
- Losing weight
- Performing well in athletics in the future
- Overcoming various anxieties
The idea she was making clear to me was that most people out there are worried about things, and her role was really to help them stop worrying. If they are quitting smoking, they are worried about how they will deal with tension or social situations if they do not have cigarettes. If they are losing weight, they are worried about being hungry if they are not eating the things they like, or not being able to use food to deal with tension. Regardless of the reasons for the person going to see the hypnotist, the real reason almost all of them went was due to worry about something that they were unsure about how to deal with.
More so than the actual hypnosis, what interested me most about seeing the hypnotist was speaking with her about her profession. She was from Eastern Europe and I assumed had originally learned hypnosis there. I would question her about her profession, what she knew about hypnosis, and what her beliefs were about the discipline and people. She then told me a long story that I no longer remember, but which she seemed to feel very strongly about. The conclusion of the story was very simple, however, and the story ended with these words:
All things will pass, so it does us no good to worry now.
The hypnotist spoke about these words with a considerable amount of passion and believed that understanding these was the key to happiness in life. In fact, the hypnotist seemed to believe that this was all we need to know and understand about anything in order to experience true happiness.
A few months later I was speaking with a well-known author who had just taken a class called The Sedona Method. He could not stop talking about how this had changed his life and was incredibly enthusiastic about this. He sent me a bunch of information and free tapes about it. I was amazed that essentially all the Sedona Method involves is a process of asking yourself a few questions about when you are going to “let go” of various things you are worried about. All you do in the Sedona Method is identify an issue you are worried about, and ask yourself the following questions:
- Could I let it go?
- Would I let it go?
- When?
That is about all there is to it. This was all this guy could talk about and he was incredibly enthusiastic about how much this had permanently changed his life. All he had done was identified a way to let go of worry. The Sedona Method is a big business and teaches thousands of people each year how to use these questions. I was amazed that something so simple could be so popular. It was like what the hypnotist taught me: the biggest problem facing most people is simply worry.
I am sure you have all been around people who worry a lot–you may even be one of them. I have been in business meetings before, or interviewing people, when all of a sudden I look down at their hands and I can see that their nails are bitten to the fingers. I have interviewed people before (more than once) who have shown up to job interviews in the middle of the day drunk and smelling like liquor. What are these people so worried about? There are also certain people who will look at any situation and decide that something awful is going to happen in the future. I have met people who believe the world is going to end in less than a year and they are worried about it.
When I meet the person who has bitten their nails down the their ends, I have a lot of compassion for them. A worrier like this is someone who is likely very concerned about how their actions affect others. They are probably also a good person, and will have thought through their actions before they do something. The person who shows up drunk to an interview is also someone who wants to do well. They are overwhelmed by stress, and worried that in their natural stressful state they may not perform well in the interview. Both people are worriers. Being a worrier does not mean you are a bad person. In my opinion, being a worrier does not even mean you will be a bad employee. What is most wrong with being a worrier, however, is that it is not good for you.
- If you are worried about finding a job, you need to stop being worried.
- If you are worried about losing your job, you need to stop being worried.
- If you are worried about the economy, you need to stop being worried.
- If you are worried about how you will look to others if you do this or that, you need to stop being worried.
- If you are worried about something wrong you did in the past, you need to stop being worried.
- If you worried about how you will be accepted by others, you need to stop being worried.
- If you are worried about what is going to happen in your job next month, you need to stop being worried.
When you meet people who are constantly worrying, you can usually see the signs very easily. Some of the signs of worry are things like:
- Insomnia. People who worry a lot will tell you they are having problems sleeping, and it is often because their minds are worried about this or that.
- Incapacitation. Many people who are worried just shut down because the stress of life is just too much for them. These people can become extremely depressed.
- Irritation. People who worry a lot may become very bothered by people around them and situations around them.
- Irresponsibility. Some worriers become irresponsible to escape the stresses they are facing. They leave jobs and relationships, and may develop different types of addictions.
- Illness. Many people who worry incessantly will simply get sick. Bodies cannot constantly deal with stress and many people who worry constantly will start developing all sorts of illnesses.
You may have your own signs and symptoms of worry. People worry and the signs emerge in different ways for numerous people. What ways are you worrying? Virtually every single person I know is worried about something. If you go out at lunch hour in any American city and listen to two friends sitting together at a table while having lunch, you will generally hear them talk about something they are worried about. They may be worried about their jobs. They may be worried about their health. They may be worried about one of their children. Regardless of what they are talking about, a substantial portion of most conversations will be punctuated by some sort of worry. We all worry.
Worry and anxiety can be extremely disabling for many people and serious, medical-level worry, is something that really affects a lot of people. According to an article I recently reviewed in Psychology Today:
For millions of people, worry disrupts everyday life, restricting it to some degree, or even overshadowing it entirely. An estimated 15 percent of Americans suffer from one or another of the anxiety disorders. These include generalized anxiety, specific phobias, obsessive-compulsive disorder and flat-out panic attacks. As a group, anxiety disorders constitute the most common disorder in the country.
The fact that almost 15 percent of people are suffering from worry to the extent it has become a medical condition is an alarming statistic. This statistic does not even take into account the vast number of people who are suffering from worry to the extent it is not a disorder. We are all worried to some extent. Worry is just not something that really does us much good.
Worry is a huge trap that many people fall into. Worry often affects many of the people who are the most motivated and want to be the best in whatever they are seeking to do. People fall into the mistaken belief that worrying is something that will motivate them to do very well. However, this is simply not the case. Instead, people who are worried all the time are constantly looking towards the past and various alternatives. What ends up happening is they become distracted and not focused on the task at hand, and are lured in the trap of thinking without doing. Worry is confusion and makes it difficult to get anything whatsoever done.
One of the most interesting things you will see when you meet very successful people is that they have an incredible ability to control worry. I have seen this with the most successful Wall Street executives and leaders in virtually every field I have studied. They look at what is in front of them in the here and now, and are not as concerned about what might happen tomorrow as they are doing the best they can today. None of this is to say that the secret of success is not worrying about tomorrow–it is not. You need to prepare for tomorrow, but cannot worry about it all the of the time. Your efforts are better put into doing the best you can with what lies before you today, and this will lead you into a better tomorrow.
Most of the time, worry is not something that does us any good . It paralyzes us and makes our current moments of life much less enjoyable than they could be without worry. In addition to worry, most of us are focused on some sort of different life in the future instead of focusing on what is in front of us today. We should enjoy each day instead of worrying about tomorrow. When we are young we say “when I am older”. When we are in college we say “when I am out of college.” When we are single we say “when I am married.” When we are working we say “when I am retired.” Soon all you have to look forward to is death.
Tomorrow will always come, but there is no use waiting to live and enjoy life until some distant point in the future. You need to live your life today. Instead of worrying about life in the future, worry about life now.
Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss it, you will land among the stars.