Harrison Barnes » finding a job

Self-Help Means Helping Others

Harrison Barnes — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 05:01:15 +0000

There is a simple concept that separates those who experience great success from those who do not. I am going to tell you all about this concept in a second, but first I want to talk a little bit about self-help. I have read countless books that discuss various methods of improving one’s life and career. I have always found it interesting that these books are almost always classified as self-help. The first self-help book ever written is generally considered to be Samuel Smiles’ Self Help, originally published in 1859. The book begins with the sentence “Heaven helps those who help themselves.” The principle that self-help seems to be founded on and seems to revolve around, is that people need to take charge of themselves in order to improve their lives. Most books that fall within this classification generally offer the same prescription for improving any area of life:

Discover what you want!
Have a positive attitude!
Create big goals!
Have discipline!

Follow through!
Believe in yourself!
Keep trying, even when you fail!

Virtually any self-improvement book you may read and any self-improvement seminar you may attend will give you some variation of this advice. I am not criticizing any of this advice, because it works and can help people become very successful. These are concrete, guiding principles that have been proven over many years and in many cases. For example, if you do not follow through with whatever you are seeking to achieve, then it is unlikely you will ever amount to much; you need to follow through. If it were my decision, I would make sure that all schools instruct people about these various principles of self-improvement, because they are so incredibly important. Far too many people are nowhere near reaching their potential because they do not understand the basics of self-improvement. There is a real difference between long-term success and short-term success. Familiarizing yourself with the principles of self-improvement can help you advance in your career and life for a while, but they are not the be all and end all of what it really takes to succeed in the long term. When the economy is good, the people who follow general self-improvement advice can always do well for a time. For example, they can more easily get jobs and, depending on market conditions, get one raise and promotion after another. There is nothing wrong with this; however, to experience consistent and long-lasting success, a completely different set of skills becomes necessary. Real self-improvement and self-development has nothing to do with you. In fact, the people who really end up succeeding in their work are usually those who believe that becoming better means the following:

helping others discover what they want
helping others have positive attitudes
helping others create big goals
helping others have discipline
helping others follow through with their goals
helping others believe in themselves
helping others keep trying even when they fail

It is like this in every industry and every career path I know about. If you name any profession, I will point out how becoming good at the profession requires you to put others first, and how the more you do this, the more success you will find. Currently, we are in a horrible hiring market for attorneys. One of my jobs is running a legal recruiting firm. Over the past several months, I have seen numerous recruiters fail at their jobs. Many of these legal recruiters got into the business initially because they wanted to make money; they liked the lifestyle associated with being a recruiter, and they had lots of other reasons for choosing the job, all of which revolved around them. These recruiters tend to be suffering the worst in this economy. Conversely, the recruiters who got into the business because they view it as an outlet to help others have continued doing incredibly well. Most likely this is because the best attorney candidates can sense whether their recruiters really want to help them. The attorneys trust these recruiters and flock to them. The self-improvement we seek starts with helping others. Making everything all about ourselves is a huge epidemic in our society, whether one analyzes people in politics, sports, business–or just daily life. I love watching politics from the sidelines. The longer you watch politicians, the more you realize that a lot of them are crooked and are only in it for themselves, not to help others. The politicians are often, it seems, more concerned with getting bribes, steering lucrative contracts to friends, and otherwise benefiting from their position of power. Instead of being concerned about their constituents and society at large, they are often more concerned with making sure that their own needs are met. There will always be scandals such as those with the former Illinois governor, Rod Blagojevich, because the idea of “self-improvement” for many people means enriching themselves at others’ expense. Not too long ago, I met a guy who owns a sports book casino. Since he is taking millions of dollars in bets a day during the sports season, he told me that he and other casino owners have learned that there is a ton of graft and so forth in college sports, for example. It is not uncommon for college football games to be fixed. The casinos can often pick this up due to betting patterns. When games occur that appear to be fixed, the casinos will usually observe players making ridiculous errors and appearing to throw the game. In these cases, the athletes are obviously more concerned with themselves than their team or fans. The same thing happens in business. Many executives get to high places in business and suddenly you see them doing all sorts of things that are more about them than about others. Whether it is an executive doling out stock options that are backdated or some other misdeed, executives are continually under fire for being more concerned with their own “self-improvement” than helping the people around them. This is something I see all the time with high-ranking executives and others: They simply care more about themselves than their customers, coworkers, or anyone else. The key to your own success is simple: Nothing you do in your life is about you. You simply cannot succeed in your life if you believe it is all about you. It is never about you and never will be about you. Ignoring this concept can be dangerous and can crush your chances of success. Your goals and aspirations need to be far greater and larger than focusing solely on your goals and what you want. Whatever you are seeking in your life, you will only find it when you are working to fulfill the goals and aspirations of others. Detroit is a fascinating city to me in so many respects. There was so much wealth there at one time, which was brought about by the automobile industry. Now, over the past five years, homes there have gone down in value by up to four times, as industry and the economy have suffered due to the weakening state of the auto industry. In reality, though, the city has been collapsing for years and has been going downhill for my entire lifetime. One of my first memories is when, in the early 1970s, Detroit started to proclaim itself “the Renaissance City,” and the Renaissance Center was built in downtown Detroit. The idea was that the city was on its way back, experiencing a revival. The problem with this, however, was that the city was not really going to come back. I believe a switchover had occurred in the psychology of the automobile companies in Detroit, from focusing on “what can we provide to the people” to “what the people can provide to us.” Simply stated, the automotive companies became insular and more concerned with their own needs and wants than with providing an exceptional product and service to the American public. Throughout the United States, there are all sorts of towns like Atchison, Kansas, which grew up and thrived at one time due to the railroads coming through. When the train diminished in importance and other forms of transportation became prominent, these towns lost a great deal of their wealth and became shells of their former selves. Detroit is another one of these towns too, and there are countless others. If these towns had been more concerned with what they could give, instead of what they could take, then my thought is that they would still have prospered, no matter what had happened. Lately, I have been reading lots of articles in newspapers, magazines, and so forth about people who formerly had high-level jobs in investment banks and similar “big” employers, who are now doing things like working in restaurants, or in sporting goods stores for close to minimum wage. “I was making $150,000 a year, and now the best job I can get only pays $11.00 an hour!” is the sort of statement you read in these articles again and again. The articles are always the same and they drone on about how the person at issue can no longer afford to go out to eat, how they are selling their house, and how they are so frustrated that employers are not responding to their applications. I have a ton of sympathy for these people. The employment market is bad; however, I often notice there is a problem with the psychology of the people I am reading about when I study these articles. The problem is that, more often than not, the people complaining about the job market and their employment situation are focused on themselves and their woes–instead of being focused on what they can provide for others. In fact, a lot of these unemployed people might not have lost their jobs or had difficult times finding a new job if their focus had been 100% on others. These sorts of articles lead me to question the ultimate value these people were providing, to begin with.

In almost every case, when people lose their jobs, they are not focused enough on their employers’ needs.
In almost every case, when an employer goes out of business, it was not focused enough on others’ needs.
In almost every case, when people have a difficult time finding a job, they are not focusing enough on another’s needs when they are interviewing and putting together their application materials.

Nothing you do in this life is all about you. Your career is not all about you. The company you work for is not all about you. Your family is not all about you. Your friends are not all about you. It is always all about the other person. Your life and the opportunities out there are so much larger and all encompassing than you. Most people spend their time asking questions about themselves and pondering over themselves. They ask questions about what they can do to be better, questions about their goals, questions about their future. Constantly looking within one’s self can actually get in the way of success. You are one person and the world is made up of billions of people. You are always going to find more answers and more satisfying answers when you look outside of yourself instead of inside yourself. When you provide value, help, and support to others, this will provide you with more spiritual, psychological, financial, and other benefits than any other self-improvement concept out there. The way to achieve your greatest potential, and to truly help yourself, is to start helping others. THE LESSON True self-improvement actually has nothing to do with you, but everything to do with helping others towards their goals. Remember that nothing you do in your life is ultimately about you. Your goals and aspirations must be larger and greater than focusing solely on what you want; helping others will provide you with more spiritual, financial, and psychological benefits than any other kind of self-improvement.

Jobs from Employers and Employer Websites

Harrison Barnes — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 05:01:38 +0000

When looking for a job, as with anything you do, you get rewards only when you put work into it. Researching employer websites is not the easiest type of work to do. It requires more effort than simply going to a job site, as you may be accustomed to doing. Nevertheless, this is very important, and these are methods you can use to track down jobs pretty much anywhere. It will be worth your while to search employers’ websites for jobs. The small investment that you take right now in learning about this can really end up changing the course of your career. Because so few people follow the process and understand this process, if you follow these guidelines you will set yourself apart. What it comes down to is research. I once knew an attorney who never lost a case. He was known for researching every single detail in his case files, and that’s what gave him the advantage. That really is the same thing with your job search. The more research you’re doing, the more likely you are going to win when it comes to finding a job. I am a huge proponent of looking for jobs online on employer websites. Anybody can do this. Whether you’re sixteen years old and looking for your first job or forty-five and a sophisticated attorney, you can benefit from this process. The rewards are extreme. When you look at jobs on employer websites, you are probably seeing unadvertised jobs. They’re not going to all be unadvertised, but a significant portion will be unadvertised. That means you’re not going to see these jobs on a major job site or in the newspaper. The job is coming direct from the employer, which is direct employment. That gives you a major, major advantage. If you’re applying for jobs that aren’t advertised, as I mentioned earlier, there are going to be fewer applications and fewer people knowing about them. Your goal in your job search is to maximize your self-interest. You want to apply for jobs that aren’t getting a lot of applications. That’s going to make a major difference for you. Another thing about employer websites that’s so exciting is the variety of employers with websites. In terms of the employer websites that my companies monitor for jobs, we’re looking at between 50,000 and 100,000; there are 50,000 really good ones and an additional 50,000 that are not as good. If you were to look at all of the employer websites available, you would be looking at well over a million sites. The reason is that today, virtually every company that has employees has a website, and a good portion of those list job opportunities. Because there are so many websites out there, when you start really drilling down into those numbers, you’re going to see an incredible variety of opportunities. Another benefit of applying to a job through an employer website is that there’s no middleman. Your application goes directly to the employer, whereas when you apply to jobs through a recruiter, that recruiter acts as a filter for the résumés before they ever reach the employer. The recruiter will only send the résumés he or she thinks that employer wants to see–and that may or may not include yours. Job sites also act as middlemen. The résumés sometimes go into a box that employers have to log in to if they want to look at the list of applicants. It doesn’t always reach the employer directly. When you’re applying to jobs on employer website, there are no middlemen like that. It’s also important to remember that posting on a job site can cost an employer up to $500. That’s a hurdle that gets in the way of the job being distributed, and anything that gets in the way of a job being distributed ultimately is going to harm your chances of getting that job. If there’s no middleman, that means that you’re more likely to find out about that job, more likely to be hired because there’s no fee, the employer is more likely to see your résumé–and all of that works in your favor. When you go to an employer site, you are really exposing yourself to a much greater variety of jobs because there are more jobs out there on employer sites than anywhere else, much, much more. The drawback, of course, is that these jobs are scattered across a huge number of sites, which means it’s very, very important that you understand the methods I describe for researching these jobs. When you apply to a job on an employer site, the employer is more likely to think you’re interested in that company specifically than if you’re coming through any other resource. That’s because you have taken the time to go to the employer’s website, log in to find the career section of the website, and then apply. That shows a lot more interest than simply clicking on a posting you happened to come across on a job site. They’re going to look at you a little bit more favorably, especially the smaller employers because they’re not receiving a lot of applications. They believe that if you tracked them down, whatever the industry is, you must have a real desire to work there, and that is a positive thing. The call for applications on employer websites is not always obvious. If you go to the website of an engineering firm, for example, they might not say, “We’re looking for a mechanical engineer with 30 years’ experience.” They may say, “We always have an interest in seeing qualified engineering candidates with the following backgrounds.” These are general statements of interest requesting applications for jobs that aren’t advertised. When you apply to those jobs, you can tell them, “I understand you’re always interested,” and that sort of thing. Again, this shows you are interested in working for that particular company, and employers appreciate that kind of consideration. [A] Big vs. Small Employers You really should know the market that you’re in. Most of my career, I’ve been involved in the legal industry. If you take an area like Los Angeles County, for example, a huge area, there are literally thousands of law firms. When most people think of looking for a job, they typically think of certain big firms or ones that everyone has heard of. A lot of times, however, there are smaller firms that pay more or just as much and that are off the radar for most job searchers. It may be seven or eight people in that operation, but people can do very, very well there. If you know what’s going on in your industry and in the job market, you will find many, many more options for jobs regardless of what city you’re in. If you’re in a small city with three law firms, that’s okay. Then obviously, you can’t investigate the market very much but if you’re in a decent sized geographic area, there are going to be a lot of employers that are going to match whatever it is you’re seeking to do. They may not always be catalogued by industry. Architects are hired by construction companies, for example, not just architectural firms. Attorneys are hired by corporations, not just law firms. Although it helps to begin your search by focusing on your industry, you can’t confine yourself to that industry. You must be creative. There are a few drawbacks. You may need to be a little bit cautious about jobs on employer sites because they may not be updated as much. Think of over a million job sites out there with employer jobs on them. That’s a million different people who have the responsibility of taking the job down when the job is filled or putting it up when it’s new, so errors do occur more frequently than on job sites. Whereas a job site will say, “This job will automatically expire in 60 or 90 days,” once they put it up, an employer website won’t do that. It comes down to an individual who is in charge of that. Don’t be disappointed if you apply to a job and you get back the response that the job has been filled, even though you found it on their website. I would call my philosophy aggressive because your job search is about marketing. Even if no jobs are posted, you can send an e-mail query and find out if a position simply hasn’t been listed yet. Here’s an example:

Subject: My Interest in Working for Groupon Dear Ms. Jones, I am a sales manager with eleven years of experience working for Quaker Oats in Chicago. I am in charge of managing a staff of 120 sales people responsible for retail distribution in an eleven state area encompassing the Western United States. I have attached my resume. I was just checking to see if you might have any openings. I’m very interested in your company, specifically because of your recent growth and my belief that I can contribute to your further growth. I have experience expanding into new markets and I believe I would be a real asset to your team as you too expand. I would welcome the opportunity to meet with you at your convenience. Sincerely, Jeff Jones

You want to offer specific reasons for applying to that company. Pull from the material on their website or what you may have learned about the company through other sources. Reputation, company mission, and plans for the future all make good reason for being interested in one company over another. I highly recommend sending your applications to employers that are expressing general sense of interest. A statement of interest is not a job. It is a request to apply if you fit general qualifications. Many people don’t. You look at lots and lots of employers out there. Many employers have these statements of interest but people don’t really respond to them. Statements of interest are very common for professionals, professional firms which would be things like law, health care – nurses are always in demand of course – architecture, and things along those lines. Because the career pages of employer websites aren’t always up to date, it’s important for you to make general inquiries even if jobs aren’t listed. Your job search is in some respects a numbers game. One of the benefits of searching for jobs on employer websites is it really helps you to take advantage of that numbers game because you will get more opportunities to apply in various places because of the fact that there are so many places out there with jobs. As people who work in direct-mail marketing know, you get better results if you mail out 100 letters compared to if you sent out 10. If you sent out 100 letters, you wouldn’t get as good of a result as if you sent out 10,000. To some extent, it’s the same game with your job search. Finding employers and applying to positions is a numbers game. The more places you apply, the greater your chances of gaining an interview and getting hired. This is also a marketing game. You’re marketing yourself. You’re the product. You are what you’re selling. When you’re doing that, it’s very, very important that you’re getting yourself out to as many potential employers as possible in order to increase your odds of getting hired. I highly recommend general inquiry applications to employers even if they don’t have jobs posted. That one thing alone could change your career. It’s more than worth the investment of time that you’re spending listening to this job search information because when you apply to people, even if they don’t have openings, you make their job easier for them because a lot of people maybe ask, “Do you have this person?” They’ll bring that person over to whoever is asking. The administrative team will bring your application to whoever is hiring. Your résumé will be filed away. It’s a very, very smart thing to get a lot of applications out there, especially with employers where you have few privacy concerns. It’s just a smart job search method and something you should be doing. I’ve been criticized for saying this is a good idea but I’ve seen it work so many times that it’s something that I highly, highly recommend that you do. Those are the main things that I wanted to talk to you about. Understanding that unadvertised jobs receive fewer applications is very, very important. Another thing I want to make clear is it’s not a question of pride. A lot of people are so invested in themselves and their personal identity that they don’t want to be rejected from an employer. Who cares? It really doesn’t matter. Just because someone out there is selling a product and not everybody is buying it doesn’t give the seller a reason to feel bad. As long as someone buys it, the person selling the product or the company selling the product can do well. In this case, you are that product. Investigating employer sites has another benefit that isn’t specifically tied to tracking down jobs. When you read these websites, you can learn a lot about employers. You can get a good sense of that employer based on how information is updated, how well it’s written, and what information is offered. You can also learn a lot about the market this way. You will learn who the company works for or what kind of customers they appeal to. This can lead you to more and more employers. Following that trail is a very, very effective way to track down jobs. [B] Resources with Employer Contact Information Finally, the biggest point I want to make to you is your chances of getting an interview are much better when you use an employer site. Typically, it’s going to be easier with smaller employers and harder with larger. If you take a big company, typically everybody will have heard of them or for a large regional employer but there are a lot of smaller employers. Those smaller employers are going to be much easier. An example would be where I’m from, Detroit, there are a couple of very large auto companies there. If someone is looking for a job in the auto industry, it would make sense that you would look at the websites of those giant employers to see what jobs they have available. However, remember that there are thousands of suppliers that supply the auto companies. Just because there’s that big company there doesn’t mean that’s the only employer. There are thousands of suppliers. The idea is you learn about the big company and then think about who is working for that big company. That can also provide you with lots of leads. The issue is how to locate employers, and the best way to locate jobs from employer websites. There are so many resources out there, it is insane. Here are just a few: Hound.com. This site monitors the career pages of a substantial number of employers throughout the world for jobs. This is an excellent site that has won several awards for its depth. Jigsaw. This is an online company directory. It is easy to use and recommended. DMOZ. An Internet directory. I like DMOZ a lot because they have a screening process that makes it difficult for an employer to get in there but once they are in there, you’re pretty much assured it’s a very good employer. You can search by industry and all sorts of things. Google at this point in time is related to DMOZ. Google gets its directory information from DMOZ. That’s something to keep in mind. Wikipedia. Wikipedia always has a lot of lists about top employers in different industries. One example might be if you were, hypothetically, a carpet installer in Illinois. There are probably a bunch of carpet associations for carpet installers or carpet workers. They will list members of that and member companies. The member companies would be a good source for you to find jobs. Manta. Manta is a good online source. Business.com. Business.com is a paid directory, meaning that people have to pay to be part of that directory, but not Wikipedia or DMOZ. Magic Yellow. Another really good source is called Magic Yellow which is the modern day yellow pages online. You can search by industry and they have website links. It’s very, very good. Yahoo. Dun and Bradstreet. This is a great database. Standard and Poors. Other resources include Thomas Register, Mergent Industry Review, Hoovers (part of Dunn & Bradstreet). As you can see, there’s a huge variety of sources that you can use to research companies. My overarching recommendation to you, however, is to go through each of these resources and find out which one suits you the best. Get comfortable and start using it to its fullest potential. [C] Building and Using Employer Lists Something that a lot of people do not understand that is very important is the way to research who those employers are. I’m suggesting that you systematically investigate and develop a list of who is going to hire you. A couple of years ago, I had an experience where my wife and I received a flier in the mail for a house that was for sale in our neighborhood. We went to the house at the appointed time. There were probably over a hundred people there. I’m thinking all these people showed up to this open house like we did but when the real estate agent sent out those fliers to everybody in the neighborhood, they didn’t say, “Let me just send out the fliers to the people that I’m confident and know with 100 percent certainty are buying a house right now.” They approached all of them. When you’re systematically investigating and developing a list of who is going to hire you, what you’re doing is no different than the real estate agent. You’re developing your future list of prospects when you find employers. To develop your list, use a service like Melissa Data, Info USA, Jigsaw, Hoovers, or all sorts of other sources. Most of these will offer you a free trial or something along those lines and you can get a lot of your data that way. You develop your list. Then you’ll have a bunch of names as the result. You will have companies plus names with the list you’ve developed. Once you have that list, it could be a large or small number. It could be twenty people depending on how broad you are or it could be more than one hundred people, or a thousand, or even five thousand. Services out there that have done this in the past typically will develop very, very large lists for people. There are lots of services out there that consult with people and develop lists. Typically, when these places develop a list, they’re creating a list of at least one or two thousand. When you target these employers, you need to understand that one of the things you’re doing is targeting them based on the geographies you want to work in plus your interest based on where you want to work. I want you to remember you can work wherever you want. I’m from Detroit. I decided I wanted to work in Southern California. That was after having worked in New York. I liked Southern California better but now I like New York a lot too. There are different places you can work. You need to make sure that in whatever search you’re doing, that you’re extremely open and making sure that you’re really looking at every potential geographic place that you can. The more places that you’re looking at, the better off you’re going to be. You really need to understand that the more opportunity you have, the more places you can look at. In a lot of cases, people want to stay close to home due to parents and other things along those lines. That certainly is okay and a good thing. At the same time, you need to understand that the more places that you’re looking, the better off you’re going to be because different geographic areas have more employers than others. It’s very common for people to move to New York because there are so many employers packed in a little scene in the city. You’re going to work where you want to. You’re going to have companies’ names on the list. You’re going to have them sorted geographically which is important based on where you want to work and by type of employer. The next thing you need to do is fill in the holes with your list. Find the company’s web address, search that website, and get the contact information for where to send your resume or application. That might mean an e-mail address or a street address. There might also be an online form. Investigate the company, not to discount places that you may be applying but to give yourself information. An example would be your list produces a company called ACME Power Tools in Lake Forest, Illinois. I’m just giving you a hypothetical. I don’t know that there would be a power tool company in Lake Forest. It’s a very nice suburb of Chicago. With that information, you go to Google. This may be all you get. Remember you’re going to have a list of potentially a thousand employers. You enter ACME Power Tools and the city into Google. It gives you the address, which you’ll have, and it will also give you the website. Once you’re on the website look for a tab called Contact, Careers, Employment, or Work Here. You will likely see a list of job openings. That’s also where you’ll find the information you need for submitting resumes. Be sure you are sending your application to the right person if there is more than one. It can be very helpful to build a spreadsheet where you can list all of potential employers with contact information. Include the web address, names of contacts, appropriate e-mail addresses, and any phone numbers available. I also recommend listing the type of application form, for example, an online form, an e-mailed resume, or something sent via US mail. How you structure this is up to you. I recommend using Excel. Some people are more comfortable using a Word document. Now it’s time to get to work. What does that mean? It means apply to jobs. If you’ve found a job opening that fits your skills, follow the employer’s instructions and apply. If there’s no job opening, realize the company is one that is in your industry and you may have a good fit for. Apply anyway to the contact person listed on the website. If there’s no contact person for your specific department, meaning they don’t say in any information anywhere how to apply, apply to any of the people listed. There may be jobs on the site that don’t match what you’re looking for. Say you’re an attorney applying to ACME Tools for an attorney job. There’s no attorney job listed but there’s a contact person. It’s always good to apply to that contact person. Another trick that has been known to work is to apply to the CEO or owner. The reason this works is that, if a company is large enough, the CEO or owner is unlikely to be reviewing your résumé when it comes in. That might sound like a bad thing, but it can work for you. Here’s how: If your résumé is directed toward the CEO’s office, typically someone else, an assistant of some kind, is going to open his or her mail. When the assistant opens the CEO’s mail, that mail is going to be sent directly to the correct person through the CEO’s office. Once the correct person gets it and see that it’s coming through the CEO, he or she is more likely to take action. So if no one else is listed for receiving applications, go ahead and send it to the CEO. Here’s something else to consider: when you email a résumé to a company or apply through its system, someone may review it or someone may not. In some office somewhere, people are sitting there receiving these emails. They are not necessarily excited to keep opening them. They may be getting dozens, even hundreds, of resumes. They’re completely overwhelmed with various applications for these jobs. Because of that, you really need to make sure that when you’re applying to jobs through these employers that you get your application seen. Email may get it seen but it may not. But also consider sending a letter. In some offices, a letter is more likely to get seen. It’s not always easy to find a mailing address for employers, but when you can, it’s a good idea to send a letter. Faxes also get noticed. A fax is typically printed. Often it goes into a little bin that circulates throughout the company until it is delivered to the person’s desk. This is one more way to get noticed. Using all these methods in combination get you seen. Is that overkill? I don’t think so. I think you look like you’re enthusiastic about the job. People love enthusiasm. I recommend more rather than less. You might opt not be comfortable using all of these methods, but certainly continue two ways if not three.

Hypnotists, Worry and Living Your Life Today

Harrison Barnes — Sat, 03 Apr 2010 06:14:33 +0000

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 show was fascinating to me and really drove me to a further study and interest in the subconscious mind–something I had been studying off and on 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 jokes. Then he proceeds to bring several volunteers on stage and starts trying to hypnotize 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 she 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. 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 hypnotism, and then decided to find a local hypnotist. I found one right across the street! For a couple of months, for about an hour every 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 had never been to a hypnotist so I was very interested to see what would happen. 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 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 everyone worries 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. 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 them 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 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 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 some 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. THE LESSON An ability to control worry is a common trait of many of the most successful people. Worry, for the most part, does not do anyone any good, as it makes people constantly look to various past alternatives. Rather than worrying about the future, you must focus on life now and not wait until a distant date to live and enjoy your life.

The Importance of Your Sense of Self

Harrison Barnes — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 05:38:07 +0000

Once, w hen I was around 17 years old, I was sitting in a car with a friend of mine, waiting for another group of kids. My friend was very wealthy and by this age had already inherited several million dollars–and he was very arrogant about this. In addition, he had been raised to think very highly of himself. He seemed to believe he had done the absolute best in everything he did. Even though he was not a great student, he reasoned that this did not matter, since the best students would one day be working for him. He had an incredible level of self-confidence, and people around him could never shake this, even if they tried. He had been beaten up at least a few times that I could remember, but he never seemed to care. His tremendous sense of self was internal to him and was unwavering. Everyone who knew this particular guy thought he would one day be extremely successful. His self-belief set him apart on so many levels from all other kids. As we sat there in the car, we discussed our futures. He had big plans for himself, which included heading an investment bank in New York, going to a major business school, and generally taking on the world. When it came time for me to share my plans for the future, I still remember quite well what I said: “I will be very happy if I get a three-bedroom house in a nice neighborhood and can at least afford to travel once in a while,” I told him. “I really hope I can get a decent job when I get out of college.” “It’s tough out there, but I am sure you will manage to get something,” he said. I never forgot this particular conversation because at that time in my life this was all I expected for myself:

I thought my biggest challenge would be finding a job when I got out of college.
I never thought I would be an attorney.
I never thought I would even go to a good college.
I never thought I would leave Detroit–and I never really had big plans for myself.

My sense of who I was and what I could achieve was simply not at a high level. At some point, however, based on encouragement from my father, teachers, and others, I began to develop a stronger sense of self–a sense of self that encouraged me to aim high in my life and to believe that I was capable of incredible things. Over time, this sense of self began to stick, and it continued to grow for me. A strong sense of self is the most important possible thing you can possess, and developing a strong sense of self will change your life. Do you think the close friends I had when I was 17 would have helped me develop this strong sense of self? In most cases it is not our friends who will encourage and push us. It is not that our friends are trying to hurt us; it is just that, as much as they like us, they may not want us to change. For example, my friend at the time liked being around people who looked up to him, and he avoided people who looked down on him. If I had changed then, the dynamic between us would have changed (and it eventually did, when I changed). People around you may want a certain level of control over their relationship with you in your career and life, and they want whatever makes them look and feel the best. While they may like it if you do well, their doing well is their priority. Please understand this: If you have a strong sense of self, this will alter the power balance in your relationships with many people around you. This is why so many people never change and reach their full potential. Many children develop a strong sense of self starting from the moment they are born, from their parents, who encourage them and help push them to do better and better. But it is not just parents who help us develop a strong sense of self. A strong sense of self comes from many areas in our lives and from the feedback we receive from the world:

Our Recognized Abilities Give Us a Sense of Self–If we are very intelligent and test well, we may feel smart, and this may contribute to a strong sense of self. If we are considered interesting or funny by others, or have been called industrious, inventive, and so forth, this may contribute to a strong sense of self.
Our Various Affiliations Give Us a Sense of Self–We may be members of a certain sports team, college, or other group that is interested in particular things.
Our Religion Gives Us a Sense of Self--If we are members of a certain religious group, this will give us a sense of self related to the religion.
Our Social Standing and Relationships Give Us a Sense of Self--We have a sense of self based on the people we are friends with and how we are regarded by others.
Our Occupation Gives Us a Sense of Self–Our jobs and what we do for a living give us a sense of self.
Our Families and Family Relationships Give Us a Sense of Self--Our wives or husbands, our parents and other relatives, all contribute to our sense of self.
Our Past Gives Us a Sense of Self–Things that have happened to us in the past and things that people may have said about us in the past may contribute to our sense of self.

When you get to know people, they will constantly be telling you about themselves and various things they have done. I have heard people brag about being the best free-thrower on their basketball team, setting local records for shot put, getting the best score in their school on a standardized test, dating the homecoming queen, and more–often forty or more years after all this occurred. Why? These people’s sense of self is intertwined with things that they achieved decades ago. It is who they are and who they consider themselves to be. Most of us rarely develop our sense of self deliberately. As children, we may further develop the characteristics for which our parents give us positive feedback, because we naturally seek acceptance, love, and protection from the people who provide us care. As we grow older, we do the same thing with the schools we attend and within our peer groups, where we also seek acceptance and protection. We may have different senses of self with our peers than we have at home. We may have a different sense of self on the athletic field than we have off the athletic field. In addition, our motivation may be affected by our sense of self. If we are told we are very smart by others, we may study more and work harder in school, due to having a sense of self that is strongly related to our academic skills. If we are given the impression that a certain behavior will improve our sense of self then we will likely engage in this behavior. Recently my wife and I have started watching a television show called Bait Car. The show is about the police parking a nice car in a bad neighborhood with the keys in it. The car always gets stolen on the show, and the police have a method for turning off the car as the car thieves are speeding away. In most instances, there is more than one person involved in the theft, and sometimes kids talk other kids into stealing the car. The kid that ultimately steals the car usually does so because he wants to be accepted by the other kids. In some neighborhoods and around certain people, our sense of self might be related to committing crimes in order to be accepted. What is inside of you, what you feel and believe may be entirely different from what the rest of the world is telling you. If you have a strong sense of self, you can overcome nearly any obstacle out there without being concerned with anything–except for what is inside of you, what you feel, and what you believe. We all think about ourselves and our lives in a certain way, and this ultimately ends up controlling the future of our lives. Our beliefs about ourselves have a tremendous amount to do with what ends up happening to us, what we accomplish, and the quality of our life. Inside each and every one of us there needs to be an understanding of who we are. Our sense of self underlies our internal strength as human beings, and it enables us to accomplish what we desire. Our sense of self needs to give us the ability to power through–no matter what others may say about us, and no matter what sort of feedback we may get from the world. Developing a strong sense of self enables us to be happier and more successful and to live better lives. Unfortunately, most of us do not live our lives in accordance with our own sense of self and, instead, our sense of self is based too much on what others are doing out in the world, what others have, and what others say about us–these are externals that are irrelevant to what is really inside of us. If you have a strong sense of self, then what you do for a living, your past, your religion, your parents, your affiliations, your recognized abilities, and more should not affect your thoughts about what you can accomplish. Having a powerful sense of self is going to make all the difference in your life. You need to understand that your thoughts about yourself and your capabilities need to come from what is inside of you, not from societal structures that may have led you to believe who you are. THE LESSON A powerful sense of self will make all the difference in your life. You must understand that your sense of yourself and your capabilities come from inside of you, not from the external forces that have brought you to your current place in life. What you feel internally might be completely different from what the world is telling you, and you must learn to focus on the former rather than the latter.

Plato’s Allegory of the Cave and Taking Your Thoughts and Life Out of the Shadows

Harrison Barnes — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 05:01:27 +0000

One of the greatest 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. The 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 an 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 the 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 stationery. 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 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 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 than 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 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 in 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 LESSON You must learn to see the world differently in order to find a job, change your life’s direction, and become the person that you want to be. Take advantage of the opportunities that are in front of you. The people who have achieved incredible success over the years where those who stepped out of their comfort zones and discovered new ways of doing things. The potential rewards for stepping out of your comfort zone are huge.

The Kick-Ass Marketing Secret of the Most Successful Job Applicants and Employees

Harrison Barnes — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 05:01:27 +0000

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. 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 managers 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 nucleus 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 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 all 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. THE LESSON Just as a Unique Selling Position (USP) is important to sell a product, your own USP is vital for marketing yourself to potential employers. You must define your USP before even creating your resume, as it comprises the basic product that you are trying to sell in your interview. Focus your USP on a specific niche, for which there is market demand, and make it thoroughly persuasive.

The Most Important Person You Communicate With is Yourself

Harrison Barnes — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 05:01:31 +0000

“The mind can make a heaven out of hell or a hell out of heaven”

-John Milton

Several years ago, I was home after graduating from college and I met a guy who was friends with my girlfriend’s brother. He had graduated from Yale University a year or two before and was driving a truck all around Detroit delivering meat to restaurants. He typically drove this meat truck from 4:00am until noon each day. He got paid in cash at the end of each day by his boss. He had been the first person from the public school he had attended to go to Yale in three decades, had been a star football player in high school and college, and was an all-around great guy. What I noticed about this guy was that he was probably one of the happiest guys I have ever encountered. He did not drink or use drugs and he worked out every day. He had lots of friends and got along with everyone extremely well. When this guy saw people he beamed a smile at them and made them feel very good about themselves. As I got to know this guy, I realized most of his friends from college were currently off at law school, or medical school, working on Wall Street, or pursuing higher degrees. I found it incredible that this guy was so happy driving a meat truck. He seemed to have absolutely no ambition to do anything else. He loved driving the meat truck. In fact, I would not be surprised if he were still driving a meat truck to this day. This guy was very interested in other people and seemed to love to sit down with me and discuss my goals and what I wanted to do with my life. He would then offer me very intelligent insights into various career paths and moves he thought I could benefit from making. Whenever I saw this guy he beamed. He appeared to love everyone in the world. What was so amazing to me about this guy was that he was driving a meat truck. A couple of years later when I ran into one of his friends he was still driving the meat truck. He loved driving a meat truck. This is what made him happy. Based on the kind of people he went to college with, I am confident that no one else in his class ended up driving a meat truck (much less around Detroit). But this guy loved driving the meat truck. I can imagine what people must have been saying about this guy’s career choice of meat truck driver:

You have more potential.
You are wasting your talent.
You should go to graduate school.
You should find a normal job.
You should at least be a supervisor of meat truck drivers.

This guy was having none of that. He was listening to his heart and doing what he wanted to do. What made him so special in my mind was the way he communicated with himself. For him, driving a meat truck was a huge victory of sorts and something that really represented what he wanted to do and be at that point in his life-or permanently, for all I know. He was not allowing what other people undoubtedly thought to influence him. Instead, he was influenced only by what he felt was the best use of his time and what made him happy. When I look back on this guy and the people I have known who have gone on to do incredibly important things, I think that he is probably one of the more successful people I have ever known. The reason I think he is so successful is because of the way he communicated with himself. He communicated with himself in a way that made him happy. I have no idea what was going through his mind; however, I bet his thought processes went something like this:

I love being outside when it is cold in the morning and there is no one else out there.
I love being able to be at peace with my thoughts when I am driving.
I love not having to be involved in office politics.
I love getting the opportunity to lift things and exercise.
I love the people I work with and talking about simple things.
I am so grateful I am not sitting in an office every day.
I cannot believe how much fun this is compared to hanging around with a bunch of boring intellectuals.
I am so lucky to be getting paid in cash.
Driving a huge truck like this is a blast.
I am so lucky to be able to have my entire day free after I finish work each day at noon.

You can see what this guy probably thought about his situation. I am not sure of this because I never did ask him. But the power he had that so many people do not is that he knew how to communicate with himself in a positive way. One experience that offered one of the most stunning contrasts I can ever remember was when I started operating my asphalt business in college out of the inner city of Detroit. For one summer I had hired all of my workers out of a drug rehabilitation center in Detroit where my mother’s boyfriend sat on the board. Through the people I met at this center I started to meet many other people around Detroit who were not affiliated with the drug rehabilitation center but who came to work for me. I became so attached to the area that I actually moved down into one of the worst areas of Detroit and lived there for several summers. Incredibly, I actually believed that it was a happier place in many respects than the all-white, middle-class suburb of Grosse Pointe not too far away where I was from. In contrast, Detroit was almost 100 percent black. These were completely different worlds. The level of poverty that I saw in these families in Detroit was not extreme–people were just very poor. Most of the houses that poor people around Detroit live in are houses that were probably pretty nice in the 1950s and 1960s but had not been painted or worked on since that time. There is a lot of peeling paint and gutters falling down. Inside the house, the carpet is worn through in many spots. Holes are patched in walls. Buckets sit beneath various areas of the room. Window coverings are torn but still there. When I would meet these families I was always amazed that the people seemed so happy. I worked seven days a week in my asphalt business and spent 12-14 hours a day with the people I worked with from Detroit, and they all seemed very happy for the most part as well. In fact, the people I was meeting around Detroit seemed in most respects a lot happier than the people I was meeting from the suburb of Grosse Pointe. I realize that this may seem a little difficult to believe; however, I largely felt this was true. The people I was meeting in Detroit lived in neighborhoods where everyone seemed to know one another and socialized a lot. They were not ashamed of being poor, and they typically moved around from family members’ houses to friends’ houses at night. It was a completely different culture. Everyone knew who the bad people were– the drug dealers and the gangsters– and most people were removed from that. This is a different story and not something that is important, but I would say that I believe the people that I met there were more connected in many respects than the people I met in the suburbs. They did not seem to worry about stuff as much. What I saw in Detroit was that, like the guy I met from Yale, people were not looking to assign a negative meaning to everything. They did not have as many rules about how life should be, and they did not judge themselves by those rules. Surrounded by poverty and a lifestyle that most people in America would abhor, the people I met were happy, always laughing, and close with each other. I think the people who had the fewest rules about how they should be living life, were the happiest. People became unhappiest on the street when they started believing they needed to be powerful or exceptional. The people who did this are the ones who became drug dealers and gangsters. In the area I was working in, the people who had ambitions like this were also the ones who almost always ended up either being killed or going to prison. Accordingly for many, a lifestyle of simplicity was far more preferable. When you are spending your days working with people who socialize with people who make their living on the street, you start to pick up ways new ways of thinking. One of the things that I heard and learned was that when you start trying to be a big deal you often get smacked down (i.e., killed) or sent away. The drug rehabilitation centers, community groups and other organizations around Detroit were in many cases telling people how to communicate with themselves in the most effective ways in order to be happy. I think the people I saw who stayed out of the gang and drug culture had learned the way to really communicate with themselves most effectively. What I learned back then was that a lot of the quality of our life is a product of how we communicate with ourselves. The quality of our life and our happiness is largely the result of the meanings that we give our lives and the things that happen to us. The more rules we have about the way things should be, the more unhappy we are likely to be. Rules are often our enemy. The most unhappy people I have ever met in my life have most often been the most intelligent people. They see the world around them in a way which is not helpful to their happiness. If someone says something to them, instead of taking it as a positive comment, they will take it as a negative comment and get extremely angry and flustered. If they hear a piece of news that does not sound important one way or another, instead of not reacting to the news they hear they allow themselves to get flustered. All around them the world looks like a complete war zone and they are taking in peoples comments, looks and so forth and interpreting them in dangerous, harmful ways. One time when I was in law school I took a course called Psychiatry and the Law, and I had the opportunity to work inside of a psychiatric institute where murderers and others were evaluated by a state psychiatrist to see if the State should put them on death row. I would sit behind a mirrored glass and a psychiatrist or team of psychiatrists interviewed a given murderer about his crime. What I noticed in my limited exposure to this was that when a murder was committed, the person often committed the murder for reasons that made no sense but were, instead, related to how they interpreted things. For example, in one murder two men were sitting around the home of one of their girlfriends. They needed money to buy drugs so they went out and robbed a liquor store. When they got back from robbing the liquor store and buying drugs the girlfriend asked them where they had been and they told her they had been out buying liquor. Later that evening the three watched the news and there were details about the liquor store robbery. The woman watched with the men (not knowing they had been the ones who robbed the liquor store) and then went to bed. After she went to bed the two men continued to drink and do drugs and decided that the reason she went to bed was because the woman must suspect them both of the robbery. They believed she would report them to the police in the morning. They convinced themselves of this and then went and killed her with a baseball bat and bedpost, put her dead body in the trunk of her car, and drove her car into a lake. The murderer I saw interviewed, had an exceptionally high, near genius level IQ. He admitted in the interview that what he believed at the time did not make sense. He was simply misinterpreting what something represented. This is craziness, but it is also the exact same type of craziness that many of us communicate to ourselves on a daily basis. We tell ourselves that something represents something that it does not. This is a serious issue that holds us back to an incredible and profound degree. It is our communication with ourselves about what something represents that often makes us unhappy and prevents us from making the absolute most of our potential. Imagine what your life would be like if you took every slight (imagined or otherwise) and, instead of getting upset, interpreted it in a positive way. They way we feel about our lives and the world is 100% due to the meaning that we give to what is happening to us. If you master your communication with yourself, you master your life. You need to know how to communicate with yourself. People who do not communicate with themselves properly are continually in a stressed state. You need to communicate with yourself in a way that makes you feel good about yourself, not bad. The reason I think the most intelligent people are most often the most unhappy is that they can see so much meaning in everything and they continually interpret this meaning in a way that works against them. Communication most often breaks down due to differing perceptions of what precisely is meant by someone. In your job it is exceptionally important that you are consistently interpreting things in a positive manner and not a negative matter. And if you are having a difficult time finding a job you need to do the same thing. Positive energy begets more positive energy. I want so much for you to be happy and have the life you are entitled to and deserve. Your life begins and ends in your mind and how you communicate with yourself. THE LESSON Your happiness and quality of life depend largely on the meanings that your ascribe to the things around you, so you must communicate with yourself in a way that makes you feel positive, not negative. You must interpret your life’s events in a way that makes you feel good about yourself rather than otherwise.

Finding a Job in a Down Market

Harrison Barnes — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 15:01:59 +0000

I made a video recently called “Job Search Secrets for a Recession,” which discussed the best way to locate a position during a recession. In my experience, the best way to find a job is and always has been to approach the widest variety of employers possible. There is another aspect to finding a job in a down economy, however, which is even more important: your own psyche. The psychological aspect of finding a job is what slows most people down in their search. People get depressed and stop taking action. This is not the right way to find a job. Finding a job requires a specific state of mind. When you get hired, someone is spending money to give you a job. People need to be inspired to spend money. The person who gets hired is the one who is able to inspire the employer (whether it is for a government job, sales job, education job, or otherwise). To be an effective job seeker, you need to put yourself in the right state of mind to get hired. This means constantly thinking of all that is possible and, specifically, what you yourself can achieve. You must bring a lot of enthusiasm to your work, and you should picture and present yourself as being successful. One of the best books I’ve read on this subject is Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich. This book makes very clear the true power our mind has over the circumstances of our lives. You need to think and aim high in order to rise above and overcome the obstacles in front of you. If you are employed and are dissatisfied with your current job, giving in to negativity is one of the worst things you can do. When employers are faced with a bad job market, the first thing they do is differentiate the people who like being on the job from those who do not. Employers tend to keep the people who have good attitudes and get rid of the people with bad ones. My career advice is that a positive attitude can be your best asset. In order to find that positivity, each day you should ask yourself what you are grateful for and concentrate on the answer.

The Most Important Thing You Can Have Is Faith

Harrison Barnes — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 06:20:23 +0000

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.