The Importance of Planting Seeds: My Experience With the Scientologists

“And when much people were gathered together, and were come to him out of every city, he spake by a parable: a sower went out to sow his seed: and as he sowed, some fell by the way side; and it was trodden down, and the fowls of the air devoured it. And some fell upon a rock; and as soon as it was sprung up, it withered away, because it lacked moisture. And some fell among thorns; and the thorns sprang up with it, and choked it. And other fell on good ground, and sprang up, and bore fruit a hundredfold. And when he had said these things, he cried, He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.”—Luke 8:4-8.

For several years I underwent a ritual throughout various suburbs of Detroit that year after year resulted in my dramatically increasing my income and customer base in the asphalt business. This ritual became effective year after year due to the power of “planting seeds” in my prospects’ minds. I have continued to use the power of “planting seeds” throughout my career to start businesses and expand various businesses year after year. When you plant seeds in prospects’ minds, they are far more likely to think of you when a need comes up in the future than if you do not. An extremely effective secret to getting a job, getting a raise and more is based on planting seeds in your prospects’ minds. In this case, your prospects should be the potential employers you would like to work for as well as your current employer if you are seeking more money or responsibility.

So few people understand the power of planting seeds, however. The inability to plant seeds is one of the biggest weaknesses of most people in the world–whether they are businesses, or individuals seeking a job or advancement. So many people out there are simply so short term in their focus that they are only looking for instant gratification. If someone or something cannot provide them instant gratification they are not interested. This movement between one form of instant gratification to the other is something that hurts businesses and people.

Yesterday I walked into a store called “Chrome Hearts” in the Malibu Country Mart in Malibu. I have been looking for a money clip for the past few years because my current money clip is getting near the end of its life. When I walked into the store a beautiful woman walked up to me and asked if she could help me. I told her I was interested in looking at money clips. She told me they had two sizes “small and large” and I told her I was interested in seeing the small.

“It’s $825,” she said.

“$825! Wow that’s expensive,” I said. There was no way in hell I was going to spend $825 for a money clip; however, I thought it might be something I could ask my wife for when we had our anniversary in a few years, for example.

“I guess not,” she said rudely. She then disappeared and completely lost interest in helping me and turned around and left me standing there. I was still interested in seeing the money clip but was extremely turned off by her attitude. I will never go into the store again. Had the sales person showed me the money clip, let me touch it and been nice to me I would have likely found my wife and brought her back and suggested to her this might make a good anniversary gift for me one day. Instead, I was completely turned off and turned away.

In my asphalt business, I had a tradition that I would always leave a brochure with every single house in the neighborhoods I worked in once a year. It did not matter if the owner was home or not, I always left a brochure. When they answered the door I also went through the same routine each year.

“I can help your driveway,” I’d tell them, my teeth gleaming in the sunlight, my khaki pants and white oxford shirt fresh from the dry cleaners (heavy starch), my hair slicked back smelling like mangos. In front of their house I would have my Chevy Suburban with its emergency yellow roof beacon twirling. This was important. Sometimes people would rush outside and grab their children and hustle them inside.

“Is there a gas leak in the neighborhood!?” people would sometimes shout from their porches in alarm.

“No, but if you don’t do something about your driveway…”

I would always hand the homeowners a copy of my brochure. The cover to the brochure warned:

Less than 48 hours from now it will be too late to seal coat your driveway. We only come by once a year! Less than three months from now, the Michigan winter may kill your driveway.Call 1-800-SEAL-NOW and your driveway will be sealed in the next 48 hours. Guaranteed. Don’t let ignorance let you make a decision you’ll forever regret!

In addition to the brochure, I always included some helpful information about asphalt that I had written that year. It might be something about how to take care of your asphalt, tips about how to hire someone like me and more. For years I left this information at thousands of peoples’ homes regardless of whether or not they were at home. Every year for almost a decade I performed the same ritual with the same brochure. In the first year of doing this ritual a lot of people had me do their driveways. After several years of doing this people actually would rush up to my truck like it was an ice cream truck to make sure that I did their driveways. They felt like they already knew me because I had been giving them information and dropping hints to them about doing there asphalt for years. I had been dropping seeds. By the time I stopped doing this business I had people practically throwing money at me begging me to do the work.

The secret I had been following was planting seeds. None of my competitors ever planted seeds like I did. Their seed may have consisted of a small advertisement in the Yellow Pages. By giving people useful information I was consistently planting seeds and by following a ritual I made sure that my potential clients also knew how to act.

I have managed and run a legal recruiting firm for almost a decade. During that time, the substantial majority of people who have become recruiters in the company are the same people I have placed. While I hate to say this, these hires have for the most part come from my ability to also plant seeds. On the few occasions when one of the attorneys I have been working with has shown promise to be an exceptional legal recruiter I have said something like:

“You should consider legal recruiting in the future. I think you would be really good at it.” Invariably, one or two years later most of the people I have said this to in the past have called me and told me they were interested in recruiting. Some of them are subsequently then hired. This is all the result of planting seeds.

Another thing about the exercise of planting seeds is that by the time these attorneys come to me to discuss being recruiters they have already spent the past couple of years thinking about being legal recruiters. Consequently, they generally hit the ground running and are far more effective than the average recruiter. In addition, they are more committed and better at their jobs.

Think about the times you have planted seeds in peoples’ minds and the results this has had. Think about the times that people have planted seeds for you.

When I am working with a candidate seeking a legal job I believe one of my greatest skills is planting seeds. When very good recruiters are deep into their work, they have a very good sense of where their candidates are likely to get interviewed and hired. I will start saying things to my candidates like this:

• “If you can get a job at this firm you will really have done something special.”
• “You would really fit in well at this firm.”
• “I think you are going to do the best you have ever done in an interview when you interview with this firm.”
• “They are really going to like you at this firm.”

This almost always works. The candidate I am dealing with ends up going to the firm I am promoting in their candidate’s interest. This is in all cases the result of planting seeds.

When I was 16 years old there were a bunch of advertisements running on television showing volcanoes (representing breakthroughs) and saying stuff like “Increase your IQ by 30 points–page 124!” The promise was that if you read a book called Dianetics by L. Ron Hubbard all sorts of miraculous things would happen to you. At the time I was incredibly motivated and worried about being able to get into Harvard College. This was beginning to look like all but an impossibility given my performance in chemistry, for one. To this day I do not know how I passed that class. In any event, I picked up Dianetics and read it. None of the promised changes happened and the book did not make a tremendous amount of sense to me. At the time I knew nothing about Scientology but was very interested in anything that could help me pass high school chemistry and get into Harvard College.

I am not proud to admit that I used to purchase clothes at Goodwill when I was in high school. One day I was in Royal Oak, Michigan after school and wandered out of the Goodwill with a sweater or something I had purchased for a few dollars. I came across a little Scientology store front that had a sign out front that stated “Free Personality Test!!” This was too much to pass up. Since I had also tried to decipher some L. Ron Hubbard recently in the book with the volcano on front, I decided to take the test. I went inside and took the personality test. As I was waiting for the test to be graded, I was taken into a basement, seated on a plastic fold out chair and shown a film about the evils of psychiatry. There appeared to be a family living in the basement and several children scurried out of the room as they prepared an old projector for me to watch the film.  I still do not remember much about it to this day; however, I do remember something about a football player getting horribly injured and people saying stuff like “he’ll never walk again!” when the football player was unconscious. Sure enough, the guy never walked again after being treated by a succession of evil psychiatrists but did walk after being introduced to Scientology.

After some time the guy who had given me the test came down to speak with me and bring me up to his office. “Are you sure you read Dianetics?” he asked me.

“Yeah, I read it,” I said matter of factly.

“Well your test is among the worst we have ever seen. Your graphs are alarming. I will go over them with you right now.”

He sat me down and explained to me that I needed an emergency Scientology intervention because a bunch of psychological things were wrong with me. It must have taken him an hour to tell me how messed up he thought I was. Then he started asking me if I could somehow come up with $2,000. I needed something called “auditing” and a few courses immediately or I was going to crash and burn. He asked me what my parents did and if they would be interested in paying for all of the services I needed.

“How much is all this going to cost to fix these issues?” I asked him.

“Well $2,000 to just get you functioning normally and at least $30,000 to effectively address the issues.”

He showed me a couple of tin cans hooked up to something called an “E-meter” that they planned on using on me (if I came up with $2,000).

Given the fact that I was in the position of shopping for school clothes at Goodwill, I knew there was absolutely no way my parents were going to give me $2,000 to give to the Scientologists. Since I could not afford the services, I became interested in learning about the guy I was speaking with. I found it fascinating that he was living in a store with what appeared to be a couple of other families and was telling me I was screwed up. He told me he had read Dianetics while on a ship in the navy and this had changed his life. He volunteered to work for the Scientologists after this great read. Between periodically telling me about himself, he encouraged me to investigate other options for coming up with $2,000, such as selling my car. That was a nonstarter. While I was understandably upset with the results of the personality test, I knew there was absolutely nothing I could do.

I had nothing to give.

A week or so after this I received my first correspondence from the Church of Scientology. It was a brochure or a book or something. This was 1986. Over the past 22 years I have moved at least 15 times (more times than I can count). I have moved to numerous different states, lived in dorms in various schools, lived in various apartments and homes. Within a few weeks of arriving at these addresses correspondence from the Church of Scientology suddenly appears. They send me voluminous amounts of information and it just keeps coming–in 2000-2007 I received information from them almost every single day. While the information has slowed down recently, I am confident that they have communicated with me via mail thousands and thousands of times.

At least three or four or my assistants have tried to cancel the mail from the Church of Scientology but they cannot. My ex-wife got so upset with all the mail she wrote them several letters and was at one point asking me to sue them when I was practicing law.

I do not have opinions about the Scientologists one way or another. I have actually known some who were good people and I am sure they do a lot of good for some people. What is so astonishing to me, however, is how aggressively they have been “planting seeds” with me for over two decades. This is an example of being extremely proactive. The more proactive you are and the more seeds you plant, the better you are likely to do in the long run.

What were the Scientologists attempting to accomplish with all this mail? While you would have to ask them, to me it appeared as if they were doing everything within their power to convince me that if I ever had a problem, or needed a new religion, I should think of them. They wanted top of mind awareness. They have succeeded in getting top of mind awareness with me. I am writing about them right now.

How is this relevant to you and your career? You need to plant seeds and make sure that the people around you are aware of what you have to offer. You can do this in a ton of ways. You can send people copies of articles you have written or read, that are applicable to them and many more things. The point is you want to insure that you are always there for the people who are your potential employers. Top of mind awareness is huge.

One example of something that can be very effective is after you interview with someone and find out something the person may be interested in, you can cut out a small article and send it to the person with a note that you thought of him or her while reading it. This sends a message that you care. Planting seeds is extremely effective and is something that helps people remember you. Remember, the world is huge and you need to do everything within your power to stick out.

Treating Your Career Like A Small Business

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

Be a good business person and your career may go far, ignore the business realities and you are likely to run into trouble. I have been a recruiter for several years and have seen countless attorneys “go out of business” because they did not run their careers well. In fact, this is something I see on a daily basis while reviewing resumes of out of work attorneys. Just as companies make bad decisions that result in them going out of business, people also make bad decisions with their careers that result in them going out of business and finding themselves unemployed.

• They may choose to concentrate on a profession that becomes obsolete–They are trying to sell a product no longer in demand.
• They may have resumes that do not serve them well–They are not presenting/”packaging” their products correctly.
• They may choose to work in an area where there are no jobs–They are trying to sell a product in a geographic area where there is no demand.
• They may have done something bad that makes people not want to hire them–They have a bad “brand”.
• They may be too old to get a job–People are “tired” of their product.
• They apply to only a few jobs and do not get a job–They are not marketing their brands to a large enough demographic.

Your career is a business and you are a product. You need to understand that using simple business principles to market yourself is something that can be of massive benefit to you.

Before I go further, there are a couple of other things I would like to cover. First, I believe that working for other people is an incredibly smart thing. When you think about your career and working for other people as a business, you will quickly realize that there are few businesses that offer higher pay for less risk, the ability to shut off work when you are not there, the ability to leverage others’ assets as your own, the ability to be part of a social network and the ability to concentrate your efforts on one thing.

Working for other people has a tremendous number of rewards and these rewards are both psychological, financial and otherwise. When you are working for someone else you are in business for yourself but allowing your employer to take most of the risk. Another secret of working for other people is that you can take advantage of economies of scale and inefficiency. If you go to work for a large enough company, the company will hopefully be throwing off huge amounts of money with thousands of workers and you can claim your desired share of this as your compensation. For some strange reason, however, when I meet people at various public functions (and elsewhere) they all start telling me how they want to start their own businesses. Whether they are doctors, accountants or lawyers, everyone seemingly wants to start their own business. I do not understand this.

When you meet people who have little education and start hugely successful businesses and become fabulously wealthy, they rarely want their children to follow in their footsteps. They want them to go to school and become professionals and work for other people. There are a lot of reasons for this–the respect, the stress, predictability, the ability to be involved with large groups of people, the ability to be part of society and more. The point I am trying to make to you is that working for other people is something that the most successful people in the world want for others. It is good to work for other people.

Many Americans seem to have a belief that it is much better to work for themselves and stay fixated on this idea throughout their careers. The truth is when you are working for someone else you are actually already in business. Working for others is a very smart and shrewd choice for many people and if you were a business person it would be advisable in most instances to work for others rather than yourself. Someone who makes a $100,000 a year working for a company is no different than someone with a $1,000,000 a year at a company who is clearing a 10% profit margin. This is an impressive profit margin and something that not many people could accomplish, but being able to step into a job where you are guaranteed this profit margin is extremely smart. When you work for others there is often less risk; other people are risking capital and not you. And if you choose the company right, you may have a lot of security.

A few years ago I was meeting with a lawyer friend of mine who had a salary of $200,000 a year, who was (like many people I spend time with) telling me in detail how interested he was in starting a business. The more I thought about it, the more incredible I realized making a salary like this is. He was sitting there talking about how he wanted to start one business after another. One business he wanted to start was a winery. Another business was a dry cleaners. The list of businesses he was interested in went and on.

“What sort of profit margins are you interested in making?” I asked him.

“At least 10%” he said.

“Well, in order to make $200,000 a year you are going to have to bring in at least $2,000,000 a year. If a bottle of wine sells for $5 wholesale that means you are going to have to make and bottle over 400,000 wine bottles to generate the $2,000,000 needed to make your profit margin.”

He gave this idea some thought and is still practicing law today. There are many people who dream of starting businesses when they would be far better off not dealing with the idea of a business at all.

Running businesses is hard. Most businesses fail.

How hard is it running a business?

A couple of years ago I hired a now world famous executive consultant to come and look at my companies. At the time the companies I was running were generating several millions of dollars a month and had over 700 employees. The coach sat me down and for a full day (and $40,000) lectured me about everything that was wrong with the companies I was running.

“You would be a good CEO,” I said. “If you know so much about this why don’t you try going to work for a company,” I said.

There was a pause and then the guy said something I will never forget.

“I could never run a real business. I have never been able to fire people. I just cannot do it.”

It occurred to me that here I was paying someone thousands of dollars an hour and he did not even have the nuts to be able to fire people. Running a business involves all sorts of things like this. You must be willing to take the unpopular position for the benefit of the company and consistently do this regardless of the consequences to your psyche. And then there are budgets, payroll and all sorts of other things that most people do not even think about. The stress of running a business is incredible. There are a million small things like this that come up when you run a business as a business owner. When you limit your business exposure to your career and what you are doing on a day-to-day basis, you are much better off.

Just understand that when you are working for someone else you still need to run your career like a business. I would like you to consider the following business realities of your career.

First, that your career, like any business, needs to have a marketable product. This means that you need to be in a profession that is marketable in the geographic area you are in. There are countless professions that are marketable in some geographic areas and not others. For example, it would not be profitable to be a cowboy in New York City, but this would work in rural Wyoming. It would not be profitable to be a financial analyst in rural Wyoming, but it would be profitable to do this in New York City. Furthermore, the profession you are in can be under attack from various forces (including the economy) at various points in time. If you were a computer programmer 15 years ago you had a very bright future. In today’s economy, however, this is not necessarily the case. Many of these jobs have been outsourced to India, Romania and other locations where they can be done more cheaply. At all points in time you need to be asking yourself whether or not you have a marketable product.

Second, you need to understand the importance of your “brand” to marketing your product. Everything you do in your career will have an impact on your ultimate brand. The better your brand is, the more in demand your product will be. The best brands typically work in the most competitive markets. The worst brands typically work in the least competitive markets. For example, if you go to Harvard Business School you are going to have a better chance of getting a job with a top bank in New York City than you would if you went to University of Phoenix at night for an executive MBA. This is not to be insulting to this school, it is just to point out a reality that you need to consider when you market yourself.

Third, you need to know how to market your product for the maximum possible success. When you market yourself you need to put your brand before the largest possible market to make the most “sales”–i.e., to get the most interviews and job offers. You need to know how to position yourself and your resume. You need to understand what to say in order to impress the employer in the correct way.

A. Your Career, Like Any Business, Needs a Marketable Product

Every business needs to have a marketable product in order to succeed. While businesses can sell all sorts of things, your business is selling yourself and what you do. This is something that will need to be carefully managed throughout your career. It is important to realize that when we are in the workforce we are all like small business people. We are selling a product (which is ourselves) and need to follow certain rules in order to sell this product effectively.

The first thing you need to consider is that your product needs to be marketable. A lot of my family is from Toledo, Ohio. They are house painters and do other sorts of blue collar jobs. From the time I was around 10 until I was around 17 or 18 they kept telling me I should be a machinist. The told me about how they knew various machinists and how well they did as machinists. One machinist had his own boat, another machinist just redid his home. Being a machinist was a very good profession 20+ years ago in the Midwest. You could work for auto companies and other companies that were doing work that required the skills of a machinist. Today, it is almost impossible to find jobs as machinist in the Midwest. If I had chosen that career path I would be “out of business.”

What do most machinists do when they lose a job? They try and find another job as a machinist. If you are working in an area where auto companies are closing and there are no opportunities for machinists (like Toledo, Ohio) you might have to wait a very long time indeed before you get a job. The problem with finding a job is not you–it is that you do not have a marketable product. Lots of people do not have marketable products and yet continue to look for jobs when their product is not marketable.

When people lose a job the path they follow is often ass backward. They do not think about themselves as a product in need of a market. You can only sell what people are buying. You need to have something that is in demand. You can never cling to something that once was. I have seen so many careers ruined by this very idea.

I know someone who, 12 months ago, was in a field that was very much in demand. It no longer is. He was making upwards of $70,000 a year at this profession. Now the most he can make if he continues doing this for a living is $12 to $14 an hour. He goes into every interview and tells people he expects to make $70,000 a year. The market for what he is doing around his geographic area has gone away, and to the extent it has, he can no longer sell himself for that amount. This is just the way it is.

If I was a machinist in the Midwest I might try looking for a job in other areas around the country where the skills of machinists are in demand. I would get the hell out of Toledo, Ohio if I realized there were no opportunities. If there were not opportunities for machinists around the United States, I might consider another career. Or, I might consider how to package myself differently.

Since I am in the legal career industry, I have recently witnessed something quite remarkable that I think you can learn from. During the real estate boom in the United States, a ton of small real estate firms became overwhelmed with real estate work. Companies and others were purchasing an incredible amount of real estate and this generated a lot of work for these real estate firms. About 18 months ago this work started dramatically slowing down to the extent that most of these firms started aggressively letting go of real estate attorneys. Things got so bad I was under the impression that most of these real estate firms would start going out of business. The crisis they were facing was incredible and beyond anything that had happened in the past. I was not sure what was going to happen. Recently, something incredible has happened with many of these real estate law firms. They have started representing to their clients (real estate companies) that they have great skill in bankruptcy involving property. Now, many of these bankruptcy law firms are thriving again and doing well. They are actively hiring. This is a remarkable reversal of fortune and something I certainly did not expect to see. This is because these law firms have figured out how to have a marketable product.

As a business person and operator of a small business you are going to be faced with countless decisions as to how you operate your own business. You need to remember that every decision you make will determine your marketability.

Everyone has a myriad of choices about how they operate their businesses. They may brand themselves as a big company employee, small company employee, government employee, you name it. Whether you are working on your own or for a large firm, you are always in charge of your career.

There are aspects of your product that will never change. Wherever you are in your career right now, you simply cannot change the things you have done in the past. This includes your education to date, performance in school, the first company you worked at (or second, or third), your current skills and any variety of things that you have done in your career. However, if you look around, there are literally thousands of small businesses operating. The pedigree of these businesses does not matter so much as whether they are in business and how well they are operating.

You need to look at the field you are in like the business world as well. Whatever type of business you are running, it must have a marketable product. If you are a computer programmer who programs in PERL, you have a product. You will be able to sell your product in certain areas and with certain audiences better than others. For example, your programming skills will be more valuable in Silicon Valley, most likely, than rural Nebraska. The list goes on and on. Everything is about having a marketable product throughout your career in the area that you are working in.

The point of any business is to survive and, for many businesses, to grow. You need to consider the market for your skills and run your business accordingly. One of the most important aspects of running your business involves the type of work you do. If you are a sales person of premium automobiles, you help companies sell expensive cars. If you are an accountant, you will help people deal with tax issues. Whatever you do, it is important to understand that your product likely has more appeal (to the market) in some areas and points in time than others. Your objective is to get business and the decisions you make in this regard are important.

There are certain jobs that may be bad business to choose. For example, railroad law used to be a popular practice area for attorneys, but you would have a difficult time running a small business now that focused on such an antiquated type of law. Several years ago, corporate work was enormously in demand. Later, however, this market was doing horribly and corporate attorneys from top 10 law schools who performed well both in school and in high profile firms were, in some cases, looking for work for more than a year. Years later, corporate work was again available. For many small businesses/attorneys, corporate law would have been a bad choice for them to get into because there is no demand for that product. In this current economic climate, bankruptcy would be a more prudent venture for the business-minded attorney.

The list goes on an on. The point is that you need a marketable product.

Likewise, the geographic area you are in, the stability of your current employer and your opportunity for advancement at your current firm are all factors to keep in mind in operating your small business. These are all things that will have a bearing on whether or not your business will succeed.

Far too many people fail because they fail to adapt their business to the current economic climate. This is why most businesses out there end up failing. They simply fail to adapt.

B. The Importance of Your “Brand” to Marketing Your Product

When you are working in any profession, you need to have a good personal brand. The quality of your brand will determine a great deal about what happens to you. The quality of the work you do, your interpersonal relationships and a variety of other factors will determine the strength of your brand. The point is that all brands have certain attributes and over time you will develop a certain brand.

Companies spend an inordinate amount of money both protecting and developing their brands. There are certain things that come to mind when you think of any brand. For example, think of BMW or Chevy. Likewise, RC Cola creates a different thought than Coke. A brand is developed over time. The places you work, your practice area and all of the aforementioned factors will have a bearing on the quality of your brand.

Generally, better brands can charge more and have more interest directed towards them than poor brands. All of the rules of the business world apply to managing your own brand. You always need to be cognizant of how you want your brand to be viewed by the outside world and potential employers. Think through what type of brand you want carefully, and ensure that you manage that brand the best you can.

You are shaping your brand in so many ways, both by the things that you do and do not do. Your brand is shaped by the type of companies you have worked for, how long you have worked at these companies, the promotions or the demotions you have received, the awards you have received, the articles you have written and the general enthusiasm you have demonstrated for your job.

There are numerous things that shape your personal “brand,” which is the general perception employers have of you. You need to be conscious that everything you do is reflecting on this brand. Something I have seen a ton of in my career are employees who move around a lot–they move every one, two, or three years. Once you have done this enough times you and your brand will start getting a reputation as someone who cannot be trusted to work with the same employer for a long time. If you do the opposite, you will also get the reputation as someone who can be trusted and will remain with the same employer for a long length of time.

If you start out working for small, non-prestigious companies and gradually over the course of several years rise into more and more prominent positions and companies, you will get the impression as someone who is improving. Similarly, you will get the same reputation if you are consistently rising to higher and better positions with your employer over several years.

It is important to understand that everything you are doing has a major impact on your brand. You shape your brand by the choices you make. The reason your brand is so important is due to the fact that it will impact your ultimate marketability.

C. How to Market Your Product and Brand for Maximum Possible Success

As an attorney, consider hypothetically that your salary is $100,000 per year. Also consider that you are being billed out at approximately $200 per hour and expected to bill 2,000 hours a year in the law firm you are working in. This means that your small business is generating $400,000 per year and out of that amount you are “netting” $100,000. This is not bad from a business standpoint.

As a legal recruiter, I am not surprised that most attorneys want to go to the law firms that pay the most money and have the most prestige associated with them. These are all business decisions. If you are an attorney, over time you presumably would like the amount of money you make to increase. You would also like the percentage of the money you collect from your billings to increase. For example, if you generate $400,000 from your work, you would rather make $200,000 than $100,000, as in the prior example. You want to become a partner and earn more. The business game continues.

Everything that happens to your career is the result of selling your product on the marketplace. The amount of money you receive as your salary (i.e., the amount of money the market will pay) will be influenced by the type of brand you have. Hypothetically, you could have no education and start out as a clerk in a small firm. This is something thousands of people do each year. Then, several years later, you could be earning in excess of a million dollars per year leading the same company you started out in. To many people this may seem like an aberration. Nevertheless, this is not an aberration and it happens all the time. The reason this happens is because of how people ultimately (1) brand themselves and (2) market their brand.

Marketing is the single most important thing you can do for yourself and your career. Marketing is about how you package yourself, the things you say and the value the market perceives that you offer.

The point of this essay is not to act as a diatribe on marketing; however, a few comments on marketing should make a helpful point. When you market a product, you need to appeal to people on both an emotional and rational (cost) level. When marketing personal services-which your specific skills are-people tend to want to deal with people like themselves. It is for that reason that large companies typically prefer a certain type of employee, small law firms prefer a certain type of employee and certain types of clients (rich, poor and in between) prefer dealing with a certain type of employee. We have a tendency to want to deal with people like ourselves. Thus, your product is likely to be well accepted in some areas and not others.

I remember one thing when I was clerking for a federal judge and I had the opportunity to see different trial lawyers come into court and conduct trials. I also spent a year trying to write a book about personal injury attorneys several years ago and once again I made a similar observation. The one thing I noticed about the most effective personal injury attorneys was that they were nothing like big firm attorneys and almost never had big firm experience or top law school credentials. What they did know how to do was market themselves and their clients’ grievances to like-minded jurors. They also tended to be quite flamboyant in their marketing efforts, but that is another story.

In small towns all across America, there are very successful attorneys. In most cases, these attorneys grew up in the area and are similar to the people they do work for. What is most significant about the attorneys who are most successful in small towns, from those who are not, is their marketing ability. They fraternize in local clubs and bar associations. Stories circulate about their successes. All of this is marketing.

The same thing occurs in large law firms in big cities. Here, the marketing is confined to the law firm and getting clients to hire you as you advance in seniority. What is most significant, though, is that the marketing component and what the individual’s brand represents are always at the forefront.

The issue then is how you market yourself and advance your own career. While this may not be obvious, a large part of a recruiter’s job is helping people market themselves to employers. They know what the employers want to hear and how the attorney should say it. Virtually every week at our recruiting firms we get attorneys jobs at firms that I know they could not have gotten on their own. That is because we “packaged” the person to the employer in a certain way and told him/her what to say in order to portray the particular brand the firm is interested in.

What is so interesting about the work exceptional recruiters do is that none of what we do is dishonest. In fact, it is just knowing the market, the particular brand of the firm and what makes a person marketable to them. People need to be themselves, but also be aware of what the particular employer wants.

If you are looking for a position you need to keep the idea of marketing at the forefront of what you do and how you think about everything. You have a product to sell and in order to sell your product you must brand it and package it in the right way. In order to sell your product, and get the highest price for it, you also need to have the largest possible market. Everything I have done in my career is geared towards helping people market and package themselves. One service I recommend that anyone look at is Legal Authority (www.EmploymentAuthority.com), which can assist you in marketing yourself to the largest potential demographic of employers possible. It helps you professionally package yourself and get the highest price for your product. Two other companies I recommend are Hound.com and EmploymentCrossing.com, which can help you see the most openings.

You need to know what the market is for your product.

EmploymentCrossing is an exceptional way to learn about the market. Here, you can be aware of the market at all times and know exactly what is going on and who is hiring. EmploymentCrossing is your personal barometer of the market and shows you where you can market your product. The benefit of knowing this information at all times cannot be overemphasized. Think of your career like a product. You have invested a tremendous amount of time and expense creating your product. You may have spent upwards of $100,000 on your education to get to where you are today. (If you are not educated, you have likely spent years of your life learning a given skill.) If you had that much money in the stock market, my guess is that you would want to watch what is going on in the market at all times. Your career should not be any different. Do not lose your investment. Do not allow yourself to go out of business. Know where your product is marketable.

D. Conclusions

You are a product. Your career is a small business. Run it like a small business and realize the importance of your brand. Most importantly, realize you always need to have a market for your product. If you remember this, you will be well served throughout your career.

Practice Makes Perfect

A year or so ago I was at a wedding, and a very successful doctor started talking to me. I was very impressed with this doctor and already knew of him through several people before our meeting. He was involved in some fascinating and cutting-edge research I found quite interesting.

I love meeting people who are passionate about their careers because they give off so much energy. People who achieve amazing and significant success in any profession always have a lot of passion for what they do. If you allow them to, these people will talk your head off about what they are doing. They will show you their collection of books about the subject, debate various philosophies about what they are doing, and more. People who commit to something are the most exciting people in the world. They provide me with an incredible education. I wish everyone was committed to what they do.

In speaking to this doctor, however, I realized despite his incredible knowledge of what he was doing, he was not satisfied. “What I really want to do is start a business,” he told me. “That is what being successful is to me. I have a friend who is doing very well in the manufacturing industry now that steel prices are up.”

The manufacturing industry? Steel? Why would someone spend years going to medical school and becoming a successful researcher only to go into steel manufacturing? I am not saying this is the wrong thing to do. But when you are an expert in something, it is not always in your best interest to switch jobs completely.

I spent many hours of my career going to various law firms and meeting with successful attorneys. I would say in at least 25% of these meetings, the attorneys I met did the same thing as this doctor–they started talking about how they wanted to pursue careers in completely different professions. One memorable meeting was with a famous attorney in Los Angeles who told me about opening a chain of ice cream parlors on the other side of the country only to see them fail miserably. Of course they failed miserably! The man running them was a famous attorney involved in all sorts of high profile cases. How on earth could he be expected to also run a chain of ice cream parlors?

At this particular point in history, I know many people who’ve lost all their money and life savings by investing in real estate. They bought homes in Arizona, condominiums in Florida, and other properties for little or no money down. They jumped face first into the real estate game because they believed they would get rich. Most of these people taught high school, sold cars, or were accountants, for example. Of course they lost money in real estate! This was not their expertise and they knew nothing about it. I saw the same thing back in 2000 with the Internet stock crash. Back then, all sorts of people aggressively invested in these stocks and lost their shirts. These people did things like sell insurance, or own auto repair shops. Of course they lost their shirts! None of them had expertise in the stock market.

The point I am trying to make is you can never be in two places at the same time. You need to choose who you want to be and what you want to do. You can never become an expert in multiple things. You need to concentrate on doing one thing.

An excellent book I recently read is called “Outliers” by Malcom Gladwell. Gladwell examines the people who are able to achieve incredible and massive success in various callings. He looks at people like Bill Gates, the best lawyers in the United States, chess grandmasters, Mozart, Steve Jobs, the Beatles, professional hockey players, and others. Gladwell cites study after study describing the fact that people do not get really good at anything, at a world class level, until they have been doing it at least 10,000 hours. According to Gladwell:

“The idea that excellence at performing a complex task requires a minimum level of practice surfaces again and again in studies of expertise. In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: ten thousand hours.”

“The emerging picture from such studies is that ten thousand hours of practice is required to achieve the level of mastery associated with being a world-class expert–in anything,” writes neurologist David Levitin. “In study after study, of composers, of basketball players, fiction writers, ice skaters, concert pianists, chess players, master criminals, and what have you, this number comes up again and again. Of course, this doesn’t address why some people get more out of their practice sessions than others do. But no one has yet found a case in which true world-class expertise was accomplished in less time. It seems it takes the brain this long to assimilate all that it needs to know to achieve true mastery.”

I get very concerned when I think about people vacillating back and forth between various skill paths. Instead of choosing to do one thing, so many people spend their careers floating from job to job – each one different than the one before and requiring a completely different set of skills. There is nothing wrong with changing careers, of course, but the most important thing anyone can do is ensure they choose something and then focus on it completely. If you continue to change your mind, you will never develop true mastery.

One of the most amazing things I have seen in my life is people who become incredibly happy, successful, and rich by seeking out and doing simple jobs to which they have committed. The universe rewards commitment. Warren Buffet has become incredibly rich committing to one form of investing. Some people make their fortunes doing simple things you would not expect.

When I was an asphalt contractor, I knew a man who’d built a giant company putting hot tar in the cracks in roads all over Michigan. I know of another man who became very wealthy building pallets for the automotive industry. In college admissions, people with stand-out interests always do the best. I remember a high school teacher who talked about his students who’d gone to schools like Yale and Harvard, and how those students all had incredibly focused interests. Some were interested in bug collecting, another liked translating Japanese poetry, etc. The world rewards people with specialized interests who nurture that interest and continue to get better at those interests year after year.

One of the most unusual things I’ve witnessed is that most people are flirting with life and their careers. Instead of committing to a career and something, these people continue to dissipate their energies in many different directions. As a consequence, they never achieve anything near what they are capable of achieving. What are your capabilities? How much do you think you can achieve? The sky is the limit if you focus and continue to improve at something.

Why do I call focus “a law of the universe”? In the family unit, marriages, children and so forth typically only occur when two people decide to commit to one another and get married. People choose to focus on one another. This is a rule in virtually every culture in the world. It is almost as if the rule is saying life cannot begin until two people choose to focus. In your life, your career will never really begin until you choose to focus.

As a legal recruiter, I very quickly get a sense after looking at an attorney’s resume of how long it is likely to take for the person to get a job, and where. The most important factor determining an attorney’s future employability is his or her focus, beyond where they went to law school, their previous employer, or specialty. If the person has had several jobs in a short period of time, then employers will stay away (they know the person is unlikely to commit). If the person has flirted with other jobs in addition to practicing law, a smart employer will stay away. Employers are looking for commitment, and they want to make sure people accepting jobs with them are going to be committed to their company. Employers want their employees to use their commitment to help the company grow. The level of commitment legal employers look for is the same as in other professions. People want to hire people who are likely to do a job long-term.

Your life and career will change when you learn to commit to something over the long term.

The Importance of Fitting In

What You Will Learn Develop the ability to fit in – it is one of the single largest contributors, in both getting and keeping a job. Employers want to hire people who will embrace, on philosophical and moral levels, their approach towards business and the world. Your happiness and the success of your career depend on the ability to recognize when you fit in and when you do not.

One of the most persistent mistakes people make is not fitting in with their work environments. Fitting in enables you to both get and keep a job. In terms of what it takes to succeed in the long term, fitting in may actually be more important than your skill level. This little-known observation is lost on many people, and overlooking this can result in unhappy and unfulfilled careers. Conversely, being aware of this often results in very happy and fulfilling careers. The problem is that it is often the very best people and those with the best academics and technical skills that end up not fitting in.

Having been raised to believe that the true success is measured purely by how well people perform academically, many people enter the working world like shooting stars. They arrive at the very best organizations and soon leave one organization for the next, and then the next. If they are smart, though, they learn the importance of fitting in; otherwise their careers quickly end, and they are left blaming a self-imposed set of circumstances and people for their career problems.

I have been a legal recruiter for several years, and I am constantly speaking with firms that are hiring, laying off, and firing attorneys, paralegals, and legal secretaries. I am constantly seeing both good and bad things happen to people searching for jobs. The interesting thing about my work is that I often get firsthand accounts regarding why people are getting hired and why people are losing their jobs. If there is one thing that stands out to me, it is that the people that get hired and keep their jobs are generally those who fit in with their surroundings at work. The people that are losing their jobs and are having the most problems landing employment, are those who are not able to fit in.

A. The Importance of Academics and Technical Skills to Your Job Search

In order to get an interview with certain organizations, you do need (for the most part) to have certain qualifications. For example, if a company is seeking someone with three years of prior experience, you are going to need to at least come close to this. If a company hires people out of the top third of their classes–from only top-notch universities, you are also going to need to come close to meeting these qualifications. With very, very rare exceptions though, once you get beyond these types of hiring criteria, you are going to be competing with a large group of people. Who do you think is going to get the job?

I’ll tell you exactly who is going to get the job: the person who meshes best with the hiring committee.

Most professionals presume that the most important thing that employers are looking for in an interview is whether or not they have the skill set to do the job. Whatever the qualifications of the job may be, the fact of the matter is that employers would not even be interviewing you if they did not think you could do the work. Whether you are applying for a blue-collar opening or a c-level position, virtually every employer out there is smart enough to know that you can be trained to do the work for which they are interviewing you, even if your skills are not immediately on target. Employers may use your skill set as an excuse NOT to hire you after the interview. More often than not, though, the person who gets hired is the person that employers feel would fit into their organization best.

B. What Is Fitting In?

The remarkable fact is that it the concept of fitting in will vary depending upon the organization you join. Fitting in will mean something different if you want to work for the government or military from what it will mean if you want to work for a private company or a public interest organization. Fitting in simply means that you will be comfortable around your coworkers and they will be comfortable with you. Fitting in can also be akin to being part of a family: Everyone may not be the same; however, everyone shares a certain set of beliefs and philosophies about the world.

Your employers do not want to have to feel uncomfortable around you, nor do they want to feel as though you are going to be critical of them. Your employers want you to embrace, on philosophical and moral levels, their approach towards business and the world. Your employers want you to get along with everyone in the office, and not to be a source of tension. Your employers want you to identify with them and be sympathetic towards them. To your employers, you should seem like a kindred spirit, someone towards whom they can take a maternalistic or paternalistic approach.

The more easily you are able to meet these needs of your employers, the more likely you are to get hired and remain hired once you are with a particular organization.

While the analogy is far from perfect, an employer, in many respects, can be viewed as akin to an immediate family member. In any family, there are likely to be a variety of different personality types. Nevertheless, most families share a lot. They tend to share the same religion; they tend to share certain values among their members; they tend to have similar beliefs about the importance of education; and they may enjoy doing certain things together. They are also likely to come from a similar economic background and to know a lot of the same people. These commonalities bind family members together on multiple levels, despite all of their differences. These commonalities are what make the family cohesive.

In order to fit in with an employer, you need to be seen as a member of the family. In order to be a member of the family, you need to be bound to the employer by a set of commonalities. On its basest level, going to a good school or getting good grades may be enough to break the ice. This is not something that enables you to fit in over the long term, though. In fact, having a shared experience and outlook towards the world is the one thing that is likely to help you the most. This is the essence of fitting in. The most successful people are those who are able to fit in with their employers’ environments.

At the risk of not being PC, I will simply note a few things. If you examine most organizations closely, you will almost always notice some very strong similarities in terms of the types of people that are most often hired. The people are never the same; however, their tolerance (or lack of tolerance), for certain types of behavior, is usually quite similar. In addition, many organizations are comprised of people with a very similar set of life experiences. Many organizations may be male-dominated bastions, made up of groups of men with an affinity for football. Other organizations may be comprised of a great deal of former military men. Other organizations may be dominated by people of a certain race, religion, or even sexual orientation. Whether or not any of this is “correct” is not for me to say. What I will say, though, is that none of this is the least bit surprising. People want to be around others with whom they feel comfortable, and share a similar set of experiences.

And this brings me to another significant point that few professionals ever take the time to realize. You cannot fit in with every group of people. Certainly there are companies and employers in every city of the United States that are considered the most prestigious. You may have the academic and other qualifications to go work at these places. The question that is important, though, is not whether you have these credentials, but whether you fit in. You are likely to experience the most success and longevity in your profession if you find an organization where you fit in. If you do not find an organization where you fit in, you may be in for a rough ride.

The drive to succeed for certain people dictates that they only go to the hiring organizations that are the most universally recognized as the best. Job seekers often ignore the concept of fitting in in these cases, when it is really the most important aspect to consider, in my opinion.

C. Fitting In at Different Stages of Your Career

I would like to walk you through a typical career from (1) being hired out of school to (2) being hired laterally after working for some time to (3) being a senior person in a company.

1. The Importance of Fitting In When You Are Interviewing with Employers During School

In school, certain employers will generally only interview you if you (1) are coming from a certain level of school and (2) have a certain grade point average. Once you get the interview, though, it is all up to you. The most important factor determining whether or not you get a position will be your ability to fit in.

Many of the best minds in every profession are not able to get positions in prestigious companies precisely because they cannot fit in. There are, of course, companies out there that will hire people because of their sheer academic prowess. Indeed, the better your school and the better your academic performance, the more likely it is that employers will look the other way if you do not fit in perfectly. Nevertheless, at least on some level, you are going to need to fit in. As you move down the food chain in terms of your school and academic qualifications, the importance of fitting in increases.

If you are currently working at a Fortune 500 company, take a few minutes to consider the following. The people with the worst academic qualifications are often the people that fit in the best. They act as people from the company are expected to act. They have the right level of professionalism. They get along the best with others. These same people are often the ones who do best in the long term in their chosen profession. The ability to fit in will only continue to increase throughout their careers.

I want to give you a couple of illustrations from my own law school experience.

In my second year of law school, I was in an interview with the hiring partner of a law firm that, quite frankly, was at such a rarefied level that I did not think I deserved to be interviewing there. This high-powered law firm came to my law school (a top-10 law school) and only interviewed five people for a half hour each before jetting back to New York. Most other high-powered law firms came to our school and interviewed candidates all day long. Some even interviewed for a couple of days straight. Suffice it to say that this particular law firm is often considered the very best New York law firm, and its interview schedule simply reflected the fact that it did not believe more than five people in the entire second and third year classes of nearly 800 students merited interviews. While I am sure that not everyone in my class tried to get an interview with this firm, I am confident that at least around 100 students did. I had no idea why I had been selected to interview with this law firm. The other four people that the firm was interviewing were widely known to be at the very top of their classes. While I was a good student, compared to those people, I was not all that special.

I entered the interview cognizant that I did not belong there based on my grades, and I was surprised to see that the partner was very welcoming. During the interview he asked me when I could travel to New York. At the end of the interview, I rose to shake the man’s hand, and when he held his hand out, he gave me my fraternity handshake! I realized right then and there that this was the entire reason I had been interviewed. While I did not ultimately get this job (after a callback), I was the only student in my school that received an invite to visit this firm’s office, despite the fact that I did not believe I deserved the initial interview.

If you think about what was going on in this situation, I am sure that something similar to this has probably happened to you in your own career or job search at some point. If I did not have the academic qualifications to be interviewing with this law firm, why did I get the interview? The reason was because the partner had also been involved in the fraternity I was in, a small national fraternity with not too many chapters throughout the United States. He knew that I had endured some of the same hazing experiences he had endured when he was younger. He also knew that we had sung the same songs and been indoctrinated into many of the same philosophies. He probably took a liking to me because he saw me as being somewhat like himself.

Many people that do not have a good understanding of the political nature of work environments often presume that the purpose of an interview is for the employer to gauge a candidate’s skills and technical acumen. This is wrong. People who succeed in interviews are people who the organization perceives will fit in the best. Every single job I have ever gotten, I have gotten because of this factor.

The people that do not fit in with the group are always easy to recognize. They tend to be more critical of the group. They tend to create problems.

Most interns realize that success within an organization is all about fitting in. This is one of the main reasons that stories circulate each year about interns that do not fit in during the summers, at companies all over the country. Companies typically hire students to work there for the summer to see if they will fit in. Below is one of the most unusual intern stories I have ever heard. This particular story is told by Tucker Max, an individual who was a summer associate at Fenwick & West in Palo Alto, California, in the summer of 2000:

—–Original Message—–
From: [Suppressed]
Sent: Monday, June 05, 2000 2:51 PM
To: [Suppressed]
Subject: The Now Infamous [] Charity Auction Debacle…

Here is the story of what happened to me this weekend at my firm’s retreat. That’s the last time I ever drink before an auction:

Aaron and I decide to leave for the Silverado Ranch by car instead of taking the bus at 2 pm. You have not lived until you’ve ridden through three hours of Bay Area traffic with Aaron at the wheel. By the time we got to Silverado, he was madder than fire.

The first reception starts at like 6 pm. There are finger foods, etc., and lots and lots of wine and beer. Not really liking any of the food, I start drinking. Heavily. By the time I know what’s going on, I’m talking to the name partner, Bill Fenwick, in a redneck accent. Of course, he is from Kentucky, so we talked about basketball for an hour. It was great.

About 9 pm the charity auction began. There were lots of “Fenwick” type items, like a dinner cooked by the managing partner, etc. One of the items was an entire night chauffeured by the hiring partner, [John]. In my inebriated stupor, I thought that if I won this, then they would have no choice but to give me an offer. The bidding starts at $50. People are bidding here and there, but I get tired of all the slow bidding, so I stand on my chair, and hold up my bidding card. Without getting down. So the auctioneer takes this as a cue to just start yelling price increases, without even identifying other bidders.

When the price hits about $800, [John] says that he will pay half if a summer associate wins. The bidding automatically doubles (John is a litigator). As the price gets to $2,000, I think I have the thing won. I get the “going once” call, and then this other summer, Aparna, goaded on by some partners, decides that she has to beat me. So the bidding hits $2,600, and before I know it, I’m on stage, taking the mike from the auctioneer, and yelling at Aparna to stop bidding. My exact quote, “Aparna, seriously, stop. I have to win, this is the only way I’m getting an offer.”

So that just inspires more partners/attorneys/recruiting staff to contribute to Aparna’s pool. When the bidding hits $3,400, I start yelling, on the mike, about how this isn’t fair, because she has partners bankrolling her, but I only have a “few scrubby summers in my corner.” I keep trying to bid only like $5 more than her, but the auctioneer gets all mad at me, and is making me bid in hundred dollar increments. When her bid hits $3,800, I get back on stage. After some banter, the auctioneer asks me if I want to bid $3,900.

I ponder this for a second, and in front of the whole firm and spouses/significant others, with the mike in my face, say, “Fuck it–go ahead.”

I won the auction.

This particular email was rapidly circulated among most summer associates in large law firms around the United States after it was written. From a social standpoint, the reason this email was so widely circulated is because it shows the antithesis of fitting in and highlights the importance of doing so.

Regardless of where you work, chances are that you will be working in close proximity to a relatively small group of people. Because you spend so much time at work, these people are going to become quite aware of your style of work, your personality, and like it or not, a lot of details about your personal life. In all of this, these people are going to want to feel comfortable around you. In addition, these people are going to want to feel that they can develop a relationship with you over time.

2. The Importance of Fitting In When Being Hired as a Lateral

After you have been working for a few years and want to transition into a new employment environment, the importance of fitting in will arguably be further amplified.

Shared experiences take on a different form when someone is trying to move laterally to a company. As a legal recruiter, my job is made easier by knowing the sorts of shared experiences that are likely to get people in the door in different sorts of law firms. For example, if someone is in Los Angeles and has worked for the Los Angeles office of a major New York law firm, I know that other New York-based law firms in Los Angeles are more likely to be interested in that attorney than Los Angeles-based law firms of a similar prestige level. The perception is that these attorneys will share a certain “New York outlook.” The same can hold true if one is moving in Palo Alto from one major law firm to another. He or she is more likely to be hired by another major Palo Alto firm than, say, somebody who has been working in another area of California.

All of these similarities are based on shared experiences and the perception that these people will fit in. Certain organizations will simply not hire from certain other organizations (even those that are generally considered better than they are) because they believe that people from these companies will not fit in. Most often, these organizations will say things like, “These professionals are all too arrogant,” or something of the sort.

When professionals are in the job market, an exceptional recruiter will instinctively know which candidates are likely to get interviews with certain organizations and which ones are not. This calculation is based first on externalities such as the school and company the person is coming from; however, it is ultimately based on other important factors in the professional’s background that are often less evident.

Recently, I have seen professionals ultimately hired over many other applicants for what I believe were the following reasons:

• I believe one executive was hired for a $200,000-a-year job over more qualified candidates because he, like the CEO that hired him, enjoyed surfing;
• I believe one manager was hired because she attended the same religious group as the hiring manager;
• I believe one executive was hired because she had formerly followed the Grateful Dead, like a director in the company did;
• I believe one professional was hired because of his military background; and,
• I believe one executive was hired because of her ongoing participation in a controversial protest organization.

I could continue this list indefinitely and give you countless examples. People always say things like, “You have to know someone there to get a job,” and so forth. Indeed, it does help if you know someone. The reason is that you have already proven that you can get along with someone who fits in with that company, which means you too will be more likely to fit in there.

I know of dozens of instances at various major organizations throughout the United States where laterally hired employees with, frankly, horrible academic qualifications are working alongside people with first-rate academic qualifications. Why do you think this is so? In many cases, these people with horrible academic qualifications may have some unusual and highly valued skill. Still, more often than not, I have discovered that these people knew someone.

This is how things work in the world. If you fit in, you are more likely to get a job and succeed in an organization. I can also tell you that there are organizations out there that are somewhat racist, and hire people that are likely to fit that mold. My purpose here is not to be judgmental. There are certainly other factors that organizations consider when making hiring decisions, too. Nevertheless, when all is said and done, many hiring decisions are the products of people’s ability to fit in.

3. The Importance of Fitting In as Your Career Progresses

In order to survive in a company, you will need people higher up than you in your corner. You can get people in your corner by working hard. Nevertheless, there will always be people working hard in large companies. The people that most often get higher-ups in their corner are the ones who are able to establish bonds. These bonds will make people go to bat for the employee. These bonds will also humanize the employee to their employer and make it much more difficult for an employer to fire an employee.

D. Conclusions

Most of the conclusions from this article can be derived on your own. You need to understand, however, that fitting in is probably the most neglected topic when it comes to discussions about success. Fitting in can be accomplished on several levels, and oftentimes you might not even be able to articulate why you do or do not fit in with a particular group. Fitting in is also something you cannot fake. You can often get a job without fitting in, but you will have a very difficult time keeping it and advancing if you do not fit in.

When you were in elementary school, junior high school, high school, and then college, there was probably a group or groups you naturally fit into. Think back about the reasons why you fit in with those groups. Certainly, you have changed over time and will continue to change. The most important aspect of why you have fit in with various groups in the past, though, was based on how comfortable you felt with that particular group of people, and how comfortable they felt with you. Your happiness and success in your career depend on the ability to recognize when you fit in and when you do not.

Being Able to Start from Scratch is a Gift

What You Will Learn You can only reach your full potential when you are willing to forget what you know and start from scratch. Changing completely and relearning everything is intimidating and tremendously difficult, but not impossible. Some areas of your life and career could benefit from starting from ground zero and completely rebuilding yourself. Starting from scratch is a valuable gift – what lies on the other side is a better you.

One of the hardest things for any of us to do is to relearn something and become infinitely better at it the next time around.  Few of us ever allow ourselves to do this because we are in a comfort zone, which often does not allow us to move, improve and change. People are motivated primarily by two things, pain and pleasure.  The desire to avoid pain is very strong and keeps most of us from going outside this comfort zone.

When I was around 14 years old, I was exceptionally good at tennis.  I was on the tennis team at a private school my parents managed to send me to, and I always played singles.  A few of my peers at the time were even ranked in the state, and traveled around during their summers, playing competitive tennis.  I never lost against any of these ranked players.  The thing about my tennis game, however, was that I picked up my game in parks and other locations around Detroit with various kids; I never had any lessons.  I also played a lot of tennis with my father on the weekends.  I was wandering around the streets with an old wooden tennis racquet, and just happened to be good at the game.

In contrast to the way I played tennis, my opponents on the tennis court at the private school had the best equipment.  They dressed like professional tennis players and most of them had been taking lessons at private country clubs and other special places, the likes of which I had not seen since the age of 4 or 5.  These kids had all grown up playing tennis and learned how to play tennis the right way.

I worked hard to win the games that I won.  I did not have the proper tennis strokes, and only made my first serve in around 10% of the time.  When it went in, however, scarcely anyone ever could return it.

One summer, my father was going to work in Saudi Arabia for the summer, and he picked me up one evening (my parents were divorced) and drove me over to a local country club.  Once we were there, he spoke with one of the tennis pros and then proceeded to write him a check for $1,000, for him to give me a series of private lessons over the summer.  This was a nice, surprise gesture on my father’s part.  I am sure he did this because he realized that I had a lot of potential in the game of tennis and that, if I were going to get good at the sport, I would need to drastically change my game.

I had my first tennis lesson of the summer and was extremely discouraged.  Before the lesson started the instructor hit the ball with me for several minutes.  He then had me approach the net and told me something I will never forget:

“You are at a crossroads right now.  With your athletic ability you could probably become a professional tennis player.  You could even become a household name.  But your game is not sustainable, and you are going to fall apart if you continue to play like this. You need to relearn everything, and it is not going to be easy.”

The tennis pro told me that I needed to relearn everything I was doing.  I needed to hold the tennis racquet differently.  I needed to stand differently.  I needed to hit the ball differently.  I needed to serve differently.  Everything needed to change.

I started doing what the pro recommended and it was as if my entire game had fallen apart.  I was playing like a 5 year-old with no coordination.  Nothing I hit went in.  Nothing I hit had any power.  The game did not seem fun anymore.

One of the things he taught me was to not hit the ball hard anymore.  Instead, I was expected to hit the ball high and long so it would bounce over my young opponents’ heads.  This was about the only shot I learned.

I ended up getting extremely discouraged.  I did not want to have to relearn all of my strokes.  I was emasculated because I was being told I could no longer hit the ball hard, and everything I had formerly loved the game of tennis, I could no longer do.  All of the passion that I formerly put into hitting the ball was suddenly ineffective under this new way of playing tennis.

I stopped looking forward to the lessons.  Eventually, I stopped going to the lessons completely, despite the fact that the tennis pro would call me on the phone to schedule time with me.

I did not want to play anymore.  I simply did not want to change my game.

I never really played a lot of tennis again after that summer.  I played in a tournament at a public tennis club that winter and won first prize.  However, when I started playing against the seniors and others on the high school tennis team, I realized that they were going to be better than me.  This frightened me away from trying out for the team, even though I am confident that I would have made the team, even as a freshman in high school.

The realization that I needed to completely change how I played took my heart out of the game.  To this day I do not play tennis.  This is because I was confronted with the fact that I could become really, really good at something, but that in order to get there I would have needed to change completely.

The idea of changing completely how we do something is more intimidating and difficult than it sounds.  It is almost impossible for many people to do this.

One of the more remarkable things to me is seeing people who have managed to lose a lot of weight and keep it off.  All throughout the Midwest where I grew up, there are countless people who are a hundred pounds or more overweight.  Many of these people are my own relatives.  Year after year, these people continue to get larger and larger.  They suffer from all sorts of health problems related to their obesity and they visit doctors who treat these health problems, but not the obesity.  These people die early and do not live the lives they are capable of, due to their weight issues.

Why do these people continue to gain weight and put themselves through this?

I am going to go out on a limb here: it is because they do not want to change.  They need to eat differently.  That is it 95% of the time.  If you eat less, or eat foods that will not cause you to get fat (for example, low carbohydrate foods), you will not gain as much weight.  This is a plain and simple fact.  However, these people are generally more comfortable eating a lot of food and not changing their diets.  I understand this because I am no different from these people.  This concept is no different from me not wanting to change my tennis game.  I was afraid of changing because I would have had to give something up in the process–a part of who I was, and what I believed.

Growing up, I saw many people struggle with alcohol and drugs.  I have never used drugs at all in my life, but I saw numerous people start using them.  Once people start using drugs, they rarely stop, at least in my experience.  I am not saying this does not happen; however, it is generally rare.  Why?  Because not using these substances, once someone becomes addicted, forces the person to give up his or her way of coping and dealing with the world.  Once the person stops using, he or she is forced to deal with the world in an entirely new way.

The person who is overweight faces the same problem.  They use food for coping and dealing with the world, and if they are forced to adopt new eating patterns, they will no longer have this ability to cope.

You may be in a position at the moment in which you are eager to change, to become something better and something different. You may want a new job, or a new career.  You may be faced with being unemployed and not knowing what to do if you are looking for a job.  What all of this is forcing you to do, right now, is to confront the fact that you may need to change–and you may need to do this right away.  I am not talking about a small change–I am talking about a fundamental change that requires you to do absolutely everything differently and alter your entire approach to life and the world.  Imagine if you had to learn to ride a bike again from scratch without any understanding of the way things could be.

I remember when I was on the tennis court and the instructor was trying to show me how to hold the racquet differently and how to approach the game in a new way.  I was hitting the ball all over the place and making one mistake after another.  I could no longer control the ball.  I could no longer hit the ball as hard.  The way I had to keep my feet was very difficult compared to the way I had kept them before.  My grip was different.  All of this was extremely uncomfortable.  What I realized was that when I would hit the ball using the new methods suggested to me by the pro, the results were better and more controlled.  I did not do this often, but I knew that over time I would be able to hit the ball correctly–if I did not give up.  I knew that I ultimately would become a much better player; it was just going to take some time.

There are areas of your life and career that could benefit from starting from ground zero and completely rebuilding yourself.  You have so much potential inside of you, and you could do such great things if you would take just a few things you are doing well, and allow yourself to rebuild your skills in the correct manner, without employing the bad habits, and without doing things an improper way.  You will find you can do much better.

If I had the time in my schedule (and I need to make the time), I would go see a professional coach once a week to help me work on my weaknesses and rebuild.  I currently do this for other people, and should be having the same done for me.  The reason it is important for people to see coaches, psychologists and others is due to the fact that these people can help us reframe our model of the world and show us where we are weak.  Once we see where we are weak, then we can work towards making new progress and completely rebuilding ourselves.

In the early 1980s, my father purchased a computer that he used to write novels.  I would use the computer during the evenings, when he was not occupying it, to write papers for school.  One of the most maddening things that happened with the particular computer that he had purchased for word processing was that it always had the habit of crashing, and I would end up losing all of my files and all of the work that I had done.  This could be avoided by pressing the F9 key while I was writing the paper, but I always forgot to do this and ended up losing an incredible number of papers over the years.

What I noticed over the years was that when I lost a paper and ended up rewriting it from scratch, the new paper was always better than the paper I had written before.  The new paper would always better explain the points it needed to make, be shorter in the right places and longer in the right places.  It would be a much better piece of work overall.  The reason was that the new paper would force me to rethink something from the beginning and make the point in a much more effective way.

It is this way with your life and career as well.  The most beneficial and helpful thing that can happen to many people is to lose a job.  When you lose a job, you are put into a position in which you need to rethink everything and test every assumption.  Some people lose jobs in industries in which they are unlikely to ever find a job doing the same thing again.  These experiences can change the world as you know it.  They also force you to rethink old assumptions.

I read an article yesterday about someone who got a job in an automotive plant at the age of 18 years old, making $60,000 a year. This person is now in his 30s and has lost his job at the auto factory.  He knows that he will likely never get a job like this in an automotive factory ever again.  Because he was making so much money at such a young age, he never saw the need to go to college or to do anything like this to improve himself.  He knew that, even with a college degree, the odds of him getting as good of a job back then were incredibly slim.  So he stayed working at the auto plant and has been there until recently, when he lost his job.  Now he is going back to college.  Going back to college in his 30s is now forcing him to rebuild his model of the world and start from scratch.  How exciting this is!  He may have the skills of a brilliant mathematician or something else inside of him.  There may be so much more that he can do and contribute to the world now that he is being forced to recalibrate and reevaluate his role in the world.  This is an amazing thing.  This young man’s destiny is about to be reshaped for the future, and his career will never be the same.  If he is smart, he will rebuild what he is and what he is doing, and will become an even better and more productive person going forward.

I could have been a professional tennis player, perhaps, had I been willing to change my model of tennis.

People can only reach their full potential when they are willing to forget what they know and to start from scratch.  If you are ever forced to start from scratch, it is often the greatest gift you can receive because what lies at the other side is a better you.

The Greek Parthenon and Your Career

What You Will Learn It is crucial to have career options in your life. You need to have additional skills incase there is a demand for something different than what you are doing. Run your career in such a way that you can adapt to all economic climates. Support your career and life with multiple pillars.

One of the most important lessons for our lives and careers comes from the Parthenon in Greece. The Parthenon has been standing in the same location for almost 2,500 years and is considered one of the world’s great cultural monuments. It is largely because of the Parthenon’s multiple columns that the Parthenon has survived for so long. If you understand and employ the lessons of the Parthenon, you should never have any issues with feeling secure in your career and life.

I personally have run my career according to what I call the Parthenon Principle (the “Principle”). I define the Principle as the following:

Your career needs to be supported by multiple pillars. The more pillars that support your career, the better. If you are in a situation wherein you are supported by just one pillar or just a few, you are in danger and need to make sure you get more pillars.

I left a job as an asphalt contractor to be an attorney due to the Principle. I left the first law firm I worked for due to the Principle, and I left the second law firm due to this Principle. I run my career right now due to the Principle. The Principle is something that can guide your life and enrich your career as well, and it is something you should always be aware of. The more you understand and employ the Principle, the better off you will be. Here are some of the rewards for understanding and guiding your career under the Principle:

• If you lose your job, you do not care for the most part.
• If you do not get an important job, you do not care for the most part.
• If a business you are involved in fails, you do not care for the most part.
• If something happens in one part of your career, you do not care.

The rewards gained from understanding the Principle are profound. Over the past year, for example, I have seen incredible reversals of fortune in two businesses I operate–a student loan business and a recruiting business. The financial losses from these have been millions of dollars a month. While the loss of jobs and business from this has been painful, other businesses have picked up the slack, and I have been largely unaffected. I feel as secure today as I felt before this turn of events. I feel this way because I am running my career according to the Principle. The scariest and worst thing I believe I could do for myself would be to support my companies on one pillar alone. At all points in time, I have multiple businesses running, and this enables me to feel secure. In fact, I would say I feel more secure than the CEOs of most Fortune 500 companies because I have tried to create a Parthenon with my own career. You should do the same.

The Parthenon represents the fact that we cannot just do things in one way in any pursuit, and rely upon that one way of doing things. We cannot be dependent upon any single method of support in our careers. If we are to rely upon one way of doing things, then we are taking a massive gamble. A career and life needs to be supported in multiple ways and through multiple outlets. Being overly dependent for your income on one data point is extremely dangerous.

For example, about 18 months ago I was in the student loan business, and this was my largest business. Overnight, the value of student loans on Wall Street went almost to zero. The government changed the compensation that student loan lenders could receive. I was almost entirely put out of business overnight. At the time, our company had probably $20,000,000 in real estate and other assets dedicated to this business. We had hundreds of employees who were dealing with this business in one form or another. Then overnight everything changed. The business stopped operating, and even the company’s real estate holdings lost probably half of their value within the following 12 months.

We pulled through this catastrophe quite easily and without too much difficulty because we were anchored by so many other businesses.

Then something else happened. Our second largest business, a large group of recruiting companies, experienced a dramatic and devastating loss in revenue. The company coughed a bit due to this, but has since pulled through just fine due to even more businesses that we have started. Due to the Principle again, the business ended up being fine because there were so many other companies there to pick up the financial slack. This is how it is with the Principle: Multiple pillars help you survive. This does not just apply to companies. It also applies to you and your career.

About a decade ago, I was sitting in my office in front of a computer and I received an email, and everyone in the office received the same message. In the subject line it said something like “All Personnel: Partnership Class Decisions”. At the time, I was in my third year of practicing law and I was very dedicated (at least, I thought) to what I was doing. The Holy Grail for young attorneys is to become a partner in a law firm. Attorneys go to college and work and compete very hard to get into the best law schools. Then they go to law school and continue to work and compete very hard. Only the best attorneys from the best schools typically get jobs with the best law firms, and very few of the attorneys who go to work in the best law firms ever end up becoming partner in these “best law firms”. The entire process is extremely difficult. Once an attorney is inside one of these law firms, he or she typically needs to dedicate himself or herself to the work with a great passion, in order to succeed. It is not uncommon for these attorneys to work 3,000 hours a year for many years in order to become partners.

When this email came into my inbox, you could hear the entire office go silent as everyone started reading it. Although the subject line of the email mentioned “All Personnel”, the more I read the email, the more I realized that this email was not something I should have been reading. It should have been addressed to “All Partners”. Someone had made a terrible mistake. While I am reconstructing this from memory, I remember that the email contained statements such as the following:

Jack will not quit if we do not make him partner this year. We have decided to string him along until next year at which point we will make him partner. He is clearly material to be a partner in our firm right now but we will delay making him a partner yet one more year.

Cindy is someone who is not partner material in our firm. Nevertheless, the decision has been made that until she quits, or otherwise leaves, we will let her know that she should “keep trying,” and in the outside chance that she does leave, she is easily replaceable.

The email then listed various individuals who would be made partner that year, and a smattering of people who would not make partner and would be asked to leave the firm. I could not believe what I was reading. A few minutes later, all of the computers in the building were turned off by some sort of remote switch. Someone had made a terrible mistake by sending out this particular email to everybody. Incredibly, a couple of days later, the head of the law firm sent an email to everyone implying they had fired the head of human resources for sending this email.

There was someone in our office in Los Angeles that I referred to as “Jack” in the quote above. He was one of the more solid and good guys I had ever known, and I liked him a great deal. He had been working in the law firm for over a decade and was then in his fourteenth year of practice or so. It is rare for someone to be an “associate” and not a “partner” for fourteen years and not leave the law firm or decide to do something else altogether, but Jack was someone who was solid and really stuck things out. I remember walking by his office the day the email had gone out, and he had a noticeable perk to him that was absent before. I think he was on the phone with his wife and telling her about what had just happened.

Over the next year, an incredible number of changes occurred within the law firm. The most important change was that the power structure within the law firm was reorganized. An important partner from another law firm, whom I’ll call “Robert”, had come over and assumed leadership of the office. Under Robert’s leadership, the firm was eliminating many of the attorneys who had been there before his arrival, and Robert also ensured that many of the attorneys he had brought with him were placed into the partnership ranks.

The next year when partnership decisions were handed out, Robert made partner a few young associates he had brought with him from the other firm, but not Jack. The day after Jack learned that he had not made partner, he reported to work as usual and was in his office that morning. Robert came into his office and asked Jack to do a very simple assignment that an attorney with six months of experience should have been doing–not someone with 15+ years of experience. Jack responded with some hostility. From what I heard, Jack said something like the following:

“You know, I am a little upset right now because I have been working here over a decade and believed I was going to be made a partner in this law firm yesterday. I am not sure why you are demeaning me by giving me this work right now. I am pretty upset right now, and would rather not deal with you while I am upset.”

Robert apparently looked at him for around 10 seconds and said “okay” and then walked away. Less than 30 minutes later, Robert walked into Jack’s office and said something along the lines of the following:

“I have two pieces of paper here. One is a check for $30,000. The other is a severance agreement for you to sign that says you will not sue us. If you sign the severance agreement you can have the check. If you do not want to sign the agreement you cannot have the check, and you are fired. Either way, I want you to be out of the office within the next 15 minutes and never come back.”

Robert may very well have had good reasons for doing this to Jack, but the episode was quite alarming for me to hear. It was astonishing to me how a 10+ year career could just come to a screeching halt like this. The good news is that Jack was able to find another job eventually, and everything ended up being okay. However, I have seen similar things happen to scores of other attorneys, and it does not always turn out okay. Many of those people did not find other jobs for a long, long time.

What is the lesson of this? Under the Principle, you need to have many options available to you at any given time, and it is dangerous to put all of your eggs in one basket. Here, Jack was entirely dependent upon the whim of one law firm and their decisions about what happened to him. He also did not have numerous clients at the time. If he had had numerous clients and were he not as dependent upon the law firm for most of his work, he would have had better leverage. He could have left the law firm and easily made money with those clients. However, Jack did not have any of these things, and it held him back.

The Principle demands that you give yourself multiple methods of support in your career. If you want to be a lawyer, that is fine; however, you better be sure that your career is not entirely dependent upon the whims of one person. You need to have clients or a skill so profound that you can help dictate the terms of your career. The more you support yourself with multiple methods of doing things, the better off you will be.

This is why the Parthenon survives to this day. Its weight is supported in multiple ways, by so many pillars.

The Greeks built the Parthenon to celebrate their victory over the Persians, and it was completed in 432 B.C.

Over the course of the next 1,000 years, this building was a temple to the Goddess Athena.

• Sometime in the Sixth Century the Parthenon was converted to a Christian church.
• In 1456, after Athens fell to the Ottomans, the Parthenon was converted into a mosque. The Ottomans added a minaret to the Parthenon; however, the building was not further modified.
• In 1687, the Venetians attacked Athens and the Ottomans used the Parthenon to store gun powder. The Parthenon was hit with a shell and the gun powder exploded destroying much of the building. But the Parthenon still survived and is still standing today.

The Parthenon is now a massive tourist destination. The building just keeps providing value no matter what age it is, and it is all due to those columns. If there were not so many columns, it would not still be standing. You too need to provide value and run your career in such a way that you are always providing value.

Although I am an attorney, I originally did not want to go to law school and become an attorney. Instead, my dream was to be an asphalt contractor. The problem with me being an asphalt contractor, though, was that my skin was not very good at being out in the sun and, specifically, on asphalt in the sun. As an asphalt contractor you need to work on black pavement all day around smoking hot asphalt. The black asphalt really absorbs the sun and it is not the equivalent of being out on a sports field, for example. It is much worse. I would get so sunburned being outdoors that several times a summer I would literally physically have to peel a layer of my skin off that had become very burned. My face was constantly coated with zincs and all sorts of lotions to keep the sun out as much as possible. Being outdoors on hot asphalt was not something I believed my body could handle over the long term.

“You would do fine being an asphalt contractor,” I remember a relative saying to me one day. “But your body probably would not, and you could not last doing this.”

So I decided to practice law instead, where I could work mainly indoors. You need to choose what you are doing and your career based on the idea that you can keep doing it forever, and will not be stopped. You do not want to be stopped by the sun, by one person who does not like you, or anything for that matter. You need to run your career in such a way that you are supported like the Parthenon and can adapt to all climates.

One of the interesting characteristics of the Parthenon and its columns is that they were designed to be thicker at their bases than they are at the top. Architecturally this was done so that they would appear taller when standing at the base of the Parthenon. This creates an optical illusion for people visiting the Parthenon and portrays more strength and height than really exists. In your career and life, you need to be supported with a strong foundation and always need to be portraying strength. The less weaknesses you have, the better.

Although it occurred a long time ago, most Americans remember the controversy surrounding Tanya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan in the 1994 US Figure Skating Championship in Detroit. Here, acquaintances of Harding struck Kerrigan on the knee after a practice. Both skaters became almost overnight celebrities due to this particular incident. In my mind, what makes this so interesting is that it highlights the incredible vulnerability that many people have in their careers. The idea that a career could be taken down by a blow to the knee is a dangerous lesson. In our careers, it is extremely important that we are not just dependent upon a knee, or one potential outlet. We need multiple outlets in order to succeed.

One of the saddest things that I regularly read about is the careers of child stars who end up not succeeding later in life. I have heard about some becoming robbers and having similar problems after having had incredibly successful careers when they were younger. There are also stories of young stars who have ended up having great careers when they are older, but these stories seem less common. The idea that I am trying to stress is this: if you do not have other options in your career and job search, then you are making a horrible decision. Your career needs to be supported with multiple pillars because the idea of long-term security should factor into how you run your career.

My first legal job was with a law firm and group of people whom I really liked. However, the longer I was at the law firm, the more I realized that I would never be able to run my career from the standpoint of the Principle. The business and clients that came into the law firm came primarily from two or three very powerful partners who earned millions of dollars per year. The other partners in the law firm were partners in the sense they had titles but they really did not have any business for the most part. Consequently, their careers were controlled by those with clients. While my perception may have been off a bit, the idea I got while working in this law firm was that the partners had so much work that they were not really looking for others to bring more clients into their business. Instead, they were most interested in worker bees whom they could control. The firm had so much work that the worker bees did not have any time to go out and meet people and get business. It was largely due to this reason that I left this firm; I did not see much of a future in it. The primary partners were, at the time, making twenty-five times as much money, in some cases, as the other partners. The idea of continuing to work in a firm wherein I would be so dependent upon a few people above me did not appeal to me.

The challenge of all of our careers is to be supported like the Parthenon on numerous columns and with numerous potential sources of work, should one source fail. You should never allow yourself to be boxed in by being dependent upon just one person, skill or income stream for your success. If you are an attorney, you probably need to have lots of clients. If you are in a company, you need to have lots of allies. If you are good at one thing, you need to make sure that you have other skills, in case whatever job you are doing becomes obsolete. You do not want to be vulnerable to any one person, or to the economy.

I left the practice of law and eventually went into recruiting because, for me, this seemed like something that was more in accordance with the Principle.

• First, I felt the profession was safe because recruiting has been around in one form or another for thousands of years.
• Secondly, I knew I could be diversified because I would have several candidates at one time, whom I could work with and, since recruiters get paid if and when a person gets a job, I knew that if one person did not get a job, another person would.
• Third, I knew that since the job required me to find candidates, and my success would be determined based on this skill, I would not be dependent upon another person to give me work.
• Fourth, I knew that I could work with numerous law firms and not just one, and this would give me extra support.
• Fifth, I knew that since I was working with law firms, even if the economy was poor, there would still be business and recruitment opportunities. When one practice area in a law firm is doing poorly during a recession, another is doing well. For example, corporate work may dry up in law firms during a recession but bankruptcy will take off.

This is an example of a career that uses the Parthenon. Eventually, to keep this business going in all economic climates, I started other businesses that supported this business when it slowed down, despite the support it had. Year after year, I have had an enjoyable career that is without a lot of stops and starts, due to my understanding of the Principle.

You too need to use the Principle in your own career. Support your career and life with multiple pillars.

The Foot-in-the-Door Phenomenon and Your Job Search

What You Will Learn One of most important things you can do for your job search is to ensure you get inside the place you want to be in. Once there, your hard work and resourcefulness can ensure your position is maintained. Starting small is also the secret to getting the results you want from people or organizations. This is similar to superstores giving away samples of a product to create a presence in the customer’s mind – eventually translating into sales.

One of the most powerful and important things you can do in order to get a job and achieve anything in life is learn how to just get your foot in the door. Once you are able to get your foot in the door, everything really changes.

My entire life, I have seen firsthand the power of people getting their foot in the door. A large part of the battle for success in your career revolves around your ability to do this, because once you get your foot in the door incredible things can happen to you. Once you are in, the people you are working with will protect you, if you work hard. You will also be in a position to impart massive change on the world.

Several years ago I was in a relationship with a woman who worked for David Geffen, who is one of the most powerful and richest men in Hollywood. This woman used to work at Geffen’s house, and when she was there she would see people like President Bill Clinton walking around. Amazingly, Geffen never completed college. He started out his career working in the mailroom at the William Morris Agency. In order to get the job, he had needed to prove that he had graduated from college, and he forged a letter showing to that effect. Geffen was such a hard worker that, once he was able to get his foot in the door, he was able to achieve what his true pedigree would not have allowed him to achieve. While people may not approve of Geffen forging the fact that he went to college, doing so got him in the door. The rest is history; getting his foot in the door gave Geffen the opportunity to become a powerful agent and, ultimately, hang out with presidents, make movies, become a generous benefactor and more.

All of his successes came from the ability to get in the door.

Several years ago, I was speaking to an attorney who was working at what is widely considered the most difficult law firm to get hired by in the United States. The attorneys who work in this law firm all seem to have graduated as the top one or two students from the best law schools in the United States. Simply stated, it is all but impossible to get a job at this law firm. When I looked at this woman’s transcript, however, I realized that she had done very well in law school, but nowhere near well enough to get a job at this particular law firm. Then I realized something else – she had started working at the law firm at the age of 18, as a secretary, and had worked there for almost 7 years before finally going to a third tier law school. Nevertheless, the law firm had happily hired her once she had graduated from law school, because she already had her foot in the door.

During the Korean War, Chinese Communists used the foot-in-the-door phenomenon with American prisoners. Unlike the North Koreans, who were very savage with the American prisoners, the Chinese were very nice to the prisoners. The Americans who were captured had been trained to provide nothing but their name, rank and serial number. The Chinese, however, managed to be extremely successful in getting the prisoners to be informants, to denounce the United States and more.

A prisoner might be taken to a room, given a cigarette and something to eat. Then they would sit there with the Chinese for some time. They could potentially sit there for hours chatting about this or that, but really nothing in particular. The prisoner would feel like he was being treated very well, and would let his defenses down to some degree. Then the prisoner might be asked to make a very simple statement that, on the surface, did not sound all that bad:

“In Communism there is no unemployment and in the United States there is. Therefore, America is not perfect.”

However, where this gets interesting is in regards to what the Chinese would do later. According to one account of this in Readings in Managerial Psychology by Harold J. Leavitt, Lewis R. Pondy and David M. Boje wrote:

But once these minor requests were complied with, the men found themselves pushed to submit to related but more substantive requests. A man who just agreed with his Chinese interrogator that the United States is not perfect, might then be asked to indicate some of the ways in which he thought this was the case. Once he had so explained himself, he might be asked to make a list of these “problems with America” and to sign his name to it. Later he might be asked to read his list in a discussion group with other prisoners. “After all, it’s what you really believe isn’t it?” Still later he might be asked to write an essay expanding on his list and discussing these problems in greater detail.

The Chinese might then use his name and his essay in an anti-American radio broadcast beamed not only to the entire camp, but to other POW camps in North Korea as well as to American forces in South Korea. Suddenly he would find himself a “collaborator”, having given aid and comfort to the enemy. Aware that he had written an essay without any strong threats or coercion, many times a man would change his image of himself to be consistent with the deed, and with the new “collaborator” label, often resulting in even more extensive acts of collaboration.

A huge secret of getting the results you want from people, organizations and others is to start small and get them to make larger and larger commitments. For example, when a man asks a woman out he never says, “Hey, lets go have sex and then spend the next 60 years of our lives together in a committed relationship.” Instead, he invites her to have coffee, go see a movie, take a walk and so forth. Everything begins with very small steps, and these small steps lead to greater and greater commitment.

When a religious organization comes to your door, the people do not say: “Hey, we would like to invite you to renounce every other religion on the planet, come to our church every Sunday for the rest of your life, and give us as much of your money as you can until you die.” Instead, they offer you a pamphlet and then ask if they can come back to see you at another time after you have had a chance to review the pamphlet. They seek smaller commitments from you at first. They know that the most important thing they can do is get their foot in the door. Once they get their foot in the door, everything else falls into place much more easily.

The Scientologists do not ask people on the street if they are interested in getting therapy for the rest of their lives, in order to get aliens out of their body. No, they know it would be “crazy” to do this. Instead, they ask people to take a personality test, and then they build upon this. You need to start small with anything, before you can build upon it. Organizations are all smart enough to know that the first step and challenge they face is getting their foot in the door.

One of the funniest things I have seen that business schools, college career counseling offices and other organizations often do with their students is encourage them to ask for “informational interviews” with various alumni of the school, who work in important positions, and in the cities they are seeking to work in. For example, the counselors will coach their students to go out and contact various alumni and tell them they are planning on working in a given industry, in a certain city (the industry could be large and very broad such as banking, retail, law, health care, etc). The students tell the alumni that they are interested in getting some information about what it is like to work in a given industry in that city and to “learn from someone in the trenches” or something along those lines. Since this is such a small request and seems quite harmless–”I’d love to provide this alumnus of my school some information”–the alumni of the school almost always agree. They figure that since there is some sort of affiliation between them and the student (having attended the same school), and the student is simply seeking some harmless information, there is nothing wrong with speaking to the student at all.

The student will invariably show up at the person’s place of business well dressed, with a folder containing their résumé, and with a list of a few prepackaged questions to which they already know the answers. The student will then sit down with the employer and commence speaking with him/her. The entire time the employer is speaking he or she is, on some level, evaluating whether or not the student could potentially make a good hire. The student is not really there to get information 99% of the time, but to “get his/her foot in the door” and hopefully get a job, or future interview at the least. While the employer has easily agreed to the small request of an informational interview, he or she suddenly starts feeling a small tug to potentially hire the student. The “informational interview” is an incredibly effective tactic, and a brilliant example of the foot-in-the-door phenomenon.

We see the foot-in-the-door phenomenon in shopping centers, grocery stores and all sorts of places every day. The “free sample” in the grocery store is an example of the foot-in-the-door tactic. You are offered a piece of something to eat or drink, and you try it. You then end up buying something you normally would not have bought. Someone sprays some perfume on you while you are strolling through a department store, and you decide to purchase it.

What does the foot-in-the-door mean for your career? It means that you do not always need to ask for the moon when looking for a job. You can start out small and build from there. David Geffen started out working part time at the William Morris Agency. You can start out working in your dream job part time. You can start out as a contract employee. If you want an important job inside the company you can start out doing something that is relatively unimportant. Who cares what it is? Starting out doing something unimportant is a good way to get your foot in the door.

This is what internships are in many companies. Numerous companies and other organizations have unpaid internships for students. People come from all over the country to work for one organization or another for free each summer, or during the school year. You might ask, why would someone want to work for an organization for free? This is a great question. Working some place for free does not seem to make a lot of sense, until you realize that the person is really just doing everything within their power to get their foot in the door.

If you really, really want to work for a particular employer, the most important thing you can do is get your foot in the door. In a bad job market you can really make the foot-in-the-door phenomenon work for you. For example, many people are looking at the prospect of being unemployed for potentially weeks (or longer) in a bad recession. If you are going into a job interview where there is a lot of competition with an employer you really want to work for, a good strategy might be to say something along these lines during the later stages of your interview:

“Listen, I have really wanted to work at this company for a long time. Financially, I am okay and do not have any pressing need for money at the moment. I am more concerned about having something to do during the day. I like working. I like the atmosphere here, and I really like this company. I would like to come work here for free for a month so you can see what I am like. Regardless of what happens, I will make the best effort I can during this time; you will have someone doing the job right away, and it will not cost you anything.”

This strategy is incredibly effective and it can work wonders. Why? Because you are showing a commitment to the employer. You are showing that you like to work. You are not making the employer feel guilty about not paying you. You are not obligating the person in any way, and you are giving the employer something for nothing. This strategy works and it is like a guided nuclear missile you can use against your competition for the jobs you are most interested in. Try it if you really want the job. If you pull it off right, it will get you a foot in the door, and once you get your foot in the door, this can lead to a full-time job later.

You need to get your foot in the door and knowing how to do this will pay huge rewards. The most successful salespeople, job seekers and others all know that the biggest step they make in their march towards a job or sale is getting the employer, or prospect, to open that door.

10 Powerful Lessons from a Turkish Rug Trader

What You Will Learn Put all your best products front and center; watch out for every opportunity; and always look professional. Never interrupt anyone; sincerely compliment others all the time; and excessively educate your potential employers about your strengths. Bond with potential employers and trust them. Love what you are doing – a well sold product or service has long term value.

Several years ago I was staying at a beautiful hotel on the beach on a small Greek island.  The hotel was full of young people in their mid-20’s who appeared to be having the time of their lives.  I had chatted with the receptionist several times during that week when I was at the hotel.  The receptionist was my age and very attractive.  She had a boyfriend who would sit in the lobby and chat with her at night. I think she was very surprised by the fact that I kept coming home alone each evening.  When I would walk through the lobby each night, she would always ask me if I had met any girls that evening and ask me to tell her about my night.  She was really nice to me.  She had actually given me a beautiful suite in the hotel and was charging me the same price as a normal room.  She had another friend who worked in the bar near the receptionist desk who gave me free beers every evening.  I was beginning to think Greece was the greatest place in the world.

At this particular point in my life, however, I was pretty out of it.  A few weeks earlier my fiance had run off with a married man 20 years older than me, within a few weeks of our planned wedding.  I was actually in the midst of my honeymoon that I had arranged before my fiance took off.  Unfortunately, I was on my honeymoon alone.  It was pretty strange walking into rooms in the various islands and seeing a free fruit platter and bottle of Champagne with congratulatory notes attached to them.

I was making the most of the trip.  I had the good fortune of dancing in small bars and smashing plates late into the night on several occasions. I was so out of control at this particular point in my life that I remember being asked to “settle down” by drunks who were also smashing plates in the restaurant.  In addition to a nasty habit of chewing tobacco that I had recently picked up, I had also started smoking cigarettes in Greece. One evening I was so out of it while dancing that I set fire to a girl’s hair from New Jersey that I was dancing with.  On another night, I had made out with a beautiful Greek girl in a bar who I found out later was dating a soldier in another part of the bar.  At some point someone came up to me and told me that the soldier was looking for me and I better disappear.  I ran out of a back door of the bar and as I turned a corner and began running up an alley I heard them coming for me.  They were screaming at me in Greek.  I took refuge under a dock for several hours.  I am confident I would have been badly beaten up.  The trip was getting really out of control.  I am not even going to get into any details about what happened with the Austrian girl.  That is a story that I will save for another time.

In order to travel on this solo honeymoon between Greek islands, I was utilizing jet boats which had giant fans on them and in normal seas glided over the water.  The receptionist showed up at the dock as I was getting ready to board the fan boat.  She was with another Greek girl who she explained was her friend.  Her friend was wearing these bizarre sunglasses that were circles the size of Coke bottles.  The receptionist informed me that I needed a girlfriend directly in front of her friend and that her friend was going to the same island I was going to and we should “get to know each other.”  I had a couple of beers in my backpack and thought I would give it a try.  The girl sat next to me on the jet boat and strangely enough starting cuddling with me and telling me all the things we were going to do together when we got to the island in 4 hours or so.  Since I did not know the girl and she was not really my type, I began to get very uncomfortable.  In fact, I started to get sick.   The sea was very rough and about an hour into the trip I started throwing up.  I was not sure if the girl or the boat was making me sick, but I decided I had to get the hell off that boat.  The boat was making frequent stops along the way and was sort of like a “taxi” because people were getting on and off at little islands all along the way.

The next stop was a very small island with only a “boarding house” and no hotel.  I told the girl who was apparently my “instant girlfriend” that I would meet her on the island.  Strangely enough, she hugged and kissed me goodbye and told me she would miss me. She gave me an address where she would be on the next island.  Since they were selling beer on the boat, I had managed to consume several. I also had the stash in my backpack that I had rapidly consumed.  Given my buzz, I was beginning to think I was in an alternate universe.

I figured that I would get some well-deserved relaxation on the island.  The island was so desolate that there were not even any real taxis.  Somehow I managed to hire a small pick-up truck to drive me to a boarding house several miles away. When I got to the boarding house, I was informed that I could share a room with a group of six German tourists. I paid the equivalent of a few dollars per day and was handed a key. After I opened the door to the room, I immediately turned around. A few of the Germans were lying on the floor, and another couple of them were watching a third inject something into himself. There was a spoon sitting on a night stand. I had seen enough and did not stay long enough to unpack my bags.  They were so stoned that they did not even seem to notice me coming in the room.

When I reached the port after a three hour walk, I was informed that the only boat passing through for the next few days was arriving in a few hours; it was a freighter bound for Turkey. This sounded good enough to me because I did not feel like spending the next few days in a drug den. Fourteen hours or so later, I was in Turkey, in a small port town that catered to the occasional cruise ship. It has been so long since this happened that I have forgotten the name of the town.

For the next few days, I wandered the streets and became very interested in how people sold rugs and carpets. There was literally a Turkish bazaar of people attempting to sell rugs and all sorts of knick-knacks. In some shops, they burned incense. In others, they played music and attempted to lure tourists in.

The shopkeepers would walk up to people passing by and speak to them in 10-plus languages until they found out which language that particular person spoke. Russian, English, French, Dutch, German, Italian…the languages rolled off the merchants’ tongues. I was fascinated by the merchants because they were so persistent and so motivated in their attempts to sell rugs. They were extremely creative. They tried to sell rugs in a million different ways, it seemed.

What was so fascinating about this experience was that after looking at numerous, numerous rug shops, I became very interested in the idea of purchasing a rug. I could not put my finger on why, however, because not a single one of the rug-shop merchants had seemed particularly interested in selling me a rug. I would try to ask a question occasionally, but the response was most likely to be something along the lines of “How much you want to pay?”

One day, I wandered into a different rug shop, and the people there taught me how to sell rugs—and just about anything else. I made several friends and for some reason these rug traders took an extreme liking to me.  One of them spoke very seriously about the prospect of opening a rug shop with me in the United States and called me several times once I had returned back to the United States to discuss this.  I stayed with the rug traders for at least a week and learned a great deal from them about how to sell, and about people.

This particular trip ended up being one of the most enlightening of my life. I wound up staying in Turkey for several days inside one particular rug shop.  The lessons I learned there can benefit you as well.

1) Put Your Best Products Front and Center–”The Lesson of Rug Placement.”

This rug shop always displayed its best two or three rugs so that a passersby could see them. Many other rug shops put their best rugs in the back. The store I went into that day had its very best rugs right out front and center. This attracted my eyes. This was all it took. You too need good “bait” to interest potential employers.

When you think about it, no other strategy makes more sense. When you see the best goods right out front, they are most likely going to attract your attention. Attracting attention is what it is all about.  Do not be afraid to toot your own horn and show people what you can do and what you are capable of.  Far too many people believe they need to hold back.  People need to know what you are capable of.

The rug store was located in a corridor, and the corridor looked like it had been there for thousands of years. (I think it had, in fact, been there that long.) When people passed by, the inside of the shop was barely visible. The only things that could be seen were the rugs outside. Incredibly, most of the other stores nearby simply hid away their best rugs, apparently hoping that if customers came in, they could potentially interest them in the rugs. This was ridiculous. Think of the thousands of people who passed by these rug stores each day without ever seeing the best rugs.

Yet, isn’t this what we do a lot of the time? We forget to tell people about our best benefits and why they should hire us. We fail to show our best selves immediately and show our inferior goods first. Lead with your strongest product. This will get your customer’s attention.

As I got to know these rug traders over the next several days, they told me that the space they were in was exceedingly expensive for Turkey. They paid $800 per month to be one of 1,000-plus shops in this corridor that tourists and others walked by when getting off cruise ships.

The store paying $800 per month in rent is no different than the business on the Internet that is paying $10 per click. If the Internet business can get traffic without paying $10 per click, then it is doing well. The same concept applies to retail establishments. If you have no display that attracts customers and 10 come into your store per month, you are paying $80 per lead. If you have an exciting display and 100 customers come into your store per month, you are paying $8 per lead.

2) Watch for Every Opportunity Out There–”The Lesson of the ‘Eye Watchers.’”

When I walked by the rug store and made eye contact with the beautiful rugs that were placed front and center, there were two salesmen watching me. The owner of the rug store had two boys working for him whom he trained to watch the eyes of tourists.  If the tourists appeared to be looking at the rugs he would ensure that they immediately started speaking with them.  Every glance at a rug was considered an opportunity to make a sale.

When I walked by the rug store and started looking at the rugs, they immediately came up to me and started to speak with me, smiling and talking enthusiastically until I responded to what they had to say. Had these boys not been watching me, I might have simply walked on by.

You can lose job opportunities if you do not notice potential opportunities out there. In this case, I could have simply walked by the store without stopping—and I most certainly would have, had the rug merchants not made immediate eye contact with me and approached me immediately.  You need to be incredibly alert to every opportunity that is out there.  Opportunities present themselves to people who are looking for them.

3) Always Look Professional and Ensure That All of Your Salespeople Look Professional–”You Need to Look the Part.”

The men who approached me when they saw I was looking at the rug while walking by (along with a crowd of other people at the very same time) were very well dressed compared to the others around them. They looked like they had just taken showers and were also wearing nice-looking shirts that appeared to have just been ironed. They were neatly shaven and looked very good.

What was so interesting about this was that later I learned that the “men” assisting me (who were young—only around 16 or so) were actually poor, uneducated Kurdish boys from the desert whose parents had persuaded the store owner to hire. The boys were paid no more than a couple of dollars per day and slept under a tarp outside of the store in the evenings. The store owner let them borrow money to look the part and gave them a very minimal commission for each sale that resulted from their efforts.

What this business understood—and what every successful job seeker understands—is that you always need to look the part and look your very best when attempting to get a job. The quality of the persona you put forward will determine the presumed quality of your products. Had these boys been poorly dressed (like poor Kurds from the countryside), they would not have aroused my interest and would have, instead, frightened me away.

How many job seekers make the mistake of not always looking the part? Potential employers want to be impressed by you and need to feel as if you will reflect positively on them. They want to be proud of the people selling to them because their decisions to do business with certain people say things about them, as well.

4) Do Not Ever Interrupt

Once I got inside the carpet shop, I was met by another salesman, while the “spotters” who had led me inside continued to work the tourists walking by. I started asking one of the salesmen numerous questions about the different rugs in the store.

The salesman could not answer most of my questions. I asked about dye, about whether the rugs were handmade, about how many knots there were per inch, and more. The salesman I was speaking to simply could not answer the questions. He eventually approached a man sitting behind a desk (the owner of the rug shop) and asked him for help answering my questions.

I noticed that the owner of the store never once interrupted his salesman when he was stuck. After a few minutes of speaking with the owner of the store, I realized that his knowledge and understanding of rugs was profound and that he could have talked at length for hours in response to my questions. However, he did not interrupt the salesperson while he was speaking and also did not give the slightest indication that he would. This was very important.

A boss who interrupts subordinates sends the wrong signals. Bystanders may think the company is disorganized. Additionally, people may simply get uncomfortable. Finally, the subject may feel demoralized. There is nothing worse than demoralizing a salesperson in front of a customer or making a salesperson feel as if he or she does not have any authority. This is never a wise tactic and undermines the strength of a sales organization at its very core.

The owner of the rug shop did not step in until his help was requested. Once he did, I actually respected him as he began answering questions that his salesperson had not been able to answer.

You should never interrupt someone in an interview.  Let whomever you are talking to finish whatever they are going to say.  People hate being interrupted.

5) Constantly (Sincerely) Compliment People

From the second I walked by the rug store and made eye contact with the rugs displayed outside, I was complimented. First, the “spotters” complimented me on spotting the rugs, telling me they were the very nicest rugs in the store—”perhaps the nicest in the city.”

“You have very good taste and an excellent eye for carpets,” one of them said. This was quite powerful and lessened my defenses somewhat. “You have such good taste in carpet. If you like these, you will be even more impressed with these rugs.”

When I finally started speaking with the owner of the store, his first instinct was to compliment me, as well. “I heard all of your questions. We’ve never had someone come in like you who sought to be so educated. You must be very smart.”

This sort of complimenting naturally lessens the tension and creates an atmosphere of goodwill between the parties. These compliments were also insightful because they were about issues that I was susceptible to being complimented on.

How many people compliment their interviewers consistently? If you are not sincerely complimenting your interviewers, you are doing yourself harm.

6) You Need to Educate Your Potential Employers About Your Strength Excessively.

Salespeople who do a good job of educating their clients are almost uniformly the most successful. At the Turkish rug shop, I asked tons of questions about the rugs and did not stop asking questions for several days. I believe I spent at least five days with the rug traders in their shop asking them all sorts of questions. I became fascinated with the rug trade.

When a prospect has unanswered questions about a product, he or she is much less likely to purchase it. You need to educate your potential employers as extensively as possible. Tell your potential employer everything they could possibly want to know, and have information available to teach them everything they want to know about you. The more people learn about something, the more they come to appreciate it.

You know your family extremely well. You know your friends extremely well. Most people do not start caring about someone or something until they begin learning about him or her or it. You need to educate your potential employer in excruciating detail about you, when offered the opportunity, so they will want to hire you.

When Steve Jobs was competing with Jean-Louis Gassée to sell his NeXTSTEP company to Apple and Gassée was trying to sell his own system, Jobs’ team did far better. The result was the sale of a company for $377.5 million versus no sale at all. In a biography of Steve Jobs, iCon: Steve Jobs, the Greatest Second Act in the History of Business, the story is told as follows:

Steve Jobs went first, and again was brilliant and compelling. “Pragmatic, specific, and precise,” Gil later called it. Then he handed off to Avie Tevanian, his top technical guru. Tevanian had brought along a laptop to demonstrate that NeXTSTEP was not just an idea in progress but a functioning operating system. The two of them put on a gold-star presentation.

They were followed by Jean-Louis, who either misunderstood that this was a shoot-out and his final opportunity, or was so certain of a decision in his favor that he didn’t think he had to do anything further than show up. He arrived alone, empty-handed, and not prepared to do anything much more than answer questions. Gil wrote that “everything pointed to Steve Jobs and NeXTSTEP , but Jean-Louis had made it a no-contest. The vote for NeXTSTEP was almost a foregone conclusion.” (Some insiders thought that Gassée’s software would have been the better solution…)

As in many crucial events in history, the decision to educate the audience of buyers made a profound difference—in this case, it was worth more than $350 million. Isn’t this the same mistake many people make when selling themselves? Far too many people fail to educate their potential employers and lose jobs due to this. Far too many people are far too arrogant and feel as if they do not need to “wow” potential employers.

The owner of the rug store lectured me for hours. He brought out tea and talked about where he bought each individual rug. He had purchased numerous books about rugs from secondhand bookstores and had put paperclips on various pages to allow me to read about certain rugs. He had a photo album with pictures of his favorite rugs and notes beside each picture of a rug. The man even had a loom set up in his office where he could show people like me how the rugs were made.

The ability to educate people about who you are is of paramount importance. Educating people shows them that you have a passion for yourself. Educating people also gives them the knowledge they need to care about you in the way that you want them to—in a way that makes them hire you.

In the case of the Turkish rug trader, after attempting to sell me thousands of dollars worth of rugs and still seeing I was not entirely convinced, the man offered to take me on a 20-plus-hour car ride to the Turkey-Iraq border in order to purchase rugs with him. I almost took him up on his offer. A good salesperson will go to all lengths possible to educate a client. So too should you in your job search.

7) Bond with Potential Employers and Be Human.

It is exceptionally important to bond with potential employers if you have the opportunity. The man who owned the rug store immediately served me tea and took me to a quiet part of the store (which turned out to be a sort of “rug cave”) while he talked about rugs and answered questions. He introduced me to everyone working for him and told me personal details about them, such as where they were from and so forth.

The owner of the store even introduced me to his cousin and took me with him and a group of his friends to a Turkish casino. This level of bonding was fantastic and unlike anything I had ever seen before. I will never forget when he introduced me to his cousin. The cousin looked somewhat depressed. “His wife is like his mother,” the rug store owner told me, laughing.

Establishing a certain level of familiarity and bonding with a client is necessary in order to create a human connection and ensure that the client feels comfortable with buying. A seemingly simple purchase can take on a whole new level of meaning.

Over the next several days, I actually made friends with the rug traders. I watched as the tax authorities came and frightened them into paying taxes. I watched them have internal squabbles. They introduced me to their friends and the places they liked to go to eat lunch during the week. They showed me how they sold stuff to tourists and won their confidence. The men talked about the tourist women they had struck up short-term relationships with while the cruise ships were docked. In all respects, the experience was fascinating and meaningful. This showed me that people who are truly exceptional at sales bond with their prospects.

You need to bond with your potential employers if you have the opportunity.  They need to realize and understand that you are human.  Far too few people are able to bond with employers like this.  The more human you look and the more you bond with a potential employer, the better off you will be.

8) Trust Your Potential Employers.

The rugs that the traders wanted to sell me cost thousands of dollars. After days of haggling and bonding I finally told them that while their rugs were beautiful, I could hardly justify paying the amounts they were asking for them without getting them appraised. Incredibly, the men told me to write them a check and that I could cancel it and send them the difference if I found out the rugs were worth less than they said they were when I got home.

I could scarcely believe it. This ended up really sealing the deal for me with these traders. I purchased several thousands of dollars worth of rugs from them. I would not have done this had I not trusted them.

As an aside, when I returned home, I discovered (after visiting numerous rug shops) that two of the rugs I had purchased were not worth what the Turkish traders said they were worth. I canceled my check (which they had not cashed) and, after several telephone conversations with the men, sent them a check for the value of the rugs. While this left a bad taste in my mouth, the trust did go both ways and I realized that there is a different method of doing business.

You need to telegraph to your potential employers that you can and will trust them.  Negotiating aggressively over finer details like health coverage, salaries and bonuses and so forth too aggressively can often result in you blowing a deal.  You need to protect yourself but you also need to telegraph trust.

9) Love Your What You Are Doing.

Early one morning, I was sitting in the carpet cave with the Turkish rug traders, surrounded by rugs. I could not have anticipated at the time that I would soon learn one of the most powerful business lessons of my life.

We’d been drinking tea and a Turkish liquor, Yaki, for hours and it was about 3:30 in the morning. One of the Turks was trying to explain to me the enthusiasm it takes to succeed in the rug business, but he was really talking more about life itself.

He went down a corridor and came back with a rug that was worth about $40,000. It was the most beautiful rug I had ever seen in my life. The colors were so vibrant. It was a Kurdish rug, about 100 years old, and had been smuggled into Turkey from Iraq during the Gulf War.

The trader lit a cigarette, took a long hit, and took a sip of the Yaki. The eyes in the room were all glued to the rug. The rug really was something else. But this particular trader had his thoughts on something even more significant. He was looking toward the ceiling.

“You do not see it now,” he said slowly. “But you will.”

“What don’t I see?” I asked.

“You have to love the rug,” he said. “You have to love the rug.”

The idea of loving the rug was so powerful. For the rug traders, the rug represented how they made a living. It was an art form and something that transformed lives everywhere—including their own lives. Carpet, to these traders, truly was “magical.”

If you think about it, how many merchants and salespeople truly love the products and services they are representing? When you love your product or service, everything changes. It changes for you and for the people you are doing business with.

You need to really love your profession and what you are doing.  You need to love the value you bring to the world.  Whatever you do for a living supports you and gives your life meaning.  The more you love what you do the more meaningful your career will be.  This was something the Turkish rug traders realized and the love of rugs and what they represented was something that I believe has been passed down probably for thousands of years.  The rug represents life itself.

10) A Well-Sold Product or Service Has Long-Term Value.

Using considerable strength, I carted all of the rugs I had purchased from the rug traders back to the United States as luggage. There are two matching rugs in particular that I like quite a bit and have taken with me from place to place across the United States for more than a decade now. These rugs have always been on one side of my bed and have been with me through different relationships and numerous life changes.

I look at these rugs every night before going to bed and step on them every morning when I get up. I will probably pass them on to one of my children when I die, and I will tell my children the same story about these rugs that I have told you today—they have that much meaning.

And this is the point of something that has been well sold. The good or service may not be worth a ton of money, but when the person selling it imbues it with a ton of meaning, it becomes worth something to the buyer. This is significant.

The rugs to me are worth far more than any estimator could ever appraise them for. The reason for this is simple. They are priceless because of what they have come to mean and what the owner of the rug store stated they meant. He told me the rugs were from a family, that he had purchased them, and that they had been a wedding present. He held them under bright lights and almost cried when he spoke about them. The rugs are meaningful to me, and I will always consider them priceless because of what the rug trader made them mean.  Your potential and current employer needs to see you like I see those rugs.

Do Not Be Immobilized in Your Job Search

What You Will Learn Never blame circumstances for what happens to you. Get up and look for the circumstances you want – if you can’t find them, make them! Take charge of your life – make sure you do not leave any stone unturned and do whatever it takes to survive. Things like lack of self-confidence, fear the unknown, or are jealousy of someone will keep you immobilized. Play by the rules and you will experience the success you are entitled to.

Several years ago, I was sitting in my office and the most amazing candidate came across my desk.  The attorney had a degree in a hard science discipline from a school like CalTech or MIT (I believe it was physics), had gone to a good law school and finished first in his class.  Not only that, he was currently working at one of the top law firms in the world and was in a practice area that was not just desirable at the time, it was white hot.  His practice area was so in demand at this particular point in time that one law firm I had been dealing with offered another candidate of mine (an attorney only three years out of law school) a $50,000 bonus to take an offer (which was unprecedented at the time).  This was the year 2000 and things were more different in this particular year than they ever were in history.  The demand for this particular type of attorney was through-the-roof. The candidate who had received this bonus offer did not look 10% as good as the candidate whose resume I was staring at right now.

This stellar attorney wanted me to assist him with moving to another law firm.  At this particular point in history, the market was so good that I estimated this person would get interviews at every single law firm that I sent him to.  However, as I studied his resume I became nervous.  I did not want to offend any of my clients by having them not accept an offer.  I figured that law firms would literally be salivating over this candidate and throwing offers at him.  I was concerned and wanted to make sure that I did not create a feeding frenzy the likes that had never been seen before.

When the market is really good and a recruiter has an exceptionally good candidate, he/she often needs to be careful because he/she does not want to upset his/her clients if the candidate does not take an offer.  As you can imagine, it costs law firms a lot of money to bring people in to interview.  They need to schedule the interviews, first of all.  These blocks of time that the attorneys are interviewing the person could be used for productive work.  With attorneys billing at $800 an hour and more in some of the best law firms, five or six hours of their best attorneys’ time could easily cost a law firm $5000.  Law firms will also typically bring an attorney they are recruiting in more than one time, take the attorney recruit out to lunch or dinner and spend time debating amongst each other whether or not they are interested in hiring the attorney. Due to this, I realized that I could really upset a lot of people by sending this attorney to them if he was not interested in working for them.  The cost to recruit this person for the average firm, up until an offer was extended, could easily be $20,000.

The best recruiters typically have a tremendous amount of credibility with law firms.  If the recruiter tells the law firm to go ahead and extend an offer, the law firm knows that the offer is very likely to be accepted.  When I was most actively recruiting, I believe a great part of my success was that I would always tell law firms when offers were going to be accepted. This made my candidates get jobs with the best law firms and it also enabled me to get more offers for my candidates.  A good recruiter does not allow his/her clients to play guessing games with candidates.

This particular candidate was in a different part of the United States and I did not end up meeting him face-to-face until weeks later.  Instead, I spoke with him on the phone for several hours extensively going through his goals and needs.  The situation was somewhat complicated because at the time the candidate was also going through a divorce, and I remember spending just as much time discussing this with him as his job search.  However, after days of speaking on the phone, I believed we had finally settled on the perfect firm for him.  I say “firm” because it was crystal clear to me that he would almost instantly get an offer from any firm he went into.

There is something else that I want to bring up, which is a really unusual phenomenon that I have noticed with law firms and the most exceptional candidates.  Throughout my career I have had a few candidates like this particular one who had perfect records and were incredibly in demand in the market.  It is always interesting to me to watch what happens.  Something I have learned is that all firms (and employers) have inferiority complexes.  For example, had this candidate had a more average record (schools, firm) within 30 minutes of sending him out to law firms they would have immediately started calling to schedule interviews.  When you send someone who is incredibly stellar, however, a lot of the firms simply do not end up calling right away to schedule interviews.  Instead, they wait for you to call and convince them to interview the person.  I am not sure why this is, but my opinion is that it has something to do with the fact that the firms suddenly want to play “coy” when someone who is exceptional shows up.  They suddenly do not want to look desperate.

After I sent this candidate out, I called the “coy” law firm a couple of days later and explained to them that the candidate looked like a perfect match for them. I explained to them that I had spoken extensively with the candidate about them and that I thought things would go very well.  The firm summarily agreed to book the candidate for an entire day of interviews, followed by a dinner.  This was something that law firms rarely did on first interviews.  Instead, they typically bring the candidate in for what is called a “screening interview” and meet with the candidate for 20-30 minutes.  This is basically so the law firm can get a sense of whether the candidate looks like they might do okay if the interview process goes further.  They want to make sure that the candidate is someone who looks like someone they would hire before committing to further interviews.

The day after my candidate came in, I called the law firm seeking information.  After sending them this particular candidate, they became a big fan of mine and my phone calls were getting returned in less than 20 minutes.  On this particular day, I did not receive a phone call back until several hours later.  There is a bit of a ritual that plays itself out with law firms when you send them candidates they really like. I will typically chat with them for an hour or more about nothing.  This is something that really breaks down the ice and puts me in a position where they will willingly share information.  If the candidate is good enough, the law firm is also “recruiting” when speaking with you and they want to be nice to you so that you will say good things about them to your candidate.  With this particular candidate, I had probably spent 2 or 3 hours chatting about nothing with the hiring partner of this particular law firm.  We knew a lot of similar people and agreed that we would grab lunch if I was ever in his part of the country.

Late in the day my phone call was returned by the hiring partner’s secretary.  “He wanted me to tell you we are not moving forward,” she said.

“Any reason why?”  I asked her.

“He did not give me any reason,” she said.

For the next several days I started stalking this particular hiring partner with phone call after phone call.  Worse yet, my candidate kept asking me when he was going to be receiving the offer.  I told him I did not have any “final news” yet.  Now what I am about to say may seem a tad unethical, but I want you to understand a little bit about what really good recruiters do.  A really good recruiter can literally snatch candidates from the jaws of death and get them hired when they are about to be rejected.  This is something the very best recruiters out there can do.  When you have rapport with the law firm they will follow your lead and often actually hire the people you are recommending to them.  Here, I needed to know what was going on.

Several days later I managed to track down the hiring partner.

“I am really sorry I did not return your calls,” he said.

“You cannot reject this guy.  He is exactly what your law firm has been looking for.”

“I know,” he said.

I sold the partner on the candidate for at least 15 minutes, finally getting him to agree not to reject the candidate and to bring him in for another full day of interviews with different people.  I have no idea how I did this, but I did not give up on my candidate.  I absolutely refused to give up because I knew that he really wanted to work in this particular law firm.

As the conversation with the partner was winding down he asked me if I had met the attorney.  I told him no.

“You should meet him,” he said.  Generally, when you are talking to exceptionally important people (and this attorney was, at the time I saw him, in the legal newspapers frequently and I am sure he was making well over $2,000,000 a year) they have the ability to keep most of their interactions to niceties.  Here, the fact that this came up at the very end meant that he was leaving me with something that he wanted me to think about.  This one remark about meeting the candidate was something I should do.

It occurred to me that I had never seen a picture of the candidate. I had also never had the opportunity to observe his mannerisms and how he might do in interviews.  Given the fact that an Oracle of an Attorney had just given me the strongest possible hint that I should meet this attorney, I decided to do so. I called him up and told him I wanted to fly him to Los Angeles at my expense so we could chat and get to know one another.  Not a lot of recruiters will do stuff like this, but it was a habit I had really gotten into doing. I flew candidates from all over the country to meet with me, and the process had really yielded some outstanding results.  When you get behind someone and show them what they need to do and say once you understand their particular interviewing style, incredible things can happen to them.  It can change their lives.

I will never forget the moment this particular candidate walked through the front door of my office.  He had the longest hair of any man I had ever seen.  His hair went clear down past his buttocks.  He had so much hair that he had manipulated it with barrettes or something to keep it away from his eyes.  When he sat down and started talking to me he was also quite depressing. He just kept talking about his divorce.  The divorce was the least of my worries, however. I simply could not get over how much hair this guy had.  I had never seen a man with so much hair in my life.

Hair is a personal thing and I did not want to upset this particular guy and did not bring it up immediately.  In fact, it was not until we were eating lunch that I decided I should say something about it.  It was the white elephant in the room.  I did not want to upset him because men can get really sensitive about their hair.

A couple of years prior, I was visiting my home in Michigan and saw one of my dear childhood friends. He had lost a little bit of hair and he was sitting in the front seat of a car and I was in back.  I tapped the back of his head and said “looks like you’re getting a little bald spot.”  To the astonishment of everyone in the car he turned around, leaned over the seat, starting punching me in the face and screaming never to call him bald again.  It was a bizarre episode from a guy who was traditionally very mellow.  It was for this reason that I was careful not to say anything about my candidate’s hair for some time.

“I do not know how to say this,” I finally said as we were eating desert. “But do you think cutting your hair may make it easier for you to get a job?”

Unfortunately, my worst fears were confirmed.  The candidate started going off in a rampage, saying “there [was] no fucking way!” he was going to be cutting his hair and would not bow to the establishment and a whole host of other things. He must have gone on a verbal rampage for at least 15 minutes and I realized it was an incredibly sensitive issue for him.

He told me it had taken him over 3 years to grow his current hairdo–just about the amount of time he had been working in his current law firm.  He had not always looked like this, and if he had I am sure he would have had a very difficult time getting a job with the law firm he had joined when he was in school.

In addition to his incredible depression over getting divorced, the biggest issue this guy had was his hair.  He also told me that if the law firm that was not interested in him and was unwilling to make a decision about him right away, he wanted to look at other firms.  A lot of other law firms.  We discussed at least 15 more law firms and he told me he wanted to speak with them all.  I knew they would all want to speak with him and I was afraid. However, I also knew that he was qualified to work in them and I should abide by his wishes.  If they wanted to discriminate against him because of his long hair there was nothing in particular I could do about this.  That was their issue and not mine.

Over the next several weeks he interviewed at every single one of the 15 law firms and was rejected from every single one of them.  After he was rejected from those firms I managed to get him interviews at several other law firms, and he was rejected from these as well.  While the law firms did not say it directly, I knew that for all of them the issue was the hair.  They could just not get over this.

The stupidest and saddest thing ended up happening with this candidate.  Due to his long hair, no one ended up hiring him.  He might have been able to get hired if he had a little bit better attitude, but as the interviews progressed he seemed to get angrier and angrier.  At one point he told me he was contemplating suicide.  Everything just kept going downhill.

A couple of months later he finally called me up and said, “I may consider cutting my hair.”  At this point, however, he had already interviewed with almost all of the firms in his geographic region of the United States.  There was not much more that he could do.  He ended up dropping off the map and doing something else besides practicing law.  His career as he knew it, had come to an end.

I have thought about this particular episode several times throughout the years, because this person sabotaged himself and his career.  This particular person could have fixed everything by simply getting a haircut.  He was in charge of what happened to him, just like you are in charge of what happens to you as well.  You choose what the world and your career will be for you.  As George Bernard Shaw wrote in Mrs. Warren’s Profession:

People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are.  I don’t believe in circumstances.  The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and if they can’t find them, make them.

This statement is incredibly relevant to your life as well.  You are in charge of what happens to you.  Anything you want to happen, you can make happen.

If someone was to come to you and say that unless you got a job working as a bank teller in some part of the United States within the next 12 months, you would be executed at the end of 12 months, you would find a way to get a job as a bank teller.

• If it meant cutting your hair, you would cut your hair.
• If it meant moving to another part of the country, you would move to another part of the country.
• If it meant applying to 10,000 jobs, you would apply to 10,000 jobs.
• If it meant mass mailing your resume to every bank branch in the United States, you would mass mail your resume.
• If it meant calling every bank manager in the United States, you would call everyone you could.
• If it meant losing 100 pounds so you were more presentable, you would lose 100 pounds.
• If it meant taking English lessons so that you sounded better, you would take English lessons.
• If it meant learning how to do math equations in your head, you would learn how to do this.
• If it meant learning to always be smiling, you would learn to always smile.
• If it meant learning to laugh at stupid jokes, you would learn to laugh at stupid jokes.

In fact, my guess is that you would do absolutely whatever it took in order to get a job as a bank teller.  You would make sure that you did not leave any stone unturned, and would do whatever it took to survive.  I know you would, anyone would do this.  People are in the business of surviving.

Why then do so many of us not do whatever it takes to get every job we are going after?  You need to do whatever you can within your power to get a job. You need to go after a job like someone who is going to be executed if they do not get the job.  This level of commitment to your job search will change everything.  This is what you need to do if you are going to get the job that you are seeking.  This is what the people who really succeed do. They make their search for a job an all consuming obsession.

What I saw that was so disappointing in my long-haired candidate was that he was not doing everything within his power to get a job.  You may think it is unfair that someone cannot have hair past their buttocks and get a job in a white shoe law firm paying well into the six figures, but this is just the way it is.  Society has rules and we can use these rules for our benefit or against us.  Having hair that is not past your buttocks is a rule that must be followed to get a job with most major law firms. I am sure there have been historical exceptions, but probably not many.

As a consequence of this man not playing by the rules and not doing everything within his power to get a job, he was almost driven to suicide.  In fact, he may very well have been, I do not know.  What I would impress upon you is that you need to do whatever you possibly can to succeed in your job search.  If you do not do this, you will not experience the success you are entitled to.

Many of us believe that being smart is about how high our IQ is.  However, the ranks of the unemployed contain plenty of exceptionally intelligent people.  The real test of someone’s intelligence, in my opinion, is their ability to take action and get the results they want from life.  When I think about the story of the man with the long hair, what I think about is immobilization.  His job search was immobilized because he refused to cut his hair.  Are your immobilized in your own job search and career?  If you are not doing whatever it takes to get a job then you are surely immobilized.

Does your lack of self confidence prevent you from applying to every possible job?  If so then you are surely immobilized.  Does your fear of the unknown prevent you from looking for a better job?  If so, then you are surely immobilized.  Does your jealousy of someone else prevent you from working effectively in your job?  If so, you are surely immobilized.  You are immobilized whenever you are not functioning at your highest and best state.  This is what you need to do and if you are looking for a job, the most important thing you can possibly do is throw out all of the stops and do whatever it takes get the job of your dreams.  You never want to be immobilized.

You Need to Stop Competing and Seeing Differences Between You and Others

What You Will Learn Be friends and find affinity with everyone around you. Become a creator, not a competitor. People will open doors for you once they can identify with you. Having open lines of communication is something that will consistently get and keep you employed.

If you are looking for a job, trying to improve in your current job, or simply wish to experience a better life, there is one thing you need to do: You need to be friends with everyone you meet in business, and stop competing and seeing differences.   This is a statement that falls on deaf ears for most people.  In fact, this is the exact opposite of the way most of us think.  Instead, we view others as competitors and the slices of pie as limited.  We view opportunities as few and limited, and feel the need to compete for what little there is.

What are the rewards for looking and seeing commonalty between you and others?  They are incredible.  In the Year 2000 I started a legal recruiting firm.  I did not start the firm until around March of that year. I had no legal recruiting experience and knew absolutely nothing about about the market.  Since I had been a practicing attorney for years, the fact that I was now recruiting seemed almost surreal to me in many respects.  I had decided to just enter a zone where I did not care what happened to me.  When you are in the recruiting business, what typically happens is that law firms will call you in a very formal way to tell you they have no interest in a candidate of yours.  The conversations will typically last no more than 30 to 45 seconds.

“We are calling to let you know that we have no interest in John Smith,” they might say.

“Thank you,” would be the standard response.

After several weeks of this I began to feel that the entire situation was somewhat absurd.  This is what recruiters do all over the country. I decided that the best thing I could do was mix it up.

“We’re calling to let you know we have no interest in John Smith,” a caller might say.  The callers were typically women in their mid-20’s to early 30’s who were called “recruiting coordinators” inside law firms.

“You know, I was just outside having my third Diet Coke in the past hour and I realized that I have not heard your voice in some time.  I really like your voice, how are you?”

“Fine,” they might say, still a little stiff.

“I am not sure how much longer I am going to be doing this recruiting thing. It is really exhausting.  Law firms are really uptight.  Do you enjoy making all these calls?  It must be a real buzz kill just calling a bunch of recruiters all day.  I cannot believe you and I are doing the jobs we are doing.”

This is what I would do with every caller.  Eventually, I would get into my personal life and they would start to talk about themselves as well.  A few months into this I was astonished when some of these women called me on the way home from work on their cell phones just to chat about random stuff, unrelated to work.  One woman’s husband was going to be building a deck on the back of her house that weekend; one man who was a recruiting coordinator was going sailing; another girl was leaving her job because she wanted to ride a motorcycle across the United States.

I did the same thing with my candidates.  (I actually ended up marrying one of them a few years later.)  My candidates and I would talk about the most random stuff.  Only about 1-2% of my time on the phone with my candidates and law firms was ever about anything having to do with actual business. I enjoyed what I was doing and made numerous friends.  I looked at the entire process as something that was meant to be fun, establishing connections and nothing more.

Prior to becoming an attorney, I had been an asphalt sealing contractor around Michigan for over 7 years.  Much of my job involved going door-to-door and selling my service.  Someone I had never seen before would answer the door and I might say something like:

“Hi.  I’m here to sell you the service of putting some asphalt sealer on your driveway but I am not in a very good mood right now.  My girlfriend from school is working in Washington, DC and she just broke up with me so she can see other people this summer.  I’m not too happy about it.”  This is the last thing people expect from a salesman.

I would show up at the home of the person, well dressed and looking professional, and invariably the person would start talking to me about my personal situation and offering me advice.  I would never have to sell the person anything.  I would slip in how much the service was going to cost and the person would always agree.  The next year I would show up at the person’s front door and they might ask me about my personal life and I would tell them what was going on, and they would do the same thing.  Using this particular method of selling asphalt sealing, I was able to become probably the largest residential asphalt sealing contractor in Michigan in less than a couple of years.  It is all about treating people as your friend.

I never talked about the service.  I just disarmed myself, exposed a vulnerability of some sort and let the person start consoling me and offering advice.  I liked getting the advice.

In the legal recruiting industry I was amazed at how fast the business grew by me just mellowing out and being disarmed.  By the end of 2000, with less than 7 full months of recruiting under my belt, I had made 29 placements which had generated over $1,000,000 in fees.  The most prestigious and well known recruiting firms at the time all wanted me to merge my recruiting firm with their recruiting firm.  The phones were ringing off the hook with referrals and people wanting to work for me.  I had people flying to Los Angeles to meet with me and seek my advice about how to get a job from places as diverse as New York and San Francisco.  It was as if I could do no wrong in the work I was in.  None of this was just due to the economy being really good, either. In the year 2002, I ended up placing every single candidate I worked with.  The legal market was horrible in the year 2002.

I am telling you this to show the power of chilling out, going with the flow and treating everyone you are dealing with as a friend and not a competitor.  Make yourself vulnerable and figure out how to deal with everyone you are encountering in a pleasant, happy way.  Your career depends on this.  You have no competitors.  The world is yours for the taking, but you cannot take it in a way which views the world as having limited resources and opportunities.

The competition in law firms to become partner is something that has always interested me, because I am an attorney and also have spent the majority of my career in the legal industry.  When most people think of becoming a partner in a law firm, they view the competition as internal between them and different attorneys in the law firm also competing to be partners. The young attorneys almost invariably view themselves as competing for a limited slice of pie.  The idea in most law firms is that they can only make a limited number of partners per year.  Accordingly, the attorneys inside the law firm will work as much as they possibly can and play one political game after another to get the people they are competing with off of the partnership track, getting themselves ahead.  The competition these attorneys go through with each other can last years and it is brutal.

Few attorneys in this competition really ever step back and take the time to realize what they are competing for: They are competing for a share of the law firm’s profits.  In this respect, however, law firms only make money when they have clients who are willing to pay for the law firm’s services.  The easiest way any of these attorneys could virtually guarantee that she will make partner, would be to bring in a tremendous amount of business and concentrate on this the second he/she got out of law school.  An attorney with enough business can work in virtually any law firm out there, and they will be welcomed as a partner in almost any law firm.

If you have enough clients, it does not matter where you go to school and it does not matter how good you are at political games within your firm.  The person who brings in the money and the clients is the one who ultimately controls everything.  In fact, one of the largest law firm collapses of 2009 (Heller Ehrman) happened because one partner with a tremendous amount of business left the firm.  As a January 26, 2009 story in the Wall Street Journal recounted:

Heller’s management focused on trying to merge with a bigger, stronger competitor, concluding that it was the only way the firm could stay alive amid continuing lawyer defections. At a shareholder gathering last spring in Colorado Springs, Colo., Heller’s chairman, Mr. Larrabee, said the firm had plenty of choices of merger partners. Last summer, Baker & McKenzie LLP, one of the nation’s largest firms, emerged as a serious candidate. But after weeks of negotiations, the deal cratered in August, partly because of business conflicts. Heller lawyers had sued many of Baker’s clients.

A new suitor soon emerged. On Aug. 21, Heller gathered 40 key lawyers at the San Francisco Ritz-Carlton to discuss its potential white knight: Mayer Brown LLP, an 1,800-lawyer firm. The mood was upbeat.

But another problem cropped up. Robert Fram and Robert Haslam, whose intellectual-property group was among the firm’s highest grossing, had said they were considering heading to another firm. Heller attorneys implored Messrs. Fram and Haslam to stay. If they left, some lawyers believed, the Mayer deal would crumble.

M. Laurence Popofsky, a Heller lifer who was the firm’s chairman from 1988 to 1993, recalls telling Mr. Fram over lunch: “People’s pensions are in jeopardy. Employees are at risk….If you do this and don’t give the merger a chance, you will hurt an awful lot of people.”

Mr. Fram says Mr. Popofsky and others tried to persuade him to stay. But his team, he says, didn’t want to join Mayer and then jump ship if they were unhappy. “We didn’t feel like that was something we were ethically comfortable doing,” he says. On Aug. 29, Mr. Fram informed Heller that he was leaving.

Here, one of the oldest and most respected law firms in the United States collapsed primarily due to the departure of an important partner.  The importance of having business inside of a law firm is paramount and of incredible importance for an attorney’s success.  The entire success of a law firm can hinge on whether or not it has business.  What this means is that the competition inside law firms between people seeking to be partners does not really have to be internal.  The only thing that the associates seeking to be partner need to do to guarantee their success is go out and get as much business as they can.  Indeed, their true success or failure is almost entirely based upon their ability to bring in business.  There are no internal opponents and no external ones either.  There is is a huge pie of opportunity out there (business waiting to be claimed) and all someone needs to do is go out into the world and claim this opportunity for themselves.  The attorneys engaged in brutal competition with one another at law firms all over the country would be well served to step back and realize that all they have to do is stop competing with the people inside their own law firm and go out into the world and get clients.

You need to understand that you have no opponents.  Your success will largely be determined by you ability to go into the world, find commonality and make friends with the people around you.  Establish commonalities and do not look for differences.

Using this one simple idea in business can have profound rewards. It can literally change your career and life.  You must abolish from your mind the idea that the people you are dealing with in your career and in business are your competition.  You must eradicate the idea from your mind that you even have any competition.  A quote from Wallace Wattles in The Science of Getting Rich is instructive in this regard:

Intelligent Substance will make things for you, but it will not take things away from someone else and give them to you.  You must get rid of the thought of competition.  You are to create, not compete for what is already created.  You do not want to have to take anything away from any one.  You do not want to drive sharp bargains.  You do not have to cheat, or take advantage.  You do not need to let any man work for less than he earns.  You do not have to covet the property of others, or look at it with wishful eyes; no man has anything of which you cannot have the like, and that without taking what he has away from him.  You are to become a creator, not a competitor; you are going to get what you want, but in such a way that when you get it every other man will have more than he has right now.

It easy to find enemies out there.  It is easy to be suspicious of people.  It is easy to not take extra time with people.  It is easy to find reasons not to be friends with people.  This is what most of what the world does.  This is what we are trained to do.  We look for differences.  We want to find how people are different than us and not the same.  This is a path that is not going to take you anywhere and will not help you.  If you want to experience the most incredible success you have ever known, if you want your career and life to change, you need to find commonalities between you and everyone you come in contact with.  People will open doors for you when they identify with you.

Over the past several years I have watched Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen rise from nothing to become two of the most important and respected best selling authors of all time with their Chicken Soup for the Soul series of books.  Chicken Soup for the Soul was the #1 book on the New York Times’ best seller list for over 100 weeks and is one of the best selling books of all time.  Canfield and Hansen have made millions of dollars through the sale of these books, and have also done countless other projects related to these books.

The publication of these books has rocketed them from small time to international stardom practically overnight.  I study success for a living so that I can share it with you and change your life.  I have been to several of Canfield and Hansen’s seminars because they typically have pretty good speakers and are somewhat interesting.  One of Hansen’s most popular seminars is his Mega Book Marketing Seminar, where hundreds of people spend three days learning how they can hopefully write and sell a best selling book.  Hansen has been doing this seminar for years and each year gets up and does a Power Point presentation about what a great marketer he is due to the incredible sales of this book.  Sometimes his partner, Canfield, gets up and shows a photo copy of a million dollar check he received from a publisher.  On the several occasions I have seen Canfield speak, he also always shows a picture of his house and tells everyone how it cost $5,000,000.

I like these guys and they really do seem to have a bit of an interest in helping people.  Canfield is also featured in the movie The Secret where he talks about how he was able to make his book popular by landing an article in the National Enquirer about his book.

Yesterday, I found some marketing inside a magazine sent to me called Radio-TV Interview Report and saw a testimonial from Canfield and Hansen.  Essentially, what this magazine does is allow authors to advertise the fact that they are available for radio and television ads if producers or anyone it interested in interviewing them.  The testimonial they put in this magazine really threw me off for a reason I will share with you in a moment:

We’ve done several things for marketing which worked well, and advertising in Radio-TV Interview Report was one of the most effective tools we have used.  When our book was first published, no one knew who we were.  But all that changed after appearing on hundreds of radio and television talk shows.  We averaged anywhere from 3 to 4 radio phone interviews a day for that first year.  We’re convinced that this ongoing barrage of radio and television publicity helped create the word-of-mouth necessary for our book to become a national best seller!

Our ads in Radio-TV Interview Report helped us hit #1 on the New York Times best seller list, and we’ve stayed there for 100 weeks and counting! But none of that would have happened had we not been willing to do several interviews a day every day on stations large and small–a commitment we continue to do to this day.  We highly recommend RTIR whenever we advise authors and speakers who want to get publicity easily and inexpensively.

Despite having attended a few of their seminars, this was the first time I realized that they had grown their business so fast through advertising in this particular publication.  Notwithstanding, what is so interesting to me about this is that according to Canfield and Hansen, most of their success was due to simply chatting on the phone with various radio stations across the country.  This is no different than a major cause of the success I experienced as a recruiter or asphalt contractor.  When you just mellow out and do everything you can to start relating to people and connecting with them, a lot of stuff happens.  If you think about it, 3 to 4 radio interviews a day takes a lot of time.  In fact, this is how it looks like they spent the substantial majority of their time for at least a year.  The key to their success, then, was establishing affinity with others.  There is nothing standoffish about this.  This ability to connect with people rocketed them to having one of the best selling books of all time.

One of the easiest ways to get a job is to establish lines of communication with the hiring personnel or people who work for the employer you want to work with.  Once you establish communication, having the people you are working with feel comfortable and develop an affinity for you is even more important.  Once you have achieved affinity and communication, then you are not only in a good position in terms of getting a job, but can excel in the new position as well.

It is very easy for me to tell the relative health of companies and firms.  When you go into a firm and see people getting along very well, joking and having a good time, you are generally in a successful company.  The reason is because the people inside the company are communicating, and feel comfortable with one another.  When you go inside a company and there does not appear to be solid communication between people and groups of people, you are most often in a company that is in trouble to some degree.

Having open lines of communication is among the most important thing you can possibly do, and is something that will consistently get and keep you employed.  Be friendly with everyone you meet. Stop looking for differences, and do everything within your power to find affinity with other people.  This will change your career permanently and take you to a far different place.

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