Harrison Barnes » get a job http://www.aharrisonbarnes.com Sun, 12 Feb 2012 05:01:50 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.1 You Need to Be Able to Close http://www.aharrisonbarnes.com/you-need-to-be-able-to-close/ http://www.aharrisonbarnes.com/you-need-to-be-able-to-close/#comments Thu, 14 Jul 2011 05:01:04 +0000 Harrison Barnes http://www.aharrisonbarnes.com/?p=2150 2150 The ability to ‘‘close’‘ and get the sale is the most important skill in selling. It is something that few people know how to do. Many people can get a consumer, an employer, or others to the cusp of making a purchasing or a hiring decision; however, it is the final ‘‘push’‘ that makes all of the difference. It takes a tremendous amount of skill to sell yourself and get a job. It takes a tremendous amount of skill to go from someone who a potential employer will consider for the job to someone who is hired. Your job in getting hired, in getting a better job and when looking for a job, is to push the employer over the fence and make them hire you. This is all there is to it. You need to get hired. There is nothing wrong with developing the skills of a master salesperson and ‘‘closer’‘ in order to get the best job you can. The desire to get a good job and ‘‘close’‘ the deal is a desire for employment, which leads to a richer and more abundant life and the desire to better yourself is praiseworthy. If you do not desire to have a better job or to find a job when you are unemployed, you are not living up to your full potential. It is absolutely essential that you give your best efforts to ‘‘closing’‘ and getting a job when you go out on interviews and apply to jobs. If you neglect to do this, you are not fulfilling your duty to yourself to be everything you are capable of being. When I was around 18 years old and starting the asphalt business, I did what anyone in the business was doing at the time. I drove around and put fliers in all of the mailboxes in front of every house with asphalt that I could find. Once I did this, the next step would be to wait for the phone to ring. I would put around 100 brochures in mailboxes for every phone call I received. Once someone called me I would then go out and give them an estimate. I would have to drive to a home at an appointed time, measure their asphalt and write up a complicated one or two page estimate describing all of the work I was going to do. For twenty minutes or more, the person would want to stand on their driveway and talk about what might happen were I to do the work. After I gave the estimate I would then hope the person chose me out of the three or four other estimates they might be getting. Since the work was rarely more than $300, a few dollars here or there could make the difference as to whether or not I actually got the work. I would then wait some more for the person to call me. Under this business model, someone in the asphalt business spends most of their time driving around, giving estimates and waiting for the phone to ring, and very little time doing work. When you are waiting for the phone to ring you are not working. At some point I decided that this did not make any sense. I wanted to make money and I did not want to have to sit around not working. I needed be be able to ’‘close’‘ people and I needed to be able to close people on the spot. Instead of waiting for the phone to ring each day, I changed my approach. I decided I would only try and sell a homeowner on asphalt service once each year. I would go down a street and knock on every single door and announce that I was going to be on the street the next day, and the next day only. In return for allowing me to do the work the next day I would charge them half of my normal price for the work. I would also leave them a bill and they could send me a check if they were satisfied with the work. This method of closing worked incredibly well. Here is what I would do. I would not measure the driveway. I would drive down the street around 6:00 to 8:30 pm when everyone was home and state the following when someone answered the door: ‘‘Hello. My name’s Harrison Barnes. I come down this street once a year doing asphalt work and because I do several driveways at once, I typically save homeowners at least 50% over what they would pay if you called me and I had to come out and give an estimate. I’ve looked it over and your driveway is something I would normally charge $300 for. I will be on your street tomorrow and will do it for $150. I will leave an invoice and you can send me a check when you get around to it.’‘ Here is what 95% of the people said in response to this:
  • ‘‘Sure’‘
  • ‘‘Yes.’‘
  • ‘‘Go ahead.’‘
  • ‘‘Please do it.’‘
  • ‘‘You’re hired.’‘
  • ‘‘Great.’‘
  • ‘‘Excellent.’‘

I was always paid and I never spent more than 5 minutes at each house ‘‘selling‘‘ and ‘‘closing’‘ the homeowners. Since the product I was selling was my labor, and the stuff I put on the driveways cost only a few dollars per house, my profits were great no matter what I charged. I went from doing one or two houses on a street each year to doing virtually every single one of them. My business boomed and I am confident I became the largest residential asphalt sealing contractor in Michigan almost overnight. Each night I would come home and there would be so many checks in my mailbox the postman would have then banded together with rubber bands. None of this would have happened if I had not developed the ability to ‘‘close,’‘ push homeowners over the fence and turn them from casual snoopers into buyers. This is about the ability to ‘‘close’‘ and get the sale. In your business the most important ability you can have is the ability to ‘‘close’‘–without the ability to close very little is likely to happen. You will be on the sidelines and others will be hired instead of you. It is easy to get in the door anywhere. Getting in the door, however, is only 1% of the battle. The most difficult thing to do once you get in the door is to close the sale and move the employer from a ‘‘browser’‘ to a buyer. In a poor economy, the price of things typically starts coming down. The reason for this is that stores and other merchandisers are doing everything within their power to ‘‘close’‘ you and get you from someone who may not purchase something to someone who will. A short time ago a local Ford dealership in Los Angeles discounted a bunch of new Ford Mustangs by around 50% to move them out quickly. This gimmick works. When I drive down the street in Los Angeles these days I have been seeing people standing on corners promoting incredible going out of business sales at various businesses, offering 90% off of retail price in many cases. Low prices are a very effective tool for closing consumers. One of my favorite scenes in the movies that highlights the incredible importance of closing, is from the 1970s movie, Kramer v. Kramer. In the movie, the protagonist, Ted Kramer, is going through a divorce and is unemployed. He wants to get custody of his son, but his wife is about to tell the judge in an upcoming hearing that he is unemployed and she should be granted custody. Ted has to get a job immediately. He first goes to an employment agency and finds the only job available in the entire city, but the recruiter tells him that now is not a good time to set up an interview. Ted fights with the man in the employment agency and finally manages to coerce the man into setting up a very quick interview. Ted manages to get a few minutes with some hiring personnel while they are having a Christmas party on the Friday before Christmas. He goes into the interview and knows this is his one shot. Here is the dialogue from the movie script 

91    INT. OUTER OFFICE, J. WALTER THOMPSON -          LATE AFTERNOON          The large room is crowded with secretaries, junior          executives, researchers, editors, ad-men, etc., etc.          They all have drinks in their hands and there is a good          deal of kissing and general conviviality going on.          THE CAMERA TRACKS WITH ACKERMAN as he steps out of his          office, closes the door behind him and makes his way          across the room to MR. SPENCER, the Advertising Director.          At the moment, Spencer stands with his coat over one          arm and a drink in his hand talking to a very pretty          young woman. Ackerman approaches him, whispers some-          thing in his ear. Spencer shakes his head and points          to his watch. Ackerman says something else and finally,          with a look of weary resignation, Spencer excuses him-          self from the pretty young woman and follows Ackerman          back to his office. THE CAMERA FOLLOWS THEM. As          Ackerman opens the door to his office, THE CAMERA IS          ANGLED so that we can SEE past them, into the office          where Ted stands waiting.                                ACKERMAN                          (as they enter)                    Mr. Spencer, Mr. Kramer.                                 SPENCER                         (not wasting any time)                    So you're the go-getter. All                    right, you've got ten minutes.          As the door closes behind them, blocking our view, THE          CAMERA PANS UP to a clock over the door. It reads          five-fifteen.                                                     MATCH DISSOLVE TO:    92    INT. ACKERMAN'S OFFICE - LATE AFTERNOON          ON A CLOCK--which now reads five twenty-two. THE CAMERA          PULLS BACK TO REVEAL Spencer, now sitting in Ackerman's          chair, his feet on Ackerman's desk. Ted has just          finished his pitch.                                SPENCER                          (sipping his drink)                    That's very interesting, Mr.                    Kramer. I must say, it's very                    interesting. Let me think about                    it. I'll let Jack...                          (indicating Ackerman)                    ...know and he'll get in touch                    with you.          Spencer gets to his feet, starts to retrieve his coat.          ON TED--as he decides to take a gamble.                                TED                    Excuse me, I believe you said                    I had ten minutes.          ON SPENCER--almost at the door, looking around.                                SPENCER                    Well?          ON TED--checking his watch.                                TED                    That means I've got two minutes                    left. I understand you're paying                    twenty-five.          Spencer nods.                                TED                          (a deep breath, then                           a real huckster)                    All right, I'll tell you what                    I'm gonna do--I'll take the job                    at twenty-two-five. Now, that's                    twenty-five hundred less than                    you're offering. The only thing                    is, you have to say yes right                    now. Not tomorrow. Not next                    week. Not after the holidays.                    It's worth it to me for a                    yes right now and I'll take                    twenty-five hundred less.          There is a long beat of silence as Spencer and Ackerman          look at one another. They were clearly not prepared          for this.                                TED                          (watching them)                    Today only. One day only.                    Twenty-two five.                                SPENCER                    Mr. Kramer, can we talk privately                    for a moment?                                TED                    Certainly.                                                     CUT TO:    93    OUTER OFFICE - LATE AFTERNOON          ON TED--as he steps out of Ackerman's office, sits down.          Now, all of the fear, all of the anxiety that he has          been fighting down comes welling up. What if he pushed          too hard? What will he do if he doesn't get a job?          If Ted Kramer could fall to his knees and pray, he          would.          CROSS-CUT WITH THE CHRISTMAS PARTY-- that swirls around          him. We notice in particular, one very pretty young          woman flirting with a number of men. She is wearing          a dress with straps, one of them has broken and she          has patched it with a piece of masking tape.          Finally the door to Ackerman's office opens and he          steps out.                                ACKERMAN                    Mr. Kramer?          Ted jumps to his feet, starts into the office.                                                     CUT TO:    94    INT. ACKERMAN'S OFFICE - LATE AFTERNOON          ON SPENCER--He looks at Ted carefully for a long time,          then:                                SPENCER                          (grins)                    Welcome aboard, Mr. Kramer.          C.U. TED--There is an instant of relief, then, with          astounding cool:                                TED                    Well, gentlemen, I'm pleased                    to be with you.          ANOTHER ANGLE--as they shake hands, say their good-          byes. THE CAMERA TRACKS WITH TED as he makes his way          through the Christmas party that is still going strong.          Then, suddenly, as he passes the very pretty woman we          noticed earlier, he turns and kisses her.

This is one of my favorite scenes from the movie because it shows the absolute power of ‘‘closing’‘ in getting a job. In this particular example Ted used money to close. He also used the power of a deadline. This is similar to what I did in the asphalt business by telling the homeowners they had to make a decision ‘‘right now’‘ and not later. The ability to pressure people to make decision now, and not later, is one of the most important things you can do in ‘‘closing.’‘ However, it is not something that is always going to work in getting a job like it did with Ted. I would like to tell you a quick story about how I once hired someone and how this person ‘‘closed’‘ me to get a job. It is an unusual story but it is something that taps into something that I believe is one of the more powerful methods out there of ‘‘closing’‘ to get a job. I used to work in downtown Los Angeles and worked in a building called the Oviatt Building, which was directly across the street from the Los Angeles Athletic Club. The Los Angeles Athletic Club is a nice club, however, anyone can join for the most part. I believe at the time it cost $500 to join the club and then cost around $100 a month to keep your membership. This is in contrast to several other ‘‘downtown’‘ social clubs which could cost $30,000 or more to join and sometimes require years of evaluation and references from other members in order to be accepted. I was perfectly happy with the Los Angeles Athletic Club but the longer that I was around people in Los Angeles and got familiar with the scene downtown, the more I realized there was a giant pecking order among clubs. In fact, the people who were from the oldest families and the more prestigious people in terms of their professional accomplishments and so forth tended to belong to these more prestigious clubs. The situation was compounded by the fact that you had to be invited to the more prestigious clubs by a current member, then they introduced you to current members and then a board would vote on you after a certain length of time. One day I had been with a recruiter of ours from Texas and we had walked into one of the more prestigious clubs to see what it was like and how to join. We were kicked out of the club and they threatened to call the police since we had come in from off the street. It was at that point I realized that there was an entire subculture in my midst of extremely private and exclusive clubs in downtown Los Angeles. They were far different than the Los Angeles Athletic Club. One day I was interviewing a man a few years older than me for a position in our company and the interview ended about 5:00 pm. The man was from an old waspy sort of Los Angeles family and was pretty classy and well spoken in all respects. Generally, if an interview ended around 5:00 p.m. I would take someone out for drinks or to dinner, but on this occasion I simply asked the man if he had plans. He told me he was going to his club to exercise and I asked him which club. He informed me that it was the same club that I had been kicked out of with the recruiter from Texas just a few months previously. He then did something extremely smart: ‘‘Would you like to come to the club with me and have a look around?’‘ he asked. This is something I was definitely interested in. He took me to the club and then proceeded over the next few weeks to introduce me to other members. In the process, I ended up hiring him. While he was very qualified for the job I hired him for at the time, I am not sure if from an economic standpoint he was someone that made sense for me to hire. He was a great guy, but at that point the company simply was not at the level where it needed him. In retrospect, and this is a sad thing to say, I think a part of me hired him because I had a desire to belong to his group which I had been an outsider of previously. This brings me to you and ‘‘closing’‘ and getting a job. When someone is hiring you or making a decision about whether or not they should hire you, one of the things they are always asking themselves is ‘‘What’s In It For Me’‘–or WIFM. You need to look at getting hired and getting a job from your perspective, and from the perspective of the person who is doing the hiring. I once heard a well known copywriter, Ben Mack, say something along these lines. I wrote this down so these are probably not his exact words, but I wanted to share them with you because they are so powerful: People will follow you anywhere to the extent you encourage their dreams, justify their failures, allay their fears, confirm their suspicions, and help them throw rocks at their enemies. For the past several years, a great deal of my time has been spent interviewing and working with the very best-educated attorneys throughout the United States. One of the things you will find in the resumes of attorneys who went to law school from the 1990s onward is that, if they went to most of the top 10 law schools, they generally have an extreme amount of liberalism in their background. By this I mean they are extremely liberal politically and were involved in very liberal organizations in college. They generally were the head of these liberal organizations. Why this is relevant is due to the fact that most of the administrators and admissions officers at top law schools around the United States are extremely liberal as well–I do not know why this is, but it just is. I know this because I have met most of them. It probably has something to do with the fact that a good portion of these admissions officers were student activists during Vietnam. If the admissions officers are young, their predecessors were probably activists during the 70s and hired their replacements based on having similar views. When these liberal admissions officers are making admissions decisions for top law schools they are faced with an overwhelming number of highly qualified applicants. Accordingly, they need to ‘‘look beyond the numbers’‘ when they are making admission decisions. What I believe happens is that they do everything they can to admit people who share their same ultra liberal views and this is what their ‘‘looking beyond the numbers’‘ means. Admitting ultra liberal students:

  • Encourages their dreams of a liberal society
  • Helps confirm their belief that social action is necessary
  • Helps them ‘‘throw rocks’‘ at their conservative enemies.

These are the people who ultimately ‘‘get the job’‘ and get into many of the best law schools. This same thing also occurs at most top colleges throughout the United States. Admissions officers are seeking to admit the most liberal people they can among a pool of similarly highly qualified candidates. I once worked for a very conservative federal judge. Most of the people that he hired to work for him were also extremely conservative. I once worked in the office of a law firm where almost everyone was the Catholic religion. What ends up pushing many employers over the fence is a powerful group affiliation. Why does this occur and what does this mean for your job search? People who are offering you a job want to hire people who they believe are part of the same group as them and confirm the way they feel about the world. This is something that is incredibly important for your potential employers and they will be more likely to hire you, and you will be more likely to ‘‘push them over the fence’‘ and close the deal, if you are able to identify with a particular group or cause that is important to an employer. When I was in high school I remember being invited to a college to spend the night there as a prospective student. Something very strange happened when one of the hosts (who was a college student) came up to me and said: ‘‘You seem too white bread and boring. This school wants people with passion.’‘ Actually, I am the opposite, but I was acting very subdued because that is what I thought it was going to take to fit in. When you are yourself and have passion one way or another, that is something that often closes the deal. The student who told me I was ‘‘white bread’‘ was right in many respects because he was pointing out that the more normal we seem the less likely we are to influence people one way or another. Pushing an employer over the fence to make a hiring decision is no easy thing to do. There are a million closing techniques that I could write about, and a discussion over every closing technique could compose a 1,000 page book. I think you have the ability to close because we all do. Your ability is instinctual. What you need to do is tap into your instinctual closing ability and push employers over the fence to make them hire you. You need to push employers that little extra bit to ensure you get the job. Anyone can go out on an interview, but only the most talented can actually close the deal.

]]> http://www.aharrisonbarnes.com/you-need-to-be-able-to-close/feed/ 5 Cheap Is Expensive: A Marine Disaster http://www.aharrisonbarnes.com/a-marine-disaster-if-it-seems-too-good-to-be-true-it-probably-is/ http://www.aharrisonbarnes.com/a-marine-disaster-if-it-seems-too-good-to-be-true-it-probably-is/#comments Thu, 16 Jun 2011 05:14:27 +0000 Harrison Barnes http://www.aharrisonbarnes.com/?p=1414 1414 One thing I’ve learned in my lifetime is if something seems too good to be true, it probably is. Every day so many of us are glued to televisions and see people becoming rich overnight on game shows. Growing up kids receive a lot of messages that you can become rich and famous without an education. Throughout America, there is a belief you can get something for nothing. One of the most successful men I ever met, a man who owned numerous auto dealerships in Detroit, once told me that “Nothing is free and there are never any deals.” This is surely true. Several years ago, I bought a mobile home on the beach in Malibu, and the story behind it is very strange. At the time I was pretty involved in giving speeches at various law schools around the United States and considered myself a national expert in advising law students on how to get a job. I was enthusiastic when my fiancé invited me to go a Pepperdine Law School party with her friend who was in her last year of law school. When I got to the party, I was surprised no one recognized me from my various law school lectures. However, no one there seemed very interested in a job search. There was a lot of liquor and craziness going on at the party. I introduced myself, and started recommending various job search strategies to the students I met. The evening didn’t go well. People would excuse themselves after a few minutes when I would pause in my conversation to reflect on one job search strategy or another. I was sipping a Diet Coke and feeling very fortunate to have this “street level” experience of meeting law students first hand. I had been a law professor five years ago and was now “in the trenches” with a group of law students, finding out first hand what their lives were like. These kids seemed more interested in partying, however, than speaking with me. About an hour into the party, I realized things seemed to be thinning out and I could not find my fiancé anywhere. I looked around and saw a lot of people going into a bedroom. I walked in and saw my finacé’s friend taking a huge hit from a bong. Other people were standing around also waiting to enjoy the marijuana. In front of a group of stunned students, I walked up to my fiancé and said, “This is outrageous!! I am getting out of this party now! I cannot believe you are allowing yourself to be in the same room with this!” The people in the room all laughed, including my fiancé. I was horrified this episode might get around to law schools and somehow destroy my reputation. I have never done drugs in my life and the fact my fiancé was associated with it was even more shocking. “I am a major figure in the national law student job search scene!! I am leaving! There is no way I can be associated with this sort of stuff and you should not be either!” I told her in front of the group. I was acting as if I was the President of the United States and she was my wife carousing with people doing drugs. People were laughing at me and I realized I must have looked ridiculous. I stormed out of the party and realized my fiancé was nowhere to be found. I got in my car and drove home. The next morning my fiancé called me from her parent’s house in Santa Monica and asked me to come get her. We fought, basically about my belief that as an important national career figure for law students, I could not be associated with her friend’s marijuana use. I am from the Midwest and my fiancé grew up in Los Angeles and attended school with people like Paris Hilton. People think differently in Los Angeles. She thought I was out of my mind for being angry with her for hanging out in a room where people were smoking pot. Because I didn’t want our neighbors to hear us fighting, I decided to drive along Pacific Coast Highway. We drove for quite awhile before I finally stopped to turn around. We pulled over to the side of the road, still fighting, and that’s when I saw the mobile home on the beach. It was for sale. Boy did it look ugly! It looked so ridiculous I was confident I could afford it. In case you don’t know, Malibu is not a place where there are typically mobile homes on the beach. In fact, the mobile home I purchased is the only one I know of directly on the beach in Malibu. To say this mobile home was run down would be an understatement. It was the first “structure” ever put on this beach, sometime in the 1950s. Imagine what its interior looked like after 50+ years of use and zero renovation. An 80 year old man was living in it. I was love struck. My purchase of this mobile home went off without a hitch. Despite the fact we were in a real estate boom at the time, it’d been sitting on the market for some time. The real estate agents seemed astonished anyone was interested in it. “Whatever you want,” they kept saying as they wrote up the purchase contract. Incredibly, the owner was so eager to get rid of it, he let me take possession of it and move in without even getting financing for a year, and I paid him a nominal monthly rent. After a day or two of relaxing in this mobile home, I realized it was not all it was cracked up to be. Living on the water is fun. However, when you are in a 500-square-foot mobile home from the 1950s, it can get pretty cramped. There was no heat or air conditioning in the mobile home, either, so the living conditions were pretty Spartan. After a couple of weeks, I decided I needed to get a boat and this would make the experience of living in Malibu much more enjoyable. My plan was to anchor the boat about 100 yards from shore and then use it on the weekends. In theory, this was a very good idea. I started to look on eBay and it didn’t take me long before I found my dream boat. It was a 15-foot Sea-doo jet boat that’d been used for only a few hours. The purchase price had been an incredible $22,000 but the owner of the jet boat had put a “buy it now” button on the listing for $5,000. This looked too good to be true and I decided I had to purchase the boat. I could not believe my luck in finding such a good deal. I sent a guy who worked in our warehouse to pick up the boat and when he arrived he became a little nervous. In fact, when he came back with the boat, he hinted the seller of the boat may have had an unusual sexual affliction. He looked a little shook up. “What happened?” I asked. “It was weird. When I got there, she had a video camera and started filming me the second I arrived. She asked me to climb under the boat and to rub it. She then started saying stuff like ‘Look at the camera and say you like it while rubbing it hard! Tell me that it’s nice and feels good and tap on it. Look at the camera and say it is smooth and hard while rubbing it!” The whole situation sounded very strange to me but I have heard weird sex stories in Los Angeles and I figured this was another one of them. A few weeks before I’d been on a freeway interchange in a traffic jam on a Sunday afternoon. I thought there must be a huge basketball game or something at the Staples’ Center, but instead there was a porno convention. It took me 30 minutes to get through an interchange that should’ve taken no more than a couple of minutes. This is the kind of stuff you see only in this part of the United States. I thought I would anchor the jet boat about 100 yards off the house where the tide never went below. I also did a lot of research and determined I would need what is called a giant “mushroom anchor” in order to build a permanent mooring for boat. I found a marine supply store on the East Coast and ordered a buoy, mooring anchor, and all sorts of other items to build an official mooring in front of my house and my neighbor’s homes. It cost me a couple of thousand dollars but the sea captain I spoke with in Maine assured me what I was purchasing could handle “gale force winds” and would keep the boat anchored. My plan was to use a sea kayak to travel out to the boat when I wanted to go on expeditions. I would use the boat to travel to and from the shore. Since you may not be from Malibu, I have to assure you this is something that’s highly unusual. People who pay millions of dollars for a house do not want to see a $5,000 boat permanently anchored in front of it. In fact, I am not aware of anyone who had ever built a mooring in front of their house in Malibu either before or since this episode. The claustrophobia of living in a 500-square-foot mobile home on the beach can drive people to do strange things. I assured myself, however, this is what my neighbors must have realized when they moved to a stretch of beach that included a 65-year-old mobile home. My plan was to put the mushroom anchor on the boat and then launch the jet boat at the boat launch in Oxnard. I would then travel 20+ miles up the coast and drop the mushroom anchor and mooring. The entire procedure was going to be quite difficult, however, because the mushroom anchor weighed 100s of pounds. A man who worked in our warehouse had picked up the boat for me, and he recommended a couple of his friends from Mexico who spent their days standing in front of a U-Haul looking for work help me. “Do they know how to swim?” I asked him. He checked and only one of them did. Therefore, the plan was to use three of his friends to place the giant anchor on the boat, launch the boat, and one of them would travel up the coast with me in the boat to launch the anchor. Despite having a mobile home that was gradually being subsumed by the sea, I was feeling very enthusiastic about having purchased a boat. I was also excited to brag to my neighbors about the boat. My neighbors were getting a little annoying. The day we moved in, one came over with his wife. “Look, they bought the lot!” the man said to her. I was actually proud I had a new home and he was calling it a “lot”. My neighbor, who resided immediately next door, came by periodically and told me he was amazed our home had not been washed out to sea but assured me it was “going down” shortly and that “I better not be there” when it did. Being a boat owner would put me on par at least to some degree with my neighbors I thought. When we finally got the boat launched and started going through the harbor, everything seemed like it was going pretty well. The anchor was resting in the front of the boat and we had to travel very slowly because the front end was practically in the water. After about five minutes I was feeling very good about everything, but then I saw a boat screaming towards me with lights flashing. Since I had never captained a boat before in my life I could not imagine what was happening. I thought I might be going to prison due to the mooring sitting on the front of the boat. Hillario, my helper, looked terrified. “Inmigracion!!” he told me with a terrified look in his eyes. It was the Harbor Patrol and they pulled us over and made us go to the side of the harbor. They asked me if I had flares, a whistle, life jackets, and all sorts of stuff you apparently are required to have in order to take a boat into the ocean. Incredibly, they said nothing about the giant mooring sitting in the boat. I had none of these things and they wrote me several tickets and told me I needed to take my boat over to a local store and purchase these items before I could venture into the ocean legally. I explained to Hillario in Spanish he was not being deported and he was incredibly relieved. Thankfully the Harbor Master didn’t pursue it when I explained to him Hillario had no identification. After spending a couple of hundred dollars on life jackets and other required supplies, we headed over the to Harbor Patrol office to show them what we had purchased and they were kind enough to cancel all the tickets. The whole episode must have taken us over two hours; however, we were now prepared to venture out into the Pacific Ocean towards Malibu. We were soon out in the sea and the boat was handling very well. Despite the massive mooring, she was amazingly agile and picking up speed. We could feel the wind in our faces and the entire event was very enjoyable. A couple of minutes into the journey I saw another boat rushing towards us. This boat was larger and looked very official. As it got closer, I realized it was the Coast Guard. “Hi, we’ve already been pulled over and we’re all set!” I told the man who boarded our boat. This guy was serious. He had a gun and I thought Hillario was about ready to get deported for sure. “That was the Harbor Master who is from the County of Ventura,” he told me. “I’m with the United States Coast Guard and we have jurisdiction over the ocean.” “Oh, I’m sorry …” “What the hell are you doing with that giant mooring in your boat? It is so big we saw it from over a half mile away.” I had no idea what to say. If I told him I was about to launch an illegal mooring off the coast of Malibu, he would not like it. Actually, the more I thought about where I was planning on putting my mooring, the more I realized it was probably an international shipping lane. Cruise ships, freighters, and all sorts of stuff went by daily. I wondered what they would make of my little jet boat if I ever made it out there. I hoped they would not run it over. I had to think quickly on my feet. I started thinking about the past few minutes. “This is a jet boat,” I told the man from the Coast Guard. As I was speaking, I realized I could see myself and Hillario perfectly in his sunglasses since they reflected directly toward me like mirrors. “This boat is fast and these waves are incredibly big. With this giant anchor here, I prevent the boat from flipping over in the waves. I am trying to be safe. You should see how fast this thing is.” “That’s so cool dude!” the guy from the Coast Guard said. “I totally understand. These jet boats are so kick ass! I want to get one but my wife would kill me!” I could not believe what I was witnessing. I thought the guy must be the biggest idiot I had ever encountered. Just like that he let us continue and gave me some sort of “hang loose” type surfer sign as we motored away. Some time later, we found it was an incredible feat launching the anchor in front of our house. Luckily, a man on a jet ski boarded the boat and somehow we managed to all get the mushroom anchor in the water and build the world’s first mooring in Malibu. Hillario, however, could not swim. For over an hour I tried to convince him to jump in the water and swim to shore but he refused. Eventually, it got so bad I pulled the boat up to an area no deeper than his chest and pushed him overboard. Despite the fact he could have simply just walked to shore in the water he sat there flailing and screaming for help. I was very close to shore and screamed to a couple of surfers who were wading in the water to help him get to shore. They refused. “I am a commercial litigator. There is no way I am getting involved in this one. I do not want the liability!” one of them told me. They just stood there. After about 10 seconds of me screaming to Hillario to just “walk” in Spanish, he figured it out and walked to the shore. Apparently, he had lied about his abilities as a swimmer to get this job. It was a wonderful sight. All weekend I tied a kayak to the mooring and jetted up and down the coast in my little jet boat. I felt as if I was the smartest resident of Malibu ever. All week at work I was looking forward to a wonderful weekend with more boating adventures. On Wednesday a call came in and a secretary rushed into my office. “Harrison!! One of your neighbors called and said there is a boat sinking right in front of your house! I have no idea what they are talking about!” I had no idea how one of my neighbors tracked me down. My neighbors all had pretty nice houses in Malibu and did not associate much with white trash like me who lived in the mobile home. I called my neighbor back. She explained to me the boat was filling up with water and her feeling was that something called “a bilge pump” had stopped working. The bilge pump turns on when water comes inside the boat from waves and then pumps it out. My neighbor told me the best thing I could do was purchase a battery and come out and install it in the jet boat. She told me I should also purchase a pump and pump out some of the water. “It’s going to go under soon if you do not get out here!” I rushed out of work and went to a marine store and purchased a battery and a pump for the boat. When I got home I noticed the boat really was sinking and it looked pretty bad. It was so far out; however, I could not see it very well. I got in my kayak and started paddling out to the boat. The sea was very rough and it was a struggle to get out in the kayak. When I finally made it to the boat I realized there was so much water in it I might not be able to pump it out. I hooked up the little electric pump I had purchased to the battery and started trying to pump the water out. There was so much water and so many waves there was nothing I could do. The last thing I remember is a giant wave coming inside the kayak. I am not sure how it happened but the car battery had so much charge to it the water electrified in the kayak, and I started getting electrocuted! I jumped out of the kayak and into the water and the kayak went off drifting into the distance. I swam towards the boat. Given the wave that’d just hit it, I figured the boat was going to completely sink within the next 10 minutes or so. I was panicked. There were rough currents and I guessed I might be too far from shore to make it if I swam. In addition, I was about ready to lose a $5,000 boat to the sea. I considered my options and realized the only thing I could possibly do was to cut the rope between the boat and the mooring. I would pray the sea would take the boat and I back to shore. I was very lucky to have a knife with me. My kayak appeared to be drifting towards the shore and I figured my little jet boat and I might be able to achieve the same. I prayed we would. Over the course of the next several minutes the sea did carry us back to shore. The boat was half way under water and filled with water but it started going towards shore and got very close. At this point a small crowd of my neighbors had formed and they rushed out and tied ropes to the boat and tried to assist me in keeping the boat in one place. The problem was the waves kept trying to take the boat out to sea. At this point, it was probably 3:00 or 4:00 in the afternoon and for the next five hours or so, I and groups of my neighbors all struggled with the boat. Eventually using winches and lots of rope, we were able to secure the boat after it was low tide. We had ropes running 20 feet from various homes on stilts out to the boat. It was crazy. One of my neighbors brought out a large bottle of tequila and we were all taking sips while trying various maneuvers to secure the boat. It was an exhausting experience and required the effort of over 10 men. By nightfall we had secured the boat. The boat was still filled with water and it was all inside the engine compartment. I actually do not know what we thought the next step was. I am assuming in the morning I was going to drain the water out of the boat. I fell asleep quickly that night, but around 4:00 am I awoke with a jolt. I am usually a good sleeper. But that night I could not go back to sleep. I had a sixth sense something was wrong. I was very nervous and wanted to go look at the boat. The boat was about 100 yards from my house up the beach so I could not just look out my window. It was pitch black and very difficult to see. I had a very powerful spotlight flashlight I had purchased unnecessarily months ago at Sam’s Club and fired it up. It was like a giant beacon. This light was so powerful that you could hit the clouds with it. I had never seen anything like it. I put on some sandals and a coat and started walking down the beach. The closer I got, the more I realized I could not see the boat — all I could see was the rope coming out of the houses and appearing to go into the sand. Finally, the truth of what was going on was inescapable: The boat was buried beneath the sand. In fact, all I could see was the rope going directly into the sand. Apparently, the tide, waves, and current had decided to bury the boat under the sand while I was sleeping. Incredulous, shaken, I walked back home and managed to go to sleep. I got up an hour or two later and managed to get a hold of the guy who had picked up the boat in our warehouse. I told him to go to Home Depot and pick up at least 10-15 guys and purchase a shovel for each one of them. I explained the boat was buried under several feet of sand and we needed to get it unburied. By 8:00 am there were at least 15 men on the beach digging. We dug and tugged on the ropes but could not move the boat. We were also using winches to try and move the boat and it was so heavy the winches were breaking. I am lucky no one was killed. The winches have cables on them and the cables were snapping and then flying back to the people operating the winches. It was so bad we started using blankets from my house and the people were operating the winches behind the blankets so they were not hit by cables when the winches snapped the cables. The boat was a disaster. It was completely filled with sand in the engine compartment. It must have weighed three times its normal weight. By 1:00 pm I realized that absolutely nothing could be done. The boat was not moving. For the next hour I sat in my house while my workers barked back and forth to each other in Spanish about how insane this entire exercise was. I realized I needed to find someone who was an expert in this sort of thing. My neighbors no longer thought this was funny. There was a boat buried directly in front of their homes. I decided to walk down to a lifeguard station on the next beach over. When I got there, I found a man who looked like he had been a lifeguard for the past 50 years. I had never seen so much sun damage. I’ll call him “Leatherface.” Leatherface told me he’d been working on the beach for 30+ years and had never seen anyone as big of a jackass as me. He told me he had been watching this episode from the outset and had never seen anyone stupid enough to build a mooring. Despite the fact he’d witnessed the entire episode with the kayak, he told me he was not even sure he would have rescued me if I started drowning because I might be better off dead. Leatherface told me I needed to call a service called Marine Assist to come out and help move the boat. He explained they would bring a giant tug boat and pull the boat back to the harbor. That sounded pretty good to me. I called Marine Assist and they told me they would send out a tugboat for $500 and $175 an hour, but if I wanted them to swim to shore to hook up the boat they would charge me an additional $300 to bring along a swimmer. I told them I would swim out and grab the rope to hook up to the boat and they agreed. An hour or so later a giant tug boat arrived about 50 yards out to sea. My neighbor let me use his kayak and I started making my way to the tugboat. I got hit by a wave and flipped the kayak. Between the tug boat captain screaming something at me and all the commotion, I lost the kayak and paddles and soon was standing on the tug boat. The guy on the tug boat asked me questions about what was going on and then shook his head. “I’ve never heard anything like this” he told me. He then proceeded to lecture me just like Leatherface had about how stupid I was. Lots of people have never heard anything like what I’ve told you so far, nor what was to come next. In fact, one of my ex-employees decided I must be a pathological liar after I told him this story. It is really hard to believe. The tug boat captain told me once I swam to shore I should hook the rope up on a couple of strategic points on the boat and then proceed to have the 15 illegal aliens push the boat. He assured me this would get it out to sea. I agreed. For the next hour the tug boat tried to pull the little jet boat out but simply couldn’t extricate it from the sand. It was a Herculean task. Several times the tug boat captain called me on my cell phone. “It’s not moving!” he would say, as if I was not there. “Keep trying!” I would encourage him. “Ok!” Eventually, after over an hour the tide started coming in and miraculously the boat started to move slowly. After several tries the boat started drifting out to sea. At this point there must have been at least 30 spectators in addition to my workers. No one on the beach had ever seen anything like this before. In fact, several of my neighbors had come home early from work to watch the excitement. As the tug boat started towing the little jet boat away my neighbors began to clap and the workers were giving each other high fives and hugging. It had been a long ordeal and we were all very excited. The tug boat operator was even excited and blew a really loud shipping horn and he towed the little jet boat away. The neighbors and everyone standing around looked really relieved. As I walked towards my house with around five shovels under my arm, I noticed a British neighbor of mine looking very intensely towards the tug boat and my little jet boat being tugged away. I realized he had not been part of the celebratory excitement in the past few minutes. In fact, he was quite focused. “Something is wrong,” he shouted from his deck. “The boat is sinking!” Sure enough, I looked out and the tug boat appeared to be backing up. I looked and I could not see my little jet boat anywhere. My cell phone rang and it was Marine Assist. “This is a disaster! The boat has sunk!” the tug boat operator told me. He had conferenced in the owner of the Marine Assist Company. “I’m going to have to call the Coast Guard about the sunken boat.” The next few minutes were a blur. What I do remember is a Coast Guard helicopter showing up within the next few minutes and making a rapid couple of passes over the area where the sunken boat was. My heart was racing. My neighbors were all alarmed as well. I looked down at my phone at some point and realized I had received four or five messages in the past few minutes from Marine Assist. I called them right back. “The Coast Guard says we are going to need to call in divers and do an emergency extraction,” they told me. “A what?” “An extraction. You cannot just leave a boat on the bottom of the ocean.” They explained to me they were going to have to send in divers to float the boat to the surface by attaching blow up devices to it. “This is out of our league. We are going to need to call specialists and another boat.” It was also explained to me that the “extraction operation” was going to cost up to $5,000. An hour or so later a boat with a bunch of divers arrived and the rescue operation began in earnest. By the time the rescue was complete I could not see anything because it was dark. I did receive a call at some point that they were not headed back to Ventura Harbor with the boat and it had taken longer than expected to complete the rescue and therefore more credit card charges were required. I was also given a complete report from the divers about what was wrong with the boat. Apparently, there was a huge gash/hole on the bottom of the boat that had been cheaply covered up with some epoxy. When I’d left the boat sitting in the water, it had all dissolved. The cheap price on eBay and the bizarre behavior with the video camera finally made sense. When the boat got to the harbor it was so heavy with sand it could not be put on the trailer. A flatbed truck needed to be called at 2:00 am to tow it away. This was how I learned that cheap is expensive. If something looks like too good of a deal, it probably is. In the case of the jet boat, it ended up costing me much more than the purchase price, just to do mandatory rescues in it. THE LESSON When you buy something cheap, it is often likely to be expensive in the long-term; things that seem too good to be true usually are. When you are approached with an attractive deal, remember that nothing comes for free and there aren’t any no-strings-attached deals.

]]> http://www.aharrisonbarnes.com/a-marine-disaster-if-it-seems-too-good-to-be-true-it-probably-is/feed/ 10 The Greek Parthenon and Your Career http://www.aharrisonbarnes.com/the-greek-parthenon-and-your-career/ http://www.aharrisonbarnes.com/the-greek-parthenon-and-your-career/#comments Mon, 18 Apr 2011 05:10:49 +0000 Harrison Barnes http://www.aharrisonbarnes.com/?p=2241 2241 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 been 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 LESSON If you are good at one thing, then you need to make sure you develop a diversity of skills in case demand for your primary skill goes away. You need to shape yourself and your career to withstand all kinds of economic and other climates. Like the Greek Parthenon, you must have a strong foundation and project strength, supporting yourself with multiple pillars.

]]> http://www.aharrisonbarnes.com/the-greek-parthenon-and-your-career/feed/ 2 The Foot-in-the-Door Phenomenon and Your Job Search http://www.aharrisonbarnes.com/the-foot-in-the-door-phenomenon-and-your-job-search/ http://www.aharrisonbarnes.com/the-foot-in-the-door-phenomenon-and-your-job-search/#comments Thu, 21 Apr 2011 05:30:48 +0000 Harrison Barnes http://www.aharrisonbarnes.com/?p=2616 2616 One of the most powerful and important things you can do to get a job or 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 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 his career working in the mail room at the William Morris Agency. To get the job, he was asked to prove that he had graduated from college, so he forged a letter 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 his 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 seven 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. During the war, 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:
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, let’s 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 do that, 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 on this. You need to start small with anything, before you can build on 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 a résumé, and with a list of a few prepackaged questions to which the student already knows the answers. The student will then sit down with the employer and commence speaking with him or her. The entire time the employer is speaking, he or she is, on some level, evaluating whether or not the student would make a good hire. The student is not really there to get information 99% of the time, but to “get a 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. It happens all the time. 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 toward a job or sale is getting the employer, or prospect, to open that door. THE LESSON Getting your foot in the door is an important, necessary first step towards getting the job you want. Once you are “in”, your colleagues will protect you if you work hard and you will have the same opportunity to compete with others. The biggest step you can make in your progress towards your goals is to get your prospective employer to let your foot in the door, even if only a little.

]]> http://www.aharrisonbarnes.com/the-foot-in-the-door-phenomenon-and-your-job-search/feed/ 6 The Importance of Fitting In http://www.aharrisonbarnes.com/the-importance-of-fitting-in/ http://www.aharrisonbarnes.com/the-importance-of-fitting-in/#comments Thu, 28 Apr 2011 05:01:33 +0000 Harrison Barnes http://www.aharrisonbarnes.com/?p=2420 2420 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 who 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 happening 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 who 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 To get an interview with most organizations, you need (for the most part) to have certain qualifications. For example, if a company is seeking someone with three years of experience, you need to at least come close to this. If a company hires people out of the top third of their classes and from only top-notch universities, you also 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 you are interviewing, 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 employers feel would fit into their organization best. B. What Is Fitting In? The remarkable fact is that the concept of fitting in will vary depending on the organization you join. Fitting in will mean something different if you want to work for the government or military compared to 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 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 toward 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 toward them. To your employers, you should seem like a kindred spirit, someone toward 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 employed 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 (or lack thereof); they tend to share certain values; they tend to have similar beliefs about the importance of education; and they may enjoy doing certain activities 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. For you to fit in with an employer, you need to be seen as a member of the family. To do that, 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 toward 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 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 While you are 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 that the partner had 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 who 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 intern, 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 e-mail 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 e-mail was so widely circulated is that 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 close 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 want to feel comfortable around you. In addition, they 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 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 externals 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.
  • 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? 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 need people higher up in the company to be 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 who 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. 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 often 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. THE LESSON The ability to fit into your work environment is among the most important parts of obtaining and retaining a job, even more so than your skill level. Fitting in means nothing more than being comfortable in one’s work environment, and making others similarly comfortable. Employers want to hire people who will embrace their approach to business and the world on physical and moral levels, so you must strive to fit in with their worldview.

]]> http://www.aharrisonbarnes.com/the-importance-of-fitting-in/feed/ 12 Find an Employer With Similar Values http://www.aharrisonbarnes.com/find-an-employer-with-similar-values/ http://www.aharrisonbarnes.com/find-an-employer-with-similar-values/#comments Fri, 17 Jun 2011 05:15:18 +0000 Harrison Barnes http://www.aharrisonbarnes.com/?p=1432 1432 In 1997, I was working for a federal judge in Bay City, Michigan. It was cold and I was working in a rural area that left a lot to be desired. Even the judge I worked for got the hell out of there when he could go to another part of Michigan. While the judge I worked for was a very nice person, the atmosphere had a certain inescapable formality. The way I was required to dress for work each day and other rituals that permeated the work reflected this. There were also some cultural differences that made it clear to me I did not exactly fit in. For example, there was another person who did the same job as me, and he and the judge shared a lot of the same values. They were very conservative politically and both came out of solid upper middle class backgrounds. On the weekends, the people in the office would do things like listen to Lake Wobegon tapes, while I would eat chicken wings at Hooters and go bar hopping. It’s very important you share values with your employer and co-workers. The people you are spending the day with should be quite similar to you culturally and value wise. I hate to say this but it is true. People get into trouble in their jobs when they do not share the same values with their co-workers. When I worked as a garbage man, I really tried to fit in. I did not have the same pressures and did not see life the same way, however. The people I was working with had been picking up garbage for several decades and I was a kid getting ready to go to college. Despite my best efforts, the people I worked with were never very nice to me. One even threatened to “cut me up” with a knife at one point. Working there was like being in a prison. I never told on the person who’d threatened me with death because being a “snitch” in this environment was not acceptable. I was very disappointed I did not fit in with the other garbage men. They knew I was getting ready to leave and despite that fact they were earning a lot more money than me, they knew I was not going to spend the rest of my life on garbage trucks like they were. Culturally, and in many other ways they shared values that were much different from mine. One of the reasons the garbage men did not like me was because I worked so hard. I would run between the houses tossing the garbage bags in the truck and always manage to get the work completed very quickly. One man would drive the truck and I would ride in back throwing in the bags. I worked really fast and got into amazing shape doing this. But this isn’t what the person driving the truck wanted. They were paid by the hour and if I was on your truck that meant you would make a lot less that day. I think the other garbage men also started to become resentful because management wondered why I could get routes done so quickly when others seemingly could not. One day I was riding on a truck and puzzling over why one of the garbage men had called me a few names when speaking with the driver. “You belong in an office,” he told me. “You have no business working here.” This really hurt my feelings. Nevertheless, this is how they perceived me. This perception was cultural and value based. Essentially, what I was being told was I did not fit in. One day after work the manager came up to me and said, “I need to speak with you.” He fired me. “You can’t fire me,” I said. “I have not done anything wrong. I am one of the best workers here.” “I know, but the drivers do not like working with you. I have to be concerned about them.” I proceeded to lecture the manager for a few minutes about why he was making a mistake and he ended up letting me keep my job. A couple of weeks later he tried firing me again. This time my mother called him. She was a civil rights investigator for the State of Michigan and had spent her career helping people who had been discriminated against in the workplace. Thirty years of working at that job gave her some incredible skills. After that phone call, they left me alone. Sitting alone at lunch and not being liked is not fun, however. Neither is being an outsider. The fact of the matter is you need to work in an environment where people like you. You need to fit in culturally and you need to be liked. This is the only possible way you can succeed in your job. If you are not liked at work and you do not fit in culturally there are almost always going to be problems. This is just how it works. You may have problems at work that will have nothing whatsoever to do with your work performance. Conflicting values with your co-workers will cause these problems. Without getting into a lot of detail, I would say I felt stifled in the environment working for the judge. I am very grateful the judge gave me the job he did and the training he provided me was fantastic. The judge is also a very good person. The environment I was in was not necessarily to my liking. Also, culturual fit was so poor I soon realized I was very likely to get fired if I remained. In fact, one day the judge and I were having a discussion about my performance that I thought could lead to my being fired. At that moment I resigned from the job. The discussion was ostensibly about my performance, but my performance was actually excellent. The real reason the judge wanted me to leave had to do with the fact there was too much of a conflict between our values. We were different people and thought in different ways. If your values are in conflict with your employer’s it does not matter how good your performance is. Your employer will not be comfortable with you. You need to be working in environments where you are comfortable with the people with whom you’re working, and vice versa. After resigning with the judge, I needed to find a job immediately. My original plan had been to work in a law firm where I’d worked during the summer after my second year of law school in New York. However, the problem was I was expected to start in one year–not now. My job with the federal judge had originally been scheduled to last for two years. I had suddenly resigned about 11 months into it and I thought I would have a very tough time explaining to the law firm in New York why I was planning on showing up for work one year early. In addition, the law firm in New York felt a little stifling too. The absolute worst thing about New York, however, was I had to spend all of my time with my girlfriend’s aunt and uncle. Every single night we would sit in their apartment doing nothing. They would play board games and watch reruns of soap operas and I would sit there doing absolutely nothing. It got really boring for me because I had nothing in common with them. Hanging out with her aunt and uncle if I moved to New York was definitely not an option. I decided the smartest thing to do was to find a job on the opposite side of the country, in Los Angeles. In order to find a job in Los Angeles, I did a mass mailing. I spent several days researching hiring contacts, spent hundreds of dollars on paper at Staples and then I mailed my resume to every single law firm I could find in Los Angeles. This worked incredibly well. In fact, the phone practically rang off the hook with calls from various law firms. To this day I believe the best way to get a job is to do a targeted mailing. I say this from experience because it worked for me. I used targeted mailing to escape Bay City, Michigan and my girlfriend’s family in New York. Today I operate two companies, EmploymentAuthority.com and LegalAuthority.com (for attorneys), that help people do targeted mailings to find jobs. These services work incredibly well for most of the people who use them. A targeted mailing is an outstanding way to get a job for many reasons, the biggest being it allows you to instantly parade your candidacy in front of every single employer you could possibly work for at one time and get the most interviews and offers. When a mailing is professionally initiated, it can really get incredible results. When I flew out to Los Angeles, I went to the law firm of Quinn Emanuel and was immediately love struck. It was an incredible firm and the people had all gone to the best law schools and also worked in large New York law firms. It was as if they were escaping the stifling environment of New York and creating their own culture. They had no dress code and people were wearing sandals and Hawaiian tee-shirts. The people in the law firm also seemed quite happy. I knew I definitely was going to work there when one of the men interviewing me was chewing tobacco. He offered me some and I willingly accepted. For the next 3 years I would not stop chewing tobacco. I could not believe you could work in a law firm where you would sit in meetings spitting in a cup and flying high on a tobacco buzz. In one of my interviews I learned an incredible story. Apparently, the firm had recently made a young attorney there partner after three years – a record. What made the story so unusual was apparently what happened the weekend before he made partner. I was told he had been out golfing early in the morning with a bunch of Germans who were clients of the firm. They were all apparently drinking straight vodka and ice out of giant plastic tumblers and having a riot of a time. At some point he blacked out and didn’t remember what happened. He woke up behind a Target in a giant dumpster filled with cardboard, naked, with a $20 bill taped to his forehead. After learning about this episode two days later, the law firm made him partner. “That was when we knew he was ready,” one of the partners related to me. The partners and others I interviewed with in the law firm seemed to take this story as a sign of a good lawyer and looked upon it with approval. I could not believe my luck in finding a law firm like this. I received an offer right in the interview. When I got to the new law firm in Los Angeles, I absolutely loved it. I loved the people and I loved the work. While I certainly did not share all of the values with the people inside this law firm, the point is I felt comfortable. I had ditched a different life and come to Los Angeles to work in a different place. I made numerous friends there I still stay in contact with to this day. The time I spent inside the law firm was some of the best time I have ever spent in my life. This all happened because I found people who shared my values. The people I worked with inside the law firm appeared to like me as well and I received a lot of positive reinforcement about the quality of my work. This was a far different experience than I had with the judge. What this taught me is you need to be in an environment that supports your values and reinforces who you are. A good environment makes all the difference. When I was in eighth grade, I was kicked out of a private school called Liggett in Grosse Pointe, Michigan. It was a conservative environment that required coats and ties and I did not share the values of the teachers or kids. When I was kicked out, the teachers and others said I should go to a special school for learning with disabled kids and they told my parents I would be lucky if I ever went to college. Two years later I was attending a private school that was considered even better than Liggett called Cranbrook-Kingswood. The school loved me and told me I was “gifted.” What’s more, I ended up going to one of the top colleges in the United States and did exceptionally well. I was the same person at Liggett as I was at the Cranbrook school. What changed was the environment. One environment supported me and nurtured me, and the other pushed me down and disapproved of me. Every organization and every person has a different set of values. Everyone and every group values and nurtures different things at different levels of intensity. Different organizations value different sorts of things. For example, some organizations may value creativity over conformity. Others may value being adventurous over being cautious. Others may value supporting the worker over the corporation. People are the exact same way – they have a hierarchy of values they either support or do not support. You need to understand the priorities of the organization for which you’re working, or are considering working. The priorities of a given organization are something that will make a giant difference in your success or failure. People tend to group together with others who share similar values. This is why Republicans group together and Democrats group together. If you tried to put a Democrat with a Republican the chances are the results would not mix well. Their values are simply too different. The worst thing that can happen is when you do not know who you are dealing with and your values come into conflict. You need to stand for something and ideally whatever you stand for will be reflected in the employer for whom you’re working. When these values are in conflict, nothing works the way it should. People and organizations have different rules for what success means and for the proper sort of behavior. You need to insure you are working for an employer who shares your outlook and values. I cannot emphasize to you enough the benefits of working with a group of people who share your values. When you are with people who share your values, everything changes. Your contribution and your work is more appreciated. Most of the reasons behind people losing jobs have to do with a values conflict. Most of the reasons for people excelling in jobs have to do with a values match. You want to be in an environment that matches your values. When I speak with people who appear to be in work environments that support them, I counsel them to remain in their jobs – even if I stand to profit from them moving. Your happiness in life is about finding an environment and a group of people whose values match your own. This is something crucial that permeates the world. Work for an employer who possesses values similar to your own. This will change your career and life. THE LESSON Nothing gets accomplished when peoples’ values are in conflict, so it is very important to work with an employer who shares your outlook and values. Find a work environment where you fit in, and where people like you. Value conflicts with your coworkers can undermine your performance, whereas a harmonious work environment reinforces your performance and values. Most cases of workplace excellence involve people in jobs that match their values, and finding this harmony will change your career and life.

]]> http://www.aharrisonbarnes.com/find-an-employer-with-similar-values/feed/ 7 Practice Makes Perfect http://www.aharrisonbarnes.com/practice-makes-perfect/ http://www.aharrisonbarnes.com/practice-makes-perfect/#comments Mon, 06 Jun 2011 05:04:20 +0000 Harrison Barnes http://www.aharrisonbarnes.com/?p=1224 1224 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 LESSON Rather than committing to a career, many people switch jobs and take positions that require completely different skill sets; consequently, they never truly master their primary skills. While there is nothing wrong with changing careers, you must find something and devote yourself to it; many people have succeeded in relatively simple jobs, because they have committed to and mastered their craft. Develop a specialized interest, nurture it, and continually improve at it, and you will find the universe rewarding you.

]]> http://www.aharrisonbarnes.com/practice-makes-perfect/feed/ 7 The Importance of Planting Seeds: My Experience With the Scientologists http://www.aharrisonbarnes.com/the-importance-of-planting-seeds-my-experience-with-the-scientologists/ http://www.aharrisonbarnes.com/the-importance-of-planting-seeds-my-experience-with-the-scientologists/#comments Thu, 23 Jun 2011 05:10:21 +0000 Harrison Barnes http://www.aharrisonbarnes.com/?p=1522 1522

“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 months, 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. THE LESSON You must plant seeds in the minds of others, so that they will be more likely than otherwise to think of you when a future need arises. In planting seeds, you are making people aware of what you have to offer; you  must make sure that you are ever present in the minds of your potential employers. Planting seeds is the most effective way to generate top-of-mind awareness, and ensure that the right people remember you at the appropriate time.

]]> http://www.aharrisonbarnes.com/the-importance-of-planting-seeds-my-experience-with-the-scientologists/feed/ 5 Treating Your Career Like A Small Business http://www.aharrisonbarnes.com/treating-your-career-like-a-small-business/ http://www.aharrisonbarnes.com/treating-your-career-like-a-small-business/#comments Sat, 25 Jun 2011 05:14:19 +0000 Harrison Barnes http://www.aharrisonbarnes.com/?p=1015 1015 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 (at $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.

THE LESSON Your career is a business, and you yourself are a product that you are selling to potential employers. Your goal is to survive and sell your product for as much money as possible. Use simple business principles to market yourself, such as identifying markets for your product and recognizing the importance of your brand. Good basic business skills can take you and your career far.

]]> http://www.aharrisonbarnes.com/treating-your-career-like-a-small-business/feed/ 4 Socrates and Your Job Search http://www.aharrisonbarnes.com/socrates-and-your-job-search/ http://www.aharrisonbarnes.com/socrates-and-your-job-search/#comments Sat, 09 Jul 2011 05:01:53 +0000 Harrison Barnes http://www.aharrisonbarnes.com/?p=2208 2208 Several years ago, we were launching a newsletter for law schools. One of our employees who was working on the project decided that the title of the newsletter should be “The Signal” and he was very enthusiastic about this particular title. In fact, I had never seen him so enthusiastic about anything. The problem with this name was that the domain name for it had been taken long ago and I seem to remember that the person who owned the domain name had no interest in selling it. Without a domain name, it did not seem like it made sense to have an important newsletter going out to law schools with this particular name. The newsletter was supposed to be electronic, and due to it being electronic, people would start associating the name “The Signal” with the newsletter and looking for it under this URL when they did searches online. I explained this to my employee but he was having none of it. He did not care what the URL was. He was convinced the newsletter needed to be called “The Signal,” and when I would not agree to this he became extremely irate. He stomped out of work. He stopped working on the project and refused to work on the newsletter the next day. What had happened to this particular employee is that he had decided that things just needed to be a certain way and he did not want to hear anything that was different from this certain way at all. He had made up his mind that only one name was appropriate and had thrown all of his thinking, energy, and spirit behind something that was really unnecessary. However, this is something that many of us do in one form or another, and we do it with numerous, numerous things. One of the biggest challenges for me in working with people looking for jobs, is that most people seem to believe that their search needs to work in a certain way. They believe that there is one way of looking for a job and that way is the only way. People are extremely attached to doing things a certain way. For someone who is in their mid 50s, they may believe they should never go online and that the best sources of jobs are always in the newspaper. Other people may believe that networking is the only approach to getting a job. Still, other people may believe they will only be able to ever get a job with a certain type of employer. People are very stubborn and this obstinance is something that really holds them back. The guy who worked for me was so frustrated by the title of the newsletter, he ended up not coming into work regularly and turned from a very dependable employee to one who was completely unreliable. This was a huge mistake and he ended up losing his job. He was pigheaded about something that did not really matter. Many of us are pigheaded about stuff that does not really matter and it ends up hurting our careers. We believe that something can only be done a certain way, and then we stick to this without questioning everything around us. For my entire career, I have been encouraging people to question their assumptions about how to find a job. I believe that questioning assumptions, consistently doing new things and finding new ways to search are among the most important things we can do in a job search. In fact, I believe they are the most important things. The more you question what you are doing and embrace new methods of looking for jobs, the better off you will be. Socrates is considered by most academics as the Founder of Western philosophy. He lived around 2,500 years ago and since he never wrote a book, everything we know about him comes largely from what others wrote about him. Socrates was considered a very interesting figure around Athens. After having been a distinguished solider he returned to Athens and wandered around the city engaging various people around the city in conversations. At the time there were teachers who traveled around the country called Sophists, who taught various subjects to people who paid them. Unlike the Sophists, Socrates never took payment for his teaching, and most significantly, he claimed that he had nothing to teach. He told people he did not have any actual knowledge and was no smarter than others. Socrates claimed that if he was wiser than others, it was only due to the fact that he was aware that he was ignorant. Most of what is known about Socrates comes from the writings of his student Plato, and from his dialogues in particular (however, the works of Aristotle and others provide some insights as well). In these dialogues, Socrates will typically confront someone who claims to know something and be an expert on one philosophical topic or another, such as a moral or epistemological issues–for example, the nature of justice or virtue. Through questioning of this person, Socrates will then proceed to show that this person does not know what he claims at all. According to one definition:
The Socratic method is a negative method of hypotheses of elimination, in that better hypotheses are found by steadily identifying and eliminating those which lead to contradictions. The method of Socrates is a search for the underlying hypotheses, assumptions, or axioms, which may subconsciously shape one’s opinion, and to make them the subject of scrutiny, to determine their consistency with other beliefs. The basic form is a series of questions formulated as tests of logic and fact, intended to help a person or group discover their beliefs about some topic, exploring the definitions or logoi (singular logos), seeking to characterize the general characteristics shared by various particular instances. To the extent to which this method is designed to bring out definitions implicit in the interlocutors’ beliefs, or to help them further their understanding, it was called the method of maieutics. Aristotle attributed to Socrates the discovery of the method of definition and induction, which he regarded as the essence of the scientific method. Perhaps oddly, however, Aristotle also claimed that this method is not suitable for ethics. According to W.K.C. Guthrie’s The Greek Philosophers, while sometimes erroneously believed to be a method by which one seeks the answer to a problem, or knowledge, the Socratic method was actually intended to demonstrate one’s ignorance. Socrates, unlike the Sophists, did believe that knowledge was possible, but believed that the first step to knowledge was recognition of one’s ignorance. Guthrie writes, “[Socrates] was accustomed to say that he did not himself know anything, and that the only way in which he was wiser than other men was that he was conscious of his own ignorance, while they were not. The essence of the Socratic method is to convince the interlocutor that whereas he thought he knew something, in fact he does not.”

Socrates was eventually put on trial and sentenced to death in Athens for allegedly corrupting the youth of Athens with his teachings. It was during this trial that Socrates made the famous statement that the “unexamined life is not worth living.” The idea that there is one way of doing things is something that needs to be questioned. One of my greatest frustrations with job seekers is trying to get them to realize how many different methods there are for them to get jobs, and the incredible number of paths they can follow in their job searches. You need to be aware that whatever assumptions you have about the way you should be looking for a job may be doing you a tremendous amount of harm. These assumptions need to be questioned, and you need to insure that in questioning these assumptions, you realize that they may be limiting you. Here are some of the assumptions that are not necessarily true that I have seen people make about their job search:

  • A recruiter will not help me get a job.
  • A recruiter will help me get a job.
  • I need to use a recruiter for my job search.
  • I would never post my resume on a resume site.
  • I need to post my resume on a resume site.
  • I would never pay someone to help me get a job.
  • I can only get a job if I pay someone to assist me.
  • I will never get a job in this economy.
  • I am too old to get a job.
  • I am too young to get a job.
  • I do not have enough experience.
  • I have too much experience.
  • I need connections to get this job.
  • I will never get another job because I was fired.
  • I did not go to a good enough school to work there.

The list of things about your candidacy and job search could go on and on. You need to be questioning everything about how you are looking for a job and what this means. Your job search is too important and your career is too important to allow yourself to be stuck in one way of thinking. You need to open your mind and ensure that you do everything within your power to think about your job search in a way that gives you more opportunities and not fewer. THE LESSON In your job search you must question assumptions, find new ways of doing things, and consistently find new ways to search. You will be better off the more you seek out and adopt new job search techniques; your career is too important for you to be stuck in traditional ways of thinking. You must open your mind, and ensure that you are doing everything within your power to view your job search in a way that grants you more opportunities, not fewer.

]]> http://www.aharrisonbarnes.com/socrates-and-your-job-search/feed/ 3