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

One of the largest challenges to finding a job, changing direction in our lives and becoming the people we are capable of becoming, is learning to see the world in different ways.  Several years ago I was on a jet with one of the wealthiest men in the country.  This guy had recently purchased a jet that I estimate was probably worth at least $25,000,000 at the time.  He used the jet to hop around the United States for leisure purposes.  He really did not do any business at that point anymore, and had been retired for a few years. I had been brought along as a passenger with him at the last minute because we were both traveling to a wedding together.  I want to be clear with you at the outset that this is not the sort of society I normally travel in.  However, on this day I had the opportunity to spend a few hours with one of the richest men in the United States, and someone who by the time he was in his mid-40s was worth hundreds of millions of dollars. What I am about to tell you right now is not about how this guy got so rich.  What is most interesting about this particular guy is how he thought about the world and the opportunities in it.  I spoke with him during the flight that day and then I spoke with him for several hours once we arrived at the wedding.  This was some time ago and I was just starting out in some respects, and was very eager to learn the secrets of someone who was so successful.  In fact, I thought this person had a tremendous amount to teach and the more I spoke with him and asked him questions, the more I realized that he had a way of looking at the world that was much different from mine. A few weeks before traveling with this mogul, I had been to a party at one of his friend’s houses.  His friend was an electrician.  The two of them had gone to high school together and stayed best friends ever since then.  His friend was uneducated and had not gone to college, but was someone who worked very hard.  The house I visited for the party was the most unbelievable house I ever saw.  They guy had done so well as an electrician that he had actually had gold laid between the cracks in marble on his floor.  The home must have been at least 20,000 square feet. I had never seen anything like it.  On the airplane that day the guy started telling me about how his friend had gotten so rich. “When I made all this money I started getting disappointed that all my friends were uncomfortable around me. If I ordered a $300 bottle of wine at dinner, they would be worried they would have to contribute to the bill and then would not order entrees.  It was very uncomfortable.  People did not want to travel places with me because they were uncomfortable with me paying for their hotel rooms.  So at some point I decided that my best friends needed to be ridiculously well off as well, and I made sure they were.” “What did you do?” I asked him. I was expecting him to tell me that he gave them the money they needed.  Instead, he really opened my mind about how some of the wealthiest people out there think. He explained that his friend who was an electrician had spent 20 years with a little ad in the Yellow Pages driving around doing electrical work in the blue collar area of Los Angeles he worked in.  The guy had one helper and they worked Monday through Friday traveling around doing some work, giving estimates and so forth.  When the electrician’s friend got really rich he sat him down because he realized they could not be friends if they were not both obnoxiously wealthy. “How much do you make a day?” he asked him. He explained how he billed out at $65 an hour, his helper at $32.50 an hour, and how the two of them spent [Read more]

Employers Want to Hire You

One of the most important things for you to realize when you are looking for a job and see a position advertised is this: The employer wants to hire you. If the position is advertised, the employer is actually desperate to hire you. When I say ”desperate,” I mean that the employer wants you yesterday and not today. The employer is losing money, or has a need that is really “calling out” when they start advertising jobs. A few years ago I was running a company that was growing like absolute madness. We could not hire or bring people on fast enough. I remember, at the time, that I hired a person and paid him $85,000 and his assistant another $50,000 just to bring people in to hire. I advertised our jobs on our own website and also made sure that those same jobs were advertised on numerous job boards. In one month I took out contracts for over $120,000 worth of job postings. Twice a week I would meet with this manager and the conversations would generally go something like this: ”I have over 40 job openings right now! Each of these jobs that is not being done is costing me a tremendous amount of money. You are probably costing this company like $500,000 a week by not getting these openings filled and filled fast!!” Each day I would watch this person go home with a stack of hundreds of resumes to review. He used to fall asleep every single night reviewing resumes. Our need for people was absolutely out of control. We needed bodies and did not know what to do. In other parts of the country I remember we needed people so badly that people would walk in, start interviewing, and if they looked like they were respectable they were hired on the spot. During this characteristically busy time, I heard a story from one of our managers about when a girl walked in for an interview to our office, which was bustling and out of control. He looked at her and said: ”You look fine. I do not have time to interview you. Sit down and start answering the phone!” This is what it is like when companies are growing and need people. They want to hire you. Sometimes if you get really lucky, they do not even ask many (if any questions). I remember walking out of my office one day and seeing a man with scores of tattoos down his arm sitting directly outside of my office. I had no idea how he had been hired. The man had a shaved head and was wearing jeans and a starchy clean tee shirt. He had a belt on that appeared to be a chain of some sort and was also wearing boots. The man had some of the most intimidating and scary looking muscles I have ever seen on a human being. He looked like a larger skinhead version of Mr. T, with a shaved head and a bad attitude towards humanity. Just to be clear, this is not the sort of office atmosphere I have traditionally fostered where I have worked. This was quite a scene for me and a lot to take in. I did not care, however. It is best to allow people to be themselves. ”Nice tattoos!” I told him as I exited my office. I noticed that his biceps were probably larger than my calves. I probably should not have said this. The tattoo on his arm appeared to be some sort of important scene. It looked like a woman with a snake wrapped around her body screaming. Whatever it represented, the tattoo was positively intimidating. I will never forget what happened next. The man looked up at me and growled, then went back to whatever he was working on. I was afraid he was going to kill me. I met with several people over the next few days and no one could figure out how he got hired. We had been so busy with everything he had been hired by mistake. He had showed up for work and people were so afraid of the guy they did not want to tell him that hiring him had been a mistake. Then, incredibly, he was allowed to start work. At the time we had around 120 people working in the particular office he was in. About 30 people who were sitting within 20 feet of this guy were stone cold silent during the day. It had formerly been a fun and playful work atmosphere, but they were all absolutely terrified. Men and women. ”We need to fire this guy and get him out of here,” I told a group of our managers behind a closed door meeting one day. ”I am afraid he is going to kill someone.” It certainly looked that way. The guy skulked through the office, bumping into people and staring them down in response when they did not react. Everyone (including myself) was absolutely terrified of this man. ”I’m not going to fire him. He will kill me if I do!”’ one manager said. One after another, the managers came back with the same thing. There was no way any one of them was going to fire this guy because they were terrified of them. Every single manager refused to fire the guy. They were afraid of physical violence directed towards them. We ended the meeting with none of us knowing what to do. A few days later a guy in the mail room declared that he was not afraid of the guy and would fire him. This completed the process and everything went pretty smoothly from there, as far as I know. When companies are in ”hiring mode,” they need people so badly that even assassins can make it through the door (as evidenced by this case). Back at this particular point in time our company was so desperate to hire people, it was amazing. These are the sorts of employers you need to find. A company that is growing and needs people. In a bad economy, places like debt settlement firms, collection agencies and others are growing and bursting at the seams. In a good economy it may be mortgage companies. The point is there are always tons of employers out there who are growing and want to hire you. I read a story the other day about a debt settlement company that is growing so fast, it is unbelievable. You need to find companies like this. When you go into interview with any company, they are desperate to hire you or someone else. Think about it. When an employer takes the time to line people up to interview you and bring you in to speak with them, they must be pretty eager to hire someone. Most employers that are interviewing people are very eager to hire. Exceptionally eager. Here is what happens, however. Most people go into interviews and throw off all of the wrong signals and end up not getting the job. It happens to everyone. You do not get the job because you throw off the wrong signals and the employer thinks you do not want the job, do not have the confidence or charisma [Read more]

Your Job is About the Transference Energy

A few years ago I was in India and was interested in going to see what is called ‘‘an energy healer’’. I was interested in this because I had been to several seminars where I had heard about people changing outcomes and healing others with energy by transferring energy from the universe. I went to see a Reiki energy healer and they did something called ‘‘balance my Chakras’’. This was an experience in itself, but the real knowledge I got out of energy and its place in our lives between people happened when I was sitting in the lobby waiting [Read more]

Athens, Sparta, America and Your Job Search

One of the greatest conflicts in the ancient world was between Athens and Sparta. In fact, the history of ancient Greece was dominated by the conflict between these two different cultures. Both cultures ended up leaving an important legacy to the world.

• On the one hand, the culture of Athens left a legacy of art, drama, architecture, philosophy, the enjoyment of wealth and opulence, the idea of a governmental democracy and a strong navy.
• On the other hand, the government of Sparta left a legacy of asceticism, military supremacy on land and oligarchy (rule by a few).

These two societies fought repeatedly between the years of 500 BC and 350 BC. Their clash was a fight between two civilizations in the fullest sense. Each believed that their society and their way of [Read more]

You Need to Be Relevant to Your Employer

In the mortgage industry many jobs have simply disappeared. This has put tens of thousands of people out of work. People who lose their jobs in the mortgage industry generally have a couple of options. Frequently they look for a new job in the same industry, because it’s the industry they know. They do their best to network, and email their resume out to every opening they can find in the mortgage industry. “The job market is really tight,” they will tell you. They may get an occasional interview, but [Read more]

In Defense of Long-Term Employment With a Single Employer

If you go into any business that has been around more than twenty or thirty years, you will inevitably find a handful of people who have been there from the very beginning of their careers. These well adjusted souls will typically report to work each day at a similar time and have managed to be the only ones presumably left in the organization after generation upon generation of people coming and going. Many people do last for decades in the same organization and there are characteristics which uniformly seem to characterize these sorts of people.While I am [Read more]

How to Survive and Succeed in Your Job

Working in a company or any organization is often competitive and scary. The reason that it can be so scary is because around you there are so many unknowns, and there is so much information that you do not have access to. Having access to information, both about how to perform your job and also about the state of the company you work for, is crucial to your survival. I love to read the business section of the paper each day. While I am not an investor, I think someone who is familiar with the field could make [Read more]

The Importance of Fitting In

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 [Read more]

Fight for the Right to Work

In a bad job market, the most important thing you can do is to keep trying.  Never give up.  Life is a race and your career is also a race.  The problem with most people is that they are often willing to give up at the first sign of difficulty.  The harder you keep trying and the more effort you put in, the more things are likely to go your way. From the time I was about 12, I had paper routes that required me to home deliver hundreds of papers all over my neighborhood by 7:00 am each morning.  It gets very difficult to do paper routes in the winter in Michigan, and it was not a fun job.  The worst part about the paper route was that I had a corrupt manager.  I think he was paid based on how many papers were being delivered on his route, so he kept increasing the number of papers I had to pay for, despite the fact that my customer base was not increasing.  I tried to keep up with this for some time but eventually it got to be too much.  He was raising the numbers of papers he sold me each week faster than I could cancel the newspapers.  Eventually I gave up. This was a huge mistake.  There are people around you like my manager, who are trying to undermine what you are doing, often for their own personal gain.  You should always fight back against people seeking to undermine you–and hold them accountable.  Had I fought back, I am sure I would have made a lot more money back when I was delivering newspapers. Each day I would be left with a huge pile of undelivered papers, for which I would still have to pay.  For years these papers accumulated in my mother’s garage.  Rats came and created elaborate nests out of them.  I knew this because when I would throw the undelivered papers into the garage each morning I could hear the sound of the rats scattering.  I became alarmed to set foot in there.  Even my dog refused to go in the garage.  She would yelp and scream if anyone tried to take her in [Read more]

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

One of the most powerful and important things you can do in order to get a job and achieve anything in life is learn how to just get your foot in the door. Once you are able to get your foot in the door, everything really changes. My entire life, I have seen firsthand the power of people getting their foot in the door. A large part of the battle for success in your career revolves around your ability to do this, because once you get your foot in the door incredible things can happen to you. [Read more]

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