Being Nice Makes Good Business Sense

Several years ago I was getting ready to interview with a law firm in New York. It was my first interview ever as a law student and I was pretty nervous. I was trying to get on an elevator as the door was closing and I saw a woman rushing towards it. I reached quickly for the button to open the elevator and was able to get the door to re-open at the last second. The woman got on and told me which floor to push, and I did this for her as well. The woman was very heavy and was not particularly well-dressed. We were going to a very high floor and there were several stops along the way.

At one of the stops, I started looking over my hair because I could see my reflection in the glass in the elevator. I looked up and saw the woman looking directly at me, and she smirked as if to say I looked ridiculous primping in the elevator.

At that point in my life I lifted weights frequently and spent a lot of time at the gym. I taught myself it was important to stick up for myself at all costs. Normally, what I would have done was turn around and tell the woman to mind her own business. On that occasion, however, my nervousness must have gotten the best of me. I turned around and looked directly at the woman.

”Do I look ok? I am going to an interview and I am a little nervous. I want to do a good job.”

The woman looked absolutely stunned. The way she looked at me had invited me to strike out and attack. Instead, I had done the opposite.

”Yes, you do. Just pull your tie up a little. I am sure you’ll do fine.”

This woman ended up being in charge of the hiring committee at the law firm. She was reputed to be extremely difficult as an interviewer and did not like anyone. In my interview, she was very nice to me. I ended up getting the job at the firm and working in this same law firm over the summer. The woman was nice to me during the summer as well and stood up for me. In fact, she was one of the nicest people in the law firm I can remember.

There is really something to being nice. When you are nice to people, you invite them to be nice in return. However, most often we are less interested in being nice than we are in being thought of as important, powerful, or right.

Given the incredible number of experiences I have had over and over again in my life, I am confident there are various forms of energy we simply do not understand. I firmly believe when you send out negative energy, it comes right back to you. I also believe when you send out positive energy, it comes back to you as well.

One of my favorite books of all time is The Richest Man in Babylon. One of the rules in this book is that when you make money you are supposed to give away 10 percent of it to charity or some other good cause. The idea is when you give away 10 percent of your income, you will realize how much abundance there is and you will become less attached to money.

While the book makes this point, and I believe there is truth to it, there is another important point about giving away money as well. When you help and give to others you create positive energy which is directed back at you. There is nothing more important than having positive energy directed back at you. The more positive energy you have directed at you, the better your life and everything in it is going to be.

The word ”appreciation” is, to me, one of the more interesting words in the English language. What appreciation means essentially is positive energy directed towards something. For example, when a stock appreciates it means people are excited about it and its value rises. When you are appreciated it means people like you and the value you bring them. Anything that appreciates takes on more value than it originally had. Things typically take on more value when others are excited about them for one reason or another.

You want to be appreciated. You need to be appreciated. Being appreciated means others are seeing and recognizing your value. When people see your value, you get more opportunities and your career and your life can only improve.

Think about things you appreciate in your life and the people who appreciate you. You appreciate these people and things because of how they make you feel. When we are babies, the only things we think about are our needs and taking care of those needs, specifically our need for food and comfort. We do not yet have the capacity to appreciate the needs of others. As we grow older we learn how our actions affect others positively or negatively. We learn we can make others happy or sad. We begin to learn how our ability to make others happy has an effect on our own happiness.

The world exists as exchanges of energy. If negative energy goes out then negative energy comes back. If someone robs a liquor store, the police come after the person and incarcerate him or her. If someone makes a large financial donation to a good cause, the newspapers write about this person’s generosity for all to know. There is a constant interplay between positive and negative energy in the world, and you want to be on the receiving end of positive energy. This is really the only decent place to be. When positive energy comes to us, we feel better and the world is a better place to us. This simple rule is so easy to follow.

We exist in a consumer-driven society where so many of our desires are shaped by things outside of us. For example, many people evaluate their happiness based on their material possessions. People strive to earn the money to purchase the best house and car they can. They want nice furniture and watches. They want to travel to the best places. Many people evaluate their own self worth based on their ability to accumulate these possessions. This is the way of the Western world. What this sort of consumer culture does, however, is focus almost exclusively on the act of accumulating various things. It does not emphasize the act of putting out positive energy and instead bases everything on taking in energy. This constant taking in often violates laws of the universe which demand equal exchanges between opposite forms of energy. Instead of being focused on taking things in, we need to be focused on putting out positive energy.

This brings me back to the act of being nice. Several years ago, I was listening to Deepak Chopra speak and he was making a similar point. He said whenever he visits someone’s home, he always brings them a flower. In bringing people a flower, he is trying to set up a dynamic of being nice and sending out positive energy. Sending out positive energy is something that comes back to you every single time.

There is a best selling career book called Nice Girls Don’t Get the Corner Office. The message of this book is if you worry about offending others, are forthright when explaining information, and make sure your decisions are popular, you will never get ahead. The idea behind the book is that in being nice to others you will not be successful. I believe the opposite is true. When you are nice to others you send out the sort of energy which gets you ahead.

Some years ago I was at a seminar and met a woman who had been a partner at a large and important law firm, but had quit after a year. She was now a real estate agent and I got the sense she was struggling a little. She told me about how she had been working with the law firm and did not become partner until she demanded it and turned mean. She told me people had walked all over her in her job until she became mean. When I asked her to give me some examples, she did not have any. She simply said they did not make her partner.

I think the woman ended up getting fired from her job within a year of making partner. She had worked for the firm for almost 10 years, and within a year of deciding the best thing for her to do was to become ”a bitch,” she had lost her job. Being mean simply does not work.

I have seen this happen in my own life and with people who have worked for me as well. Recently, I had someone working for me who was extremely competent in all respects. The person was working very close with me and I was extremely impressed. For some reason, however, this person could not get along with others outside my office. One day, she called and screamed at a co-worker for no apparent reason. She also refused to follow instructions. Somehow, she’d come to believe it was good to be mean to others, to attack others savagely, and to not follow orders. The person was quickly let go despite her competence in other areas.

Who knows how this person rationalized losing her job to herself? If she had just been nice to others she would still be happily employed. Instead, this person ended up losing her job and poisoning the people around her who were working for her in the process. When someone sends out negative energy, it does a lot of damage.

You need to be nice to others. This is the most important thing you can do in your job. Let the negative energy of others flow right through you and be nice in response. The way to get ahead is to be liked, not feared and hated.

We want to work with people who are nice. Companies need people who are nice. It is important to be nice. I want to be very clear that by being nice I am not talking about being a doormat. When you are nice and place the needs of others on the same level as your own, you are simply being smart. Being nice is the smartest thing you can possibly do in your career.

Love Your Work And The People Who Give It To You

From the time I was 19 until I was about 27, I spent a good portion of my summers doing asphalt work around Detroit. That included asphalt sealing, hot tar crack filling, and asphalt patching. It was seasonal work and most people in Michigan only seal their asphalt once a year.

”Around Detroit” is a blanket term because I was working in three counties and in an area ecnompassing hundreds of miles. Essentially, I would travel to areas where people could afford to maintain asphalt. Seven days a week, I would get up as early as I could and go out to start the day at one of my jobs. Sometimes my drive was about an hour. Sometimes it was 15 minutes. Most of the time, I drove about 30 minutes.

I made this drive each day because I had work to do. Every day I had work to do was an extremely exciting day for me. Once I got to a work site, I would count on the people around the area – neighbors, other businesses, and passing traffic – to see the work I was doing. I would stop cars and tell them I was in the neighborhood and willing to work. If I was in a residential area, I would knock on doors and tell them I could do work for them. I would do everything within my power to get work, and I always got business. I worked seven days a week. I worked so hard some of my employees would quit the job from exhaustion only after a few days. There were, however, people who lasted.

In addition, while doing this work I maintained a profound respect for the people for whom I was working. I did everything in my power to do the work to the absolute best of my ability. I took the work incredibly seriously. I loved my job.

The worst thing that could happen to me was not getting work. I knew if I did not do a good job one year, the next year I would not get the work again. I knew people talked, and the better I did in one area, the more work I got. I remember one year I showed up at a house in a certain neighborhood where I’d worked for several years, and a widow answered the door. She told me her husband had died and she could no longer afford the service. Although it was a nice house in an expensive neighborhood (where I normally could have earned a good amount of money), I really liked her husband a great deal and wanted to help her. I did her driveway for free that year and the next year as well. I wanted to work.

I simply would not take no for an answer. I remember a very nice man who owned a Chevy dealership in Warren, Michigan. He also owned a rundown mall in addition to the dealership. I really wanted to resurface his dealership, but he didn’t have the money either. I told him I thought things would one day pick up for him. I offered to do work for him at his rundown mall on days I did not have any work, doing hot tar crack filling for the cost of the goods. He let me do this and, over a couple of months, I worked there for seven or eight days when I did not have any work. I never ended up resurfacing his dealership, but I was glad for the work he had given me. He did not take advantage of me and was a very nice person.

Why would someone work for free? Because you need to fall in love with your job. You need to love what you do. And work attracts work. There is absolutely nothing wrong with doing something good for people. The right people out there will never take advantage of you.

Having work is a privilege. Work deserves to be cherished and held in the highest possible esteem. Work is your lifeblood. Without work, everything stops.

When I was younger I needed to get up each day and drive to go do my work and to find new work. I needed to impress each person I met each day, or else I knew they might not let me work for them the next year. For me, having work was extremely important in all respects. With work I was able to support myself during the summers and school year. In addition, work provided me the knowledge I would always have something to do no matter what happened in the world.

The best opportunity you can ever have is when someone gives you work, because this work can lead to more work.

One of the stupidest mistakes people can make is being suspicious of those who give us work. There are people who measure every single hour of their day and make sure they never under any circumstances give their employer too much of their time. There are people who cheat their employers. There are people who disrespect their customers and clients. There are people who resent being given more work. There are people who feel they have too much work.

Work is what supports your family. The people that give you work to do are the people who are giving that support. You need to respect them and you need to get work at all costs.

The only way to advance is by doing a good job with your work and exceed expectations. The more incredible your work is the more people want to work with you. The more work you are given and the more you do, the more you are seen as someone who is promotable, someone who is an expert. The best supervisors are the people who have done the work they are supervising.

In law firms where I have worked, when someone stopped getting work it meant they were not doing good work. If someone is not doing good work, they are generally in trouble. What bad attorneys do is move around from firm to firm for a while until eventually people stop giving them work and they cannot get a job.

Most attorneys exist almost day to day. They are entirely dependent upon people continually giving them work. If clients do not like an attorney’s work, they will stop giving the attorney work. If lots of clients stop liking the attorney, the attorney will be left with nothing whatsoever to do. Once the attorney has nothing to do, his or her career is over. This happens to more people than you may think.

I have given a lot of thought to the concept of doing ”good work” over the years because I think it is so crucial and important to our lives. When you do not care about the work you are doing, there is no reason for the person paying you to have you do it. When you do not care, whoever is paying you can always find someone who does. It is very easy to find someone who cares about the job he or she is doing.

You need to make each day at work the most important. You need to respect the work you are getting and you need to fall in love with it. Work itself is a wonderful thing.

If you have ever been without work for even a short time you know how hard this can be. It is never good to be without work. Being without work means your skills and value do not currently have a place. People without work are depressed and wallow. You need to make sure that you always have work.

I want to tell you a couple of stories that you may think are sad; however, they are also about two people whom I respect immensely.

I sometimes spend a good portion of my day reviewing the resumes of people who are applying to various jobs being recruited for by BCG Attorney Search, one of our recruiting firms. I have seen some pretty dramatic things happen to attorneys. In a down market even attorneys are at risk of losing their jobs. Conditions can become very, very brutal. When attorneys making $200,000+ a year lose their jobs, they often have a very hard time finding another one. In the middle-class world, from where I hail, there is a belief you should never accept a job that pays less than your last job. The idea is once someone has paid you a certain amount to do a job, that is your worth forever, and you should never take a job that pays less.

This particular belief is so prevalent that all over the United States there are people sitting on their rear ends all day doing nothing because they are waiting for a job to come along that pays as much as their last one. I cannot tell you how many careers have gone down the drain due to this philosophy, which is incredibly short-sighted.

One day I reviewed the resume of an attorney who had lost his job after about 10 years with a major American law firm. I am confident the job he lost paid more than $200,000 a year. He’d lost his job about six months earlier and, instead of doing nothing, he’d taken an entry-level job in a customer service call center. During this time, he’d actually won some awards. He was doing the best he could. When I reviewed his resume I could see he was someone who refused to give up when the going got tough. I respected him. I could see his optimism. He knew the importance of work and did not give up.

For the past couple of years, about once a week on average, I’ve gotten a massage from an older woman who comes to our home to do this. When the economy began to slow I stopped getting regular massages because work was so busy due to the number of people losing their jobs. When the woman did come by, I asked her how the economy had been treating her. It used to be you needed to schedule her at least a week in advance because she was so incredibly busy. One day things were different. She showed up with some information about a spiritual topic she knew I was interested in. She’d never brought me anything like that before. In addition, during the massage she wanted to make sure I was going to get a massage again the following week, and I could sense the desperation in her voice. I started asking her about her business and she told me it had really slowed down. She told me she was going to start doing more marketing. I asked her what she meant and she told me the following:

”I like to go and sit out in front of fancy restaurants with a sign and my massage table. People come up to me and ask me for my card.”

This is how this particular woman was finding work in a recession. Is this pathetic? No. This is someone who was staying busy and doing the very best she could in a tough market. The same goes for the attorney. He was also doing the very best he could.

I am in the career business and I see people take jobs that are beneath them every day. I have seen first-rate attorneys end up on the street after losing jobs, addicted to crystal meth and walking around barefoot. I have seen shocking things happen to people who did not have any work. Work is the absolute most important thing you can have.

My hope for you is that you will make the most of whatever job you have and give it your all. If it does not work out, give your next job your all, whatever it is. You need to put your heart and soul into everything you do. You are a special person and the world will realize this, but you need to keep moving. Never slow down. Keep working. The harder you work, the higher you will climb.

Play Each Day Like it is Your Most Important

What You Will Learn Love the work you do, be focused, and see each day of your life as the most important. Foster a relationship of love and improvement with your work. Focus on the big picture and not on the rewards. Realize that your relationship with your job is an absolute reflection of your character and the sort of person you are.

Most people never do their work the best way they can. To be successful you need to make every single day at work, every single interview, and every single job you apply for the most important one ever.

I want to propose to you a relationship with your work that is one of love, improvement, and embracing everything that you do. Embracing your work is the only way to continually move ahead and to stand out among all of the people out there who are also competing for the life that you want.

There is a reason for maintaining this philosophy: the better you perform each task, the more you will improve in each task. The more you improve, the more praise and rewards will come your way. When you are continually improving at each task, you will always look forward to the next task that lies ahead of you. You need to play each day of your life and career like you are playing in the World Series. Every single moment truly matters.

I was reading an article in the New York Times yesterday about President Obama being on vacation in Hawaii several years ago, and being recognized in a snack shop by a reporter (who was also on vacation). Most politicians would probably not have been too excited about being caught off-guard by a reporter while in the middle of a family vacation.

What happened was surprising, even to the reporter. Obama proceeded to be the nicest and most open guy he had ever met. He sat down and spoke with the reporter about his policies and other matters for some time. Back then Obama had not even announced that he would be running for the presidency. Most politicians would have viewed something like this reporter as an annoyance. Obama was smart enough to realize that you always need to be on. However, I believe it goes deeper than that. I believe people who are truly great in any discipline, and who rise to great heights, are always on.

The article I read yesterday in the Times gushed about this episode. You simply cannot buy this sort of glowing press coverage. Obama realized that if he wanted to be a public figure and a representative of the people, he needed to be accessible. This is what the best people do in every discipline: they live their work and are always on, wherever they are.

Think about all of the people you work with who are frequently stating that “this does not matter” or “that does not matter” right now. People are constantly justifying giving less than a 100 percent performance in their jobs, as if they seek some reason to believe their work is not all that important. This is one of the worst approaches one can take to his work and career.

Several years ago in the United States, people got jobs and typically stayed employed with the same company for their entire careers. They looked forward to annual raises and did whatever they were told to do. It did not matter if they liked their work or not. People did the work they were given within the hours required, and they could look forward to a pension and other benefits years later. They resented their bosses, and they resented their jobs. They did their work simply because it was required of them. They looked forward to the weekends and dreaded Monday mornings.

Today, we are no longer tied to employers like this. Most people move around numerous times in their careers and work for numerous employers. In this modern environment, employees are less loyal to employers and vice versa. We rarely have pensions anymore, and instead we have portable 401ks, which we can move between employers.

Because work is so different today, you cannot afford to dislike your job; whether you like your job or not matters to your employer. There is no excuse for you not to give 100 percent; if you do not give 100 percent, your employer will find someone who will. You have no excuse to not find work you love to do. You can find a job you like, if you just look hard enough.

There are people who will only work hard for an organization if the organization is prestigious or is experiencing financial success. There are people who will only work hard if they feel they are in their dream job with their dream employer. There are people who will only put in their best effort if it looks like they are going to receive a bonus at the end of the quarter.

Let me give you some examples of people like this that I have seen or heard of in the past:

-The lawyer who goes to work at a law firm that is less prestigious than the one he or she used to work for and does not work as hard, because others in the community do not think highly of the firm.

-The person who only puts in a good effort at their job before a performance review is about to occur.

-The decorator who is used to working in the homes of stars and other wealthy people, and gets a job working for a smaller client. The decorator does not promptly return calls or work hard due to the lesser social status of the client.

-The manager who decides to stop working hard the day he realizes he cannot qualify for a bonus.

-The contractor who used to make thousands of dollars a week when the economy was strong, but who suddenly can only find work on small, unimportant projects. Instead of doing a good job, the contractor wastes time and does not apply him or herself to the work that is offered.

-The person who works hard only when his or her supervisor is around.

-The job seeker interested in working for a particular company, who is extremely rude to someone he or she meets at lunch, believing this person cannot help him or her get a job.

-The athlete who gives a horrible performance and does not put out the required effort because he or she does not think the game matters much.

Several years ago, I was at a playoff game for the Detroit Pistons, and I was sitting next to someone who was very knowledgeable about how Dennis Rodman played the game. The person said to me:

“He’s playing his best tonight because this is the playoffs. He never tries this hard in the regular season.”

It is amazing to me that we reserve our best efforts only for certain times. The people who are always on and are always being watched are the people I believe succeed the most and perform the most consistently. I want to tell you a quick story about someone I never knew all that well, but whom I realized many years ago would do well.

I remember walking into my public high school in Detroit when classes were not in session, and seeing a girl going down the hall, picking up various pieces of paper and so forth that were on the floor. The school authorities did not know anyone was on campus; it was the middle of summer and there was no reason for anyone to be there. This girl was the class president, and this sort of work was something I knew that she probably did not ever tell anyone that she was doing. She just did the work to support the school. In the few years I had known this girl, I ha seen numerous examples of her doing things like this, which no one else ever saw.

A few years ago it occurred to me that someone like this was probably famous by now. I had known this girl when I was between 13 and 16, and although I never really spoke with her much about her work ethic back then, her need to always contribute–in the true sense, had a profound effect on me. I knew that this girl was out to better the world.

When I searched for her on the Internet, what immediately came up were tons of pictures of her in Asia, in places like Vietnam, Laos, and other countries–in villages, helping people who were stricken by poverty and disease. There were news stories about her, and a great deal of other information about her online. Twenty-five years ago I probably would have predicted that this girl’s selflessness would have made an impact somewhere. Her attitude towards work is the same now as it was back then.

To be really outstanding in life and in a job does not require that much strain. An extra 10 percent effort is often all it takes to become an extraordinary performer in your chosen field, or an average performer in any other field.

Your efforts need to be focused on the work you are doing, not on how people are responding to it. When we are focused on who is responding to our work, how many people are responding to our work, or whether or not we can get ahead through peoples’ responses to our work, we are missing the big picture. The big picture reminds us that the best performers out there are continually focused on doing the best they can, no matter what. Making each day’s performance the most important ever is something that enables them to constantly improve.

Making the most of each day’s performance also strengthens your relationship with your work, rather than with the rewards of your work. When you are looking at the rewards of your work, you are not giving your work the attention it deserves.

Your work is far more involved and far more complex than any reward you could possibly receive for it. Your work can teach you how to become a better person. When I watch people work, I can see their character coming through. I can see how the way that they treat their work relates to how they treat the people around them. I can see how people think of themselves and also how they think of others.

You need to realize that your relationship with your job is an absolute reflection of your character and the sort of person you are. Those around you see everything you do and every single part of your performance–regardless of whether or not they appear to be watching.

Concentrate on the Process, Not the Results

What You Will Learn Pay attention to the small, almost invisible things that collectively make a difference. Think of yourself as an instrument, like a fine piano – it is the attention to everything that will go into making you ultimately produce the best notes. You need to make sure that you continually improve every single data point that is involved in the process of your seeking a job, or growing your career.

Some time ago, I was listening to a seminar about a company that was in the furniture business. This company decided that because it was doing so well, it should expand into the piano business, and also sell pianos. They went out and purchased a Steinway and took the piano apart to study all of the pieces. Then they made the same pieces themselves and built a piano. When they finally had built their own piano and tried to play it, nothing but thuds came out of the instrument. Discouraged, not knowing what they possibly could have done wrong, they decided that they would no longer go into the piano business.

They reassembled the Steinway Piano so they could return it as well. When they reassembled the piano, however, the same thing happened: only a thud came out when they tried to play it.

This is how it is with many people and businesses. We only look at the results, and not the process that goes into creating a particular result. In order to build a piano, you need to have studied instrument- making for some time, and to really understand a lot about the process. You also need to understand and study musical theory. It could take generations for a family to become proficient in making a great piano. There is just so much that goes into it.

This is how it is with everything. You cannot just call yourself a piano company and start making pianos. You cannot just decide that you want to do something and expect immediate success just by trying to copy an outcome. You need to understand the complete process that goes into what you are trying to do.

My first year as a legal recruiter, I generated over $1,000,000 in fees. This means, essentially, that for the work I did personally, I sent out over $1,000,000 in bills to law firms for my services. Since the average bill for recruiting back then was probably around $30,000 or so, this means that I made a tremendous number of placements. When you are doing well, it tends to attract more business to you.

Within a few months, I had hired various people to help me with recruiting, and pretty soon the word had gotten around that our team was really good. Soon after that, various local attorneys around Los Angeles started calling me. Several people I know of copied me and went into the business only to fail pretty quickly.

I loved recruiting and I am sure I had some natural skills for it. However, by the time I started recruiting in an office, I had already essentially been doing the job in one capacity or another for almost 15 years. Since a young age, I had run an asphalt business that had required me to sell door-to-door to people, businesses and others. Sales skills were really important in that business. While asphalt and recruiting are very different in many respects, in actuality they have a tremendous number of similarities. Here is the biggest similarity:

If you emphasize the process over the results in the recruiting and asphalt business, you will succeed.

One of the biggest mistakes many people make in business is emphasizing results over process, or style over substance. The more people concentrate on the process and substance of their work, the better they do:

• The more people concentrate on their intended results, the worse they do in the long run.
• The most successful job seekers are the ones who have the ability to excel in their work process.
• The most successful companies are the ones who have the ability to excel in their work process.
• The most successful workers and employees are the ones who have the ability to excel in their work process.
• The most successful asphalt contractors are the ones who concentrate on their work process.
• The most successful legal recruiters are the ones who concentrate on their work process.

I am not saying that results do not matter; they do. But what ultimately matters most, and what makes people successful is focusing on the process and how things are done.

A lot of the problems in the American economy have been caused by a massive emphasis on results rather than process. For example, the Wall Street practice of emphasizing quarter-by-quarter profits and gains has been extremely dangerous to our company in numerous respects.

I believe that in business, in your job search, and in everything else–process is the most important thing. It is how you do things that matters, and not just the result you hope to attain.

Process in the Asphalt Sealing Business. In the asphalt sealing business there is essentially one thing you are doing: You are putting black stuff on people’s asphalt and then leaving.

This is the result of what happens when you do the work. This is what most contractors and others concentrate on, and it is why most of them fail or eek out poor livings at best.

In the asphalt sealing business, there are a lot of tricks that contractors can do. When you are putting asphalt sealer on a driveway or parking lot, essentially what you are working with is a black coating that fills in cracks and pores and makes the surface look good. More importantly, the coating serves to protect the surface from oil spills and other things. This material is typically purchased from a factory in a raw state, when it is very heavy and thick like molasses. The contractor has to water down the material in order to make it the proper consistency to be used on asphalt.

From the consumer’s point of view, it does not matter how much water you put into this concoction, within limits. After the material dries on someone’s asphalt, it is generally going to look quite similar, regardless as to how much water was used in the mix. Contractors can save a tremendous amount of money by watering the material down more heavily. This is something that many contractors do. The difference is that a few months later, the material that has been applied ends up looking very bad, which does not do the customer much good.

There are other tricks of the trade as well. One of the most outrageous scenarios involves people traveling from city to city purchasing used motor oil (which used to be practically free) and then putting this on peoples’ driveways and parking lots. They would get paid for the work, and the customer would have a piece of pavement that looked decent when the “contractors” left, but the asphalt would never dry and the job would end up having been a complete waste of money and time.

Here are some other tricks of the trade:

• There are chemical thickeners you can buy to bulk up watered down sealer, for example.
• Using a squeegee will apply much more sealer than a brush, but it costs more.
• You can fill cracks with sand instead of tar (which is more expensive).
• It is better to put the material on when the asphalt is cool because it can cure longer (but this means you cannot work when the asphalt is hot, unless you have cooled it).

I could create a long list of the various things that contractors do to cut corners when they are doing this work. However, it is really never a good idea to cut corners. This is what most people and contractors do, however.

Asphalt contractors who emphasize the process of the work they are doing always do much better in the long run. They come back and work for people year after year. There is a certain confidence they exude in their work. They are craftsmen, not salesmen. They take pride in their work. They build careers, and meaningful careers at that. You can do very well financially (and in many other ways) as an asphalt contractor. However, very few people truly do well in the asphalt business. In fact, not only do most asphalt contractors fail, the contractors who do not fail end up making mediocre livings at best.

Every year tens of thousands of people go to law school. They all graduate and compete for the same jobs. How many people choose to become asphalt contractors? Hardly any. You could learn most of what you need to know about this job in less than a week. There are some complex areas of the job that require engineers to work on roads and stuff, but basically anyone can do the work or run a business doing this. When a state or city needs to build a road out of asphalt, they will get bids from a contractor. Most times there are only a few people bidding on many of these jobs because there are just not a ton of people in the business with credibility. The reason is that most people get a single job and simply try and make as much money as they can as quickly as they can. They cut corners. The people who do not cut corners get good reputations and end up doing better in the long run.

Process in the Legal Recruiting Business. In the legal recruiting business, there is essentially one thing you are doing: Finding an attorney and making an introduction between the attorney and a law firm or a legal employer.

This is the result that occurs when you do the work. This is what most legal recruiters in the business concentrate on, and it is why most of them fail to even moderately reach their full potential.

When I got into the legal recruiting business, I quickly noticed people cutting corners, just like people do in the asphalt business. If you were looking at the profession from a distance, without any form of understanding, you too would likely think that all that recruiters do is find people and make introductions. I remember one of the most upsetting interviews I ever had was interviewing someone for the job of being a recruiter, who told me that the job sounded great. He told me that he thought he could spend time out on the golf course doing the work, forwarding résumés around on his Blackberry between strokes. This person simply thought that all the job involved was forwarding résumés from one person to another.

Incredibly, the more I learned about the business, the more I saw that most recruiters seemed to feel this way. In fact, this sort of idea was indeed how most recruiters seemed to approach the entire business. They would put a little advertisement on a job site, or in a legal newspaper, and then forward someone’s résumé to an interested employer. Others would simply cold call attorneys. The idea was that they were simply going out and plucking people from one firm, and sending them over to other firms.

This simplistic understanding of the job characterizes the way many people approach it. Without going into too much detail, however, there is a much more in-depth way of looking at the work:

• The best recruiters are constantly writing and lecturing about recruiting-related issues and their industry.
• The best recruiters put together very compelling and in-depth presentations about their candidates.
• The best recruiters meet with employers on a weekly basis.
• The best recruiters know about the industry and the most important things happening in it.
• The best recruiters are constantly networking at industry events.
• The best recruiters have highly developed research skills to find jobs.
• The best recruiters have highly developed research skills to find candidates.
• The best recruiters never compromise their integrity.
• The best recruiter help people, even when it does not mean a short-term reward.
• The best recruiters are committed to working hard throughout their careers.

There are actually thousands of little things like this that the best recruiters are constantly doing in order to excel at their jobs, and all of these details are what make them incredibly good at their job. Most of these things are not, however, related to simply emailing résumés. They are related to the deeper process of recruiting.

When you speak with recruiters who are process rather than results oriented, you can always tell. They are not focused so much on getting résumés out the door or making money. They are doing a good job at all “touch points”.

The importance of process in recruiting also has a huge impact on the bottom line. The best recruiters do well in all economic climates due to their emphasis on process and not results.

Process and Your Career and Job Search. Just as a successful piano maker, contractor or recruiter needs to concentrate on the process in order to be successful at their trade, so too do you in both your career and job search. Good results only come about when you concentrate on the entire process of what you are doing, refine each step of the process, and ensure you are getting better and more skilled each step of the way.

A job search ideally should not start, for example, when you are looking for a job. There are thousands of data points that go into finding a job and ensuring that you get a good job when you are looking for one. For example, you need to consistently be building relationships, and building every single relationship you can over time. The more relationships you build both inside and outside of work, the more people you are going to have to call upon when you are interested in getting a new job.

The harder you work in your existing job, the more people are going to be interested in helping you when you are looking for a job. People will come to your defense and do everything they can to help you when they believe that you are someone who will work hard. When you do the right thing and always make a good effort, this will come back to help you.

This is the opposite of what many people do, however. Many people are only out for short-term rewards and “quick fixes” at every turn. They do not think in terms of building long-term relationships with those around them. In your career, you need to be consistent, to give results and perform over time–not just in the short term.

When you are looking for a job, the quality and the depth of work you put into your résumé matters. The quality of the letters that accompany your résumé matters. Whether or not you apply to enough employers, to increase your odds of getting a job, matters. Your interviewing skills matter. The entire process that you follow matters and the better that you do at each step, the more likely you are to get the results you want.

Think about the manufacturing a world-class piano. A lot of thought goes into each little component of the piano. Whether it is the wood used, the thickness of the wood, the polish of the wood, where the wood comes from, how the wood is sanded, how the wood is fitted into the piano, the glue that is used in the piano, the dexterity of the person working with the wood, the machine that the wood is compressed on (if it is compressed) and more–the thought that goes into each part of the process matters. Every data point is refined and studied and probably has been refined and studied for a long period of time.

You need to make sure that you continually improve every single data point that is involved in the process of your seeking a job, or growing your career.

Several years ago, in the late-1980s, I was taking a test drive of a Corvette with the President of a German car company. He thought the American Corvette was a piece of junk, and did not like the car at all. He told me a story about how his company operates, contrasted with how a typical American automobile company operates.

He said that American car companies build a car model, and then completely change up the model the next year. They may throw a different transmission in the car, a different engine, radically change the styling and so forth–the idea being that they are trying to show progress and innovation, although, in reality not much is really changing. In contrast, he told me that when his company builds a car, over the next decade or so they keep refining it and making it better and better. They figure out a way to make the transmission better and to make small “almost invisible” changes that continually improve the car. They are concentrating on the process of improvement in building a car, and the result is that when you get in one of their automobiles, it feels very different. The cars also last longer. They run better. There are a myriad of powerful things that make these cars superior, and they are all the result of concentrating on the process.

You need to be focused on the process in your job and job search. Pay attention to the small, almost invisible things that collectively make a difference. Think of yourself as an instrument, like a fine piano. It is the attention to everything that goes into you that will ultimately produce the best notes.

10 Powerful Lessons from a Turkish Rug Trader

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4) Do Not Ever Interrupt

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

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

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

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

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

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

5) Constantly (Sincerely) Compliment People

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

7) Bond with Potential Employers and Be Human.

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

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

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

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

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

8) Trust Your Potential Employers.

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

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

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

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

9) Love Your What You Are Doing.

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

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

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

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

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

“What don’t I see?” I asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do Not Be Controlled By Your Need to Feel Significant

What You Will Learn Your emotional state shapes you and what happens to you and your life. You need to understand that the need to feel significant controls your life – detach from it. Love the work you do, focus on it, and choose how to control your mind.

When I was around 15 years old, I was in front of an ice cream parlor in Grosse Pointe, Michigan and there was a large group of kids around my age gathered around a well-dressed man who appeared to be in his mid 30s.  The man was wearing a good-looking dress shirt, khakis and good shoes.  I quickly realized, however, that the kids were all making fun of him.  The man was quite off emotionally, and all he kept saying was that he used to work for a United States Congressman.  The kids were all making fun of him and asking him about what he did for the Congressman.  The man would list various details about what he had done for the Congressman but after a few minutes would begin acting crazy again.  The kids were not being nice to this man.  Based on his mannerisms and other things, it was obvious to me that the man had experienced some sort of nervous breakdown.  For weeks I would see him around the city nervously puffing a cigarette.  Kids would always stop him.

“Tell us about how you went to Yale Law School,” they might say.  The man would then launch into a monologue that would slowly descend into his insanity.  For example, he might start talking about how he went to Yale Law School and then somehow segue into a story about how he had worked on a project for the Congressman where he was fighting against rapists being chemically castrated.  Then he would start talking about his own anatomy.  That was one I remember.  The man was clearly insane, but by all accounts, had at one time associated with, and worked with, some incredibly important people in Washington.

All he kept talking about, however, was how he worked for a Congressman. I learned later that the man was from a very old and extremely wealthy family in the city and was living with his family after going crazy.  No one knew how he went crazy, but he did.

After watching the chemical castration monologue, I never chatted with the man again or joined the groups of kids who would taunt him.  I felt very sorry for the man and was not interested in participating in this.  Kids thought it was funny talking to him, and I viewed it as cruel.

What occurred to me back then, however, was that all the man wanted to talk about was what he had been.  He had a need to feel important and significant.  As I have gone through my life, I have come to realize that one of the most important things to any human being is to feel important.  We all need to feel important and will do whatever it takes to feel important.  I have a lot of people in my family who have done great things, such as Laura Ingalls Wilder (the author of Little House on the Prairie), a former United States Senator, Amelia Earhart , a former President, and others.  The thing about this, however, is that no one in my family has really done anything of great significance like this for well over 100 years.  However, to this day, many members of my family define themselves entirely by someone else’s past achievements.  This is something that makes them feel extremely important.  I have watched many of them tell anyone who will listen, even within a few minutes of meeting.  Other relatives have gone to Harvard, Yale, important East Coast prep schools, like Andover and Exeter, and to this day will tell the people they encounter about their achievements in attending these schools within moments of meeting them.  There is nothing wrong with this.  Every single person does this.  We all have a profound need deep inside of us to feel important.

We try to feel important based on who our families are.  If this does not work, we may try and feel important based on the groups we are associating with.  We may join the Army or Marines to feel important.  We may become doctors or lawyers to feel important.  We may convert to a different religion to feel important.  We may convert to Orthodox Judaism to feel important.  Regardless of who we are, most of us are doing something to do everything we can to feel important.  Everyone I know does this.  Feeling important is one of the most fundamental human needs that there is.  In fact, for people who are motivated by achievement (presumably you are if you are reading this), feeling important may govern their entire outlook on life.

I want to talk about you and your job.  If you have ever lost a job, then a major source of your identity and importance has been shaken.  If you are in a good job, then a good part of your identity and significance is most likely related to this job.  If you are an attorney, a good measure of your importance in the world is likely related to the prestige of your background and your current employer.  Our sense of importance is incredibly tied up with our careers and how we are doing in these careers.  For most of us, there is nothing more important to our sense of importance than our careers.

One of the hardest things in my career is dealing with the incredible anger and sense of betrayal that people experience when they lose their jobs.  Although I deal with people who lose their jobs and are making career transitions for a reason, I also run several companies and am ultimately responsible for final decisions as to whether or not someone stays or goes in the company.  One of my greatest personal successes and failures is having run companies that have boomed and then have experienced setbacks due to forces beyond my control.  For example, a couple of years ago I was running a large student loan company.  All of a sudden, the financing for this company dried up.  For months, I tried to make the company work and kept many employees on.  When the company finally could not hold its own anymore, I was faced with letting hundreds of employees go. The employees who lost their jobs became incredibly angry, and many are still angry with me to this day.  In fact, based on what I have seen, some have dedicated their lives to being angry with me.  I do not harbor these people any malice.  I know that when they lost their jobs, their very foundations about what made them feel significant and important in the world were shaken.  Since they know I am the ultimate decision maker, they have let their anger out on me and, in trying to tear me down, this makes them feel more important.  I hope for their sake it is working and wish them well despite their attempts to harm me.

We all need to feel significant and will do so in every means we possibly can.

Before we go further, however, what I would like to encourage you to do is explore what makes you feel significant in the world.  The more you understand this the more you will not allow your need to feel significant work against you.  You need to make your desire to feel important work to your advantage and not against you.  Consider what you are doing to feel significant?  Many people will try many different things in their push to feel significant.  You need to realize that the most important thing you can do is skillfully apply your need to feel significant.  I love the study of Buddhism, kundalini yoga, meditation and other mind enhancing personal development tools.  What one begins to realize the deeper and deeper one goes into these studies is this: You need to surrender all attachment in order to truly be free.  This is a crucial observation because the more attached you are to feeling significant and the more you concentrate on this attachment the unhappier you are likely to be.  True happiness really does come when we can just be.  Notwithstanding, hardly anyone knows how to just be.  Instead, they are constantly pushing to feel significant.

Your emotional state shapes you and what happens to you and your life.  You need to choose how to control your mind.  When you are looking for a job, the most important thing you can do is move away from being attached to the need to feel significant and move, instead, to a position where you are not attached.

I want to discuss something briefly that I believe is relevant to your need to feel significant.  I have spent almost my entire career working and living in Los Angeles. I was young when I first moved here and saw countless people who desired to be famous actors and actresses, writers in the movie industry and producers.  I know so many people who have done this that I am having a hard time recalling them all right now.  One of the clearest patterns I have noticed is that most of the people who want to become involved in the movie industry come at it in an arrogant and superficial level.  They act as if they are incredibly important and are, quite simply, full of attitude.  They are also incredibly calculating.  Others come with a strong desire to just be in the entertainment industry.  Their desire is not about being better than others.  It is just to share their talent with the world.  The pattern I have seen over and over again is the people who are clearly focused on their own significance never make it–and if they do, it is never at a high level.  The people who are focused on the work go to a different level of stardom and rise to a higher level.  They are focused on the work and not how it sets them in relation to others.  They are able to go into the “zen” state where they are only focused on the work and their need for significance does not factor into the equation.  These are the people who most often succeed at the highest levels from what I have seen.

Being focused on the work is incredibly important.  Being focused on your own significance is attachment, and all attachments eventually result in disappointment.

One of the most important things for any human being out there–you included–is to feel significant.  In fact, this need is so important that most of us will do whatever we can to place ourselves in a position where we feel important.  While this is something that is fairly widespread, I have learned to recognize this more among the highest achievers than others.  In some cases, going to excellent schools, or having worked for the very best employers can actually be something that drives people more and more to find reasons why they are significant and important in the world.

Your need to feel significant may have created for you a life that you do not deserve.  Since I am involved in the legal industry, I know how to recognize good attorneys.  I know someone with the most amazing legal skills who never finished law school who, in my opinion, would be an incredible lawyer.  This person thinks like a lawyer and has a mind that works in a way that is quite brilliant from a legal perspective. Unfortunately, this person grew up believing that the most important people in the world are those who work as executives in large corporations.  This person’s career has been incredibly unfulfilling and marginal due to this.  He was working in large corporations because this was his idea of what would make him significant.  This person could be a world famous attorney today if he had pursued his real skill.

I chose to go to law school because I believed that lawyers were very important.  I took the law school admissions test and, despite months of studying, did horribly.  I took the business school admissions test and did exceptionally well despite not studying. I struggled to get into law school because my test scores were so sub par.  When I applied to business school, I applied only to Stanford Business School (at the time it was ranked the #1 business school in the country) and got in.  I believed, however, that lawyers were more important, and I would be much more significant if I was a lawyer and always pursued this despite my better judgment.  For three years of my life, and three years of law school, I did something I hated because I believed this was what would make me significant.  I was never unhappier in my life.

What have you done with your career and life out of the need to feel significant?  How well has this served you?  People will do all sorts of things to feel significant, and you are no different.  What have you done to feel important.

I believe that the need to feel significant is one of our most important needs as people.  In law school, I had the opportunity to view patients in a mental asylum, as well as people who were being evaluated after murdering people.  When people start disassociating and actually going crazy, what happens most of the time is that they start imagining themselves as far more important than they actually are–like the former aide to the Congressman I met.  They start telling you how they know this famous person or that famous person, how they are related to this important politician, or how they are actually this famous person.  When I was studying these people I always understood that these people were just trying to feel important.

Listen to the people around you and how they talk about various things.  The need of people having to feel important will come out when they tell you how they know this piece of information you do not, how they socialized with this person, how someone complimented them about something–and more.  Most people are literally obsessed with feeling important.

As part of my job, I often have to entertain men who are clients of our company.  If you go out for a steak dinner with a group of men in a strange town, it seems that about 90% of the time, one of the men will suggest going to a strip bar after dinner if you are in an area where there are a bunch of them.  When men are together in a group, saying that you are morally offended by this sort of thing is generally not an option. I am not trying to offend anyone–this is just how things are.

I went to high school in Bangkok, Thailand for a year when I was growing up, and I am totally not interested in strip bars anymore.  They say that people in France never become alcoholics because they are given wine from the time they are are old enough to hold a cup.  This is in contrast to Scandinavians, Americans and others who are denied alcohol as if it is sinful and end up going crazy when they are exposed to it.  So, too, is it with me and strip bars.  I cannot even begin to express to you how messed up it was going to school in Bangkok at the age of 16.  All the boys and girls in my class did all weekend was hang out in strip bars.  This was literally the meeting place for our class on the weekends.  The entire class would be in strip bars on Friday and Saturday nights every single weekend.  As such, in this day and age, I tend to just sit there bored while the people I am with go crazy dancing with girls and throwing money at the stage. By the time I was 17 years old, I had probably spent the equivalent of 20 lifetimes in strip bars–and strip bars in Bangkok back then were insane and not something I should be talking about.  The stuff that went down on stage was just plain wrong and makes even the gaudiest and wildest strip bars in the United States look like G-rated movies.

A couple of months ago, I was on a business trip in Atlanta, and a girl at one of the strip bars came up to me and started talking to me.  Typically, the girls will strike up a conversation with the objective of giving you a “lap dance” and charging you $10 per song or something along those lines.  I was not interested in this, and have not been in decades, because I know the drill and have lost interest.  I am also married (but I can tell you from experience this does not seem to bother 99% of the men who go to these strip clubs.)  In any event, a girl who looked exactly like Marsha Brady on the Brady Bunch sat down and started talking to me.  Given the fact that my profession is getting people jobs, when I meet new people (especially in fringe professions (stripping is one of them), I am interested in learning about how they wound up doing what they do and also what their job entails.  This particular girl was at a bar ordering a drink across the room.  She made eye contact with me and smiled, took a hit of her cigarette, walked over, grabbed a chair sitting next to me, turned it around so the back of the chair was facing me, and sat down backwards.

“Do you want to see my tattoo?” she immediately said. She took another long hit of a cigarette.  I was sitting with two other men, and they were also watching this spectacle.  She had a shirt on and pulled it up standing up to show me her belly.  On her belly, just above her crotch, was the most incredible tattoo:

PROPERTY OF EDUARDO   ↓

Apparently, Eduardo had claimed everything starting at her waist down as his property.  This giant tattoo made this clear.

“Wow, how does Eduardo feel about you working here?” I asked her.

“We’re divorced.” she said.

“Oh, you better get rid of the tattoo then,” I told her.

“Would you like to lick it off?” she asked.

I almost fell out of my chair!  That was very original.  Over the next 30 minutes, however, I started learning more about her career and particular aspirations for her life.  What I found most interesting about the entire conversation, however, was how she kept coming back to the fact that Eduardo had been associated with a certain brutal gang that had chapters all over the United States.  She bragged to me about how the gang frequently cut peoples’ heads off in Mexico, and anyone who crossed the gang was likely to be in severe trouble.  She literally could not stop talking about the gang and how the gang was the most brutal and serious gang the world had ever known.  At the time, there was a lot of violence going on in Tijuana (several killings per day), and she bragged to me that this particular gang was involved with this epic violence.  She was also very proud of her association with Eduardo since he had been such a high-ranking gang member.

What I realized about 20 minutes into the conversation was that her “claim to fame” and what she felt most significant about in her life was the association with this gang.  It was the most important thing she had in her life.  She had left home when she was very young and did not have any meaningful contact with her family.  She also did not have an education.  All she had to feel significant about was the fact that she had been married to a member of a brutal gang.  That was it.

Had I been trying to impress her, I am pretty confident that anything I would have told her about myself would have paled in contrast to her former association with this gang.  She had so ingrained this into her need for significance that there was nothing I could really do that would measure up to how important she was due to the gang affiliation.

Have you ever met someone who is incredibly angry at the United States?  Have you ever met a criminal?  Do you know why people do bad things?  Deep down, most of the evil in the world is related to peoples’ need to feel significant.  The fastest way to become important, for many people, is to point a gun at them.  “Okay, you’re in control!” you might say to them.

One of the most amazing experiences in my life was the day someone tried to kill me.  When I was around 17 years old, kids in Grosse Pointe, Michigan developed a tradition of holding “keg parties” at banquet halls around Detroit.  The banquet halls were typically in terrible neighborhoods.  The kids would go out and purchase a bunch of beer kegs, rent out a banquet hall, and then charge kids admissions to get into the hall.  The kids who would go to these parties were all from Grosse Pointe, which at the time was almost 100% white and a middle- to upper-middle-class suburb.  One Saturday evening, I picked up a friend of mine to attend one of these parties.  Since I was attending  school in a different part of the Detroit area, I did not see him very much anymore.  He had become a very good student in the past few years and was quite proud of himself.  As we were walking into the banquet hall, two African American kids from the bad neighborhood pushed ahead of him in the line we were standing in.  They were apparently thinking they might like to attend the party, as well.  My friend said something to the kids, and they started arguing. I do not remember what the argument was about.  Some of the kids who were hosting the party came out and told the African American kids to leave and that it was a private party.  As the African American kids were walking away, my friend said the most offensive and incredible thing I had ever heard him say:
“You guys better be careful how you act because one day you are going to be working for me.”  The kids did not flinch, looked at him and walked away.

Sometime later we exited the party.  I was still a little shook up about what my friend said.  As we were walking towards the car I noticed the kids my friend had made the remarks to were sitting on a snow pile.  They appeared to have been sitting there for some time.

“These kids are going to kick our asses,” I told my friend.

“Just look down and keep walking,” he said.

I got into my Yugo and my friend did, as well.  We were parked in an alley, and I started the car.  A second or two later, I heard a knocking on the windows.  It sounded like metal tapping on glass.  I looked up and saw a gun barrel pointing directly at my face.

“Who’s in charge now!!!” I heard the kid with the gun scream.  I will never forget how terrified I was at that moment. I am still terrified thinking about it to this day.  I think the car must have already been in gear because within less than a second I had peeled out and was driving like hell away. I had thrown my body in my friend’s lap and was not even looking out the window.  As we drove away, I heard several gun shots, and one of then hit one of the lights on the back of the Yugo. Had I been a second later in starting the car, I am confident my friend or I would have been killed.

What was going on here?  My friend had said something to these guys that had implied he was more important than them.  They responded by showing him a gun which instantly made them more important.  This is how most violence works, I think. We want to feel important.

I have been sued before by people who have lost their jobs in our company in nuisance lawsuits.  Some of these former employees worked in places in our company where I never actually met them–such as in our warehouse.  When it really gets down to it, I believe I have been sued because someone feels unimportant when losing their job and wants to level the playing field.  The lawsuit gives them more power, and they suddenly are significant.  This works.  It is no different than pointing a gun at someone: Suddenly you have instant power. I read recently a study that doctors who spend more time with their patients socializing, and are less professional and more likable, get sued much less often. They study concluded that they probably get sued less because they do not hold their superiority over the patient, and allow the patient to express themselves and feel more important. They listen and show empathy for their patients.  More professional and more distant candidates do the opposite and get sued more often.

Practically every person out there has a massive need to feel significant, and they will do this at whatever cost they can.  I recently read some excerpts from the biography of the woman who played Marcia Brady on the Brady Bunch, Maureen McCormick.  What really struck me about this biography was that after the series had ended, her life spun out of control in a downward spiral of sex and drugs.  Nothing really significant or important at all happened in her life after the series ended.  As she is reflecting back on the life she had, she appears to be looking for any significance apart from the work she did on the television series.  What struck me about this life after the television series was that one of the most “significant” things that appears to have happened to her is a date with Steve Martin.

Martin had asked for McKormick’s phone number through Chevy Chase.

“I remember him being a very good kisser,” McCormick writes about Martin. “But I was insecure and either high or spaced out (most likely both), and I didn’t laugh at his jokes.

“Though Steve was too polite and confident of his talent to say anything, I’m sure my inability to carry on a normal conversation or respond intelligently put him off,” she writes. “We never spoke again after that date. I’ve always regretted my behavior because he impressed me as an extraordinary guy. I would’ve enjoyed a second date.”

People look for significance in the smallest details and do everything within their power to feel significant.   We all have the need to feel significant and this need is something that really controls and governs many of our lives.

Think about the people around you (and yourself) and what these people will do in order to feel important.  The list of things that people do in order to feel important is almost neverending:

• People will collect material possessions
• People will get involved in certain extracurricular activities
• People will do drugs
• People will get tattoos
• People will associate with certain groups
• People will run for office
• People will go to certain colleges and schools
• People will associate with certain types of people
• People will criticize others and tear them down
• People will contribute money or time to organizations

We all want to feel that we are unique and special in some way.  This makes us feel as if we have a purpose and meaning for our lives.  One of the largest challenges of our lives is making sure that we do not meet our need to feel significant in a way that is destructive.  For example, many people in their need to feel significant will try and be critical of others.  Another popular thing that people will do in order to feel significant is to manufacture all sorts of illnesses.  Throughout my life I have witnessed numerous people who would come down with all sorts of sicknesses and ailments that, in my opinion, were related to getting the care and attention of others–so they could feel significant. According to one definition I found on Wikipedia:

In Münchausen syndrome, the affected person exaggerates or creates symptoms of illnesses in themselves in order to gain investigation, treatment, attention, sympathy, and comfort from medical personnel. In some extremes, people suffering from Münchausen’s Syndrome are highly knowledgeable about the practice of medicine, and are able to produce symptoms that result in multiple unnecessary operations. For example, they may inject a vein with infected material, causing widespread infection of unknown origin, and as a result cause lengthy and costly medical analyses and prolonged hospital stay. The role of “patient” is a familiar and comforting one, and it fills a psychological need in people with Münchausen’s. It is distinct from hypochondria in that patients with Münchausen syndrome are aware that they are exaggerating, while sufferers of hypochondria believe they have a disease.

I have a distant relative that never ceases to amaze me.  I love him and he is a very nice person.  I do not know how to judge the truth of the things he has told me, however.  For example, in the past couple of years he has told me stories about people he knows who have murdered people and about the number of gangs he has been associated with in New York.  Some time ago, I was in his home, and he started showing me all sorts of things.  One thing he showed me was a sword that had allegedly been stolen from a house several years ago during “a job” that his friend did.  He told me the sword was from a general in the Ottoman Empire and probably worth millions of dollars–I am sure this made him feel very significant.  The only problem is that the blade on the sword looked brand new.  Who knows if it is genuine or not?  The point is that this person was trying to feel significant by something he was dreaming might be worth millions of dollars–much more than he has ever seen in his life.  In realty, the sword is probably not more than 20 years old–who knows its value.

You need to understand that your need to feel significant is something that controls your life.  The best thing you can possibly do for your career is detach from this need to feel significant and realize how this is controlling so much of what happens to you.  More importantly, you need to do the work you love and live the life you want without being controlled by a need to be significant.  This will change everything for you and allow you to contribute to the world in a productive way.

Ferraris Crashing Into Poles and the Importance of Focus in Your Life and Career

I read another article about someone in Los Angeles crashing a Ferrari into a pole today. The car was split in half. The driver of the Ferrari was Charles Lewis, a famous mixed martial arts fighter whose car spun out of control while he was racing a Porsche.  Lewis’ Ferrari was split in two after hitting in a pole.  Tragically, Lewis was killed.

Right in front of my house a couple of years ago there was another famous Ferrari crash. In February of 2006, Stefan Eriksson a Swedish entreprenuer, lost control of his $1,000,000 Ferrari Enzo sports car while driving along Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu and crashed into a pole at 199 mph as recorded on a speedometer by a passenger videotaping inside the car.  The impact of the crash was so violent that the car was split in half.  Incredibly, Eriksson survived.  Here’s a picture of the car right in front of my house:

Here’s a picture of another Ferrari that was split in half after hitting a pole in Australia:

The fact that people are crashing Ferraris should not be news to you.  There are tons of Ferrari crashes each year as the uber rich take these cars and make horrible mistakes driving them.  What should interest you, however, is that people are crashing these cars into poles and splitting them in half doing this.  Think about all of the places these cars could crash into when they are barrelling down the road out of control right before the accident.  Why is it that they are always crashing into poles?  If you really think about this particular problem you will realize that crashing into a pole is something that would be pretty difficult to do even if you wanted to when you are jetting along at 150+ mph.  Something is going on that is making all of these people crash into poles.

I know exactly why these people crash into poles because I have almost done something similar myself.

What You Will Learn Focus on where you want to go and what you want to achieve – not on what you fear and want to avoid. What you focus on ultimately decides where you are going to go and what will happen to you. Focus cannot change overnight – You need to take small steps and add on to it. Changing your focus, changes the direction of your life. Focus is what will empower you and give your career strength and direction.

When I was younger, I was very interested in race car driving.  Although I never went to race school, a good friend of mine did.  My friend had always been incredibly interested in racing and his wife had purchased him a couple of days at Skip Barber racing school for his first anniversary.  When I was around 27 years old, I purchased a used Porsche that was very, very fast and had the time of my life in the car. Like these men who had terrible accidents, I remember that I too was guilty of some incredibly reckless driving.

I will never forget the lesson that my friend taught me one day as we were careening around a curve I had taken at around 70 miles per hour.  The back end of the Porsche started to slide and the car started to go out of control.  I braced myself as we were careening right towards a pole.  My friend started screaming:

“Don’t look at the pole!!  Don’t look at the pole!!”  I was headed right at the pole.

He grabbed my head and turned it in another direction.  We kept skidding but he was forcing me to look in a different direction.  As I looked in the other direction, I ended up turning the wheel accordingly.  I do not remember exactly what I was looking at, but it was something else–I think it was a big piece of gravel and dirt to the side of the road.  Sure enough, the car miraculously avoided the pole, and we went screeching in a huge cloud of dust and dirt right where my friend had turned my head.  We stopped just fine.

I was almost one of those guys who crashed into a pole.

I was, of course, very curious about what had happened, and for the next several minutes, I spoke to my friend about it.  He explained to me that the most important thing about racing is understanding how to come out of a skid.  He explained that what he learned at racing school was that what most people do when they are in a skid is they focus on what they do not want to hit.  He said that what ends up happening is the driver who is in a skid looks around them and sees the telephone pole or whatever it is and, despite the fact that it is the last thing in the world they would want to hit, they end up slamming right into it because they (1) pick it out and (2) it is the only thing they are focusing on.  Instead, he said the only way to pull out of a skid is to focus on where you want to go and not what you fear.

He said you need to focus on where you want to go and not what you fear.

How does this relate to your career and life?  It has absolutely everything to do with your career and life.  The best way to get where you want to go in your career and life is to change what you are focusing on.  What you focus on has everything to do with what will end up happening to you and where you will go.

When you focus on the results you want, you are likely to go there.  This is typically how you get where you want to go.  When you are focusing on what you want and what you need to achieve your goals, you are going to be far, far better off than when you are focusing on what you do not want to achieve.

One of the craziest things happened to me several years ago with one of my employees.  It is so crazy that I still cannot believe it happened.  It is something that related to the power of focus and how powerful it, in fact, is.

I had an employee who was really quite lazy compared to other people in the company doing the same thing he was doing.  There were several other people in the company who were much harder workers and did a much better job, and this particular employee seemed to cause one problem after another.  Since this guy was not doing much work, I started thinking that he might be better off working somewhere else.  It was really not in the company’s best interest to keep him around.

One day I was sitting in my office, and he walked in and asked to speak with me. I was hoping that he was going to quit.  Instead, the guy sat down and asked for a raise.  He started telling me what a good job he thought he was doing and how he was entitled to a raise.  I listened to him for awhile and then told him I would think about it.  The guy was clearly delusional, but I was taken back.

The same day he asked for a raise I was actually hoping to fire him; however, he had not been at all afraid of getting fired.  Instead, he focused on what little work he was doing and decided that this made him entitled to a raise.  This helped change my focus as well.  “Was I really seeing things correctly with this guy? ” I wondered.  He had put the focus with him somewhere else.

This particular employee ended up diverting my focus away from his substandard performance for a period of time by getting me to focus on something else.  It actually worked for awhile, and it was a very effective tool because it manipulated me into focusing on something I had not been focusing on before.  Instead of me being focused on what was wrong with him, I started focusing on the little that was right.

You need to understand that your focus can have huge results in either a positive or a negative sense.

• When you focus on getting an offer, instead of not getting an offer, the offer is more likely to come to you.
• When you focus on not getting laid off, as opposed to being laid off, you are more likely to not get laid off.
• When you focused on getting a promotion, as opposed to not getting a promotion, you are more likely to get a promotion.
• When you focus on getting along with people, as opposed to not getting along with people, you are more likely to get along with people.
• When you focus on prosperity instead of the lack of, you are more likely to be wealthy.
• When you focus on being happy as opposed to being sad, you are more likely to be happy.
• When you focus on being talented rather than average, you are more likely to be talented.
• When you focus on being interesting rather than boring, you are more likely to be interesting.
• When you focus on being a hard worker as opposed to being an average worker, you are more likely to be a hard worker.

Whatever your focus on is most often the direction you are going to go in.  This is just how it works and how it has always worked.

If you wanted to feel bad right now how would you do it?

• The first thing you could do is start thinking about all of the funerals you have been to of close people.  Then you could think about all of the bad relationships you have been in.
• Then you could think about all of the bad things people have said about you in the past.
• Then you could think about the biggest failures you have had in your life.
• Then you could think about how you are not that successful if you wanted to, as well.

This would make you feel really lousy, right?  I am sure it would. It would be a real ball of laughs!  What do you think your mental state would be like after an hour or so of this?  Do you think you would be able to accomplish a lot due to these thoughts?  Do you think it would be fun having these thoughts?  Give me a break!  This would be a complete nightmare.

But this is what a lot of people do with their lives.  They focus on the negative, they focus on where they do not want to go and this is exactly where they end up going.  This is so stupid! This is something we all do, however.  You may be among people who concentrate their thoughts on negative stuff like this.  A good part of the world does this all day long and every day. I am sure you know a lot of people yourself who concentrate their thoughts like this.  What a bunch of bologna!

If you wanted to feel good right now, you could do the following:

• You could think about your greatest successes.
• You could think about all of the good things people have said about you in the past.
• You could think about all of the people who love you and you love.
• You could think about what you are grateful for.
• You could think about the future you are dreaming about for yourself.
• You could think about all of the good decisions you have made in your life.

Now that’s what I am talking about!  If you focus on the positive and things that empower you, that is exactly where you are going to go!

I am about to describe two types of people to you. I am sure you too know these two types of people because they are everywhere around us.

First, there are people who tend to look at every situation in a positive way.  They look at people and assume they have a positive intention.  They look at the world and see a happy and exciting place.  They are, in a word, happy people.  When you are around people like this, your experience of the world tends to be pretty good as well.  It is enjoyable being around those who are happy with the world and whose focus is on positive things. When you see the world in this vein, you tend to feel less threatened and overall much better about everything that is going on around you.

Second, there are people who tend to focus on the negative.  They focus on how this or that is impossible or very difficult. They focus on how people are mean and out to get them.  They focus on negative things that people have said.  They look at the world as evil and they are suspicious about the world and what is going on around them.  When you see the world like this, and spend time with these sorts of people, you tend not to feel that great about anything.  Your experience of the world tends to be pretty bleak.

The sort of focus that has gotten you to where you are today is not going to be the same focus that gets you to where you may want to be tomorrow, next week, or next year.  Changing your focus cannot happen overnight and instantly.  It is like anything–you need to take small steps to get more cumulative changes made over time.  However, if you change your focus, you are going to change the direction your life is headed. This is just how it works.  Remember that where you focus is where you are going to go.  Focus is what empowers you and gives you and your career power and not what hurts you.

The Peter Principal and Being Ready for More Responsibility

What You Will Learn Do what you know – remain focused on the things that you understand. By excelling at whatever you are doing, you are like to put yourself in a situation where you advance. Be wise and make sure you do not take on responsibility more than you are capable of or are ready for. The biggest mistake you could make is to try and get ahead of yourself.

The most important thing you can do in your work and in your career is to do what you know. It is fine to try new things.  However, when you try new things, you need to be very careful that you remain focused on the things that you know and understand.  If you venture outside of what you understand, you are likely to get into massive trouble and this trouble can come quickly.

People who do well in their positions are typically rewarded with more responsibility and a better position.  Eventually, however, this position will exceed a person’s level of expertise.  This principle is called the Peter Principle, a theory originally conceived of in the late 1960s by Dr. Lawrence J. Peter.  Dr. Peter Wrote: “In a hierarchically structured administration, people tend to be promoted up to their level of incompetence.” In easier to understand terms, Dr. Peter wrote that “The cream rises until it sours.”

The idea behind the Peter Principle is that, in many organizations, people are going to keep getting thrust upward until they end up failing at what they are trying to do.  What does this mean for you?  First, you need to be aware that by excelling at whatever you are doing, you are likely to put yourself in a situation where you advance.  There is nothing wrong with this and it is healthy.  However, you need to be ready for the next step.  Second, the worst mistake you can make is to be thrust into a position before you are ready for this position.  If you are not ready for a certain position, it is often wise to make sure you do not take this responsibility before you are ready.  This can end up getting you fired or worse.

Several years ago I started a magazine.  At the time, our company had at least 100 people working in our headquarters and one day I held a meeting with various people from the company to discuss this magazine.  We had hired numerous temporary people.  We were doing a lot of work in the student loan business at that time and we had hired temporary employees who were paid not more than $10 an hour to catalogue, mail and do various things like this when needed.  One day, I grabbed one of these workers and several others and brought them into the office.  At the time, I did not know who the temp worker was. I just noticed he did not seem that busy.

“It’s costing us over $300,000 to get this issue out and we do not have anywhere near enough advertising running in this issue to break even!” I barked at the group.

I instructed the temporary worker that he needed to sell at least $100,000 in advertising and he had three weeks to do it.  Every day or so, he would pop into my office.  One day he got an ad from Citibank.  Another day he got a law school to advertise.  I did not listen to him, I just kept barking orders at him.  The poor guy had never worked at a job paying more than $10.00 an hour and here he was all of a being given the incredibly challenging assignment of hustling up ads for an upstart magazine.  He was uneducated and had applied to stuff envelopes.

As he sold ads, I started putting more and more pressure on him to sell even more.  I started yelling at him and telling him he needed to “stop bullshitting” and “start closing.”  I banged my hand on my desk and told him stuff like “now is the time for action!”  I gave him pep talks and walked over to him when he was cold calling advertisers and told him what he was doing wrong.

One day the guy disappeared.  Someone came into my office and explained that he had applied to stuff envelopes.  The guy had been turned into a professional advertising sales person over night.  A funny thing happened after this guy disappeared.  I hired two girls who were professional ad sales people from another magazine.  They were each paid $50,000 a year plus commissions.  After six months on the job, countless meetings, having hosted a major party for advertisers in New York City and more, they had sold fewer ads than the guy from the mail room had in less than a month.

The guy from the mail room was promoted into a position faster and more aggressively than probably even his wildest expectations.  This sort of thing happens all the time, however.  It happens in businesses everywhere.  Had he not been promoted, he might have still been happily employed in the mail room.  Because he did not say “no,” he allowed himself to be thrust into a position beyond his comfort level and he failed.  The thing was, he actually did not fail in this position.  He believed he was failing and quit.  He was uncomfortable with the work but he actually did not fail.  He did well and much better than the professional salespeople I hired later on.

One of my most glorious seasons in the asphalt business was the time I branched out. I did hot tar work, residential ashphalt work, commercial asphalt work, asphalt patching and I stripped parking lots.  I also got into paving and started doing commercial paving jobs. I purchased compressors to break up asphalt.  I purchased a jackhammer. I purchased a dump truck and did a tremendous amount of work.

One day, I was doing a man’s driveway in Grosse Pointe, Michigan.  During the job, the man’s wife was not allowing him to smoke inside so he was smoking cigarettes outside and watching me the entire time.  I was on my “evening shift” at the moment.  I worked so hard in the asphalt business, frequently starting work at 5:00 or 6:00 in the morning, that around 4:00 many days I would drop off my exhausted crew and go out to do asphalt work alone.  This was one of those days.

I am not sure what was wrong with me.  I think I was trying to get market share.  I had so much energy and enthusiasm for this work it is hard to describe.  In fact, there were times when I was doing some large commercial jobs that I literally did the work all night.

One of my favorite things to do when doing this work was to talk to the owners of the homes.  At the time, Grosse Pointe had a lot of big homes with a lot of successful executives living in them.   I loved speaking to these men and seeing what they did for a living, the struggles they had overcome and more.  Since a lot of the work I did was between 6:00 and 10:00 in the evening, I had the opportunity to see lots of people, get to know the success secrets of a lot of people, as well as the secrets they probably would rather I not know.  For the most part, however, what I learned was exceptionally helpful and useful information. I got to meet the CEOs and high ranking executives of all the auto companies, and people who owned and controlled well-known businesses around Detroit and the world.

On this particular evening, the man smoking while watching me do my work explained to me that he owned a giant construction company that built small strip malls around Detroit.  For me, jobs like this were great because they always ended up leading to even more work.  I loved meeting business owners during my work in the evening because if they owned a business I would do whatever I could to get this business as a client.

The discussion turned out well. The man was in the process of rebuilding a small building in a city called West Bloomfield, around 70 miles away.  He asked me to go over and give him an estimate for ripping out the existing parking lot, building a giant divider going through the parking lot, putting curbs in and striping the parking lot.  It was a huge task he had in mind and I was certainly very enthusiastic about the entire job.  The only problem was that I had never ripped up a parking lot, built a parking lot,  or done any paving.  I knew very little about paving at this particular point in my life.

“If you work with me you are going to be very successful in the asphalt business,” the man told me.  It was clear from our discussion that I needed to ensure that I did a good job with this asphalt at all costs.

When I arrived at the work site to give an estimate, it was the most professional job I had ever been involved in.  This was a large project and being very professionally run.  There were foremen and various men in hard hats running around with engineering schemata. They sat me down in a trailer they had brought to the construction site and reviewed various architectural plans with me.  They spoke about thinks like “pitch” and “elevation” and “grade.”  I had no idea what the hell any of them were talking about.

“You say you want me to rip out the parking lot?” I asked.

They looked at me like I was crazy.  The guys going over the engineering schemata seemed like they were engineers. Here I was, standing here in shorts with tar all over my face, and at the time was around 22 years old.  It must have been a really sorry sight.

I gave an estimate of $1,500 to do the entire project.

This estimate was insane. In fact, the estimate should have been more like $20,000 for the entire project. I did not know this at the time, however.  I had no idea because I was doing something I did not understand. My estimate was accepted and I was assigned a construction manager whose task became to call me every day until the work was done.

It must have been a sorry sight the first day I pulled up to the job. I had 4 guys driving a Chevy Suburban who were towing a small compressor behind the truck.  I had another couple of guys towing a Bob Cat, which is a small bulldozer.   I was driving a 30 year old dump truck that barely made it to the job site.  When we got there, probably 60 or 70 other people were busy with various tasks involved in building.  There were people in hard hats and people with engineering documents spread out on tables.  The operation was very professional.

I directed my men to take the compressor and start breaking up the parking lot. I was not sure what else to do.  For the entire day we used sledge hammers and the jack hammer (which is why we had the compressor) to break away at the asphalt.  We picked up load after load of the parking lot and put various pieces of it in the dump truck.

Around 1:00 in the afternoon, we broke a gas line underneath the parking lot with the bulldozer.  It was a complete disaster.  I still remember the worker lifting out the piece of asphalt with the gas line still attached to it, completely oblivious to the magnitude of what was going on.  Because our work was such an unprofessional operation (my workers were doing things like dropping giant pieces of asphalt on their feet by accident and then hopping around in pain, etc.) a small crowd of workers had gathered to watch us with expressions bordering between amusement and shock.

When we ripped up the gas line, though, everything changed. Men started screaming, someone cut all of the power to the building and it was so much commotion I did not know what had happened.  Some guy charged the driver of the Bobcat and practically knocked him out of the bulldozer.  The fire department was called and within moments the gas company arrived.

Everything worked out okay after an hour or two.  I was given a cell phone and it was the guy who had given me the job.

“You need to be more careful reviewing plans,” he told me.  “The gas line was clearly indicated there.”  The last thing I wanted to tell him was that I did not know how to read plans.  He told me that they would deduct the cost of redoing the pipe from the $1,500 they were going to pay me.

That evening, as I was driving my dump truck back to where we stored all the equipment in Detroit (we called it “the Yard”) I realized I did not know where to take all of the broken asphalt.  I figured there must be a dump of some sort where I could take everything.  As I was driving down the streets of Detroit, I looked around me from side to side and realized that I was in Detroit.  There was row after row of abandoned houses and lots.  Mattresses and large piles of trash were on many of the lots. I took all the asphalt and dumped it in an abandoned lot.

When I got home that evening I realized that I had spent more than $1,500 on the job already and I was also facing a deduction due to bursting a gas pump.  Over the next several days I spent thousands more on the job and eventually, like the guy in the mail room, I too did not show up for work.

I called the guy who had hired me:

“This is not a $1,500 job and you know it.  I have spent close to $10,000 of my own money on this already.  This is not fair and you are smart enough to know that I was not experienced enough to do this work and was not giving you the correct bid.”

The man was unsympathetic. He did not care that I had made a mistake.  I felt horrible about this for several years.  I had never abandoned a job or quit something, but I had gotten in way over my head.

You want to be motivated.  You want to succeed.  You want to take on new tasks. But you never want to get ahead of yourself and take on work you are incapable of doing.  What ends up happening when you do this is you sabotage everything.  You end up losing your job or, even worse, your competence.

You want to rise but there is nothing wrong with only rising when you are ready and have a good understanding of the challenges before you.  Do not take on more responsibility or work than you are capable of before you are ready.

You Need to Be Seen as an Authority

What You Will Learn Portray strength and confidence to your employer and potential employers. The more presumed authority you have to offer your employer, the bigger the difference it will make. You need to always cultivate authority and it will have a giant impact upon on your success.

Several years ago I learned about the power of authority while operating an asphalt business in Michigan.  When I initially started the company it was called something like “Barnes Asphalt Service” or something along those lines.  When I would show up at peoples’ homes, since I am Harrison Barnes, they would know the company was intimately associated with me and that I was a kid seeking to do asphalt work on their home. I was also around 18 years old when I started doing this and since for most people their home represents the biggest purchase of their life, not many people were all that enthusiastic about letting me loose on their driveways.

I had great plans for what I wanted to do, however.  I wanted to grow a large asphalt company and I knew very early on that I was having a very difficult time because the name of my company simply did not convey the authority needed. I would give estimates at churches, bowling alleys, school systems and other large owners of asphalt and would never win the bid.  I am sure that people must have thought to themselves “There is no way I am giving a kid an important job such as this!”

It was very depressing, not being able to get work for so long.  If you are in sales you know how difficult it is to go through a “down streak” like this.  I wanted to work so much and each evening when I would go out I would do everything within my power to really look the part.  I even started putting on a tie in the middle of summer and made sure my hair was perfectly parted and combed.  I still had an incredibly difficult time getting work. In my first season in the asphalt business I did very little work.  It was incredibly depressing. In fact, I was absolutely ready to give up.

This slump I was in is no different from being unemployed.  However, in my case I knew that a great part of the problems was not the economy or the business I was in, it was me.  I was too young and too inexperienced. I had nice flyers and brochures made up with the name of the business and what I did on them.  Nevertheless, this was not enough to convince homeowners, business owners and others that I was the right man for the job.

The asphalt business in Michigan is seasonal.  You can only work in the Spring and Summer because it is cold, raining, and snowy the rest of the year.  The nice thing about was each year I had a time to “hibernate” and think about what I would be doing in the business the next year.  In this respect I want to point something out for you: The chance to hibernate and rethink your career is a blessing and something you should make work for you and not against you.

I looked forward to my annual time of unemployment each year because I knew that I would be able to use this time to come back stronger the following year.  During the winters I always thought through what I would do differently the following year and how I would improve and get better.  I played out what I had done the previous year in my mind and learned lessons. I took the lessons I learned and made sure that I applied them in the next year.  Over and over and over again I incorporated the lessons about what had happened the previous year into my way of thinking.

This “hibernation” I had from work is something that you may be able to benefit from as well.  If you are currently unemployed, your time away from work may be giving your extremely valuable time to think through your next steps, what you would do differently the next time and what steps and actions would benefit you the next time you act.  This is something that is extraordinarily powerful and for me, each year of “hibernation” from the asphalt business enabled me to think through lessons so I could come back even stronger the following year.

After my second year in the asphalt business I realized, during my time of hibernation, that what was holding me back was the name of my business.  As “Barnes Asphalt” I was just a kid doing asphalt work around the neighborhood. I needed something that sounded official and really portrayed strength and confidence to consumers and potential customers.  I thought about this issue most of the winter and when I started the next year I had new brochures and signs made for my truck.  I made sure the signs were giant.  They said:

MICHIGAN INDUSTRIAL ASPHALT SERVICES

Based on nothing but the name, the entire operation sounded to potential clients as if it was a giant conglomerate.  When I rolled into residential neighborhoods people thought I was doing them a favor since they had been used to dealing with much smaller companies.  Suddenly, the confidence of having residential asphalt work done by a giant company had come to the suburbs of Detroit and people no longer needed to rely on a small neighborhood company.  Most importantly, this changed how I was perceived when I started selling the service door to door.  People no longer thought I owned the company. Instead, these people assumed I was a young “go getter” sales kid who had miraculously risen throughout the ranks to become a top salesman in the asphalt business.

The situation was actually quite humorous on many occasions.  I started to get larger and larger projects when I went out to sell them. Some of these projects included giant parking lots for funeral homes, bowling alleys and churches, for example.  I was doing this work in the early 1990s and my communication set up was pretty basic.  I had an answering service that would answer the calls that came in with a professional receptionist and then forward the live calls to my cell phone. It seemed like a very substantial operation.

One day we were doing a church parking lot and horrified members of the congregation had been watching us.  I was doing one of my first “hot tar” jobs and it was going very poorly.  I had lit a giant trailer full of hot tar on fire by not preparing things properly and there was smoke that could be seen for miles.  The fire department had shown up, and I had explained to them that there was nothing unusual going on as I battled some flaming tar that was creeping along the ground like flaming hot lava.  One of my workers was so horrified that he announced he had to go to the bathroom and never came back.  We were at least 40 miles from home.  It was a bizarre scene.

I answered the call coming in from the answering service.  I could hear my own worker screaming in the background.  If you can imagine the scene, there was a priest standing there in a robe and several people from the early morning church service all watching the flames of hell creep all over their parking lot.  Several fire trucks had just left and traffic was backed up in the street watching the entire spectacle.  I was very upset because around $1,200 of tar was on fire and that was all the money I had in the world at the moment.  As a matter of fact, it was probably more money than I had in the world.  The check I had written for it was going to bounce if I did not get paid for this asphalt job at the end of the day.

“This is the least professional operation we have ever seen! These are kids out here!  We thought we were getting INDUSTRIAL WORK.  These are not CRAFTSMEN.”

No, we were not.

Since I had smoke in my lungs from the fire I realized I must have sounded like a 60 year old man.  When I picked up the phone and started talking the man thought he was speaking with an adult, likely much older than he was.  I then proceeded to explain to the man that I was standing right there in his parking lot and would stand behind my work and so forth.

Over the next several years my asphalt business thrived, in large part (I am almost entirely sure) due to its name.  The idea with its name is that it conveyed authority and made people trust the company.  The name held more authority than my young face and age.  People wanted to have the work done and they wanted to have the work done from a company they could trust.  Having a name behind the product they could trust was something that was quite powerful.  I learned a lot from this lesson. Authority means a lot.

I learned a tremendous amount from this on multiple levels.  I started to get extremely self confident for a long time based on this.  For example, if I walked up to a girl at a party and she did not seem that interested in me I might say something to her along the lines of “If you knew who I was you would not be acting like this.”  Incredibly, this line worked and young women would turn from cold to interested in seconds.  Simply hinting at presumed authority, fame, or something along those lines can dramatically change how we are perceived.

Several years ago, I was starting my career in legal recruiting and I was sitting in a small office behind my garage, alone.  I was on the phone with a candidate who was questioning me very aggressively and giving me a hard time about potentially representing them.  I was taking the abuse fairly well; however, I realized at some point that the abuse had gone a bit too far.  The candidate I was speaking with was extremely arrogant and being quite mean to me.  I knew that the only way to turn the situation around was going to be to assume an air of authority and put the person in their place.

“Listen.  I have more people who want to work with me than I can count,” I told the candidate.  “I am pretty sure I make more placements than any other recruiter in the United States and I am incredibly good at what I do.  I really do not have time to listen to you and would rather not work with you.  So I think it is best if we just end this conversation now.  It is clear to me that you need to find an average recruiter who is going to kiss your ass.  There is no recruiter out there who can even come close to the results I can get you.  Find someone else.”

I believed this at the moment and it was true.  However, you need to understand I was not working with a big recruiting firm and was literally sitting inside my garage.  The candidate had stated “wait, wait … I’m sorry!!” while I was on the phone with them, after I assumed control.  The candidate called me back within 30 seconds and begged me to take them on.  I told them I would have to think about it.  Then they wrote me a 10+ paragraph email begging me to take them back.  They did all of this due to my presumed authority and being someone who was very good at what they do.

Several years ago I used to look at peoples’ college and law school degrees as a credibility indicator and something that was an excellent reflection of their authority.  If I saw someone who went to Yale Law School or Harvard Law School, for example, I would do my best to hire them in almost all instances.  Why was I putting so much faith in these degrees?  I was doing this because I believed that people out of these schools must be extraordinary due to the credibility of their degrees and what they must have meant.  I was fooled many times. In fact, I ended up hiring one person who was mildly schizophrenic and sat in the office mumbling to himself (presumably hearing voices) all day long.  What I was hiring was presumed credibility and the belief that a degree meant something.  We take credibility extremely seriously and give authority to many things.

How does authority relate to you and your job search?  Here are some things that will give you presumed authority among hiring personnel:

• Where you worked last and the “prestige” of this employer.
• How long you worked for a given employer.
• The size of the employer you worked for last.
• What your last salary was.
• What social class you are.
• Where you went to school.
• Awards, certifications and other honors you might have.
• Who your parents were/are.
• How many jobs you have had.
• How much you have studied your discipline on your own.
• Your responsibilities with your last employer.
• How confident you seem about the job you are being hired for.
• Where you grew up.
• The reviews you may have had at your previous employer.

There are numerous other potential authority indicators a potential employer is looking for.  In addition, your current employer may be holding you in higher esteem due things you have done in the past ,even before you showed up at your job which give you authority.  For example, if you attended a great university you may be getting the benefit of the doubt.  If you formerly held a very important job in another company this will also give you authority.  For example, General Electric (“GE”) for years has been considered the top training ground for Chief Executive Officers (“CEOs”) of other major American companies.  Every several years GE makes a new CEO and there are typically numerous individuals who are competing for this position within the company.  The people who do not get the CEO position typically leave to become CEOs of other major American companies.  An April 18, 2005 article from Money Magazine, Get Me a CEO from GE, relates:

When a company needs a loan, it goes to a bank. When a company needs a CEO, it goes to General Electric, which mints business leaders the way West Point mints generals. Had you visited GE ten years ago, you’d have found Bob Nardelli running transportation, Jim McNerney running international, Larry Johnston in appliances, and a pair of VPs named David Cote and Jeff Immelt. Today they run companies like Home Depot, 3M, Albertsons, Honeywell, and GE–with combined revenues of $311 billion. Before Harry Stonecipher was ousted at Boeing last month, five of the Dow 30 were headed by GEers.

Anywhere else such an outflow of talent would be cause for alarm; at GE it’s just a strong graduating class. One headhunter estimates the company harbors another dozen execs of FORTUNE 500 caliber. Immelt guesses the number is double that. “I’m disappointed” to lose talent, he says, “but we march on.”

Given the authority that GE has in management circles, people who come out of this environment are typically thrust into important leadership roles at other companies.  The environment people come out of is something that holds a great deal of authority.

Establishing your authority is something that should be done in every interview and every job you have.  When you are going out to the market to purchase things you want to deal with businesses and others who have authority in certain fields.  Virtually every single person I know of that has been sick has always told me how their doctor received this or that award, or is the head of a certain hospital group.  People want to do business with people who have authority.  When we purchase goods and anything of value we typically brag about some aspect of the product, which gives the product a certain amount of authority.  We may purchase a Volvo because it has the authority of being “safe” or a Mercedes because it has the authority of being “well engineered”.  We purchase products and services due to their presumed authority in given fields.  When we go to the grocery store most people purchase name brands over generic brands due to the presumed “authority” a particular good or service has in a field.

Last summer, our neighbors a few houses down rented out their house to a group that hosted all sorts of parties for MTV and a bunch of celebrities.  We even were in an episode of The Hills that was filmed there.  Because these parties made a lot of noise, the producers of these parties invited my wife and I to them so we would not call the police on the party.  My wife could not have been more enthusiastic because she reads all sorts of magazines like US Weekly, Peopleand so forth, where she gets to read about the lives of celebrities all day long.  What was so interesting about going to these parties is that on more than a couple of occasions, a star of some sort walked up to her and made a positive remark about something she was wearing.  “I love your dress!” one might say to her.  My wife was incredibly enthusiastic after getting such compliments.  In fact, she was ecstatic.  After all, if someone with an incredible amount of “fashion authority” walks up to us and says something positive like this, we are bound to feel good about ourselves.  This is just how it works.  It also, of course, works the opposite way as well.

Many people have very little self confidence and are constantly asking others questions and seeking the approval and authority of other people.  In fact, one of the main functions of friends and acquaintances for many people is to provide us “outside authority” and judgments that we are ok and everything is fine.

• “I was right saying that, don’t you think?”
• “It was not very nice of that person to say that to me, don’t you agree?”
• “I did a nice thing by offering that to them, right?”
• “That was a really nice thing they did for me, right?”
• “I look good in this dress don’t you think?”
• “I am doing a good job, don’t you think?”
• “I have every right to be upset, don’t you agree?”
• “This is a really nice room, don’t you agree?”
• “I think I made the right decision purchasing this car, don’t you?”

We look for others’ opinions (we all do) in an effort to give authority to our decisions and, in fact, even our lives in many cases.  We use authority to govern our relationship and interaction with the world.

One of the most amusing things to me is how we use titles to reflect authority.  I have made job offers to people before and they have come back and wanted to negotiate titles on numerous occasions.  In some cases these titles have been for jobs that are relatively unimportant.  I have had people working in an administrative capacity want to be called a “Vice President” and I have even been called on several occasions for reference checks on former employees who had no title when they were working in the Company.

“President of sales and marketing of our company?” I might ask someone doing a reference check on someone who was simply a salesperson earning around $12 an hour, with no title, and now interviewing for an important position in another company by virtue of using this title.  I hate to say this, but the cold hard truth is that we give titles an incredible amount of merit, and give them a massive amount of authority.  By virtue of calling yourself something, or having a title, people will often feel you are far more important than you are.  Titles carry a lot of authority:

• We would consider someone with a Pd.D. more important than someone with a masters degree.
• We would consider a professor at Stanford to have more authority than a professor at Utah State.
• We would consider a medical doctor to have more authority than a chiropractor.

We also use age as an indicator of authority.  We consider the older to be far wiser, know more and often have more authority than someone who is younger.

We use dress as an indicator of authority and are influenced by this a great deal.  The mother of one of my best friends growing up died when he turned 18 years old, leaving him several million dollars in inheritance.  He had an incredible amount of money at his disposal that he could use for anything he wanted, but never really spent very much at all. I will never forget going into a Paul Stuart store with him in New York one summer.  At that point in his life, despite being in his early 20’s, my friend did not even shop in traditional stores like Paul Stuart.  Despite the fact that Paul Stuart was one of the more expensive stores in New York City for men’s clothing he actually got most of his suits handmade, which is a completely different level.  He was wearing a tie dye t-shirt and flip flops while we were in the store looking around.  We were snooping for perhaps no more than 5 minutes when a salesperson came up to us:

“I see you guys are doing a lot of looking and not purchasing.  Are you in town for a clothing convention?”  It was an incredibly arrogant statement and something that was pretty outrageous.  The man would not have said this to my friend had he been wearing a $5,000 custom made suit.  However, he was saying it because how he was dressed did not give him suitable authority.  He did not look like he could afford to be shopping in such an expensive store.

In order to get a job, stay employed and succeed in the world you need to have authority.  You can do this through titles and all sorts of other ways but having authority is something that is crucial.  The more presumed authority you have to offer your employer, the bigger difference it will make.  Authority matters if you are trying to sell something.  Authority is simply something that matters and has a giant impact on your success and what ends up happening to you in your career and job.  You need to always cultivate authority.