Harrison Barnes » high school

Good Things Only Happen When You Are Moving

Harrison Barnes — Mon, 02 May 2011 05:41:47 +0000

Probably the low point of my life was the summer I decided I needed to get ready for eleventh grade. Since I was young, I had been told that if I wanted to get into a good college, I would have to earn excellent grades in eleventh grade. My father had gone to Harvard and had told me since the time I was old enough to understand about how he earned all As in his junior year of high school, and how this had helped him get into this great college. I intended to do the same. Some of the stress of this was elevated due to the fact that my father also did some admissions work for Harvard, so I had some pretty good insights as to how my current application would be viewed. In a word, I needed to do really well in eleventh grade. Eleventh grade is typically the most important year because it is the last year of grades that colleges see before you are enrolled. Since my grades had not been all that fantastic in the years leading up to eleventh grade, I told myself that I would brush up on various subjects that summer before school started. I went around speaking with the teachers I would be having the next year and declared my intention to do work over the summer to get ready for their classes the following year. I remember the look of astonishment on their faces as I related my desire to do my best to get ready for their classes the following year. I do not think they thought I was serious. Nevertheless, they were happy to give me work to do and they must have been humored by it. I think one teacher might have told me to read Paradise Lost and a few other books including the Old Testament as a joke (but I took him seriously). My math teacher gave me a copy of the math book his class would be using the following year. Because I planned on spending the summer getting ready for eleventh grade, I did not even look for a job. My parents are divorced and I decided to move in with my mother on the other side of town because I thought this was the only place I could conceivably get any work done. At my father’s house, my room was right next to my stepsister’s room. My sister had dropped out of school at age 14. She was a few years older than me and had recently gotten her dream job working in a record store. She had also used her money from this job to invest in stereo equipment that was so powerful it shook the walls of my room. Her mother was fiercely protective of her, and try as I might, I could not get her to turn down the music. She had recently started listening to nothing but hip-hop. I was beginning to think she fancied herself a hip-hop artist. She started dressing and talking differently. The worst thing about her new job was that they gave her free hip-hop records. Many of these records would start out with machine gun fire sounds that would shake the walls of my room, and it was very hard for me to read when I was hearing expletives pour out in surround sound every few seconds. So I decided to move in with my mother to escape the hip-hop music. I was very excited about spending the summer getting ready for school so I could go to a top college. I have no idea what was wrong with me to this day. It was like I was going on a nerd mission. My friends at that point were all pretty wild and I am not sure what they thought of me going across town to study at my mother’s house. I told myself I had made a good decision, though, especially after visiting my friend Steve a few weeks into the summer. Steve lived on my father’s side of town in Birmingham, Michigan, about an hour away from my mother’s in Grosse Pointe. I drove my Volkswagen Rabbit Diesel over to Steve’s house and arrived there at about 6:00 in the afternoon. I was with my friend Joe, whom I did not see very much anymore. Joe had become very good at football and was being recruited by colleges at that point. We had grown apart. Steve loved my Volkswagen Rabbit Diesel and always used to say “Diesel!!” whenever he saw me. When we got to Steve’s house, he was smashed. Steve’s parents were in the middle of a divorce and he was not handling it well. Steve proceeded to take us to a party. The party was in a neighborhood called Wabeek that, at the time, was inhabited almost exclusively by people who had recently immigrated from the Middle East and owned convenience stores and gas stations throughout Detroit. The homes were really nice and gold plated lions sat on many of their front lawns. I think there was also a small replica of the White House somewhere in this neighborhood. We were not at the party for longer than 15 minutes when Steve got kicked out. He had been talking to a girl and something bad had happened. I have no idea what. We were standing at the curb and Steve was still shouting stuff at the girl. It was a bad situation. There were spectators (at least 15 of them) standing in front of this giant, gaudy house, listening to the insults being hurled back and forth. I realized at this point that the girl’s entire family was also standing on the front lawn witnessing this–apparently, this was her house. Even her grandparents were there. “The worst thing is that you’re fat and you smoke!” Steve screamed at her. This was too much. The men in the group, including the grandfather, started running towards the car. I fired up the Diesel and barely got away. Volkswagen Rabbit Diesels from the early 1980s were not fast. They were embarrassingly slow and I was lucky to have made it out of there. I looked over at Joe (the football player) and even he looked very frightened. “Those guys are going to kill us,” he said. “They are not messing around.” I was frightened, too. I continued to drive. A few moments later, I saw a Lincoln Continental swing around a curve and realized it was headed right towards us. Then I saw another car swing around the curve. The cars caught up to us in no time. They proceeded to cut me off and I drove my car into a ditch. The men then raced up to the car, pulled Steve out, and started punching and kicking him. Steve was laughing the whole time. The men then said something about treating women with respect. My friend Joe got involved and explained that Steve was a drunk and his parents were going through a divorce. Joe was a huge guy and I can imagine he felt the three to four hours a day he lifted weights was going to help him break up this bizarre altercation. Joe was so big and so tough that he had to ride in the Volkswagen with his head resting on his shoulder because he was too big to fit in the car otherwise. When Joe got out of the car, the men with the gold chains and Iranian accents quickly turned into puppy dogs and made us promise to take Steve to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. Then they shook hands with us and left. I think they must have thought Joe was a professional wrestler. Steve was bruised and bleeding and still laughing. For the next hour, we drove from church to church looking for an AA meeting to drop Steve off at. He was still laughing and there was blood all over the back seat of my car. Eventually we dropped Steve off at another party and I drove back to my side of town with Joe. “Wow, it’s pretty hardcore over on this side of town,” Joe said. “Boy, it’s a good thing you’re not spending the summer here.” “Yeah, it sure is,” I said. When the summer began, I am sure you can guess what happened. I opened a math book and got confused within a few minutes and then I stared at the wall in front of me for a few hours while alternating between periods of doodling and feeble attempts to study. Then, I tried reading Paradise Lost. I was about two hours into it before I realized I had not progressed much, since I did not understand the 18th century English that the book was written in. It was also incredibly boring to me because it was about the Old Testament. My friends called me during those first few weeks of the summer, wanting to go out, and when I related to them that I was studying they seemed to think I had lost it. I think I had. Notwithstanding, I did the best I could to push forward, but I simply could not bear to memorize words in a foreign language, read 200+ years-old books, and puzzle through a bunch of math problems. I began to get depressed. My mom was dating a Scottish tugboat captain and by 6:00 pm every night they would start having a party. He would sip scotch and rock back and forth on a chair with a big smile on his face while playing tapes of bagpipe players. I’d try to talk to him sometimes and we would get into ridiculous arguments about conspiracy theories he would propose about the government. I think he believed that George Bush was an alien, for example. On the nights he and my mother stayed in, he would invariably tell me around 9:00 pm each evening: “I am so drunk I cannot talk anymore. We will need to continue the discussion tomorrow …” On many nights the Scottish tugboat captain and my mom would go out and have a great time at restaurants and meet friends. I would be left sitting there, looking at page seven of a math book I had been involved with for weeks. I must have watched a lot of television. To this day, I cannot recall much of what happened that summer. The strangest thing I remember from that summer was when a few of my friends showed up at my house one evening–on LSD. I had never really met anyone on LSD, but really did not sense anything all that unusual. Everything seemed pretty normal to me–until early the next morning. At that point, I realized one of the guys had been sitting on the curb all night staring at a blade of grass. “I had the most incredible experience. I watched that blade of grass change all night. It got dew on it and then the dew disappeared,” he told me. Drugs can really mess people up. I helped the guy get up and he walked home talking to himself about the blade of grass as if he had just met Jesus Christ. Throughout the summer, various neighborhood girls would stop by in groups of two or three to see what I was up to. At first they were quite sober when they arrived, and the visit would generally progress in two steps. First, there would be an initial visit while they were sober; then this visit would be followed by another visit, wherein they would bring over groups of messed up friends, all hyped up, as if they were witnessing a laser light show played on a planetarium ceiling with Pink Floyd blasting in the background. “What are you doing?” they would ask. “I’m studying and trying to get ready for eleventh grade,” I would tell them. They would look at me like I was absolutely out of my mind. “That’s great!” they would say. Invariably, a few weeks later the same girls would come back, but with more girls. There would always be a couple more girls with them, whom I did not recognize. It was as if they were saying, “Hey, you need to check this guy out. He’s totally intense and studying for classes he has not even taken yet! Isn’t this the most insane freak show you’ve ever seen!” The spectators would tag along and their eyes would dart several times to the eyes of the girls I knew, as I related how I was studying that summer. I knew they thought they were witnessing something akin to another life form. Visits would typically begin with idle chitchat. The girls’ eyes would all be glassy-eyed from recent marijuana use and they would smell like smoke. “So, tell us about how you are spending the summer studying …” they would always say after a few minutes of talking about nothing. On one occasion, one girl was so close to laughing she would run into the bathroom so she could laugh. Invariably, a short while after I would relate to them how I was spending the summer studying, they would leave. After several weeks of this, I became quite mopish. I was hardly making any progress in my studies, and despite making my best efforts, I could not bring myself to get through any of the textbooks and other reading. It lacked excitement, to say the least. I also told myself that I needed to disassociate myself from my wild friends if I were ever going to get into an excellent college. Other than that, I am not really sure what was going through my mind. Literally nothing happened that summer. To this day, I am still getting over the damage that summer did to me. The thing about this horrible summer is that it is no different than the lives many of us lead; and it is no different than the lives many people lead after they lose a job. The most serious mistake I made that summer was that I stopped moving. I literally did nothing that summer and ended up accomplishing absolutely nothing. It was the worst 12 weeks of my life. When you stop moving and being productive, you can very easily get depressed. That’s when bad things happen. When things stop moving, they die. Every week, I review all sorts of unemployment data to learn about what is going on in the job market. One of the points that is often noted in these statistics is that there are numerous people who simply stop looking for jobs each week. These are people who may have been looking for a job, but then they give up. This is absolutely the worst thing that can happen. I have seen this happen with so many people I know. People simply stop trying to look for a job. Nothing good can come from this. These are people who have stopped moving. You never want to stop moving. The more you move, the more opportunities you will see. That summer was completely worthless to me socially, financially, and academically. I had stopped moving. While it is admirable to try and study for an entire summer, I suppose, I was not able to do this. Instead, I withdrew and became a circus attraction by virtue of my inactivity. The quality of your life is determined by what you focus on and you need to choose things that are interesting to you. You need to direct your focus on tasks that are going to keep you productive. One of the images I never have been able to get out of my mind is when the police are called, or an ambulance is called, to rescue someone that is overweight and trapped inside a house. I see stories like this in USA Today all the time:

Rescue Workers Who Can’t Get Morbidly Obese Woman Out of House Call for Front-End Loader Dozens of paramedics and firefighters failed in their efforts to get a morbidly obese New Jersey woman out of her house and to the hospital. Now they’re waiting for the county to send over some heavy construction equipment. As of 11 p.m. last night, the woman still had not been extricated from the house and rescuers on the scene were calling to county officials to inquire about borrowing a front-end loader. After several hours of work, the rescue workers on the scene concluded that they wouldn’t be able to get the woman out of the house without removing a second-story window. The scene began just before sundown in the 100 block of Huff Avenue, when reports said the woman, believed to weigh between 700 and 800 pounds, fell and injured herself in an upstairs bathroom,” The Trentonian reports.

http://blogs.usatoday.com/ondeadline/2007/04/rescue_workers_.html While such stories as this are extreme, they are examples of people who have stopped moving, and they demonstrate what can happen when you stop moving. When you stop moving, the job market and the world begin to look at you very suspiciously. All further progress is extremely difficult for people who stop moving. In the practice of law (and in many other professions), the absolute worst thing you can do is have a significant unemployment gap on your résumé. This is often interpreted by prospective employers as a lack of commitment to your job and your profession. Also, on another level, I think that other attorneys look at it as if you are out of touch with what is going on. You are no longer current, and are therefore less relevant. If you are perceived as being out of touch, you are much less employable. You need to be perceived as continually in touch. Several years ago, a very talented attorney I know was fired because the company he was working for was involved in corrupt activities and he told them that he was under a fiduciary duty to report this. Despite the fact that he had been earning over $200,000 a year at the time, he was fired. He came to me and told me that for his own psychological health he just needed something to do. He told me he would even work for $20 an hour. I gave him some tasks to do and he was very grateful. He was just trying to look out for his health. It worked for him. Research by the American Psychologist confirms that work “plays a central role in the development, expression, and maintenance of psychological health. [It can] promote connection to the broader social and economic world, enhance well-being, and provide a means for individual satisfaction and accomplishment.” There are far more benefits than just this, for sure. You need to keep moving and should never slow down. Even in a bad market it is important that you stay busy and work. Do not ever idle. When you slow down, bad things can happen. THE LESSON You must maintain a state of constant motion; when you stop moving and being productive, bad things happen to you. Things die when they stop moving, which is why you should never give up under any circumstances. When people stop moving, they make all further progress difficult. Avoid gaps in your employment, as you will be seen as out of touch and less employable; instead, you need to stay continually moving and never slow down.

The Use of Testimonials and Endorsements in Your Job Search

Harrison Barnes — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 05:01:12 +0000

When I was in my final year of high school, I remember that in English class one day the teacher handed me back a paper I had written and it had a B+ on it. While there were a lot of classes that I would have been incredibly happy if I received this grade in, English was not one of them. In fact, with the exception of a horrible play I had written for one English class, I had not received a grade of less than an A- in any English class for years. I decided that I needed to meet with the English teacher and go over this. After all, I figured that something must be seriously wrong. The teacher asked me to meet him for lunch, and so a few days later, I was sitting there with the teacher having lunch. We spoke for some time before the grade came up and when it did I said, “Listen, I have not received a grade this bad on any paper I have ever written in any English class. There has to be some mistake.” I then proceeded to list all of the other teachers I had taken classes from, including this teacher’s boss who was the head of the English department of the school, and rarely if ever gave “As” in any of his classes. Incredibly, the teacher looked at me for a few seconds, grabbed the paper and crossed out the “B+” grade and changed the grade to an “A”. “I know that grade was ‘out of line’ I guess,” the teacher said. “I just wanted to motivate you to try harder. Of course you are also going to get an “A” in the class. Just keep up the good work.” I will literally never forget this episode because it was something I used in college as well. I would take a class with the head of a department and work my tail off. Then I would take classes with the people who worked for the head of the department. If I got a grade less than an “A,” I would meet with them and tell them about how their boss had given me a perfect grade and how well I had done in this class or that class. In addition, the more classes I took, the more ammunition I had. In every single instance where I did this, I ended up getting my grades raised from “B’s” to “A’s”. I did not know anything about psychology at the time. All I knew was that this worked. The principle was very, very simple: Other peoples’ opinions about my academic work mattered more than the opinion of the people who were my teachers at the time. This sounds incredible and hard to believe, but this is something I quickly learned. Teachers seemed to believe that the opinion of others were more important than their own. I can still remember some of the teachers’ faces to this day. When I would bring up the judgment another teacher had about my work who was considered better known, more influential, or more powerful than my own teacher, they would suddenly look uncomfortable. They would make loose statements justifying why they had given me a grade lower than an “A”. It was an incredible thing to witness, and it is something I did several times. Why was this occurring? Well, a paper is a subjective thing. The differences among them relate to things like the logic used in reaching conclusions, writing style, the ability to understand details of what is being written about and more. However, when it comes right down to it the grading of a paper is pretty subjective. There are many obvious differences in the quality of given papers but, for the most part, the grading of papers is subjective. Therefore, the person grading the papers is often in a position where they are questioning reality and are unsure that they are evaluating reality correctly. When this person is provided “cues” that outside authority thinks something is exceptionally good, then they will follow these cues. The idea is that reality is something that is quite subjective and providing testimonials or outside authority for people to understand reality is something that can be of tremendous benefit to helping you convince someone to your way of thinking. In fact, all of us are somewhat confused about the actual state of reality and how to judge various things. We are always looking for the opinions of others, in most cases, to help up make up our mind. We use what other people think and believe to form the basis of our own opinions. We do this because it helps us make sense of the incredible amount of information out there. I would like to reveal to you one of the most incredible tools for success that you have available to you. I have personally witnessed numerous businesses and careers transformed by this tool. This tool can work for you no matter who you are and no matter what you are seeking to do. If you employ this tool, you will have many more interviews than your competitors. You will get more job offers than your competitors. You will also look upon your job and the work you do as an opportunity to constantly build on your expertise and sell-ability. You will alienate fewer people along the way, and you will be more confident in everything that you do in your career. The tool I am talking about is PROOF. About every 1 in 1,500 to 2,000 resumes I review has letters of recommendation attached to them. Some of these resumes also have one or two pages of references attached to them. Others have quotes from various people who have worked with the particular individual. These resumes always stand out to me. They are incredible because they give life to the resume and much, much more depth than they would have without these “letters of recommendation” and other testimonials. Any evaluation that I have of a particular individual is given even further credence by the recommendations of other people. In fact, one of the most helpful things is when there are recommendations by famous people. For example, if someone attaches a recommendation from a Congressman or a Senator, I am generally very impressed. The idea that a senator is writing a recommendation for me to review makes me feel important. We give a tremendous amount of weight to the opinions of others and even more to the opinions of well known, important and famous people. If you do nothing else as the result of reading this article, get people who can be solid and important references for you in your job search. Get testimonials on your resume or attach a page with testimonials describing what a good worker you are, what good work you do and so forth. If you do this and nothing more, your job search will become probably ten times more effective than without this. By this I mean that for every resume you send out, you will be ten times more likely to get an interview than if you did not send the resume. It is that simple. Testimonials and positive references are something that can bring you incredible results. I know what you are thinking. What if you got fired from your last job? What if you do not have any testimonials and solid references? What if you did not get along with all of your coworkers? Then remember you will have to fix this in your next job. You want to build up a long line of references and positive testimonials. Your entire career can be built upon a steady stream of outstanding testimonials. The more testimonials you have, the stronger your applications will be. You want the ability to stand out and get the same jobs that others are not getting, and there is no more powerful way than with testimonials. There is something in our genetic makeup that makes us extremely influenced by testimonials. I have loved watching how various people use testimonials for the longest time, because of an experience I had when I was younger. My father and I used to take trips to New York from Detroit about once a year, because he would need to go there for business and would bring me along when I was around ten years old. While I loved going to New York, the trips were exhausting because we would spend hours walking around. My father loved walking the streets and seeing all the sights and sounds. I will never forget one day when we passed a man who had set up a small table on the sidewalk. He was playing a game where he would shuffle a ball between three different cups and then have people guess which cup it was under when he was done. There were two or three people gathered around him who looked as if they kept winning money. “This is fantastic! I’ve already won $150!” one man said to my father. “And I’ve won $200!” a woman exclaimed to my father. We sat there watching this sidewalk spectacle for a few minutes before someone said to my father: “You ought to try it too!” “Yes, start out with $40!” the man shuffling the ball around said. It made no sense, of course. The man shuffling the ball appeared to be just standing there losing money hand over fist. My father reached for his wallet and put his hand on some $20 bills and was prepared to put them down. Instinctively, however, I knew it did not seem right. Sometimes young people can see things that older people cannot because they have not been so jaded by the world. I grabbed my father by the arm and pulled him away from the game. The man in charge of the game started coming after us. “You have to try this!” he exclaimed. For someone apparently losing so much money he certainly was eager for new players. I am in Las Vegas today and went to see Chris Angel last night. Chris Angel does all sorts of magic tricks. Over the past several years, I have been purchasing various books to learn about the sort of tricks that he does and have learned several of them. The same books that I have read studying many of his tricks have also taught me about the simple science behind what was going on with the man with the ball under the cup on the street corner in New York. The man was using an ingenious tool of “social proof” and testimonials from others out there to convince my father that it really was possible to win. He was giving fake testimonials, in effect. I have seen this sort of act occur on street corners in New York more times than I can count in the several decades since I first saw this. The reason people keep doing this scam over and over again is because it works. We are influenced by testimonials. When you see an infomercial on television they are using testimonials to influence you. Every advertisement you see on television, with limited exceptions, uses testimonials. The advertisements that run in magazines and are successful are almost always using testimonials to make their point. The reason all of these people are using testimonials is due to the fact that they work. The testimonials work because we are influenced by what others believe about something. You have been influenced by testimonials and are probably being influenced by them on a daily basis. I am not just talking about testimonials found in advertisements. I am talking about a friend of yours who tells you they used something and it works exceptionally well. I am talking about someone you know who appears to be enjoying using a certain product or service, which you also decide to use. We are incredibly influenced by testimonials and, like it or not, we cannot help but be. Most of us give others’ opinions about things almost as much weight as our own–if not more. If you do not make use of testimonials, references and so forth in your job search, you are straining to get work and convey your specific virtues in a way that makes no sense. You can have people do the heavy lifting for you by talking up your various virtues. This is not a job you need to do yourself. Let other people talk about how great you are. Others can easily make your case, and this is a heck of a lot more effective than if you try and do this yourself. Allow others to make your case. Another powerful thing you can put into your application materials is information about your performance ratings. For example, “I was the top-rated executive in my division 7 out of 8 quarters.” There are numerous techniques you can use in this regard, but talking about what others have said about you that is positive is enormously helpful. Including comments by supervisors in quotes such as “What Others Have Said About Me” and then listing numerous positive statements that coworkers and supervisors may have made to you formally, or informally, can be incredibly powerful in making your case to a potential employer. From the time I was 18 until I was 27 years old, I always did asphalt work during the summer. A good part of this work involved selling my asphalt service door-to-door in residential neighborhoods. I thought this was the easiest job possible. All I ever needed to do was show up at a door and tell people how I would like to do their driveway, and that I had done work for numerous neighbors of theirs over the years and continued to do work for their neighbors. While it was more involved that this, using “inferred testimonials” of others was something that worked like magic for me. I cannot tell you how many job seekers, salespeople and others I have taught the power of testimonials to. However, this is still something hardly anyone uses in their job search. I simply cannot understand why, but it is what it is. For someone in the sales industry, for example, using testimonials like this might double or triple their income. For someone looking for a job, they might get three or four times as many offers–or even more. The power of these testimonials, references, implied endorsements and so forth is like gold. You should use them every single chance you can possibly get. THE LESSON Proof is itself a tool in your job search, and if you employ it effectively then you will stand ahead of your competition. Reality is subjective, so providing proof in the form of testimonials can do a lot to sway someone to your way of thinking. Testimonials, references, and endorsements are worth their measure in gold, and you should employ them whenever possible.

The Pygmalion Effect and Setting Incredible Expectations for Your Career and Life

Harrison Barnes — Fri, 12 Aug 2011 05:01:30 +0000

In your life, have you ever been around people who set either extremely high or extremely low expectations for you? It is important that you surround yourself with people who believe in you and what you can achieve. It is equally important that you distance yourself from people who do not believe that, for whatever reason, you are not capable of achieving much. In your career and personal life you are going to be around both sets of people: People who believe in you and those who do not. What is so striking is just how much harm the people who do not believe in you can do and how much good the people who believe in you can do. I would like you to think back on your life and the people who have believed in you and what you could accomplish. What did this do for your self esteem? How did this make you feel? I know that when people have believed in me and what I am capable of, it has made all the difference. I notice that they treat me differently and that I am more eager to show them what I am capable of. The opposite is also true. People who have not believed in me have really brought me down. It is very difficult to deal with people who do not believe in you and what you can accomplish. When I was in High School, I was always exceptional at English related classes and then did not do as good in classes that involved math. Eventually, when I got to college, I think I did better in math related classes than when I was in High School. When I was younger I had taken an IQ test of some sort and did very, very well on the verbal part of the exam. I did so well, in fact, that every year my new teachers would make remarks like “according to your test scores you are not living up to your potential” if I got even an A- in an English related sort of class. However, year after year I would get “Cs” and “B-’s” in all of my math-related classes. One day, in front of an English class that I was in, the teacher handed me back a test and it was an “A-”. I was attending a public school in ninth grade called Grosse Pointe South High School and was only attending for the first few months of the school year before moving to Thailand with my family to go to school there. I was not taking school all that seriously and really, really goofing off. Prior to handing out the test the teacher had written the the grades up on a blackboard without peoples’ names so the class could see the distribution of the grades. “You ought to do much better. You’ve got a lot more talent than this,” the teacher said as she handed me back the test. “I got the highest grade in the class!” I told her. “What are you talking about?” “Yeah, but I’ve seen your aptitude scores for English and they are some of the best I’ve ever seen. You ought to get all As and never “A-s”. The reality was that when I took the SATs I ended up doing much better on math than the verbal. However, due to some aptitude test I had taken when I was younger, my teachers seemed to think I was some sort of verbal genius. I may have been lucky when I took this verbal related test when younger–who knows. What I do know is that I heard about it on several occasions from teachers and I would estimate that it ended up in some respects influencing the way I was perceived all throughout middle school and high school. I think it also influenced the way I perceived myself. George Bernard Shaw’s play “Pygmalion” tells the story of Henry Higgens, a professor of phonetics, who makes a bet with his friend Colonel Pickering that he can teach a poor flower girl, Eliza Doolittle, from a lower class background to speak and act like the an upper-class lady. In the process of the training, Higgens and Doolittle become close but she ends up rejecting him and decides to marry Freddy Eyrnsford-Hill, a man who is poor but a gentleman. “Pygmalion” is loosely based upon Greek mythology. In Ovid’s “Metamorphoses,” Pygmalion is a sculptor who falls in love with a statue that he made. He offers the statue presents and eventually prays to Venus (Aphrodite) and she brings the statue to life. Pygmalion marries the statue and they end up having a son. The idea behind the Pygmalion effect is that people will internalize the expectations of their superiors and, in this respect, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The idea is that students with poor expectations internalize their negative labels and those with positive labels succeed. This is something that was extensively studied in what is known as the Rosenthal-Jacobson study (the “Study”). The study is described in the book “Pygmalion in the Classroom: Teacher Expectation and Pupils’ Intellectual Development” (1968; expanded edition 1992). In the Study, teachers at a school were told that the IQ of their students had been measured and one set of their fifth grade class would develop much faster than the other. However, the students were actually randomly selected and there was no truth to what the teachers were being told. The purpose of the test was to support the idea that reality can be influenced by what others expect. The hypothesis of the study was that when someone approached something with a bias, they will create what is essentially a self-fulfilling prophecy as a result. Without going into too many specifics, the Study showed that when teachers expect students will do well and grow intellectually, they do. When teachers do not believe students are intelligent and will not do well they do not. In the Study, at the end of the year the students whom had teachers that were led to believe would do well showed significantly greater intellectual growth than the control group. The degree of difference that was found was significant at the end of the year: First graders in the control group showed a gain of twelve IQ points and students in the experimental group showed a gain of 27.4 points. Overall, in grades first through sixth, the experimental group showed a 12.22 point gain compared to a 8.42 point gain for the control group. The main idea of the Pygmalion effect is that if you believe someone will achieve this or that, then they are more likely to. Through the Pygmalion Effect teachers can create better students just by believing in them. For example, if a teacher that has no previous experience with a student is told that a certain student is brilliant and very intelligent, the new teacher will likely be more supportive, teach the student more challenging material, be more patient with the student and give the student more feedback. Consequently, the student will likely learn more. The student’s true level of intelligence does not matter as much as whether or not the teacher believes the student is bright or not. What does this have to do with your career and your life? First, the lesson is that the beliefs others hold about you often have a lot to do with what is going to end up happening to you. If someone believes that you are capable of something, then you are more likely to end up being able to achieve it. This is just how it works. If people are saying good things about you and holding high expectations for you, then you are likely to really end up much better than people who feel the opposite. Have you ever had a job or been in a relationship where the employer or person you are in the relationship with thought you could do nothing right? I certainly have. It was no fun at all. It did not make me feel good about myself. I was depressed and had very low expectations for what I could achieve. When I look back at my life I can see that some of the worst times I have ever had were when I was in jobs, or in relationships, with people who did not like me or have faith in what I could accomplish. I want to be clear to you that a lot of problems you may have had in your life may not have everything or much at all to do with you. Instead, these problems have a lot to do with the people around you. I know this may not be something which makes you completely accountable for your actions, but this is true. Some of the people who may have “done a number on you” include: Your teachers Your parents Your relatives Your employer Your friends You neighbors Your schools You may have been segmented and put into certain roles due to your social class, who your parents were, what others have falsely said about you, your race, your religion and more. This is true and it is not something that is meant to make you happy. Additionally, other people may have put you in one negative role or another because it makes them feel better about themselves. This is just the way it is. You need to be aware that others may have messed with you, and this is likely affecting your life right now. What do you do in this situation? In most cases, what I personally have done is just continued on with my life and learned to shut out peoples’ negative opinions of me. I continue in the face of adversity and I do not let it bother me. When you prove people wrong who want to have low expectations of you, their response usually is that they do not want to have much to do with you anymore. Who cares? You cannot afford to surround yourself with people who want, for whatever reason, to set limits on what you can achieve. About a year ago we started making various videos for some of our jobs websites. One of the most popular videos we made was what was called a “keyword video”. Essentially these videos are short, 3-4 minute videos that announce that one of our various websites contains a certain type of job. For example, one job might be “a corporate attorney job in Sacramento.” A broadcaster would get up and talk about how one of our websites contained this sort of job and the video would be complete. They would then do some editing to the video and then would be done. For months and months I assumed that no one could possibly film and edit more than 20 of these videos per day. At first, I only had broadcasters doing these videos in Malibu. Within a few months, however, I had built a small studio in Pasadena and decided to send all of the Malibu broadcasters to Pasadena and hire an entirely new group of broadcasters for Malibu. I told the new group of broadcasters that I hired that they were expected to do 40 of these videos per day and that this was easily obtainable. What happened to me was amazing. The broadcasters who believed they could do 20 videos continued doing this amount. The new broadcasters who had no contact with the broadcasters in Pasadena were told they could do 40 videos per day, and they ended up doing 40. The ones who did 40 figured out how to be more efficient with their time and do things in a more productive way. What we believe people are capable of and what we honestly think they can become have powerful effects on the way things turn out. Second, the most important lesson is that if others’ beliefs about us can impact what happens to us, an even more important thing that will impact what happens to us is our beliefs about ourselves. Nothing at all is more important than what we believe about ourselves. In fact, our beliefs about ourselves are even more important than anything that anyone else has to say about us. One of my wife’s relatives goes to Alcoholics Anonymous (“AA”) meetings daily, from what I understand. Growing up I also knew someone quite well who used to go to these meetings all the time, and when I was an asphalt contractor I had an employee I used to drop off at these meetings on a nightly basis after work. I have never been to an AA meeting. However, from what I have witnessed from a distance, these meetings are something that many people are quite religious about. In fact, from what I understand, there are an incredible number of people out there who go to these meetings on a daily basis. The idea behind organizations like AA is that the people are alcoholics, drug addicts, or whatever and need the support of other people. Relapse and getting back on drugs or alcohol is something that they need to avoid at all costs. However, because this is in “their nature” relapses happen and people then are rehabilitated again over time by AA until another relapse happens again. The idea that I have witnessed for how substance abuse is dealt with is that the people who have a substance abuse problem are classified as “alcoholics” or “drug addicts” and so forth and presumably never recover. Before commenting on this, I have also known several diabetics growing up and over the years who cannot eat any form of sugar. Now I am not an expert in diabetes by any stretch of the imagination, but I do realize there are different forms of diabetes–some people cannot eat any sugar and other people need to control their sugar. I have known diabetics who could not eat any sugar, which means they have to avoid various carbohydrates and other foods which metabolize into sugar. What these people do is simply not eat any of this food at all. They stop and they are done. They do not go to support groups to talk about how they can no longer eat sugar and then relapse. They simply stop when the doctor tells them it is prohibited and they are done. When they go out to eat, they do not eat foods containing sugar. When they order something to drink, they do the same thing. No meetings and no relapses. Now, I am not an expert in chemical dependency by any stretch of the imagination, but it does seem to me that there is something wrong with sending people who have a problem with alcohol or whatever to a group that tells them they are alcoholics each day as part of the treatment. Associating with and being labeled as something is only likely to reinforce the person’s belief that they are the negative thing they do not want to be. In order for someone not to be addicted to drugs or alcohol, why not try and change their identity as a person? Until the person sees themselves as someone different they are unlikely to change. This is probably why people who go to AA and all of these sorts of rehabilitation centers are constantly relapsing. It has everything to do with how they see themselves. Until they believe they are someone different, then they probably will never recover at all. They need to believe they are not addicts and believe they are something else. Someone who detests drugs or alcohol, for example. A model of fitness. A model of sobriety. The problem with us allowing ourselves to believe negative things about ourselves, and being the subject of other peoples’ negative beliefs about ourselves, is that we will generally act in a manner consistent with this. A lot of how we act in the world is an effort to be consistent with how we see ourselves. We expect people to be consistent with what we believe they are. We also want to be consistent with how we see ourselves. Most of us define ourselves based on what other people tell us we are like. You need to decide right now how you want to be. Then you need to believe you are that person and capable of being the person you really want to be. Who are you? Who do you want to be? Describe yourself as the person you want to be and then start acting like that person. The biggest challenge for you to succeed in your career and life is not knowing who you really are. You need to be the person you want to be and you need to think big. You need to surround yourself with people who also share that vision for you and who you are. Start behaving and being like the person you want to be right now. Your life is defined by your beliefs and the perception of who you are. You need to decide: Are you your past, or are you who you decide to be now? Are you what others say you are, or who you want to be? What you are going to feel and what you are going to become in the future is not based on what has happened to you in the past and what others have said about you, but on your interpretation of that information. You need to interpret your life going forward in a positive way that empowers you–and not the other way around. THE LESSON You will come across both people who believe in you and those who do not in your life; it is vital that you surround yourself with those who believe in you and what you can achieve. The beliefs of others dictate what ends up happening to you, so it is equally important to avoid those who do not believe in you. Define yourself in terms of the person you want to be, and start acting like that person.

The Best Way to Prepare for a Job Search and Interviews

Harrison Barnes — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 05:01:08 +0000

Several years ago when looking for a position in Los Angeles I interviewed with numerous law firms. In virtually every one of these interviews I ran across an attorney who knew not one, not two, not three—but numerous, numerous attorneys in my current firm. If this is the case in a market the size of Los Angeles (and the market in Los Angeles is huge), I cannot even imagine what it must be like in smaller markets. For example, I am from Detroit. I grew up in a suburb of Detroit. When it came time for me to decide where to work after law school, when I started interviewing with firms in Detroit I knew many of the attorneys before I even arrived at the interviews–they were the parents of people I grew up with. The following are my suggestions for the best way to prepare for a job search and interviews: 1. Know you are always being watched, observed and judged When I was in high school I remember that one of the best looking girls in my school was known to be a prude and someone who would date boys but never let anything all that exciting happen. She was also a star athlete and a student counsel leader and a very respected student. My parents were divorced and lived about an hour apart. I lived with my father. The funny thing is that this same girl also had parents who were divorced and spent a lot of time in one city visiting a parent. The girl had the exact opposite reputation in the city where she did not live full time. Her strategy it seemed, like the strategy of many, was to have two separate personas. She knew that if she behaved one way in her school and around people there she would experience fall out. She also knew that by keeping her “wild side” in another town this would not affect her directly in her own back yard. In life we are always being observed. We are being observed in our communities. We are being observed in our jobs. We are being observed by our peers. We are being observed by our superiors. There are a lot of people out there who understand that. The smart woman discussed above certainly understood that (albeit, in a different context). When I went to look for a job in Detroit, despite the fact that I had not spent time in the city since high school I already knew which firms I would likely get jobs in and which ones I likely would not. This had nothing to do with the prestige of the firm—it had to do with the people inside the firms. I knew that I had been close to certain people growing up and their parents liked me. I also knew that I had not been close with others and had made some enemies along the way. Sure enough, when I started applying for jobs in Detroit I was preceded by my past. The Detroit legal community is small enough that most people know one another. In everything you do in the public arena you are likely being observed, watched and judged. The people you need today will likely have some impact over events that may happen to you tomorrow. It is as simple as that. Like the woman discussed above, you need to do everything you can to maintain a strong public face at all costs. One thing about interviewing is that there will likely almost always be someone where you are interviewing that knows of you. That person will likely have a say in what is happening to you in your new position. Be aware of this and you will be preparing for interviews every second of every day. 2. Remember that the best employees can spot other good employees and you cannot “fake it”—you are always preparing for interviews just by doing a good job with your current work There are many people out there who go to work in jobs and for whatever reason are not challenged. Most often the people who claim they are not challenged are the same people who go out of the way to not challenge themselves. We all know the type of person who does not challenge themselves in the job. These are the sorts of people always looking for shortcuts and other methods to do as little work as possible. I have never understood this sort of person—but they are there. This sort of person is also the same one who is likely to be very defensive when asked about something they do not know but think they should know—“oh, I already know that!” they will say. When you are good at something and really doing your job you have the tendency to get “immersed” in your subject matter. Over time the subject matter and its intricacies and innuendos becomes almost second nature to the good student. You also become more astute and a level or presumed understanding emerges between people who understand the subject matter well. Little tidbits and other bits of understanding emerge. Two people who are very good at something share a similar understanding. When you are interviewing with a truly excellent person, they will also be able to tell if you share this level of understanding. If you are a slacker and not a hard worker, or someone who does not consistently challenge their mind, they will see right through this. This level of understanding is particularly important at the higher levels. You need to always be working hard and doing good work even when you may not want to make long-term plans to be at your current firm. This is essential. 3. You need to go into your job with a sincere and 100% desire to make it work and switch jobs infrequently—if at all Until the 1980s, the majority of workers in America hardly changed jobs—if at all. One of the major changes that happened was when the Japanese started importing cheaper and better cars into the United States. American car makers (a major industry at the time) could no longer afford to be as loyal to their employees and mass firings and layoffs became increasingly commonplace. Furthermore, pensions were fairly rapidly phased out at most companies in favor of 401ks—because employees began to be more “portable” in their jobs. Despite that fact that people can switch jobs at a whim, switch jobs is not always the smartest thing to do. Young people like to feel as if they are in control and more valued by their employers than they value them. In addition, young people are likely to move for a slight bump in salary, a person in the firm they do not like, or some other trivial sort of factor. These are not good reasons to move. In fact, there are few good reasons to leave most employers. The best reason and the only reason is if there is something inside your firm that is so endemic to the firm and so pervasive that unless you leave your career will never go forward. These factors also should be near 100% beyond your control. When you join an employer it is much like getting married. If you show a lot of commitment to your current employer you will be respected if you have to leave due to factors outside of your control. The reason all of this is important is because the person interviewing you wants to trust you. If the person or organization interviewing you does not trust you and believes you may leave for a trivial reason then they will be unlikely to hire you. If your reason for leaving is sound and the next firm who hires you believes you are likely to remain on board in the face of adversity then they are more likely to hire you. People want to have people with staying power in their organizations. No organization is perfect and all organizations go through ups and downs. Conclusions In everything you do—both inside and outside of work—you are always preparing for your job search and interviews. You need to remember that the time to prepare for interviews and a job search is before you ever know you will need to prepare. Being a good employee and a job searcher is something that takes the same amount of time and effort to achieve. THE LESSON Everything you do is a form of preparation for your job interviews, as you are always under some form of scrutiny. The best employees can always spot other good employees, and you cannot “fake it”; merely doing a good job in your work is a form of interview preparation. Always put your all into your work, therefore, even if you do not have long-term plans to remain at your current employment. Switch jobs as infrequently as possible. The time to prepare for a job search is before you even realize that you need to do so.

Your Perceptions Will Control Your Outcome and Life

Harrison Barnes — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 05:14:11 +0000

When I was in middle school, my girlfriend announced to me she was going to be trying out for the cheerleading squad. Our relationship consisted mainly of us riding our bikes to school together each day. Occasionally, I might call her after school. The cheerleading squad in our school cheered for the basketball team. I attended a public high school in middle school and the basketball team was the most important one in the school. The entire gym filled up with students, parents, and teachers every Friday night. Everyone was very enthusiastic about it. “You should try out for the basketball team,” she told me. I had never been good at basketball. In fact, it was my worst game and not something I really enjoyed. However, the more I started hearing about this basketball team and what a big deal it was, the more I realized I needed to try out for it if I had any hope of hanging on to my girlfriend. It was a little bit more complicated than that. I had just left elementary school and come to this new school, and because my girlfriend happened to be popular, I was meeting a bunch of new guys and sitting at the right table in the lunch room. Unfortunately, I realized all of the people she was friends with were also basketball players. I am not sure how it happened, however, I was hanging out with the basketball crowd. We were all very clean-cut and got good grades and sat at lunch looking like good kids. These kids were pretty boring compared to the sorts of kids I would eventually be friends with, but I was tolerating it. Their mothers typically packed their lunches, for example, and they bought milk in the cafeteria. Their sandwiches would be neatly wrapped in wax paper or little plastic sandwich bags and they would have an apple and maybe some chips . My mother had never packed lunch in my life. I would sit there at lunch with a couple of Ho Hos I bought from the vending machine with some change I’d scooped from the bottom of my mother’s purse. I have no idea how I fit in with these kids to this day. I went home and told my mother about this dilemma. I told her I needed a basketball net built immediately over the garage because tryouts were in three weeks. My mother grew up in a town where athletics were very important, and she had a strange history with obscure sports. I think she’d actually been a state champion in ping pong when she was younger. My mother reacted in a way I’ve never seen when I told her I needed a basketball net. For example, once I told her I needed a desk in my room and she told me that was nice but I could study on the floor or on the kitchen table. When a spring came through my mattress that was a hand-me-down from my mother’s mother after she died, my mom told me to flip it over. The basketball net was different. “Oh my! There is no basketball net for you to practice on? We need to fix this right away!” She grabbed her cigarettes, made a drink, and started calling her friends to get recommendations for contractors and so forth. She found one that would come over in the afternoon. I was incredulous because I had never seen my mother react to anything this way. I went to my room to watch re-runs of Three’s Company. An hour or so later she popped her head in my room: “Hurry!! The sporting goods store closes in 30 minutes. Let’s go.” I’ve got some blue collar roots and my mom was very aware of what was important in life. When we got to the store she purchased me the most expensive basketball backboard they had. The next morning I got home from school and there was the most professional contractor my mom had ever hired putting the finishing touches on the basketball backboard. He was going around with a leveler and making sure it was perfectly installed. My mom usually cut corners with contractors but not this guy. I was old enough to know he was really good at what he did. My mom came home from work early to make sure the backboard was installed properly. She even demanded the contractor install some lights so I could practice at night. For the next couple of weeks I must have practiced at least three or four hours a day. I hit shots from every direction I possibly could, I practiced layups and every conceivable type of shot. I was getting really good at making shots and starting to really enjoy basketball. Meanwhile, not only did my girlfriend make the cheerleading squad, she was chosen to be the captain. She rode her bike over to see how I was doing with my practice one Saturday afternoon. “We’ll both be captains!” she told me with approval. When the day of the tryouts for the basketball team finally arrived, I felt I was ready. While I had gotten very good at making shots, the thing I had not prepared for was the fact that none of my shooting abilities mattered if I could not make it to the net. Basketball is as much about footwork as it is about making shots. The most damaging aspect of my tryouts came when I was running defense against a very good player and instead of slapping the ball I slapped his nose by mistake with the palm of my hand. Hard. He fell down to the gym floor with blood pouring out of his nose. After that I realized I probably would not make the team. Kids thought this was funny and word of this quickly got around the halls of the school. I remember walking to class and people jokingly getting out of the way like I was going to clock them in the face. The guy I had hit showed up with a giant piece of tape across his nose the next day. I did not make the team. How we feel about ourselves is all due to what we tell ourselves certain things will mean. I told myself if I did not make the basketball team my girlfriend would no longer like me. I told myself my friends would no longer want to be friends with me if I did not make the basketball team. When you are thinking about your life, you need to ask yourself a few things:

Is how you feel determined by the economy?
Is how you feel determined by how others treat you?
Is how you feel determined by how you think others perceive you?
Is how you feel determined by the things you own?

The truth is how you feel is determined by how you direct your mind. The ability to direct your mind and control your emotional and psychological states is about the most important tool you can possibly have. Very few people have the ability to control their minds and their states. You need to be able to control how you feel about yourself and your emotions. I read the papers every day and most of the human interest stories I read are about people who are not able to control their minds and their states. Lately I have been reading a lot of stories about people who have been committing suicide due to dire economic circumstances. These people are not controlling their states. We also continually hear stories about stars and others who die due to drug overdoses. These people are using drugs to try and control how they feel, and it ends up killing them. When I think about people like Chris Farley and Marilyn Monroe, I am thinking about people who, despite an incredible amount of success, could not control how they felt. One of the best writers of all time, Ernest Hemingway, ended up killing himself. He, too, could not control how he felt. Despite a wonderful world around him he did not care. You really need to control the meaning you give things and the meaning you allow things to have. The meaning you give things will control the quality of your life. When my girlfriend found out I did not make the basketball team, she did not appear to care at all. She was really nonchalant about the whole thing and told me she was sorry about this. Unfortunately, the meaning I gave this was quite severe. I immediately assumed she would no longer like me at all. The next day I told her that I needed to go to school at a different time and did not ride my bike with her to school. At lunch I felt really out of place with my new friends who had all made the basketball team. That was all they talked about at lunch. In class, several of my teachers started talking about the first game. Despite some decent friendships, I started to feel like I did not belong with this athletic crowd because I hadn’t made the team. I felt like I’d failed horribly. I started blowing off my girlfriend more and more. I started sitting at other tables at lunch and associating with different sorts of kids. My girlfriend broke up with me. I did not really like her all that much so I was not too upset. I knew it was coming. I had allowed myself to get really depressed when I did not make the basketball team. The real low came about a week after the breakup when she called me one day after school and told me she’d bought me a Christmas gift when we were dating and still wanted me to have it. She showed up at my house with half the cheerleading squad who all watched me open the board game Yahtzee. “Wow Yahtzee!! I have always wanted this.” What a pathetic sight it must have been seeing me open that board game. I could not hug her. I could just stare at this board game with 6 gorgeous cheerleaders standing in my messy bedroom with my ex-girlfriend looking on smiling. In retrospect, I now realize that not much would have changed with my friends, my relationship, and more if I had not told myself my failure to make the team represented something it did not. Like people who kill themselves because they cannot control their emotions, I, too, could not control my emotions and what I was telling myself. The thought that crossed my mind was the head of the cheerleading squad would only want to be with someone who was also the captain of the basketball team. On yet another level, I thought the basketball players would only want to be friends with someone who was also a basketball player. The more I thought about all this, the less worthy I felt and the more I felt like I needed to fit in somewhere else completely. Within a short time of not making the basketball team I had made new friends who were not athletes and who were more dedicated to getting into trouble than anything. My grades plummeted and were so bad the next year my parents enrolled me in a different school. Most of this happened because of what I told myself not making the basketball team meant. I remember one public high school I attended had a small enclosed courtyard where students were allowed to smoke between classes. These kids wore jean jackets or leather jackets and grew their hair long. These were the bad kids. They also would get stoned out there, and the school must have known about it. These were all kids who at some point probably had dreams, too, but gave up somewhere along the way and looked for a way out of their presumed failure. They started smoking and using drugs and living a life of which they could never be proud. Who knows what sent them over this edge. It could have been a bad grade in an important class, it could have been the divorce of their parents, it could have been a nasty breakup. What I do know is that in the year I attended that school, I witnessed kids who were normal and clean-cut go over to the other side and join this group in the courtyard. People look for things outside themselves to help people control their states and how they feel. Many people feel like they cannot control their emotions and so they start looking for stuff outside of themselves to help them feel good. You pay a hefty price when you are not able to manage your states and how you feel about yourself. There are huge rewards when you know how to manage your states. The rewards for managing your states are happiness and the ability to control your destiny and what happens to you and your life. These rewards are something that can pay huge dividends. The problem most of us have is we tell ourselves something means something it does not.

You may have lost a job and represented to yourself that the reason you lost the job was because you are a bad person. You may have lost the job because the company had no money to pay you.
A relationship may end and you may represent to yourself it is your fault when, in reality, the person who broke up with you is working through some psychological roadmap that existed long before you came along.
You cannot find a job and you represent to yourself it’s because you are not good enough instead of the fact the economy in the area of the country you are in is horrible.
High school kids become “stoners” because they represent to themselves they are losers instead of just normal kids suffering through problems.
I sabotaged my friendships because I represented to myself that not making the basketball team meant I would be rejected by my girlfriend and friends.

Even if something does mean the worst, it does us little good to hold on to this representation. Instead, we should represent the events in our lives to ourselves in a way that empowers us. How could I have reacted differently to not making the basketball team? I could have decided I was cool enough I did not have to play basketball every day to date the captain of the cheerleader squad. I could have told myself despite not being a good basketball player, I could continue to be good friends with the most popular kids in school. All of these interpretations would have empowered me. Instead, I represented the opposite. The meaning you give things is crucial for your career success. Whatever happens to you in your career you need to choose meanings that make you stronger and not weaker. Bad things happen to everyone and the messages we receive from the world are often not positive. The most important thing you can do is choose meanings that are going to allow you to succeed and do even better. This is what you need to be doing with your career and job right now. You need to ensure you interpret things in a way that serves you and does not hurt you. Don’t fail to reach your full potential or mistakenly classify yourself as someone who is not fit to succeed at the level at which you’re capable. This is not what you want for yourself. You need to take charge of your mind to have the career and life you are entitled to and deserve.

Love What You Do

Harrison Barnes — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 07:30:46 +0000

If you wish to get and excel at a job, one of the most important things you can do for yourself and for your employer is to love what you are doing. When I say, “love what you are doing,” I truly mean it. You must be so passionate about what you are doing you can hardly believe you’re getting paid for it. I do not care if you are 20 years old or 65 years old, you need to find and do work you enjoy. People who enjoy their work are the ones who advance and do well in any calling. Love of your work is a source of inspiration. It is something that makes you more creative in your job and gives you energy to work harder. Being playful in your job makes you happier. Making your job a game makes every moment something to grow from and makes your life much more enjoyable. Let me tell you about someone I know quite well who loves his job. He has a library of thousands of books. He has so many books he had special shelves built in his office. He has books all over his basement. He has books crowded beside his bedside. He has DVDs all over his living room. He spends weeks away from his family each year going to seminars, in order to learn more. All of these books, CDs, and DVDs cover topics such as management, getting jobs, finding satisfaction in one’s career, and others relevant to people wanting to improve themselves. He reads these books before he goes to bed at night and when he gets up in the morning. He reads them when he exercises and uses a stair-master instead of a treadmill to exercise, just so he can read during his cardio workout. He even listens to CDs about whatever he is studying when he is driving. He’s angered by the thought of people who go to work just to make money. He knows people who go to work just to make money typically work less, contribute less to their employer and the people they are helping, and they are not interested in long-term relationships with their work or their employers. He knows of countless people who think of work as just work, who are miserable. He speaks with these people every single day. He knows if you truly enjoy your work and get into your work, you will have a life that is incredibly meaningful. This person truly believes what he is doing is the most important thing in the world. If you met this person in a normal situation, you might find him a little boring. But if you ask him about what he does for a living, he will become animated and his face will change. He will sit up and become very excited and talk about what he does for hours if you let him. His enthusiasm for his work is so sincere and profound he smiles whenever he thinks about his job. This person is angry he has to sleep each night because he would rather be doing his work. The person I am speaking about is I. I have found my passion, and my passion is helping you and others get jobs. I love what I do and I want nothing more than profound success for everyone, because I know what everyone is capable of achieving. I was once in a job I detested, and I was unhappy. I got out the second I found something that seemed like fun and appealed to me spiritually. I am getting an enormous amount of happiness and satisfaction out of my job and my life because I’m doing what I want. When I was in high school, I remember sitting in a Denny’s one day at lunch with a group of friends, talking about other people. We must have spoken about 10 other people in depth over the course of 45 minutes. At the end of the conversation, I realized that each person we had spoken about had a special talent. One might have been really good at math, for instance; another person might have been very capable socially; another might have been an outstanding athlete, another an amazing writer, another a very talented saxophone player. I realized each person had a very special gift, or combination of gifts that made him or her unique and special. As I have gone through life, I have come to realize everyone has special and unique abilities. We need to do what we enjoy because this can give us immeasurable and long lasting happiness. This is the most simple career advice I can give. One of the most remarkable people I know is a mathematical genius – and no, I am not talking about myself this time. This person was so good at math, physics, and other disciplines as a kid that he was already taking college calculus classes when he was in middle school. He never liked math-related disciplines, though. He was more interested in journalism. Incredibly, he was never a particularly gifted writer, but writing was something he loved to do. Just because we are good at something does not mean it’s what we like to do. Today, this man is a journalist and he loves his job. He’s good at it, too, and he runs a newsroom in a major city. While he took calculus at the age of 13 at the local community college, he was actually struggling to get by in English and the other classes he enjoyed. Perhaps he could have designed rockets, been a professor at MIT – who knows. But instead he followed his passion and pursued something he loved. Today, when I see pictures of him, he looks content and enriched. His family is healthy, and I can tell deep down they are all happy. When this fellow was working complex math problems many years ago, I do not think he was happy at all. There is something inside of you that lights your fire. What is it? Become passionate about your work and find something that elevates you. What do you read about in your spare time? What part of yourself would you improve to become better at doing what you love? In November of 2008 I attended the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco. I saw the CEO of Yahoo!, Al Gore’s boss at Kleiner Perkins, the CEO of Zappos shoes, and other famous people (I missed Lance Armstrong, unfortunately). When I see people like this, I know they love what they are doing, because they speak with so much passion. You too can, and should, love what you are doing. I know many people who do their jobs because they love them. People who reach great heights in any discipline get there through a love of their job. Love of a job comes from a genuine, heartfelt passion deep inside a person. What motivates you to get out of bed? What would you do if you could do anything with your day? That is exactly where you belong and it is the path you should be following.

One of the Most Significant Lessons I Have Ever Learned About Work

Harrison Barnes — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 08:21:19 +0000

When you become detached mentally from yourself and concentrate on helping other people with their difficulties, you will be able to cope with your own more effectively. Somehow, the act of self-giving is a personal power-releasing factor. -Normal Vincent Peale While I am no expert in the laws of the universe, one thing I’ve consistently noticed is when you stop thinking about yourself in business and concentrate on the needs of others, you begin to do well. I’ve seen this rule repeat itself over and over again, and I believe it is one of the most important keys to success. When I was in high school I started an asphalt business to earn money for college. I ran this business as a part-time job during school for about two months, one of which was during summer vacation. My sole objective was to make money. There are many entertaining stories I could tell, but to make a long story short, after several weeks I lost a great deal of money, did very poor work, and failed. Miserably. I’d done shoddy work, and there were a lot of people who were upset with me. The only thing I thought of when I did those early jobs was the money, and getting done with the day’s work so I could go and have some fun with friends. Doing a good job wasn’t my top priority. I was. Because I absolutely had to make money for college, I then began working as a garbage man for $5 per hour. I worked from 5 a.m. to 4 p.m., Monday through Friday for the remainder of the summer in order to save money for tuition and expenses. It was not a fun job and the people I worked with left a lot to be desired. For example, one day the driver of the garbage truck that I was riding on was pulled over by the police and arrested because he’d assaulted a woman the evening before. I was then relegated to another truck, and the driver of this truck told me one day if I was not careful he would “cut me up.” Even though I’d quit the asphalt business, my phone continued to ring with complaints and demands that I come and repair the poor work I’d done. Towards the end of the summer, I had saved just over $1,000. I had to use that money to buy supplies to fix the jobs I’d botched. I didn’t have to do the repairs, because I’d already been paid, but my sense of integrity won out. I knew I could not enjoy my time at college knowing I’d left shoddy work behind. As I was buying supplies, I noticed an older man asking a hardware store clerk questions about various asphalt products. The clerk did not know the answers. I did, so I approached the man and began talking to him. I was surprised by how much I knew about asphalt. I must have talked to the man for over an hour. Despite the fact I was not a talented asphalt contractor, I was somewhat knowledgeable. As it turned out, this man was the owner of a large apartment complex, and he was planning on having his maintenance man do a large resurfacing project on the property. During our conversation, I told him how much he should be paying for the work, the best materials to buy, and how to ensure his maintenance man did a good job. At the end of the conversation, the man asked me if I would look at his apartment complex to provide him with more tips. Not even thinking about the money (I was actually interested in the process—and helping this man), I went and looked at the complex and called the man with my recommendations. He asked for my phone number in case he had any further questions. When I hung up the phone, I felt good I’d assisted the man with his questions. Throughout my whole exchange with him, I never expected anything in return. A day or two later the phone in my house rang again. I was not in the habit of answering the phone because I was always afraid it would be another complaint. I let my mother get it. She told me it was the man from the hardware store. He wanted me to do the work on the apartment complex for him! I could not believe it. He said something to the effect, “You care about the work. You will look out for me. I want you to do this because I know you will do a better job than anyone else I could find.” To make a long story short, I made over $3,000 on that job, and it was done in just two days. The work turned out perfectly. Over the years, I continued to do a great deal of work for this man, and always delivered top quality. I learned a lesson that summer, one about selflessness and taking pride in your work. Two summers later, at only twenty years old, I was confident about my work. I did more driveway resurfacing than any other contractor in Michigan. I continued in this business throughout college, law school, and even after graduation. I loved it! I owed that success to the realization that, in business, you can never focus on just yourself. While I eventually sold the asphalt business, I never forgot the lessons I learned, and I still share them as career advice. Today, I believe I owe my home and much of my current motivation to the lessons of selflessness and caring about your work, which the man in the hardware store unknowingly taught me.