Trust Your Intuition in Your Career and Life
March 5, 2012
When I was around 11 years old, a couple of friends of mine, Charlie and Dave, had found a use for an amazing garden of sculptured bushes that was behind Charlie’s house. I had never understood or appreciated how exciting a garden could really be. Charlie’s dad was a very successful salesman of something or other, and he and his family lived in a giant corner house on a street called Sunningdale, in Grosse Pointe Woods, a nice suburb of Detroit. Charlie was about the richest kid in our elementary school class, and he was also a [Read more]
Insider Trading, Ponzi Schemes, and Making the Most of Your Assets
March 2, 2012
One kind of story that probably will forever be a part of the new is the kind of story concerning various arrests and criminal prosecutions for insider trading, Ponzi schemes, and so forth. When these arrests have occurred, whether we are talking about Ivan Boesky or Martha Stewart or Bernard Madoff, the people who get into tremendous trouble are, somehow, often amongst the most successful people out there. An extremely successful trader apparently worth $1.4 billion or so, Raj Rajaratnam, was arrested recently for insider trading. He allegedly made around $20 million from those dealings. [Read more]
Control Your Environment
March 1, 2012
Have you ever known someone whose life seems to go wrong at every turn? I have known several people like this. Here are some examples of things that have gone wrong for them:
- They sign up for a course in school, forget they are enrolled, and get an F in the class–crushing their chances of getting into a good graduate school.
- They constantly have strange health problems.
- People around them seem to constantly be dying or having accidents for no apparent reason.
- They are robbed and beaten up, even in good neighborhoods.
- The sewer pipes explode in their house and destroy their home a week after they forget to pay their home insurance.
- They get fired and dismissed from jobs after being accused of things they did not even do.
- They touch a microwave oven to heat up some food and the microwave breaks.
- Their cars keep breaking down–even new ones–and they are always late and missing out on this or that.
- They have strange auto accidents, like being directly behind a truck making bottled water deliveries, which suddenly discharges its load onto the freeway, causing them to drive into a ravine.
- They have a couple of drinks and go for a bike ride, then get arrested and thrown in prison for drunk driving.
- The companies they join go out of business.
- They lose an important sporting competition because they have a bizarre accident right before they are to compete.
- They constantly lose purses, keys, and other personal articles.
I could go on and on about various people like this whom I have seen bad things happen to over and over again. However, the most interesting thing about these people is that [Read more]
Surround Yourself with Positive People
February 28, 2012
A few years ago I made friends with a guy I met at a self-improvement seminar. It was his second time attending the seminar; apparently he had gotten incredible results the first time around. According to this man, he had lost fifty pounds, had given up drinking and drugs, was cured of his ADD, stopped working fourteen hours a day every day of the week, started exercising daily, dramatically improved his marriage and family life, and started a successful new career–all after attending the seminar. He credited this massive and profound life turnaround to going to the [Read more]
Get Dissatisfied
February 26, 2012
I recommend spending a Saturday afternoon in an exotic car dealership where they sell sports cars that cost $200,000-plus. Here, you will learn a success secret of the sorts of people who purchase these cars (and those who prey on them). I have never driven a Ferrari, but for educational purposes I believe that Ferrari dealerships impart the lesson the best. A Ferrari serves almost no social utility. They are very fast, but they are not known to be particularly good cars. All they really do is look good and go fast. Saturday around [Read more]
Job Hopping: It Is Always About You
February 21, 2012
Many people’s careers and lives are often held back by one small thing. You might also be holding yourself back in your career, but if you can fix this one small thing, your career and life will change for the better. If you are not able to make this minor yet substantial adjustment, then everything will just continue in the same way as before, and you may never achieve all that you are capable of achieving. I have always believed that it is best to focus mainly on our strengths, not our weaknesses. When [Read more]
Success Requires Ignoring Group Norms
February 19, 2012
When I started legal recruiting, within a few months of starting the business, I met a man who was one of the founders of the dominant legal recruiters association. At one time, he had the largest legal recruiting firm in California. As I spent time getting to know him, he told me that he had been ”kicked out” of the recruiters’ association he started because he had started a job site to help attorneys get jobs as well. Apparently, the recruiters’ association viewed the job site as competitive with legal recruiting—despite the fact that less than 1% of attorneys are even qualified to use a legal recruiter. I found this very odd, but at the time I realized that there were certain rules and dynamics associated with being part of this organization. Several years later, I largely forgot about what had happened to this recruiter and joined the organization myself. Soon thereafter, I started receiving all sorts of correspondence from them stating that I should not make any statements that my job site for attorneys (LawCrossing) was a good way for attorneys to get jobs (because doing so was competitive with recruiters who were also members of the association). To my astonishment, in order to be a member of this organization in good standing, it was a virtual [unwritten] requirement that you only be in the legal recruiting business and have only one opinion about how attorneys should get jobs. You are most certainly surrounded by people with all sorts of opinions regarding what is ”normal” and ”expected” in your life and career:
- What your opinions should be
- What lines of work you should be doing
- How you should dress
- How you should act
- How you should spend your free time
- Who you should associate with
In fact, no matter your profession, my guess is that there are certain norms regarding what is expected of you with respect to items such as [Read more]
Do and Give More Than Is Expected of You
February 10, 2012
When I was 18 years old I spent three months working as a garbage man in Detroit. It was one of the more interesting experiences of my life. I had taken the job out of necessity because I had the good fortune of being cut off from any spending money by my parents. Facing my first year of college in a few months, I wanted to make sure that I had money for my books and other expenses. When I started the work I threw myself into it with a great deal of enthusiasm. I had not [Read more]
You Must Have the Home Team Advantage
February 8, 2012
One of the most interesting things to me is witnessing people when they make a complete reversal in their lives and overnight become incredibly successful, happy, and fulfilled people. Perhaps the reason this is so fascinating is that it happens so rarely. When this does happen, more often than not, the major life change is related to a career, location, mate, or some other important aspect of the person’s life. This is why, I believe, that making good decisions pertaining to these different areas of your life is among the most important determinants of your happiness on earth. [Read more]
Vested Interests: Ask Yourself, “Does This Really Serve Me?”
February 2, 2012
One thing you often find is that there seem to be a great number of people out in the world whose chosen business is to make your life and circumstances, whatever they may be, seem much worse than they are. In fact, in your day-to-day life, you are probably already continually surrounded by various people whose personal interests lie in making you feel bad about yourself and the world in general. Your success and ability to get on will in large part be determined by your ability to sift through all of this negative information coming at you. [Read more]
