In Defense of Long-Term Employment With a Single Employer

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

You Need to Have Desire to Achieve Your Goals

In order for you to achieve the things you are capable of, you need to constantly be creating goals for yourself and creating a massive desire deep down to achieve these goals. There is nothing more important than having a desire deep down in you to achieve goals. Every single day you should have both long and short term goals that are fueled by desire. The larger your goals are, the greater your desire needs to be. A wish is far different than a desire. Everybody has wishes, but wishes are meaningless without desire:

• I am sure every single freshman entering a college class each year wishes that s/he would get all “A’s”. However, only a small fraction of these people ever end up with all A’s. The people who get all A’s figure out how to make it happen. They work harder than most of their other classmates. They often take classes they know they will do well in. They push themselves to get the best results they possibly can, and get these sorts of grades because of the incredible effort they put in.
• Every single person wishes that they had all of the money they wanted to fulfill all of their dreams. However, only a small fraction of people ever have all the money they want. The people who do have all the money they want have a massive desire to get these results. This desire enables them to work more than others and to see opportunities where others see none.
• Most people wish that they could make a huge impact on the world by doing something positive. However, only a small fraction of people ever do this. Instead, they have no particular desire to do anything of major significance and just meander through life watching other people in the world who have managed to do great things. They may sit on the sidelines and criticize these people. They may watch others living lives from a distance. The people who are out there achieving great things are the ones who have the most desire.

You will not have the career that your are entitled to claim for yourself if you are only wishing for it. Wishes cannot give you what you are seeking. When you have a wish, however, that is backed by a desire, you will start to achieve what you are looking for because you will create opportunities for yourself and your desire will drive you to excel. In Alice in Wonderland, Alice gets trapped in a wonderland and not knowing how to get out, she [Read more]

Your Beliefs About Yourself are Controlling Your Destiny

When you go down any street in virtually any major urban environment in the world,  you will see people living on the street. I have lived in Europe, Asia, and all over the United States and wherever I have gone, I have seen people living on the street in various parts of these cities. The only place I can honestly say I have not seen this is in rural Ohio, where several members of my family live surrounded by miles of corn fields. Perhaps homeless people live in the corn fields there, I do not know. Who [Read more]

Cheap Is Expensive: A Marine Disaster

One thing I’ve learned in my lifetime is if something seems too good to be true, it probably is. Every day so many of us are glued to televisions and see people becoming rich overnight on game shows. Growing up kids receive a lot of messages that you can become rich and famous without an education. Throughout America, there is a belief you can get something for nothing. One of the most successful men I ever met, a man who owned numerous auto dealerships in Detroit, once told me that “Nothing is free and there are never any deals.” This [Read more]

My Lesson From the Missionaries

Several years ago, I was working at a law firm and virtually from the moment I arrived a woman I’ll call “Linda” used to come into my office for a few hours a day to talk. Her topic? How bad things were at the law firm. She would share one rumor after the other about how many bad things were going on at the law firm. I was treated to information about allegedly corrupt activities, affairs, who did not like who, incredible insights into who was about to be fired, what different people had said to her, and [Read more]

The Importance of Being Well-Liked in Your Job

One of the most persistent problems people in the work world have is their failure to collaborate with, and learn from, their co-workers. Several factors are necessary for success in any job and in advancing your career. Being well liked and collaborating are two of the more important factors. This is at odds with many people’s personalities. Salespeople thrive on competition and being number one. Attorneys, accountants, and engineers, among many others, were once quite competitive at academics and spent a lot of time studying to get an edge over their peers. In some work environments, [Read more]

Don’t Be Persuaded by Others Who Tell You How to Do Your Job Search

Several years ago, I was sitting at my desk when my secretary ran into my office. She told me the career services dean of a major American law school was on the telephone, demanding to speak with me, and that she was extremely angry. I took the call and the dean yelled at me for several minutes. She was angry about a letter I’d sent telling her I wanted to help her students with a service called Legal Authority, which assists law students and attorneys in getting jobs by doing mass mailings of their résumés to employers [Read more]

Watching for Waste in Your Job

Several years ago I was moving from one house to another, and I hired three day laborers from outside of a U-Haul branch, where I had rented a truck. One of the workers was a man with a strong European accent, who seemed very intense. He worked as fast as he could–practically running as he moved things out of my house and into the truck. He also frequently burst out in a paranoid type of shouting at the other two men, talking about how they needed to be more careful or they might scratch or dent a [Read more]

Smash Through Whatever Ceiling You Are Seeing by Concentrating on Your Largest Reward

When I was about 12 years old I went to look at BMWs with a relative of mine. We spent several hours in the dealership. My relative was trying to figure out if there was a way to get a lower lease payment on the car. Negotiating with the people in the dealership took him a very long time. We were in a not-so-great area of Detroit, and I could see my relative was trying to get a good deal, and was feeling like a big shot in the process. For most of us, buying a car is among the most significant events in our lives, and for this relative it was no different. He was someone who had gone to all the right schools, played by the rules, and continually held jobs for a long time. About two hours into the negotiation, a couple of men pulled up in a giant, brand new BMW. The stereo was blasting and the car [Read more]

You Are Not Entitled to Anything

One of the greatest traps people fall into is believing they are entitled to something based on what they have done in the past, or are capable of doing. An even greater problem is believing you are entitled to something for nothing. Incredible as it may seem, most of the people I have seen in the working world throughout the years have an improper sense of entitlement. Rather than helping you, a sense of entitlement holds you back. Anyone who believes he or she is entitled to something – a parent, an employer, a union, a government, [Read more]

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