Flow, Your Ego and Your Career

Aristotle believed that more than anything, we seek to be happy.  There are some individuals who do their work and continually find happiness in this work, and for whom work takes on a meaning that transcends what most of us experience in work.  These people feel completely involved in the work they are doing and are completely focused.  They do not experience emotional turmoil when they are doing their work. In Mihhaly Czikszentmihalyi’s book “Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience” (1990), he described a state of “flow” where people involved in an activity “forget themselves, the time, their problems.” Flow [Read more]

Government Bailouts, Groups and Your Career

Recently, something quite interesting has been happening in the American economy.  The government has decided to get involved in running various businesses.  These businesses include insurance companies, banks and automotive companies.  This is something that I am almost 100% confident is going to likely be a disaster.  In fact, it is already turning into somewhat of a disaster as far as I am concerned. History has shown time and time again, that when a government tries to operate a business, this ultimately fails.  It never worked in Russia, for example, and China and India have only started [Read more]

Work, Details, Your Surroundings and Your Mind

Yesterday, I was getting a haircut and, before the haircut, the woman in the salon was washing my hair. As is typical in most salons, the woman also gave me a scalp massage for a minute or two while washing my hair.  I was enjoying the scalp massage and told her so: “You guys ought to start offering these scalp massages for an hour in addition to cutting hair. This is great!” I told her. “It is obvious you are feeling my cosmic aura and energy,” she said.  “You can tell that I am [Read more]

Alpha Pygmy Goats, Unreasonably Optimistic Russian Attorneys and Setting High Expectations for Yourself

I used to be a law professor, and I remember in my class there was the nicest kid you can imagine who had immigrated from Russia a few years previously and wanted to be an attorney.  He hardly spoke English and had a difficult time putting sentences together, however, none of this appeared to matter.  He was always the first guy who arrived in class each day and always stayed after to ask questions.  During class, he took notes and wrote furiously.  He sat in the front row and appeared to believe that he was going to be the greatest attorney of all time.  He wore a suit to class each day and other kids were showing up to class in shorts, tee shirts and flip flops.  All of the kids in the class liked him a lot, and they respected him a lot. Each day after class, he would approach me and ask me questions about ridiculously prestigious law firms and whether or not I thought he could get a job with these firms.  I never had the heart to tell him that it would be impossible for him to get a job with most of these law firms due to where he was attending law school and his ability to speak English.  He did not seem to care, however.  For as long as I could take it each day, he would sit there and question me about various law firms and then, from time to time, also ask me questions about the material. When the semester was over, I continued to hear from [Read more]

Nicholas Cage and Personal Leadership

Yesterday I saw the most interesting story about Nicholas Cage. Apparently, he just had a pyramid commissioned and delivered to a Louisiana cemetery for his body to be placed in when he dies. The story also talked about how Cage had recently dyed his hair blonde to ”get in touch with his Celtic roots.” I have been hearing interesting stories about Cage for a long time. A few years ago I was walking on the beach and one of my neighbors was bragging to me that he had recently loaned Cage $1,000,000 against one of his properties and [Read more]

The Use of Testimonials and Endorsements in Your Job Search

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 [Read more]

Do Not Allow the Past to Limit Your Opportunities Today

My one-year old daughter calls a coffee cup “hot” and avoids coffee cups lest she gets burned.  Until she learns that the coffee cup can also contain coffee, milk, and other foods that will not harm her, she is likely to avoid coffee cups for some time.  She must have been burned a little by touching a coffee cup at one point and learned to stay away from coffee cups.  Until she is able to see the coffee cup for what it is (a cup), and not her past experience (getting burned), she will not be able to experience everything positive that can [Read more]

Police Chases, Foreclosures and Access to Information

About three years ago my mother’s boyfriend Dave started calling me, threatening to come out to California from Detroit and kill me unless I made my mother sign her house over to him. My mother had moved away from Michigan to be close to my sister in Rochester, New York a few months previously and had left her house vacant back in Michigan. From what I understood at the time, she had stopped speaking with Dave—but I really could not be sure. The messages on my answering machine would ramble on sometimes for several minutes. Dave would call [Read more]

How to Manage Crisis

One of the scariest things for any of us is when we are in crisis.  A crisis can be defined a lot of ways.  It can be:

• the loss of a job.
• a divorce.
• a traumatic injury.
• a death.
• the alienation of a loved one due to a fight or disagreement.
• a severe illness.
• or even your own impending death.

Crisis is absolutely one of the most challenging things that we face, and when many people are in crisis they simply cannot cope and therefore fall apart. The key to managing any crisis is to look towards the future while you’re inside the crisis.  You [Read more]

You Need to Be Seen as an Authority

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

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