Why You Must Change and How to Overcome Resistance to Change

Two of the largest impediments to our living better lives, having better careers, and being everything we are capable of being are (1) not changing, and (2) not taking the action necessary to get us to a new place. The more consistent action you take, the more you can grow, and the more you grow, the better you become. Since most people are motivated to improve and have better lives and careers, it stands to reason that to reach their full potential they also need to change, and in order to change they need to take action. [Read more]

Five Gallons of Soup: Are You a Moving-Away-From or a Moving-Toward Sort of Person?

When I was a freshman in college, one of my older fraternity brothers once dumped a giant pail of soup over my head while I was eating dinner. This was during my “pledge” period when I was in the process of joining the fraternity. Each of the kids in my pledge class experienced similar humiliations at one point or another, something that we all endured until we were officially inducted into the fraternity. The older fraternity brothers loved these sorts of pranks and mischief and I am sure it is still going on to this day. [Read more]

Are You Motivated by Information, People, Activities, Things – or Places?

Most people are motivated by either information, people, activities, things, or places. You are probably focused on one of these as well, and this explains why some people interest you, and others you find boring. This also explains why you hit it off with certain types of people and do not hit it off with others, and why you are attracted to certain jobs and activities more than others. The rarest sort of person is the one who is interested primarily in information. For most of his life my grandfather woke up every morning and studied the [Read more]

The Importance of Environment

I have decided that I do not like exercising in the gym in our building in Las Vegas anymore. The facility itself is very nice and new, and it has excellent equipment. It is also very clean and well maintained; in fact, it is one of the nicest gyms I have ever seen. The window views of the stratosphere outside are also pretty cool. However, it is what is going on inside the gym that bothers me. Almost every time I have been to the gym I have seen men running with their shirts off on the [Read more]

Marketing Yourself–Who, What, and How

In your career and life you need to be aware of (1) whom you are marketing yourself to, (2) what you are marketing, and (3) how you are marketing yourself. Each of these three things can make a major difference in the success of your job search. People who understand these three components can

• make tens of millions of dollars in a short time;
• get a job at a company that is not hiring;
• easily find positions in any economic environment.

Market to the Right People. When I first started working as a legal recruiter, it was early 2000 and the market for corporate attorneys in Silicon Valley was out of control. At the time, attorneys were leaving law firms to take jobs inside of Internet companies and were getting stock options in many cases. Some young attorneys made millions of dollars in less than a few years, and because attorneys perceived there was so much opportunity inside of young tech companies, they were “jumping ship,” leaving law firms as fast as they could. In response, law firms started ratcheting up salaries and hiring new corporate attorneys as fast as they could. I used to be a legal recruiter in Los Angeles and for the first six months or so that I was recruiting I did not place a single corporate attorney in Los Angeles. However, during this six-month period I placed probably 20 corporate attorneys in Silicon Valley. I placed corporate attorneys from small towns as well as firms in New Jersey within giant Silicon Valley firms. In many cases these were people who had been out of work for months. If a corporate attorney could make it to the interview and act with a modicum of professionalism in the interview, he or she would get the job. To say the market in Silicon Valley was incredible would be an understatement. At the same time, though, corporate attorneys were not in high demand in Los Angeles. Many of the corporate attorneys I was working with in Los Angeles waited weeks to get interviews, despite having stellar qualifications. The corporate attorneys simply were not having luck tracking down jobs in Los Angeles. It was the same thing in a few other cities around the United States. If you were a corporate attorney working in Los Angeles at the time, you might have become quite discouraged by the market and thought there was something wrong with you. In reality, there was nothing wrong with the corporate attorneys–it was all about the market trends at the time. The way the market works is among the most important things you can understand about your life and particularly your job search. You need to bring your product or service to the right market in order to succeed. If you put yourself in the right market, you will do exceptionally well. I met a guy my age not too long ago who attended the University of Michigan Law School. When he graduated from there, he had a difficult time finding a good job with a law firm in Detroit. He took a low-paying job with a company that was not that prestigious, because it was the only job he could get. Then, I think, he got fired and moved to the Bay Area. He was one of the first people hired at a major technology company and he got all sorts of stock options and made millions of dollars. After that he was one of the first few employees at another technology company and in less than a year, he made more than $50 million, when the company went public. He now spends his time traveling between multiple homes and investing in other technology companies. Do you think any of this would have happened if this person had stayed in Detroit, working his first lousy job? Of course not; he had to go to the right market, one that would make full use of his abilities and talents. It is all about where and to whom you market yourself. This morning I got a spam e-mail about a Russian bride dating site. I went to the site and then [Read more]

Your Career Is More Important to You Than Anyone

I went to high school in an area called Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, and lived with my father there during high school. Up until ninth grade I had lived in a city called Grosse Pointe, Michigan, which was about an hour’s drive away. Since I had grown up in Grosse Pointe, many of my friends still lived there and I spent many of my weekends there visiting. One day I received the most amazing telephone call from a friend of mine in Grosse Pointe. A girl who I (and just about every other guy I knew) had been [Read more]

Pay Attention to the Details

One of the most important things you can do in your career, business, and life is pay attention to details. With very few exceptions, the most successful people I have met always have an extraordinary ability to pay attention to even the smallest details. In fact, the more you examine successful people, the more it becomes clear that they are often obsessed and incredibly knowledgeable about details. In my house, shows like The Hills and so forth are on all the time. (A quick aside: I was at a party a few years ago where I had to [Read more]

Do Not Be Influenced by Others’ Negative Opinions of You

I have kept a journal for years. Today I opened the journal and found a quote that I had written down on July 4, 2002. I had written this quote down because at the time I had just gotten out of a relationship in which the person I was with had decided that I could do absolutely nothing right whatsoever. At that time I was reading a self-help book about recovering from bad relationships, and this particular quote had really hit me with tremendous gusto, because I believed it really described what I had been going through. I was sitting in my backyard [Read more]

Plan for Success–Not Failure

When I was younger, there was a restaurant on Telegraph Road in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, that used to offer people a percentage off the price of their meals equal to a person’s age, on the person’s birthday each year. So, on your 25th birthday, for instance, you would get a 25% discount on your meal. On your 50th birthday, you would get a 50% discount on your meal. Not surprisingly, this particular restaurant was extremely popular with older people on their birthdays. In fact, elderly people came from all over town on their birthdays each year. I [Read more]

Bullies and Your Career

One of the guards was always incredibly bored and was therefore always looking to get into long conversations. My job kept me pretty busy, but one day I decided to sit down and start chatting with him. I was glad I did because it turned out to be one of the most interesting conversations I had ever had. The guard told me he had spent the past 10 years of his career sitting in police cars outside the homes of a few kids in the neighborhood where I grew up. These homes were within a few streets of my house. The retired officer told me that he and various policemen had been doing 24-hour surveillance of a few of these homes for “at least a decade, just watching who came and went.” “A couple of your neighbors were among the most powerful crime bosses in the country,” he told me. “They were being watched all the time.” The neighborhood in which I grew up consisted of quiet urban streets. Since the courthouse I was working in was around 100 miles from there, it was a real coincidence to find myself talking to someone who had spent 10 years sitting in a police car right down the street from my house. I certainly never saw these police cars or the police officer doing stakeouts down the street when I was growing up, and I never heard anything about it from anyone. The people whom the guard mentioned, with whom I had gone to school, all had Italian last names, and their parents had been rumored to be in the mafia. When I asked the retired officer what the parents did to warrant such massive police attention, he said something I will never forget: “Lots of stuff. But like most people who succeed over a long period of time, they were experts in bullying and intimidating people, and getting them to do what they wanted them to do. They are just grown-up bullies who are really mean-spirited.” This former police officer essentially saw the world in terms of bullies and the bullied. In fact, everything about the way the guy saw the world was in terms of people intimidating others, and people being intimidated by others. He was very short, and in listening to him speak I started to feel that he himself had probably been bullied when he was younger, perhaps because of his stature. The guard’s statement really stuck with me because at the time I was working in a courthouse, seeing all sorts of conflicts every day. I was seeing cases of companies being sued and suing people. I was seeing cases of bank robberies and other crimes. However, when I looked at most of the cases I was dealing with, I realized that most of the conflict always had a bully on one side of it. In fact, when it comes right down to it, most conflicts involve bullies in some way. Over the next several months I started looking at every case I worked on in a different light.

• I saw a case of a man who found a bum on the street and talked him into robbing a bank for him by intimidating him.
• I saw a case of a woman hurt in a giant convenience chain, in which the chain was “layering up” and intimidating her by dragging up her past, threatening her with malicious prosecution and questioning her motives.
• I saw a case of a company copying a very small competitor’s product and then making it incredibly difficult for the small company to sue, by making the legal process extraordinarily cumbersome and expensive for them.
• I saw a case of the government bullying someone that it did not like by taking away their property and making things difficult for them.
• I saw the case of a large company taking away the business of a small company by unethical means, and then making it incredibly difficult for the smaller company to fight back.

[Read more]

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