Remain Calm

For a portion of one summer when I was younger, I had a valet job at the Grosse Pointe Yacht Club outside of Detroit, Michigan. I worked during the lunch hour and spent most of my time sitting in a small air conditioned shed in a corner of the parking lot waiting for cars to pull up. When a car would pull up, I would fling open the door to the shed and run over to the car, hand the person a ticket, and park the car.

One day, I was sitting in my little shed and a giant Cadillac pulled up and a man stepped on to the curb. As I was exiting my shed, he looked at me and shouted:

“Hey Boy … PARK THIS!”

The man then proceeded to throw his keys in the grass.

This amazed me. I used to lift weights and played football in high school. From the way I’d taught myself to think, this sort of treatment was not to be tolerated.

“Are you kidding?!” I shouted at the man. “Are you trying to start something with me?! Because if you are, I’m ready!” I strolled slowly up to the car which was about 20 yards away. Apparently terrified, the man went sprinting inside of the club. A few moments later the manager of the club emerged and fired me. The manager was so upset about the whole thing he actually called my mother and told her about the incident.

I lost my job because I lost my cool.

When you think about your life and your career, what would be different if you had, instead, developed the ability to remain calm? Most people are agitated–moving in many different directions and unable to remain calm. When you remain calm many things end up changing in your life.

Remaining calm is one of the most important traits we can have. Being calm is not just about being relaxed and not yelling. Being calm is about being focused enough to absorb the world around you and make deliberate and carefully considered decisions before acting. When you are calm, you do not lose jobs like I did, and you are more likely to keep friends and to advance rapidly in whatever environment you are in. People will trust you more. People will look to you to fill leadership roles. When we are calm, we are far more powerful than when we choose, instead, to react from our gut with anger, fear, or other nonproductive emotions. Calmness is a virtue and one of the strongest you can have. The calmer you are, the more you can control and understand the world around you. The more you understand the world around you, the better you can be at everything you do. This is the nature and importance of being calm.

Several years ago, I took a multi-day course at Disneyland about leadership. While I could write for several days about what the course covered, I remember when the instructors summed up the entire meaning of the course after countless examples and numerous exercises they said it with few words: “Leadership is about being calm.”

The more I thought about this example, the more I realized the most important thing we can do in business, our careers and in leadership, is to be calm. The more we relax our minds and our bodies, the more positioned we are to make the correct decisions in our careers. I once read a book about former president Kennedy. Apparently, Kennedy liked to use stimulants and was often up for days during his periods of stimulant use. While it is not widely talked about, there was some fear among members of his cabinet that he might have potentially created a disaster during the Cuban Missile Crisis due to his use of stimulants and inability to remain calm. Some conspiracy theorists have even speculated he was assassinated by the CIA because they felt his inability to control his emotions could have led to a nuclear Armageddon. Despite an illustrious presidency in many respects, Kennedy’s inability to consistently be calm was considered by many a massive weakness.

Several years ago, a high school friend of mine named Jeff was coming to Los Angeles from the Midwest to visit me and a friend of mine, John. We decided we would rent a giant limousine and take Jeff around Los Angeles to show him the sites. The limousine was so large it had a Jacuzzi in its trunk! I had honestly never seen anything like it. Because it was so massive, it blocked two driveways when it was parked in front of my house. About 10 minutes after the limousine arrived we called our friend to see where he was.

He told John and I he would not be able to make it because he was having dinner with his girlfriend and her parents, who’d shown up at the last minute. At that moment, I got extremely angry and felt hurt. Here I was with this giant limousine in front of my house with a bubbling jacuzzi in the trunk I’d already paid for. I felt alone and stupid. I exchanged some harsh words with Jeff and decided I would never speak with him again.

That was several years ago.

Do I regret it? Yes. I overreacted. In contrast, John got mad too, but he made up with Jeff just a few days later. To this day, I have not spoken with Jeff.

It’s easy for me to look back now and realize how wrong I was. Jeff was rude, but if I had looked at the totality of the situation I would have realized getting angry was a stupid decision. Instead, I should have remained calm and simply filed this episode away and recognize that I could not always trust him when we made plans. I could have also been empathetic and understanding of his need to entertain his girlfriend’s parents. Instead, I chose to get mad.

I’ve seen careers abruptly crash because of people failing to be calm. People react inappropriately to a perceived slight and fire off a crazy and savage email to someone. Someone does not think something through before acting. People whose careers soar to incredible heights are most often the ones who have the ability to remain calm. Being calm is more than just consistently being relaxed. Being calm is having the ability to react in a level-headed way to circumstances around you and face the world without getting flustered and keep your confidence strong.

Being calm is a sign of security and self confidence.

When you are calm, you are often more in control than the people around you. Many people fly off the handle at work, in public and when they feel they have been wronged. Generally, when someone flies off the handle, someone else is receiving their anger and negative emotion. The person who is on the receiving end typically has a couple of potential reactions. The first is to lash out and get angry. This is the most common reaction. The least common reaction is when the person on the receiving end remains calm. The person who remains calm puts themselves at a profound advantage. Usually what ends up happening is the person who has reacted angrily, or irrationally, comes to their senses and realizes they acted and responded in the wrong way. They come back to the person they have reacted to and seek apologies or attempt to make up. At that point, a subtle power shift has occurred and the person who was able to remain calm has assumed control. When you remain calm, you almost always end up in the role of the leader—regardless of the situation.

When we think of generals, presidents, CEOs and other leaders, we rarely think of them as people who fly off the handle. Instead, we think of them as people who are constantly able to remain calm no matter what. We want leaders who have the ability to stay focused and calm despite the turmoil around them. We do not want people who fly off the handle.

We think more of people who have the ability to remain calm. We respect those around us who stay calm. Being calm is so respected we have a word for it in the English language – “cool”. We call people with the ability to remain calm “cool”. We elevate people in society we believe are cool. Fonzi from the show “Happy Days” was considered “cool”. LL Cool J is considered “cool”. Action heroes are always “cool” when others around them appear to be acting nuts. We respect people in our society who are able to maintain their composure and stay cool.

In your job, nothing is more important than being cool. One of the best jobs I ever had growing up was working for Domino’s Pizza as a driver. Back in the 1980s, I was making $150+ some days delivering pizza. The tips were really good. Unfortunately, I only worked there for one summer due to an incident delivering pizza in a bad neighborhood. I did not get fired from this job. However, when I tried to get a job there the next summer they told me they did not have any openings (which I am almost certain was not true). I’m pretty sure they told me this because of the incident I am about to relate.

I dropped off a pizza in a bad neighborhood and the person’s change was only a few cents. When the person asked me for change I said: “Are you kidding?” There was only a few pennies at issue and in addition to not giving me a tip the person was asking for a few cents. I was deeply offended.

After I fished the few cents out of my pocket, the guy said to me: “If you had the change ready, I might have let you keep it. Now get the f**k off my porch.”

I was absolutely incredulous. I got in my car and started driving away, but then my anger got the better of me. I stopped my car and backed up. I got out of the car and screamed “F**k you!” at the top of my lungs at the house. The guy came out of his house and screamed “F**k you too, bitch!” This bizarre episode lasted a minute or two as we stood there screaming at each other. Eventually I peeled out in my car and drove away.

When I got back to the pizza parlor, my manager said, “Calm down. Calm down.” The manager looked like Bill Murray and he said something I will never forget to this day: “I know that guy too. He is a total a**hole, but you have to calm down. It is not professional to stand on the street screaming at a customer when you have a Domino’s pizza sign on the top of your car. The guy’s neighbors called me about you!”

The calmer you are, the more opportunities will present themselves and the fewer opportunities you will end up losing in your life. There is no sense losing your calm. This is simply not something you should do. You need to remain calm at all times.

Remaining calm will not only keep you employed, it can also help you get a job. When you are calm, you make better decisions and understand more of the world around you and what is going on. You can see opportunities where others cannot. People who are effective networkers are often very calm because they are very adept at being able to listen to others and understand where others are coming from.

People who are not calm are most often more interested in making themselves heard than understanding others. Steven Covey, the author of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, is fond of saying “Seek to understand before being understood.” This is excellent advice and something I have heard many of the most successful people repeat time and time again. In sales, for example, this is something I have seen transform careers. People who have the ability to remain calm are much more likely to have cultivated the ability to understand. Understanding people and situations requires that you remain calm.

When we react to things in the world, or instantly make decisions, we are most often doing so due to our conditioning and the things we have been led to believe. We react instinctively instead of thinking things through. The ability to react instinctively often serves us well. However, when we are able to remain calm we are often far more effective. One of the most effective things we can do is to delay our decisions and not make decisions quickly. Making rapid-fire decisions is something that can do us a great deal of harm. When you are calm you are able to make decisions in a slower and more deliberate way that will serve you very well. If you delay making a decision you can always make another decision later. [Read more]

Finish What You Start

If you drive less than an hour outside of any major city in America, you will very quickly begin to see a different world. Typically, in the best neighborhoods and areas the lawns are well maintained and there is not much to see beyond trees, flowers, and shrubs. When you start getting into poorer neighborhoods outside of major cities, however, you begin to see things like automobiles on blocks rusting in front yards and the landscape looks a lot different. I’ve ridden through these neighborhoods with wealthy people from larger cities. At least once I heard someone say something like, “Why don’t they clean up that mess?”

I know exactly why they do not clean up that mess because I have some family members who live in the country who also collect vehicles on their front lawns, and behind their homes. They do not clean the mess up because they are in the middle of trying to restore and fix those various vehicles. There is a story to every car and truck that is in a state of disrepair. One needs a new transmission and will be fixed soon. Another needs some complicated engine work. Most of the cars were purchased on a whim and for cheap when they were already broken. Everyone believes they will one day fix the car or truck and when they do they are going to make some good money.

It is almost as if the unfinished car or truck gives the person who owns it value. It makes them feel as if they are important because they have some untapped wealth or power of which they’ve not taken advantage. Isn’t this how many of us are in our own lives? We have untapped power of which we’ve not taken advantage, and we’ve started things we have not completed.

One evening I was at a mall and I saw a poster advertising surgery for women to lose weight. I saw the most stunning before and after pictures. A woman was at least 350 pounds and so large you could hardly make out her face. After the surgery, she had lost about 200 pounds. Her transformation after losing the weight was amazing. She was very attractive, and she looked much happier. What was so striking to me was the difference in potential the two pictures represented. One woman looked like a supermodel and the other could not fit into clothing you would find in an average mall. Why would someone want to pass up the incredible potential they have in their life? This is only one example of potential.

People start diets and never finish.

Others tell themselves they will start exercising and never follow through.

Others start school and never finish.

Others plan to start a business and never follow through.

Others tell themselves they will start saving and never follow through.

Others start a novel and never follow through.

Others start taking the path to a better life in one of a million ways and never follow through.

In fact, I think following through and finishing what you start is one of the most important things you can do. Why don’t more people follow through? What is it about following through that scares so many people? Why don’t more of us finish what we start?

I know so many people with so much potential who could be incredible artists, lawyers, programmers, businesspeople, and more who never complete what they start. I know people who are chronically unemployed because they never finish what they start. I can think of whole groups of people I know of who are brilliant and talented but have lives of complete mediocrity because they never finish what they start.

Before you read any further, I want to make sure you are aware of one thing: the only thing separating the people with the most important and meaningful lives from those who have average lives or fail is that the latter fail to finish what they start.

When I was practicing law I remember being at a cocktail party with numerous partners and associates from the law firm where I worked. One of the associates was joking with the partner that the law firm had only made two partners in the entire 14 years it had been in Los Angeles. The partner looked at the associate and said, “That’s because you guys get too scared you will not make partner and always leave before we have a chance to nominate and vote on you.”

I thought that was an interesting statement because, regardless of the truth of it, the partner was saying that no one who worked there ever followed through by staying on the job. They got too scared and left. Perhaps those associates went somewhere they were positive they would make partner. The thought of all of those careers that were stalled by not following through was an interesting one to me. Maybe those associates like to say to themselves, “I would have made partner if I stayed around, but I did not like it so I left.” I do not know. However, what I do know is this situation is not much different from those people whose personal worth is tied to the fact that if they fixed up the cars on their front lawns they would have a lot of money. If only.

Once you go inside the homes with cars rusting in front of them on blocks you will see additional projects that are half finished. You will see a bathroom that is being remodeled, and that has been for a long time. For years the family may have been taking a shower in a bathroom where there is no tile on the floor. This epidemic is not just confined to rural areas, it also exists in cities. People do not collect cars on their front lawns in cities because the police and authorities in these areas do not allow it. Go inside many homes in cities and suburbs and you will also see a huge collection of unfinished projects.

I want to be clear about something with these unfinished projects: it is not just about the money. You can tile the average bathroom with inexpensive tile for less than $30. You can rebuild a transmission quite inexpensively if you know what you are doing. It just takes time.

My mother is someone who was always attracted to dreamers and she dated a lot of them while I was growing up. These were men who always told her tomorrow was going to be far different from today. They were on the verge of getting rich, they were going to build a house on the water, something was going to change and change soon. My mother had relatives all over Michigan who did things like drive trucks and work in factories in the country, but she had a small house in a nice suburb. The whole outlook of never finishing what you started came right into our house with these men who were dreamers. Most of them were contractors or were involved in contracting, and they would start one project after another and keep the projects going for years. One project might involve replacing the kitchen floor. A few hours would be dedicated to ripping up the floor on a Sunday and a few years would pass before a new floor was installed. For years we would get splinters and eat in a kitchen with no floor.

In the interim, they’d start numerous other projects. None of these would be completed either.

What was the meaning of all of these uncompleted projects? Why did so many things consistently not get done? What was happening?

The answers to these questions are complicated. However, I believe a large part of it is a desire not to be held accountable for the result. If the kitchen remodel is completed, we will have to call the result our kitchen. If all of the cars are fixed, we will have to explain why we do not have any money. If we finish college, we will have to be accountable for getting a high-paying job.

How many people have you met who have started a novel and never finished it? Almost everyone knows someone like this. Have they not finished the novel because they do not know how to write? Have they really had writers block for the past eight years? The legions of people with unfinished novels are legendary. I think so many of these novels go unfinished because if they did finish them, the person will have to come to terms with the fact they are not the next great novelist, or they are not as important as they would like to believe they are deep down.

Many of us want to represent ourselves as something other than what we are. Finishing what we start forces us to confront who we really are. So we are afraid to finish what we start. This brings me to you and your job. Do you finish what you start? I have supervised and worked with hundreds of people over my career, and the number one characteristic I have seen in the very best people is they finish what they start.

Finishing what you start is the most important thing you can do in any job. The people you are working for need to know whatever work you are given you will finish. Every week for the past several years I have had a series of teleconferences with various individual employees in my company. The purpose of these teleconferences is to solicit various ideas about our businesses, to go over projects that have been assigned, and to assign new projects. They are the most effective method I know for making our company strong, ensuring the continual promotion of the good people, and pressuring the average people in the company to “shape up or ship out.” These teleconferences are simple and there is really nothing to them but ensuring that people finish what they start. I believe that cycles of action and finishing what we start are the most important things that can happen in any company.

Several years ago, before I conducted these weekly teleconferences, I found most of the projects I assigned never ended up getting completed by certain people. It was a constant source of anger for me when things did not get completed and, after a while, I would simply give up on many people.

The typical teleconference goes like this: we start going over the assignments for the current week and explaining them. Then we go over the assignments for the previous weeks and the person with the assignments provides an update. The spreadsheet may look like this:

Assignment Weeks

Write a letter to all previous EC clients re: sale 7
Call Franchise Tax Board re: new tax ID number 7

Certain employees never have any task go more than one or two weeks, and others have their assignments open for months at a time. The people who complete tasks are the people who remain at the company and work there year after year. In the past I have hired people from other great companies, great schools, and people with a lot of “flash” who could never complete an assignment.

I have also hired others who did not look as good on paper but who always finished an assignment. Our company has no venture capital or borrowed money and must support itself with real revenues. In our company, the only thing that really matters is whether or not projects are completed. If a project is not completed, our company does not make any money. I believe the downfall of many companies begins when there are more people not finishing tasks than finishing them. There are people who are in the habit of not finishing what they start. The same employees who do not finish what they start are often the people who have the most doctors’ appointments and waste the most time during the day. They spend their time in a nonproductive zone. I do not judge people who do this because I am also guilty to a certain extent of not always finishing what I start. The fact of the matter is, however, the way to do the absolute best in your job and life is to make sure you always finish what you start no matter what.

When you do not finish what you start at work you are sending the message the task and the company are not important enough to you. In the business world, if you do enough of this people will stop taking you seriously. People do not have confidence in people who do not finish what they start. Companies do not promote people who do not finish what they start.

Everyone, regardless of who they are, must be accountable for finishing what they start. When Hillary Clinton was running for president, one of the images I could not stop thinking about was when she pledged to fix the healthcare program in the United States when her husband had been president years previously. After a great deal of effort, she failed completely. I saw her at a news conference and she said something to the effect that “I do not know why anyone even tries. You cannot get anything done with these people in Washington.”

To me this was a striking statement. It was striking because she had essentially “thrown in the towel” and given up. I wanted to see her succeed. After this sort of attitude, I felt it was very unlikely she could have really thrived in Washington. For example, when Al Gore lost the run for president he kept fighting for his belief in fixing the environment – even without public office. I wonder what Hillary Clinton would do with healthcare reform if she were not in office. My feeling is not a lot.

Finishing what you start says a lot about your character and leaves a huge and lasting impression on everyone around you. It is extremely important you are always finishing what you start. The results you will have in the world and the impact you will make will be in direct proportion to your ability to finish. Everyone can finish what they start if they really put their minds to it.

The rewards for completing what you start are huge. When you complete what you start, you learn about your capabilties. You learn lessons you can use to take the next step and grow.

I believe most people will do a lot more to avoid pain than they will to experience pleasure. For many people, completing a task may represent the potential for being criticized or judged for something, which is painful. People want to avoid pain. Success, however, could be compared to creating constant failure and forcing yourself to grow in response. If you finish a task and do not believe what you have done is good enough, then you will learn lessons that will drive you forward to do as good as possible the next time. The important thing is that you finished. Growth only happens when you are completing tasks.

Create Rules that Make You Feel Successful, Not Unsuccessful

I attended a private high school named Cranbrook-Kingswood. There was a lot of competition to get accepted. A couple of years before I started there, the founder of Little Caesar’s Pizza, Mike Ilitch, made a large donation to the school with instructions to build an indoor hockey rink. Mike loved hockey, and his son had also been very good at the sport. I believe he may have also “required” the school, as part of his gift, to have an exceptional hockey team.

The school went out and recruited the best hockey players from all over the United States and Canada and gave them free tuition, room and board and, most of all, admission to the high school. In order to ensure these same kids could graduate, the school created special classes for some of them in mathematics and other disciplines they could pass. I want to be clear that several of the hockey players were extremely intelligent and did not need these classes. However, many of them had come from backgrounds where athletics, and not academics, had always been stressed.

I first found out about this special program when I became friends with a kid from my neighborhood who played hockey for my school. He had been a star hockey player in his public high school his first year and was living a dream of sorts. He loved hockey and was doing fine in school, and the girls loved him. One day after practice, a scout from my high school approached him and told him if he wanted to attend private school and play hockey there he could do so and tuiton would be free. He accepted. My friend and his family were incredulous because they had known other kids who were far more intelligent who had applied and gone through a rigorous admissions process and were not able to get into the school.

My friend’s instant admission to the school was incredible to me because it took months for me to get into the school. I had to take tests, come in for interviews – even my parents were interviewed.

The guy I was friends with was kicked out of the school for bad grades after one year. He was a big handsome guy who the girls in his school really liked a lot. After getting kicked out he really struggled, however. His self esteem dropped and he migrated into aggressive partying. He also had several auto accidents while drunk. I think he even stopped playing hockey.

Before going to the school he’d been a star hockey player and was very happy with his life. After going to the school, he became very unhappy. The more I got to know him, the more I realized he was unhappy because he was not on the path to attend a prestigious college, was not smart enough to pass the classes in a private school, and, despite being a good hockey player and getting a scholarship to the school, he had failed. It was as if being in a good environment had taught him how to be unhappy with his life and who he was.

At Cranbrook-Kingswood he learned a bunch of rules about what success meant – ones completely different from the rules he’d known before attending the school. Rules like:

1. It is important to do well in school; and,
2. You are only successful if you are on the path to going to an important college.

In the environment from which he’d come, none of this mattered. All of a sudden, in this new environment, all of it mattered, and he felt bad about himself and self-destructed. Imagine having the rug pulled out from under you like that. It must have felt horrible. He went from all to nearly nothing just based on the rules he had learned.

Over the years I met many of these hockey players, and I came to believe that, for many of them, going to this school did not serve them well. While they could have been extremely happy in most environments, going to a school where academics and getting into college were stressed so much set them up for feeling badly about themselves. They learned that to be successful, you need to do well in school and not in hockey. I am not sure how well these rules served them. I think they learned to think about themselves in a way that was not empowering.

As the head of a legal recruiting firm, I used to spend several hours a day reviewing resumes of attorneys who were applying for jobs for which our firm was recruiting. In addition, I would take phone call after phone call from these same attorneys about various jobs and their attempts to get a position. Sometimes these attorneys would show up in our office and want to talk about getting a job.

The hopes and dreams of attorneys are something I have come to understand quite well. No matter if the attorney is in law school, has been practicing several years, or is a partner in a large law firm, there are certain “rules” most attorneys measure themselves by that tell them if they are successful or not. These rules most often involve:

1. The size of the firm they are working at.
2. How prestigious this firm is considered by the legal community.
3. How much money their firm is paying relative to other firms.
4. The quality of law schools and pedigrees the attorneys have at the firm for which they’re working.
5. After several years, whether or not they are a partner in a prestigious law firm.
6. When they are a partner in a law firm, whether or not they have a lot of business.

This is, of course, not the rule for every attorney but it is for most of them. For the most part, attorneys judge how successful they are based on how they stack up under this criterion.

One of the hardest things about going to a top law school is the competition inside these schools is quite intense for the top jobs. Every year students in these schools compete for the jobs paying the most at the largest law firms. At the top law schools a higher percentage of the students get the jobs with the highest paid and best firms than at the lower ranked law schools.

While I do not know the exact numbers, I believe over 85% of the law students graduating each year will not get the jobs with large law firms that pay top market salaries. Instead, they get jobs (if they get one) in smaller law firms that pay 50% or less than what the jobs pay in the largest, and most prestigious law firms. In the smaller law firms the work is most often for smaller and less prestigious companies, as well. Nevertheless, the attorneys inside these law firms are doing work that is essentially no different than in the largest law firms.

I have been in the legal recruiting industry for a long time. What I have noticed is the attorneys from the best law schools are always governing their lives and their career with the following rule: “I will not be successful unless I am practicing law with a large law firm.” In addition, attorneys with small law firms who went to bad law schools spend a lot of effort trying to get into the larger law firms. They, too, do not feel successful unless they are practicing law with a large law firm. Somewhere along the line they picked up the “rule” that they will not be successful until they are working in a large law firm.

Most legal recruiters around the United States spend their time trying to help attorneys realize the dream of working in a large law firm or remaining employed in a large law firm environment. Attorneys panic when they feel they may not be able to remain employed in a large law firm. Because the “rules” most attorneys have about their careers and lives require them to be in a large law firm, many of them are extremely unhappy when they are not doing so. They literally use this rule to set themselves up for lifelong unhappiness.

It’s crazy. Instead of being happy practicing law, a lot of attorneys spend their career feeling like they have failed. You need to have rules for your life and career that empower you.

I try to spend my time around people who are the happiest. What I have noticed is the people who are the happiest have the fewest rules about the way things should be, and who they should be. If you ask yourself what it takes to be successful you may say:

1. I need this kind of car.
2. I want this sort of job.
3. I want this sort of house.
4. I want this sort of mate (or, for many people, I want my mate to be a certain way).

These are the rules many people require of themselves for being happy and feeling successful.

Other people may just tell themselves they will be successful and happy as long as they are alive.

This is the most amazing thing. Who do you think is happier? The person who is happiest is the person with the easiest rules to meet and the least stringent rules.

You determine your level of happiness and success based on the rules you set for yourself. If you set rules which are difficult to meet and you will never meet, you will experience lots of pain. If you set rules for yourself rules that are easy to meet you will experience lots of fulfillment. It is up to you what you do with your rules. You are in complete control of how you feel about yourself and whether or not you believe you are successful.

My definition of success requires that I experience very little pain and tons of pleasure. I set rules which empower me rather than hurt me. I set high standards for myself, but require very few rules in order to be happy. People who feel the most successful typically have the fewest rules.

We are constantly asking ourselves the question “What does this mean?” and do this on a daily basis. If we see someone smile at us, we assume they are nice and friendly. If we see someone grimace at us, we assume they do not like us. We have rules for our environments and how to interpret the things happening all around us. The rules we formulate about the world and our surroundings have a giant impact on how we feel. In the case of the hockey player, he learned rules that suddenly cast a shadow over what was a very happy and successful life. Have you allowed rules to do this to you?

What I want for you is to use rules to make yourself happy. I want you to have fewer rules and make success something you are always feeling, instead of constantly needing to be something different. The more success you feel, the more good things will come your way. Like attracts like. You need to feel good about yourself and your life, and the more of this you feel, the more you will attract. The more negative you feel, the more negativity you will attract.

When I look around me, I see so many people who do not allow themselves to be happy due to the rules they set for themselves.

I live in a large city and, when I go to small towns, people tell me they are unhappy and wished they lived somewhere else. When I meet people who went to bad schools, they tell me they wish they had gone to better schools. I used to hire lots of writers in our offices in Los Angeles who had experience in the entertainment industry. I stopped doing this long ago because they all felt lousy about themselves and never gave their work their all. They had “rules” that said they were only successful and doing well if they were selling huge screenplays to major motion picture studios. Anything less was failure. Consequently, they never gave the job with our company their all.

Your rules for what it means to be successful will largely control how you feel about yourself and your job. One of the worst things that can happen to someone is to be in an atmosphere where they are surrounded by the most successful people imaginable when they are not the same way. I remember once speaking with a man who had grown up, been friends with, and gone to school with a couple of people who ended up becoming very famous—one was a United States Senator, the other was a governor of a huge state, and the other was the CEO of one of the largest companies in the world. This person had never been anywhere near as successful as these people, but he still had a good career. How do you think this person felt about himself? Instead of feeling like he had a good career, he could only compare himself with the people he knew who had become incredibly successful. He felt like a failure his entire life. What a lousy rule to have for ourselves.

What has to happen for you to feel successful?

Rules control so much. They literally control our sanity and how we feel about ourselves on a daily basis. Every upset you have ever had in your life with another person is probably due to them violating some rule you had about such and such, or vice versa.

I have very few, if any arguments, with my wife about anything. However, if she gets excited while talking about something while eating, she will often speak while chewing. When I was growing up my mother used to go ballistic and get incredibly angry with me if I opened my mouth and spoke while chewing food. She would call it a sign of disrespect and, in one case, I think she actually made me sit next to the dog on the floor while eating as punishment. In fact, my mom was so angry, it was as if I had committed a crime.

Years later, I find myself also getting angry when I see people I am close to eating with their mouths open. I take it as a sign of disrespect, among other things. I want to be clear that I know this is completely irrational. The only reason I am reacting this way is because of the rules I learned when I was younger. Here I am, decades later, having a happy meal with my wife and suddenly this rule about the way things should be comes up and prevents me from having a good time. Do you have any rules which are impacting your life like this? I bet you do.

Make the rules you have for your life and your career empower you. Make your rules represent success and not failure. You need to feel good about this life and your life. Work hard and enjoy your life. Do not allow your rules to hold you back.

Practice Makes Perfect

A year or so ago I was at a wedding, and a very successful doctor started talking to me. I was very impressed with this doctor and already knew of him through several people before our meeting. He was involved in some fascinating and cutting-edge research I found quite interesting.

I love meeting people who are passionate about their careers because they give off so much energy. People who achieve amazing and significant success in any profession always have a lot of passion for what they do. If you allow them to, these people will talk your head off about what they are doing. They will show you their collection of books about the subject, debate various philosophies about what they are doing, and more. People who commit to something are the most exciting people in the world. They provide me with an incredible education. I wish everyone was committed to what they do.

In speaking to this doctor, however, I realized despite his incredible knowledge of what he was doing, he was not satisfied. “What I really want to do is start a business,” he told me. “That is what being successful is to me. I have a friend who is doing very well in the manufacturing industry now that steel prices are up.”

The manufacturing industry? Steel? Why would someone spend years going to medical school and becoming a successful researcher only to go into steel manufacturing? I am not saying this is the wrong thing to do. But when you are an expert in something, it is not always in your best interest to switch jobs completely.

I spent many hours of my career going to various law firms and meeting with successful attorneys. I would say in at least 25% of these meetings, the attorneys I met did the same thing as this doctor–they started talking about how they wanted to pursue careers in completely different professions. One memorable meeting was with a famous attorney in Los Angeles who told me about opening a chain of ice cream parlors on the other side of the country only to see them fail miserably. Of course they failed miserably! The man running them was a famous attorney involved in all sorts of high profile cases. How on earth could he be expected to also run a chain of ice cream parlors?

At this particular point in history, I know many people who’ve lost all their money and life savings by investing in real estate. They bought homes in Arizona, condominiums in Florida, and other properties for little or no money down. They jumped face first into the real estate game because they believed they would get rich. Most of these people taught high school, sold cars, or were accountants, for example. Of course they lost money in real estate! This was not their expertise and they knew nothing about it. I saw the same thing back in 2000 with the Internet stock crash. Back then, all sorts of people aggressively invested in these stocks and lost their shirts. These people did things like sell insurance, or own auto repair shops. Of course they lost their shirts! None of them had expertise in the stock market.

The point I am trying to make is you can never be in two places at the same time. You need to choose who you want to be and what you want to do. You can never become an expert in multiple things. You need to concentrate on doing one thing.

An excellent book I recently read is called “Outliers” by Malcom Gladwell. Gladwell examines the people who are able to achieve incredible and massive success in various callings. He looks at people like Bill Gates, the best lawyers in the United States, chess grandmasters, Mozart, Steve Jobs, the Beatles, professional hockey players, and others. Gladwell cites study after study describing the fact that people do not get really good at anything, at a world class level, until they have been doing it at least 10,000 hours. According to Gladwell:

“The idea that excellence at performing a complex task requires a minimum level of practice surfaces again and again in studies of expertise. In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: ten thousand hours.”

“The emerging picture from such studies is that ten thousand hours of practice is required to achieve the level of mastery associated with being a world-class expert–in anything,” writes neurologist David Levitin. “In study after study, of composers, of basketball players, fiction writers, ice skaters, concert pianists, chess players, master criminals, and what have you, this number comes up again and again. Of course, this doesn’t address why some people get more out of their practice sessions than others do. But no one has yet found a case in which true world-class expertise was accomplished in less time. It seems it takes the brain this long to assimilate all that it needs to know to achieve true mastery.”

I get very concerned when I think about people vacillating back and forth between various skill paths. Instead of choosing to do one thing, so many people spend their careers floating from job to job – each one different than the one before and requiring a completely different set of skills. There is nothing wrong with changing careers, of course, but the most important thing anyone can do is ensure they choose something and then focus on it completely. If you continue to change your mind, you will never develop true mastery.

One of the most amazing things I have seen in my life is people who become incredibly happy, successful, and rich by seeking out and doing simple jobs to which they have committed. The universe rewards commitment. Warren Buffet has become incredibly rich committing to one form of investing. Some people make their fortunes doing simple things you would not expect.

When I was an asphalt contractor, I knew a man who’d built a giant company putting hot tar in the cracks in roads all over Michigan. I know of another man who became very wealthy building pallets for the automotive industry. In college admissions, people with stand-out interests always do the best. I remember a high school teacher who talked about his students who’d gone to schools like Yale and Harvard, and how those students all had incredibly focused interests. Some were interested in bug collecting, another liked translating Japanese poetry, etc. The world rewards people with specialized interests who nurture that interest and continue to get better at those interests year after year.

One of the most unusual things I’ve witnessed is that most people are flirting with life and their careers. Instead of committing to a career and something, these people continue to dissipate their energies in many different directions. As a consequence, they never achieve anything near what they are capable of achieving. What are your capabilities? How much do you think you can achieve? The sky is the limit if you focus and continue to improve at something.

Why do I call focus “a law of the universe”? In the family unit, marriages, children and so forth typically only occur when two people decide to commit to one another and get married. People choose to focus on one another. This is a rule in virtually every culture in the world. It is almost as if the rule is saying life cannot begin until two people choose to focus. In your life, your career will never really begin until you choose to focus.

As a legal recruiter, I very quickly get a sense after looking at an attorney’s resume of how long it is likely to take for the person to get a job, and where. The most important factor determining an attorney’s future employability is his or her focus, beyond where they went to law school, their previous employer, or specialty. If the person has had several jobs in a short period of time, then employers will stay away (they know the person is unlikely to commit). If the person has flirted with other jobs in addition to practicing law, a smart employer will stay away. Employers are looking for commitment, and they want to make sure people accepting jobs with them are going to be committed to their company. Employers want their employees to use their commitment to help the company grow. The level of commitment legal employers look for is the same as in other professions. People want to hire people who are likely to do a job long-term.

Your life and career will change when you learn to commit to something over the long term.

Show Value, Do Not Expect Value

If you understand the message I am about to share with you, you will thrive in your career and life, and you will also be very good at identifying organizations and people to avoid. The message is this: people and businesses crash and burn when they start expecting value before giving value.

This may seem like a very trivial thing to say, but this is happening in epidemic proportions around this country. It’s spinning out of control and it’s hurting our economy, individual careers, and your future to the same incredible degree it’s hurting mine.

A few months ago, a friend of mine and I discussed working together on a small business deal. My friend does a show for ESPN and when he is not filming the show the studio just sits there. He thought it would be fun to start filming a show announcing sports scores and streaming this information over the Internet on his website. He wanted someone to help him with some of the business aspects, and I agreed to do so. In order to do this, we needed to draw up a contract outlining our responsibilities.

I have another old friend who’d recently become a partner at a big law firm in Los Angeles. I asked him to put together a simple agreement. The agreement was a standard, “form” type of contract and I knew it would not take him more than an hour. Although our firm has an in-house attorney who could have easily drafted this document, I wanted to give my friend some business, since he was a new partner, and also introduce him to my friend from ESPN. I thought this might result in some work down the road for him. I was trying to do a nice thing.

My friend at the law firm called me after I requested he email over a short form agreement. Pretty soon, he was trying to talk me into spending over $20,000 on this agreement, which included all sorts of unnecessary work. I told him to just email me a form agreement and not to do any work on the project. He said okay. A few weeks later I still had not received anything and called him looking for the agreement. He was out of the office and my call was transferred to a paralegal who said she would get an agreement right over to me. A couple of hours later I received an email from the paralegal with an agreement. I knew all she had to do was a global “search and replace” to change a few words to the name of our company. It was not a lot of work. It probably took her no more than an hour.

A month or so later I received a bill for over $7,000, charging me $600 an hour for work that simply was not done. The bill had such notations in it as, “Review business plan, 3.5 hours, $2,100.”

The problem was there was no business plan. My friend was literally making things up and lying about the work he had supposedly done. Then he started calling me, demanding the money and harassing our accounting department. I was incredibly shocked.

What happened here? Why was this guy doing this?

His attitude was that he deserved something for nothing. This attitude can creep into organizations and destroy them. It can also destroy people.

Around the same time I had referred another friend of mine to the same attorney. The friend I had referred had a very large and serious legal issue. My friend went to Santa Monica to interview the attorney about working for him. After the interview, the attorney said he would send him a fee agreement discussing what the fees would be if he wanted to hire him. Once my friend received the “retainer agreement” (a simple statement of how much the firm will charge for doing the work) he decided he did not want to work with the attorney due to the high costs he was proposing; therefore, my friend did not return the agreement.

A few weeks later, after the attorney realized my friend was not going to work with him, my friend received a bill for $14,000 from the attorney for putting together the retainer agreement. Like me, my friend called this attorney to ask him if he was serious. He told him he was quite serious. My friend refused to pay this bill and is being harassed to this day.

You may find this story as hard to believe as I do but it actually happened. This sort of thing happens in the business world every day. There are tons of people who simply expect something for nothing regardless of whether or not they provide any value. What do you think happened with my friend and this law firm? Exactly what you might expect: the law firm and its owner were indicted for their role in one of the largest scams by a law firm in history. When people start expecting something for nothing it is generally a very good indication something bad is about to go down.

The example of my friend is so serious because he will never get a referral from me again. He will never get business from any of the friends I referred to him. His desire for quick gain has likely cost him millions of dollars in potential referrals throughout his career.

Have you ever focused too much on your rewards? When you focus on getting rewards and not adding value, you stop yourself dead in your tracks. People see right through you.

Your career is not about you at all. Your career is about the fact someone else has a problem that he or she needs you to solve. For any job you have ever had, the company hired you because it had a problem that needed to be solved that it could not solve on its own. Throwing yourself into solving someone else’s problem is essential to growing in your career.

The problem could be as simple as serving clients in a restaurant by bringing them food, or as sophisticated as analyzing the tax issues between a large corporation and a foreign country in which it does business. Regardless of the problem, someone needs you to solve it.

Let me tell you a secret very few people understand: your income, praise, and life will get better in proportion to how well you solve people’s problems, and how dedicated you are, and appear to be, to doing so.

The more you throw yourself into solving other people’s problems, the more dedicated you appear to be to solving other people’s problems. The better you are at delivering results, the better you will do in your life. This is the secret to a great career. It is a simple one but very difficult for most people to do on a day-to-day basis. You are owed nothing by the world or anyone until you go out and create huge sums of value. You need to create value by solving problems to the very best of your ability.

When you look at work simply in terms of the rewards, you are diverting your energy from what creates those rewards in the first place. You need to get into the work you do and make it the best you possibly can. People will hire you and seek you out as long as you create outstanding value for them.

People and companies that expect something without doing work cause enormous damage. Car companies in the United States have experienced this type of damage. One of the fringe benefits of working for car companies, such as General Motors, is their unions often have contracts that prevent people from being laid off. The arrangement is so absurd that if GM wants to close down certain plants, for example, it can, but it needs to keep paying the workers from those plants. For months, and sometimes years, those workers are furloughed in “job banks” where they go and sit all day with no purpose whatsoever in large rooms with nothing to do, all the while getting paid. The absurdity of this is hard to believe. Once a company or group of individuals starts expecting something for nothing, death is often near.

The problems with car companies go even deeper than this. For example, many American car companies do not make cars people want. Refusing to make cars the public wants is an example of not showing value. You cannot get ahead or do anything worthwhile if you do not show value. Once you start expecting something without creating value, the end is often near.

One of the most amazing things about many musicians, movie stars, and other individuals who become really famous is they usually start out creating a lot of value. Their performances contain a lot of passion and they wow audiences with their talents. The same thing goes for businesses that get really popular. They provide tremendous value to people, and people flock to them. However, at some point along the line many businesses and people become famous and something happens – they stop providing value to others, and this leads to their fall.

The indictment of Governor Rod Blagojevich of Illinois was a perfect example of this. Politicians typically start out their careers talking about how they will provide more value to the people than those they are running against. Politicians get elected based on their pronouncements they will help others. At some point, however, for many politicians the office becomes more about providing value to themselves than to others, and this is when politicians typically fall. One quote from the Wall Street Journal really stuck out for me:

Mr. Blagojevich appeared frustrated that the Obama team didn’t appear willing to talk about favors to the governor in exchange for a favorable appointment.

“They’re not willing to give me anything except appreciation. [Expletive] them,” the governor said, according to the affidavit. It further claimed that Mr. Blagojevich expressed frustration at being “stuck” in his job as governor, which pays $177,412, according to one conversation alleged in the affidavit.

Here Blagojevich is complaining about his salary and what he believes is due him. When I think about this I am absolutely amazed. I can imagine it must be a tremendous amount of work to win a governor’s election. People do not run for the position for the money. In this quote you can see the governor has become more focused on his own rewards than on what he can deliver to others.

Creating value for others sets up a natural path for rewards. Contributors focus on the work they are doing and the rewards comes naturally. Focusing on the rewards diverts your energy from what generates rewards in the first place – the value your customers, clients, or audience gets from what you do. People want to align themselves with people who are focused on giving.

I want you to be the best you can possibly be. I want you to be constantly focused on creating value. I want you to be a wonderful and capable person on whom the light of the world’s approval is constantly shining. This will happen to you when you focus all of your energies on creating value for others. Get started today.

Love What You Do

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.

Can You Be Trusted?

Can you be trusted?

This is more important than any other single question. Regardless of how motivated you are, regardless of where you went to school, regardless of your work history, if you slip up in this area, you might as well forget about a good career in any profession.

Certainly, there are many people who rise quickly by playing fast and loose with the rules. I’ve seen this more times than I can count during my career. Nevertheless, when all is said and done, no matter how far an individual gets, they almost always come crashing down if they are not trustworthy. When this happens, it’s major. Careers end.

I used to teach professional responsibility at a law school. In this class, like in most professional responsibility classes, we spent a lot of time going over the rules and debating various ethical questions. Personally, when I took this class in law school, I believed it was somewhat of a blow-off, just like most of my fellow students. However, this article is about the consequences of dishonesty, not a blow-off discussion of professional responsibility.

As a legal recruiter I have seen far too many careers stall out or end due to credibility lapses. This is more common than you might think. In fact, I would estimate at least five to ten percent of all careers in the legal sector experience long term, negative results because an attorney has done something dishonest, or not credible. When you probe the reasons why top attorneys from exceptional backgrounds do not get interviews or hired, it is most often because when their references are checked others believe they cannot be trusted. While some credibility lapses are obvious – for example, stealing client money or lying in court – most often the issues are far subtler. If an attorney shades the truth with superiors or does not make important information known to a client, the results can be disastrous to his or her career.

In the organizations in which I’ve been involved or run, the most persistent cause of failure is someone losing credibility. Once this happens, a person’s career within an organization usually ends, and their lack of credibility ends up following them to their next job, and the next one after that, because people remember and people talk. I do not care if you screw up in a law firm in Chicago and then move to New York or Florida, wherever you go, the chances are very good that your past will follow you.

Can you be trusted? Once there is any doubt, you have lost a great deal.

Fortunes can be lost and rebuilt. Being fired for wrongdoings wherein your credibility was not an issue can eventually be forgotten. If you lose your credibility however, you may never regain it.

Credibility encompasses far more than you may realize. Paradoxically, it is almost always the most accomplished, aggressive, and talented people who seem to lose their credibility. Years of achievement can be ruined by one moment of poor judgment.

Credibility can be defined in many ways, but at its simplest, it means the following: (1) never being dishonest or lying, (2) never failing to make someone aware of the truth behind circumstances when you should, and (3) not cutting corners, and doing what you say you are going to do, and when you say you are going to do it.

You must never be dishonest or lie. If you lie then you are toast. This is the most direct cause of loss of credibility. Most liars are exposed, and people stop trusting them. People do not want to give liars work or do business with them.

Lying is all too common. When it occurs, careers quite often end. You simply cannot be good at any job and lie to others. It does not work.

Never fail to make someone aware of the truth. This area can be particularly problematic, because not disclosing the full truth is something many people do not consider as being dishonest. Why, I don’t know.

A common example of this is the prosecutor who does not turn over exculpatory evidence, simply because he is not asked for it. These sorts of prosecutors can become pariahs in the legal community. More importantly, when you are an attorney working for someone else, you are expected to make your superiors aware of information they should be aware of. If you have failed to do something, or have done something, you need to make others aware of it.

Others will trust you if you make them aware of information they should know about. Keeping silent is often tantamount to lying. There are numerous examples I could get into here, but basically, if you do this you are hurting yourself and putting yourself in a situation wherein you might not be trusted in the future.

Do what you say you are going to do. This is probably the most common lapse of credibility out there. In fact, I would say this is the single largest credibility failure for an attorney.

First, if you say you are going to do something, then you should do it. No questions asked. If you cannot be trusted to get something done, then you are sending all sorts of negative messages to your employer. There are always excuses for not completing work or not doing this or that. However, there are always people who manage to get things done, and then there are people who always make excuses. You need to be trusted as someone who will get things done if you say you are going to do them.

Second, you should never cut corners when you work. This also is a credibility issue. If you are going to do something, you should do it in a professional and serious manner. This sort of performance will win you a great deal of credibility. In addition, people who carry out assignments this way are the ones who are most likely to get future work from clients and superiors. There are far too many people who do things half way, and do not complete work the way it should be done.

When I was about 20 years old, I met a man who ran a giant steel factory. He was an uneducated German immigrant who was competing in my hometown of Detroit against some of the world’s major steel factories. One day I met the president of a major automotive company, to which this man supplied a lot of steel. I told the president I could not understand how this man was so successful, because he appeared to lack business sense, and certainly could not hobnob with other important executives. The president told me one thing I will never forget: “He does what he says he is going to do, and does it well. That’s all he does. It’s very rare.”

Far too many people out there are out for a fast buck or a quick transaction. My career advice is to become someone of integrity, and you will be trusted and thrive.

It is important to be credible for a number of reasons: (1) it makes you human and therefore more likable and appreciated, (2) if you are not credible, people will fear that dealings with you will lead to negative repercussions for them, and (3) if you are dishonest you will constantly be reminded of your lack of credibility, no matter where you turn.

Everyone has probably seen a comedian perform at some point. Typically, the comedian will talk frankly about topics that most of us can relate to, but would never speak of publicly – sex, bathroom habits, or strange things they do. Most people laugh at comedians and enjoy them. I believe this is true is because comedians let us see who they are. We like people when we can really see who they are.

The work environment is extremely competitive. Many people spend a great deal of time trying to cover up their weaknesses. They do this by avoiding talking about what they cannot do. They don’t tell clients they have never worked on a certain type of project; they do not speak about negative performance reviews to peers; they try not to let superiors know an assignment did not get done in a timely manner because they were out having fun over the weekend.

The most successful individuals I’ve known do not approach others with a tremendous degree of arrogance or confidence. Instead, they are always careful to point out what they know, what they can do, what their limitations are, and what they need in order to do whatever is being asked of them. This is an explicitly honest approach. It is also an approach that makes the person preferable to deal with.

If you think about it, the reasons you probably like people who act this way are not much different from the reasons you like comedians. When you like someone more, you are not only more forgiving, you trust they will ask the correct questions when carrying out assignments and doing work. You also identify with them because you know you too have limitations. When you identify with someone, it creates a bond of sorts, which makes your relationship stronger. In addition, when you let people know your limitations, they are more likely to award a “job well done”.

I am not suggesting you should not be self-confident. You need to be. The issue is how you let people know your limitations and how honest you are with those around you. When you are honest with those around you, they will also be likely to open up to you more. You will learn more from the world around you and grow more.

If you are not credible, people will avoid dealing with you. Twice in the past two years I have come across attorneys who were terminated from their law firms for reasons related to a single credibility issue. What happened in each of these cases was so remarkable in its simplicity and stupidity it’s hard to believe. The attorneys were asked by a partner if they had completed an assignment and although the attorneys said yes, they hadn’t, and were fired as a result. In one case, the attorney was terminated only a couple of weeks before he was going to be formally installed as a partner in an AmLaw 100 law firm. In each case, I do not think the attorney found a new job for a long time, if at all. Certainly, no good recruiter would continue to represent someone who was dishonest like this.

The reason this simplistic bit of dishonesty, like most dishonesty, resulted in such a drastic outcome is because it has the capacity to hurt other people. If people tell their employer they did something when they did not, this will affect the employer’s dealings with the client. The result is the employer could lose a client, which is bad for everyone involved.

Time after time, attorneys engage in one stupid episode of dishonesty after another. In the above example, the rationale may have been to appear competent for a moment or two in the partner’s eyes. Who knows? Regardless, these sorts of lies ultimately harm people, and are seldom worth any perceived short term gain.

Everyone is certainly familiar with the trials of Martha Stewart, Dennis Kowalski and others regarding various sorts of fraud and insider trading charges. Each of these episodes looks harmless enough on the surface. Nevertheless, these people ultimately hurt investors and others who relied upon the dishonest representations of the individuals in question.

When you are dishonest with others, you put them in the position of not knowing if up is up or down is down when they are dealing with you. People will actually fear doing business with you.

This is something I have noticed over and over again in the attorney placement business. When a recruiting firm decides to cut corners and be dishonest in one respect or another, law firms and others in the legal community quickly learn of the dishonesty. As a consequence, they do not know if what the recruiter is saying is right or wrong. They do not trust the recruiter and opt to cease doing business with them completely. Because it is a small industry, other law firms and employers quickly learn about the recruiter’s dishonest ways. Very shortly, the recruiter may be out of business.

A lot of times people who do something dishonest are under the impression they can do one dishonest thing, get away with it, and then come out ahead. This is rarely the case. When you lack credibility, you will be constantly reminded of it. This is the case whether you do one, or many things wrong.

One of the most common forms of dishonesty is the lie. There are different categories of lies. It can be something as benign as calling in sick when one is not really sick. On another level, there are things like lying about whether an assignment was completed, or lying about what a law means, so that you can do something you want to do. The issue with these sorts of lies is that you may often have to tell many additional lies to cover up for your original one. The more lies you tell, the more you have to keep telling. Pretty soon, lying becomes a near full-time occupation, and the lies just continue to build upon themselves. This is almost always disastrous.

In addition, a lot of people think if they are dishonest with someone, they can confine their dishonesty to that one person and be okay. This, too, is rarely true. If you upset one person through your dishonesty, chances are you will see them again and again and again. How you deal with the guilt of upsetting them is up to you. You need to understand, however, you will likely carry that guilt for a long time.

Your credibility is one of the most important aspects of your career. For many, credibility comes naturally. Others are always looking for a way to cut corners, or are simply dishonest. Those who cut corners and lack credibility never come out on top. In fact, their failure and mediocrity are all but assured.

Job seekers often don’t understand their reputations are fragile. The most important thing you can do for your reputation is to approach your work with credibility in mind. Always err on the side of credibility.

Never Get Too Comfortable

One of the greatest causes of failure stems from people experiencing success in their careers. Whether it is being given a new title, a raise, a position of increased job security, or other success, people often suddenly decide they have earned the right to relax. Security and comfort are certainly desirable results and may be a significant part of achieving your goals. However, when you focus on your comfort or bask in your success, you stop growing.

Executives and others who begin to relax or let their guard down quickly get crushed. They usually end up losing their jobs, or their careers quickly fade into obscurity. When you find yourself in a position that allows you greater comfort, security, you have an outstanding opportunity for further growth. Use this opportunity wisely. People are put in positions of responsibility and given higher incomes because they have shown growth in their current position. You never want to stop growing.

I would like to explain to you a pattern I have seen within my own companies and also among people I have known and worked with in the past as a legal recruiter.

I have worked with many people who have gone to top schools like Harvard, Yale, and Stanford. The talent you need to exhibit to get into schools like these is phenomenal. You need to be academically gifted and have a long history of very high-level achievements. You also need to show talent in areas other than academics. People who attend top tier schools also have to work exceptionally hard to earn the academic marks and other honors needed to succeed once they are accepted.

What ends up happening to people who attend these elite schools is very interesting to me. A good many continue to work hard once accepted, while others think just because they were accepted, that’s good enough. The students who continue to work hard ultimately crush these students.

In the legal field, most attorneys in the top law firms worked hard in college and continued to work extremely hard in law school as well. Their hard work landed them positions in prestigious law firms. The competition to get a job with a prestigious law firm is even more challenging than what one must face to get into a prestigious college or law school.

Once in these prestigious firms, many of the new attorneys are already exhausted from having worked so hard in law school and college. Many believe that, because of their past achievements, they can now rest on their laurels. These new attorneys then end up losing their jobs very quickly, and many even leave the practice of law forever due to this experience.

My career advice is to never let your guard down. Whatever you have done in the past has only given you the right to compete on the playing field you are on now. No one cares about your past successes. If you do not perform your best, you will become expendable.

I have witnessed a very familiar pattern in the work world. People get a job based on their enthusiasm, past employment record, and other related factors. Once hired, they work extremely hard to earn praise and recognition. They are given increased responsibility at the company, more and more tasks, and people to supervise. As these people get more and more responsibility, the company traditionally begins to watch them less closely. At this point, these people have two choices:

-Step up their efforts and keep improving, or,

-Begin to coast and let others do the work, keep things the same as they are, relax, buy new things, take more vacations, and take time off.

The latter is what probably 50 percent of people do once they reach a certain stage or accomplish a certain goal in their careers. In my career I have seen far too many go this direction. What ends up happening when the person starts coasting is generally one of two things: one, the company fires them, or two, the company puts pressure on them to improve, and the person simply decides to leave, believing their status does not merit this sort of treatment.

Is this you?

This happens because too many people get too comfortable. You always need to be on your toes with any job.

Look at the headlines in the paper each day, and you will see business tycoons in their 80s and 90s who are winning and losing fortunes. They are still working. You will read about other prominent individuals challenging themselves in different ways. Ted Turner became famous for racing sailboats all around the world. Richard Branson has become known for trying to set records in balloons. These are some of the most successful men in the world. They are not sitting on a beach relaxing. They are challenging themselves in every way they possibly can. They challenge themselves in their work, and outside of work.

I live in Malibu, California. Up and down the 26 miles of coastline are some of the most magnificent homes you can imagine, some right on the beach. Some of these houses sell for $50 million or more. Some of the richest and most famous people in the world live in Malibu.

What is so remarkable about these houses is the fact most of them are empty almost every day of the year. People do visit these houses but, for the most part, the largest and most expensive of the houses do not have families in them year-round and their owners only drop in occasionally.

The owners rarely visit their multi-million dollar houses, but not because the properties are insignificant to them. The reason these people don’t visit their houses is because they simply do not have the time. They are always working. They enjoy their houses only for short periods of time and then they are back to work.

The most successful people do not allow themselves to slow down and get too comfortable. Using the old analogy of the world as a jungle, I leave you with this closing thought: animals, fish, and birds are always on the move. Whenever a lion is hunting, he looks for the weakest animal in the herd – the one that is not moving.

Always Be Willing to Readjust

About a year ago, I was sitting in my office and a registered letter arrived for me. The letter was from a large financial institution saying they could no longer lend me funds to provide student loans, and they would stop lending to me within the next four weeks. I had grown my student loan company into a large business over the previous few years and was doing hundreds of millions of dollars in loans annually.

From my office, I looked out and saw at least 10 very nice people whom I liked a great deal sitting at their desks. I looked across the street and saw the 15,000 square foot building the company recently purchased for almost $7 million for the student loan company. Across that street, at that very moment, teams of contractors were working to build a room to house a server farm and a $250,000 phone system. At one time, I’d imagined the student loan company would employ over 500 people in our California office alone. This did not include our offices in Utah and India. The company appeared to have a very bright future.

In that moment I sat and observed our bustling Los Angeles headquarters: the FedEx man was talking to the receptionist as he dropped off the day’s student loan applications, employees were coming out of the kitchen, and a Xerox salesperson was in the lobby, ready to discuss adding features to a $700,000 high speed printer we had recently purchased to send letters to prospective borrowers – we had recently purchased a warehouse and filled it with all sorts of printing equipment, so we could send sales letters to millions of people around the country.

As I watched all of this, the world seemed to slow down. I looked out into the office and saw so many happy people. I almost felt like crying because I knew their lives were about to change.

I’d heard about the credit crisis in the United States and was seeing it firsthand. I knew the economy was in serious trouble, but I did not realize how bad it would be. I could not believe our funding for providing student loans was about to dry up. For days, I called around to various financial institutions all over the country and they, too, had no money to loan. In one case, I set up a meeting with an important banker, and on the day of the meeting he called to cancel because he had just been fired.

All around me I started seeing bankers and others with whom I had developed relationships in the past drop off the face of the earth. Pretty soon I realized there was no money for me to lend. Every day I heard about another student loan company failing.

In reality, this story is not about me, it is about you. There is something you need to understand about your job and the work you do right now: it could change at any moment.

-Your responsibilities and daily duties could end just like that.
-Businesses can end just like that.
-Your job can end just like that.

Whatever you are doing right now could come to a crashing halt. You never know when this may happen, but it does, and it happens a lot.

One Saturday I was driving through Agoura Hills and Thousand Oaks, California, on my way to look at some tropical fish. There are giant office parks in those cities that were built by Countrywide Mortgage for their operations. Many of these gleaming, new buildings now stand abandoned. No one works in them now, whereas probably not even a year earlier thousands of people had been reporting to work each day in these buildings. Who knows where those people went? There must have been countless families whose lives took a dramatic turn for the worse when those jobs disappeared.

When I learned about the dramatic shifts occurring in our student loan business, I did what I believed was the right thing, and tried to transfer everyone into other roles. The student loan business is similar to the mortgage business in that during its boom made lots of money. In fact, people with no more than a high school degree could have made over $100,000 a year giving people simple advice over the phone about refinancing their loans.

Many of the employees I’d hired who’d earned so much money during the student loan boom had never earned more than $12 an hour before they joined us. For some of them, it was their first job. I had employees who were 18 years old who were making well over $60,000 a year. After several days of searching for alternative funding sources, I set out to save everyone’s job in my student loan business. Together with a few other managers, I found alternative positions within our companies, with upward potential, which took advantage of people’s various skills. I announced these changes one Tuesday afternoon.

By the end of the day, more than 50 percent of the student loan representatives had simply quit and walked off the job. By the end of the week, more than 80 percent were gone. By the end of the month, only a few were left. Eight weeks later, only two were left. Those two are now gone. The two who lasted the longest were given different jobs; however, they never applied themselves in their new jobs. It was as if they refused to learn something new. Their jobs and responsibilities changed dramatically, and as soon as this occurred, they gave up and left.

As people walked out the door, they made statements like, “I made $82,000 last year. Why should I risk making only $40,000 next year?” Incredibly, several of these people could not find better jobs elsewhere. One of our highest-performing student loan employees now works for minimum wage at a Dairy Queen. Had she stayed with us, she would have continued to do very well, only in another job.

The point I am trying to make is that you need to be ready for change in your job. Your job can change in a heartbeat. People should never hold on to the past. You need to be ready for the future, and whatever shifts it may bring.

I had a fascinating discussion one Saturday night about successful people. A friend and I were talking about billionaires like Kirk Kerkorian, Ron Burkle, and others. One point I found quite interesting was the most successful people usually find opportunity when the market is down. There are a lot of opportunities to seize when businesses and people seem to be at their weakest.

In the events surrounding our student loan company, I did not want to let a single person go, and had hoped they all would stay. I created opportunities of which they could have taken advantage. Whoever you are, it’s likely at some point you will work for an employer who’s facing dire economic conditions, and is forced to change.

I have some advice for you. Walk into your boss’s office and tell him or her you are ready to change with the company and do whatever it takes to keep working there. Find opportunities where others see obstacles. There are opportunities everywhere if you are ready to grab them.

Never Focus on the Money: Focus on Your Higher Purpose and Contribution

People fail far too often in the working world because they focus too much on the money they earn at their jobs. The money you are paid is generally commensurate with your contribution to something more important, more meaningful, and much larger than yourself. When you focus on what you are doing for the world and the value of this contribution, you become energized. Being energized by your work brings more and better work your way, and ultimately leads to greater earnings. The money is a byproduct of your contribution to your job. You will be paid in any organization at a rate matching your contribution to the bigger picture.

What is your particular contribution to the bigger picture? Every job makes a contribution to a bigger picture.

I started delivering papers when I was 10 years old. By the time I was 13, I was getting up at 5 a.m. every morning to deliver over 175 papers in a prestigious suburb of Detroit. High-ranking auto executives lived in most of the houses. When I delivered these papers, I found myself energized by the thought I was providing them information they would be using to help run companies that supported the American economy, provided millions of jobs and gave people access to transportation. In a small way, I realized in this job I was fulfilling a larger purpose.

Some years later, I took a second job washing dishes in a cafeteria. I motivated myself in this job by thinking if not for my work, hundreds of people each night might go hungry. I was also providing people enjoyment when they sat down for dinner, and I was helping families spend more time together, and I was making the world a happier place. This motivated me to do good work, and it made me happy.

Whatever you do, there is a higher purpose to your work, and your job is fulfilling a role that is changing the world and making a contribution. Money is just money. When you focus on the money, you lose track of the importance of the contribution you make. My career advice is to find the importance in your contribution, and use this to inspire your job performance.

Don’t focus on money if you want to do well in your job. In the same way a person must focus on his or her relationship in order to have a successful one, a person must focus on his or her work in order to be successful at it. Focus on your job and your performance–nothing else. If you can do this, the money will follow.

It is easy for me to spot people whose eyes are on the money and not the job. They are in every profession and they never have long-term success. Having a larger purpose is incredibly important, and money is not a larger purpose.

The issue I see with people who always focus on the money is that they are constantly interrupting their work to consider if they are getting the short end of the stick. They are extremely concerned about their compensation relative to others. They wonder whether or not their efforts are being adequately compensated every step of the way. They are overly concerned about the accuracy of each paycheck. Their focus on their work is perpetually distracted by an interest in the money, rather than the job.

If you were an employer, who would you want to have working for you? Someone who is committed and enthusiastic about the job? Or someone who appears to be doing the work just for the money?

Several years ago, I was speaking with a young CIA agent and he told me about a meeting he was getting ready to have with a senior agent. The senior agent told him the person they were going to speak with was very dishonest, untrustworthy, and an all-around bad person. However, the agents would be nice, and treat the target nicely. They would only accomplish their assignment if the target were to see them this way. The senior agent said something to the younger agent he thought so profound he remembered it throughout his career:

“Don’t ever think something or else you will show it.”

Basically, the second you start thinking something, you will begin telegraphing your thoughts. People will begin to pick up on it through nonverbal signals, facial expressions, and body language.

Have you ever had the experience of being able to tell something about someone without speaking to the person? You just get a feeling about something. Who knows how we pick up on it, but we do.

When you are focused on the money, your put your purpose in the job on the back burner in favor of your obsession with how much you are going to make. People easily pick up on this – employers, clients, and others. This is one of the worst things you can do in any job.

At the risk of becoming a little too metaphysical, I would like to share a quick side story with you. I was at a dinner once discussing this exact topic of people picking up clues about others through nonverbal communication. The person I was talking with had a background in engineering and the study of energy, and he too was interested in this subject. He told me there is a gland at the very top of the brain – the pituitary gland – that for some strange reason has almost the exact same cellular structure as our eyes. He told me he believes people pick up on information using this. He also observed when a child is born and his or her skull is not yet fused, with only skin separating this gland from the outside world, this gland is pointed outward. He believed this has something to do with how humans pick up signals from the world around them when they are babies.

This may seem like bizarre thinking, but I do believe when people are more concerned with their salary than their work, the people around them pick up on it. You should push any concerns you have about your compensation out of your mind, and focus on your work and your work’s greater purpose. The greater purpose of your work is something that deserves your attention. Regardless of what type of work you do, it has a greater purpose. People will pick up on your passion and will want to work with you.

Every single person I’ve ever known in our company who is outstanding at what he or she does has always focused on the greater purpose of his or her work. Every single attorney I know who is outstanding at his or her job has always focused on the work and not the reward. Get into what you do and realize your higher purpose.

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