In Defense of Long-Term Employment With a Single Employer

If you go into any business that has been around more than twenty or thirty years, you will inevitably find a handful of people who have been there from the very beginning of their careers. These well adjusted souls will typically report to work each day at a similar time and have managed to be the only ones presumably left in the organization after generation upon generation of people coming and going.

Many people do last for decades in the same organization and there are characteristics which uniformly seem to characterize these sorts of people.While I am a recruiter, I do have a great deal of respect for people who in this day and age are able to “stay put” at the same organization for a long period of time and remain at single organizations throughout their careers. None of this is to say there are not really good and solid reasons for leaving an employer if the going gets impossible. I am the first to admit that there are employment environments that can be intolerable for many.  Nevertheless, you need to keep in mind that if an employer has been around for 30+ years, there is a chance the employer is doing something right. Before leaving it is often wise to take inventory of yourself.

There are certain characteristics that  people who stick with the same employer for long lengths of time tend to exhibit and also certain characteristics of this sort of employment situation.  These characteristics are as follows:

1.People Who Remain With the Same Firm for Long Lengths of Time Are Generally Very Committed to Their Jobs

Many people were raised with the idea (or have the idea) that fidelity to an employer is something that is simply expected.  The unwritten rule is that if you are not treated horribly, then there is really no reason you should leave a job.

One of the saddest (but also the most refreshing) things I have seen as a legal recruiter is when I interview and meet with attorneys who have been with the same firm for 20 years or more and whose firms are going under, who are in a position of being forced to look for other opportunities. When attorneys like this look for a new position, their rationale is most often that something profound has happened at the firm that is making their separation necessary.  These attorneys appear as if they are going through a divorce or have just had a death of someone they are very close to. For them, leaving a position is a traumatic experience.

This sort of fidelity between employers and employees reminds me often of people who have been married 50 years or more. There is a mutual respect that comes out of this and a thinking that both need one another. I believe that this sort of thinking is really missing in this day and age. While this may not seem related to careers, a statistic I once saw in a social science class showed that as divorce rates went up in society, so did rates of drug abuse, suicide and other associated societal ills.  The bond between an employer and an employee is a powerful force that in its best form is much like the bond between a husband and wife with a very committed relationship. Both sides respect and accept one another with certain conditions, but for the most part unconditionally.

2. People Who Remain With the Same Organization Are Not Interested in Office Gossip or Negativity

In every organization there are typically people who are not succeeding at their jobs.  These people generally are looking for ways to cut corners with their work and are not producing satisfactory results for their employer. Most organizations will generally call out this behavior and then speak with the employee. Some employees correct their behavior and others simply get mad at the organization. Some employees may be mad at their organizations for no particular reason at all—or may be angry with a previous organization and simply transfer their anger to their most recent organization. I remember a recruiter once telling me never to hire someone who had been fired from their last job. People who have been fired from their last job will typically take out their anger on their next organization, he told me.

There are always going to be people who have a lot of anger towards their employers.  These angry employees will start rumors, attempt to share their anger with others in the organization and often subtly (or not so subtly) forecast “gloom and doom” for their employer. This is how rumor mills get started and these sorts of rumor mills are prevalent in every decent sized organization.

People who remain with their employers generally do not participate in these rumor mills or even pay attention to them.  Every business goes through boom and bust periods, or faces various crises.  Loyal employees barely notice the difference because they’re too busy getting their job done day in and day out.

3.People Who Remain With the Same Organization for Long Periods of Time Generally Are Not Interested in Being Grandstanders—They Are There to Do Their Jobs and Do Them Well

I once heard someone say that the most successful people are often the most screwed up. I am not sure if this is true, but there is some wisdom in every saying like this. People who are able to remain with the same employer for long periods of time are generally not concerned with “getting ahead” to the same extent as many others are. Many people who are extremely concerned with getting ahead will often leave, saying they are looking for better opportunities because they are interested in immediate advancement. In other cases people will try and show up others in their workplace.

People who remain at their organization for long periods of times are generally most interested in just doing their jobs.  They have faith in their organizations and that things will work out for them.  They are not loud and do not go out of their way to attract attention to themselves.  Their main concern is to simply do the best job possible.

What ends up happening to people who remain focused on their work and not grandstanding is they end up getting ahead while others end up putting their foot in their mouth.  I remember when I first started practicing, there was an attorney who was first in his class from a major law school and the Editor in Chief of his school’s law review. Everyone thought this particular attorney was really on his toes and someone likely to have major success at the firm.  This attorney wrote articles in his spare time, and argued with firm partners about the finer points of law (and was right when he argued). While this attorney was very smart, he thought he was so good that he ended up sabotaging his career when he called a newspaper to discuss a case he was working on. He ended up being quoted on the front page of the Los Angeles Daily Journal.  The fallout from this incredible incident was that the attorney left the law firm a month or two later and never worked for a large law firm again.

These sort of incidents aside, it is important to keep a moderately low profile in order to have long-term success in any job. It is never wise to raise your swords and capture the limelight. While someone can win a sword match for some time, they will eventually lose—and in a sword match (which your career could be compared to)—the loss is usually permanent.

4.People Who Remain With Their Employer for Long Periods of Time Typically Do Good (But Not Necessarily “Brilliant” Work)

Someone who remains at their employer for long periods of time typically has learned to “pace themselves” and manages to do work on a day-to-day basis that is good but not necessarily extraordinary.  This does not matter. I believe that the majority of the battle of being an excellent employee is simply showing up. Sure, some people can do extraordinary work. However, the brightest flame is not always the longest burning flame. The ability to consistently show up and do the work is the most important aspect of being a long-term performer in most organizations.

The smartest people out there are often the ones who end up having the most problems. People who can consistently show up for work and do an excellent job send the message to colleagues, clients and others that they have the ability to get the job done.

5.An Understanding of ‘Insiders’ and ‘Outsiders’ Typically Develops Between People Who Remain At Their Jobs For Long Periods of Time

After someone has been with an employer for an extended period of time an understanding develops between that person and others who have been with the employer for a long period of time. An institutional understanding also develops.  This understanding seems to say something to the effect of “people may come and go, but we are the ones who are committed to this organization and we are the heart and soul of this place.” A similar sort of understanding that develops is that “we owe each other because we have each demonstrated a commitment.”

Bonds form between people who have been part of the same organization for long periods of time.  These bonds are often invisible—but they are real bonds.  These bonds are powerful and make the organization and forces within it come to the defense of those who are committed to the organization during times of change and reorganization.  These sorts of bonds are something that get stronger over time as an organization changes. After some time people who have been with the organization for decades are simply treated as part of the very fabric of that organization and are virtually unquestioned.

Conclusions

While it may seem odd for a recruiter to write a story in defense of people who remain with their employers for long periods of time, remaining with an organization for a long period of time is something that is meaningful in this day and age. There are many characteristics of people who remain at their jobs for long periods of time and these characteristics, in my experience, are usually found in stable people.

A final factor is that, in my experience, people who remain with an organization for long periods of time are often less tormented than the average person. By looking for reasons to like and respect their organization rather than find fault, they find themselves in organizations which ultimately welcome them.

Finally, it is always important to remember that if an organization has been around for 20 years or more the chances are it is doing some things very right.There will always be people who succeed in these organizations and, of course, always those who leave or fail.

Being Nice Makes Good Business Sense

Several years ago I was getting ready to interview with a law firm in New York. It was my first interview ever as a law student and I was pretty nervous. I was trying to get on an elevator as the door was closing and I saw a woman rushing towards it. I reached quickly for the button to open the elevator and was able to get the door to re-open at the last second. The woman got on and told me which floor to push, and I did this for her as well. The woman was very heavy and was not particularly well-dressed. We were going to a very high floor and there were several stops along the way.

At one of the stops, I started looking over my hair because I could see my reflection in the glass in the elevator. I looked up and saw the woman looking directly at me, and she smirked as if to say I looked ridiculous primping in the elevator.

At that point in my life I lifted weights frequently and spent a lot of time at the gym. I taught myself it was important to stick up for myself at all costs. Normally, what I would have done was turn around and tell the woman to mind her own business. On that occasion, however, my nervousness must have gotten the best of me. I turned around and looked directly at the woman.

”Do I look ok? I am going to an interview and I am a little nervous. I want to do a good job.”

The woman looked absolutely stunned. The way she looked at me had invited me to strike out and attack. Instead, I had done the opposite.

”Yes, you do. Just pull your tie up a little. I am sure you’ll do fine.”

This woman ended up being in charge of the hiring committee at the law firm. She was reputed to be extremely difficult as an interviewer and did not like anyone. In my interview, she was very nice to me. I ended up getting the job at the firm and working in this same law firm over the summer. The woman was nice to me during the summer as well and stood up for me. In fact, she was one of the nicest people in the law firm I can remember.

There is really something to being nice. When you are nice to people, you invite them to be nice in return. However, most often we are less interested in being nice than we are in being thought of as important, powerful, or right.

Given the incredible number of experiences I have had over and over again in my life, I am confident there are various forms of energy we simply do not understand. I firmly believe when you send out negative energy, it comes right back to you. I also believe when you send out positive energy, it comes back to you as well.

One of my favorite books of all time is The Richest Man in Babylon. One of the rules in this book is that when you make money you are supposed to give away 10 percent of it to charity or some other good cause. The idea is when you give away 10 percent of your income, you will realize how much abundance there is and you will become less attached to money.

While the book makes this point, and I believe there is truth to it, there is another important point about giving away money as well. When you help and give to others you create positive energy which is directed back at you. There is nothing more important than having positive energy directed back at you. The more positive energy you have directed at you, the better your life and everything in it is going to be.

The word ”appreciation” is, to me, one of the more interesting words in the English language. What appreciation means essentially is positive energy directed towards something. For example, when a stock appreciates it means people are excited about it and its value rises. When you are appreciated it means people like you and the value you bring them. Anything that appreciates takes on more value than it originally had. Things typically take on more value when others are excited about them for one reason or another.

You want to be appreciated. You need to be appreciated. Being appreciated means others are seeing and recognizing your value. When people see your value, you get more opportunities and your career and your life can only improve.

Think about things you appreciate in your life and the people who appreciate you. You appreciate these people and things because of how they make you feel. When we are babies, the only things we think about are our needs and taking care of those needs, specifically our need for food and comfort. We do not yet have the capacity to appreciate the needs of others. As we grow older we learn how our actions affect others positively or negatively. We learn we can make others happy or sad. We begin to learn how our ability to make others happy has an effect on our own happiness.

The world exists as exchanges of energy. If negative energy goes out then negative energy comes back. If someone robs a liquor store, the police come after the person and incarcerate him or her. If someone makes a large financial donation to a good cause, the newspapers write about this person’s generosity for all to know. There is a constant interplay between positive and negative energy in the world, and you want to be on the receiving end of positive energy. This is really the only decent place to be. When positive energy comes to us, we feel better and the world is a better place to us. This simple rule is so easy to follow.

We exist in a consumer-driven society where so many of our desires are shaped by things outside of us. For example, many people evaluate their happiness based on their material possessions. People strive to earn the money to purchase the best house and car they can. They want nice furniture and watches. They want to travel to the best places. Many people evaluate their own self worth based on their ability to accumulate these possessions. This is the way of the Western world. What this sort of consumer culture does, however, is focus almost exclusively on the act of accumulating various things. It does not emphasize the act of putting out positive energy and instead bases everything on taking in energy. This constant taking in often violates laws of the universe which demand equal exchanges between opposite forms of energy. Instead of being focused on taking things in, we need to be focused on putting out positive energy.

This brings me back to the act of being nice. Several years ago, I was listening to Deepak Chopra speak and he was making a similar point. He said whenever he visits someone’s home, he always brings them a flower. In bringing people a flower, he is trying to set up a dynamic of being nice and sending out positive energy. Sending out positive energy is something that comes back to you every single time.

There is a best selling career book called Nice Girls Don’t Get the Corner Office. The message of this book is if you worry about offending others, are forthright when explaining information, and make sure your decisions are popular, you will never get ahead. The idea behind the book is that in being nice to others you will not be successful. I believe the opposite is true. When you are nice to others you send out the sort of energy which gets you ahead.

Some years ago I was at a seminar and met a woman who had been a partner at a large and important law firm, but had quit after a year. She was now a real estate agent and I got the sense she was struggling a little. She told me about how she had been working with the law firm and did not become partner until she demanded it and turned mean. She told me people had walked all over her in her job until she became mean. When I asked her to give me some examples, she did not have any. She simply said they did not make her partner.

I think the woman ended up getting fired from her job within a year of making partner. She had worked for the firm for almost 10 years, and within a year of deciding the best thing for her to do was to become ”a bitch,” she had lost her job. Being mean simply does not work.

I have seen this happen in my own life and with people who have worked for me as well. Recently, I had someone working for me who was extremely competent in all respects. The person was working very close with me and I was extremely impressed. For some reason, however, this person could not get along with others outside my office. One day, she called and screamed at a co-worker for no apparent reason. She also refused to follow instructions. Somehow, she’d come to believe it was good to be mean to others, to attack others savagely, and to not follow orders. The person was quickly let go despite her competence in other areas.

Who knows how this person rationalized losing her job to herself? If she had just been nice to others she would still be happily employed. Instead, this person ended up losing her job and poisoning the people around her who were working for her in the process. When someone sends out negative energy, it does a lot of damage.

You need to be nice to others. This is the most important thing you can do in your job. Let the negative energy of others flow right through you and be nice in response. The way to get ahead is to be liked, not feared and hated.

We want to work with people who are nice. Companies need people who are nice. It is important to be nice. I want to be very clear that by being nice I am not talking about being a doormat. When you are nice and place the needs of others on the same level as your own, you are simply being smart. Being nice is the smartest thing you can possibly do in your career.

Try as Hard as You Can

Many people want and demand a lot out of life. They want the happiest family, the best material goods and vacations, the best homes, and the best cars. They demand the best in everything. They also want the best jobs and the most advancement. Often, these same people feel very angry and upset if life does not provide them the things they want.

A lot of people are very upset with the world. They are angry about jobs they have lost. They are angry about advancements and breaks they have not received. In fact, these people believe the world owes them a lot. Most often, when people are angrily telling you how much the world owes them they are sitting around not doing much of anything. They may be talking to someone else in a bar. They may be talking on their cell phone during the day when they are supposed to be working. There are many who believe they are owed something.

I want to tell you one of the more inspiring stories I’ve heard. Several years ago I was practicing law, and a man in the office next to me worked extremely hard. He had a history of high achievement. He’d been the valedictorian at the University of Iowa Law School. He’d come over to this firm from another law firm. He wanted to be a partner. Most law firms require you work at the firm a certain number of years before they will make you a partner, and this law firm was no different. I believe at that time the firm had a charter which said people needed to work there for three full years before they could be considered for a partnership position.

At the end of this man’s second year, after billing over 3,000 hours each year, he was not made partner. The reaction of most attorneys would have been to accept the fact they are not being made partner due to the fact the charter required them to work there for three years. This man was different, however. He was someone who was interested in always trying his hardest, and sometimes trying your hardest means ignoring the rules of how things are working around you.

In the month of January, after not making partner, this man billed over 400 hours. Since there are only 720 hours in the average month, this essentially meant he was working very long days seven days a week and sleeping very little.

He did the same thing in February.

He did the same thing again in March.

After seeing the incredible amount of hours he had been working, in early April the firm decided to call a special meeting, amend their charter, and make him a partner. The firm simply felt it had no choice. They had to make him partner or else the man might have ended up killing himself from too much work. This is an example of really trying your hardest. This is the sort of reaction to a perceived setback very few attorneys would ever have. This man was different, however, and is an example of someone who simply did not give up.

The only excuse for not having the job you want, the life you want, and everything you want out of life is you did your best and did not get it. I have a secret for you, however, and I think it is something you may have failed to realize your entire life: you have never done your best with anything you have attempted. You have never really given 100 percent at anything. Imagine what is going to happen for you when you start trying to give 100 percent. I am very excited to see what happens when you start trying to hit 100 percent.

When you think about the example of this attorney it may not seem that significant until you really think it through. In order to work this hard you need to push your body beyond exhaustion. You need to push your mind well beyond exhaustion. You need to get other attorneys to give you the work that will allow you to bill this much. You need to give everything you can even when the rules appear to be against you. You need to do everything in your power to achieve what you want to do.

Have you ever run a marathon? I have not and wish I had. A marathon is something that teaches people to give their all. The distance they have to run is taxing on their bodies. They need to use their minds to overcome the resistance in their bodies. They need to keep pushing even when they feel they cannot go on.

You can likely point to many instances in your life where you may have come close to giving 100 percent and believe you made a major effort. Perhaps this was trying to get a job, working for a promotion, or related to a personal matter. My belief is you never really gave the full 100 percent, though. In fact, you probably have never given 100 percent at anything you have ever done.

I would like to propose to you a way of life and a way of being in the world where you start giving close to 100 percent and doing your best in every possible thing you can. This means in every single thing you do in the future you need to make a major effort and do your best to succeed. Before I do that, though, I would like to tell you another quick story.

When I played football in high school, I always noticed my grades were better during the season. When you think about this, it does not make a lot of sense. After all, I would be out practicing for several hours a day and even traveling sometimes to play. I was not alone in this. Most football players get better grades during the football season. That’s because when they do sit down to study they are more careful with their time and know it is important to be very focused during this time. Another reason for this, I think, is that they are in better shape. Their minds work better because their bodies are in better shape. They are “at their best,” so to speak.

There is a lot you can do in terms of trying your best. You can discipline your mind to enable you to push yourself harder. You can read and research about how to do better at what you are doing. You can practice. You can pray. You can interview and learn from people who are the best at what you are doing. You can always push yourself to do better in everything that you do.

One of the disciplines I practice is Kundalini yoga. I enjoy this form of yoga not just because it is relaxing but because, at its highest level, what it does through various actions is force your mind and your body to their absolute limits. When you push your mind, you also push your body, and when you go through the various exercises you become a completely different person. You go past what you thought was possible. A Kundalini exercise, for example, may involve holding your arms outstretched, keeping them straight, and flapping them each up and down six inches. An exercise like this can be easily done for a minute or so, but when you keep doing it for, say, seven minutes, it becomes next to impossible. You need to condition your mind to give it your all. Your arms, and your shoulders start hurting tremendously. At some point, however, the pain stops. When you break through the pain you are able to live your life on the other side.

Kundalini yoga is very effective because it can teach people how to give life their all.

Trying your hardest is about coming up against your limits, pushing through, and doing this time and again. You need to continually push through every possible limit you have. If you are going to do the best you can in anything, you need to use your mind and your body. You need to learn from others. You need to become fixated on doing everything possible to succeed. This is how you achieve your dreams and this is how you live the life you want. The people who succeed in life and reach their full potential are the people who push all the way through their limits.

In the book Think and Grow Rich, there is a very inspiring story:

One of the most common causes of failure is the habit of quitting when one is overtaken by temporary defeat. Every person is guilty of this mistake at one time or another. An uncle of R. U. Darby caught the “gold fever” in the gold-rush days, and went west to dig and grow rich. He had never heard that more gold has been mined from the brains of men than has ever been taken from the earth. He staked a claim and went to work with pick and shovel. The going was hard, but his lust for gold was definite.

After weeks of labor, he was rewarded by the discovery of the shining ore. He needed machinery to bring the ore to the surface. Quietly, he covered up the mine, and retraced his footsteps to his home in Williamsburg, Maryland. He then told his relatives and a few neighbors of the “strike.” They got together money for the needed machinery, and had it shipped. The uncle and Darby went back to work the mine.

The first car of ore was mined and shipped to a smelter. The returns proved they had one of the richest mines in Colorado! A few more cars of that ore would clear the debts. Then came the big killing in profits.

Down went the drills! Up went the hopes of Darby and uncle! Then something happened! The vein of gold ore disappeared! They had come to the end of the rainbow, and the pot of gold was no longer there! They drilled on, desperately trying to pick up the vein again – all to no avail.

Finally, they decided to quit. They sold the machinery to a junk man for a few hundred dollars, and took the train back home. Some “junk” men are dumb, but not this one! He called in a mining engineer to look at the mine and do a little calculating. The engineer advised the project had failed because the owners were not familiar with “fault lines.” His calculations showed the vein would be found just three feet from where the Darbys had stopped drilling! That is exactly where they found it!

Most people miss the gold in their life because they do not try their hardest. In this story, the Darbys trying their hardest would have simply involved continuing to drill and researching exactly what needed to be done. The world is composed of so many parts and so many variables. You can always find a variable to push through and will always succeed when you do.

When I was about 10 years old the most important assignment we had in grade school that year was to spend three months writing a report about a country. I was assigned Russia. Over the next three months I made writing about Russia an important goal. I found every book in the elementary school library and even had my father take me to the downtown Detroit library on Saturday to check out as many books as I could possibly find. When the day came for putting my report together I had to put the chapters in multiple rooms because there were so many of them. It took three large binders to fit the entire report together and when all was said and done the report was over 400 pages.

Why would I write a report like this? Why would any 10 year old do something like this? Personally, I did it because I learned somewhere along the line the best thing you can do is try as hard as you can, and that you do not always get the opportunity to shine and do your best. Most people never try as hard as they can or do their best. Who knows why this is? A culture of sorts exists that actually seems to be against people doing their best.

Develop the habit of pushing yourself and always doing your best. I look back on my time in elementary school and know – as ridiculous as this sounds – that I always did my best. People who always do their best are sought out by others, and everyone wants these people to work with them, and for them.

When I was practicing law some of my first clients were people who knew me when I was a very young man. They found out I was an attorney and sought me out from all over the United States. They did this because they knew whatever issues they had I would fight like hell for them and do my best. While kids may have made fun of me when I was in elementary school for working so hard, they practically lined up to talk to me once they knew I could go to work for them.

For years after I stopped practicing law, I used to get calls from former co-workers who were starting their own firms. They wanted me to give up recruiting and come to work with them practicing law. They called me because they knew I would do my best.

People want to work with people who do their absolute best. The rewards from doing your best far eclipse what waits for people who make a mediocre effort. Try your hardest in every single thing that you ever do, and make the most of your life.

The rewards for not trying your best are few and far between. You can choose to live an average life and have average results if you choose. You will not inspire others around you if you do. People will not seek you out to do work. You will not respect yourself as much.

Nothing makes me angrier than someone not trying his best. You have been gifted with a life and this life is your chance to make the most of everything. Try your hardest and never give up. Always do the absolute best you can with everything. This is what you are entitled to, and deserve.

The Most Important Thing You Can Have Is Faith

Several years ago I was practicing law, and over Christmas I went home to Michigan from Los Angeles for a one week vacation. At the time, I was also a law professor and I had brought a stack of papers to grade with me. For several days I read paper after paper. After about a day, it occurred to me I was unhappy with my life. I was unhappy with my job. I did not like where my life was headed and what my career was like. At the time I was making a very good living and doing everything I thought I should be doing. But I was not happy.

For the next few nights I had a lot of difficulty sleeping. Then I made a decision. What was making me unhappy was not just my job but the practice of law. I did not want to be an attorney anymore. I simply did not want to do this.

I had gotten married just a few months before. I had also bought a house around the same time with a pretty decent-sized mortgage. By all appearances, my life was on the right track for someone in his late 20s. I had done everything I thought was right up until that point in my life. But my job did not make me happy. I did not like the constant confrontation. I did not like where I worked at the time. I did not feel my talents were being utilized as much as they could be. I knew this was simply something I did not want to do any longer.

I went back to work on January 3rd and gave my two weeks notice. I knew this was not what I wanted and I simply needed to have faith that everything would work out. I had no savings to speak of and my wife was not earning very much money. I needed to trust that everything would work out – although at the time I had no idea what was going to happen. I knew deep down, however, that if I was happy I would do much better in my life than if I wasn’t.

Your ultimate resource in your job search and in your life is faith. Faith is the most important thing in the world. Faith is what enables you to move forward and find a new job, to get into a new relationship, to move to a new city, to start a new life, and to take chances. Similarly, a lack of faith causes people to feel trapped in bad relationships and never leave them, work in jobs they hate, and stay in circumstances which do not make them happy. The most important and forward-looking thing you can do is have faith.

Similarly, the worst thing you can do is spend time around people who shake the faith you have in yourself. When we are driving, we have faith the cars across the median will not cross over and hit us. We have faith when we are walking down the street we will not get shot. We have faith when we get home at night, our spouse will still be there. We have faith our children will always love us. When you get on an airplane, you generally have faith the plane will take off and land safely. You should. Statistically, you are 10 times more likely to get hit by lightning than die in an airplane crash. Nevertheless, after September 11 numerous people became afraid of flying. The goal of the terrorists was to shake our faith in our daily lives and, for many, it worked. Is there anyone around you who shakes your faith?

Faith gives people the will to live even when it looks like there is no reason to go on. I remember when I was a young boy my stepfather had to undergo a surgery that lasted almost 36 hours to remove all sorts of cancer from his body. The surgeons said before they took him there was a 99 percent chance he would die in surgery. Before he went into surgery, he told my mother he would be fine and not to worry. When he came out of surgery, the surgeons said the only thing that kept him alive was his faith and without it he never would have survived. I have heard others tell stories about faith like this before. Faith is something that is real and makes a giant difference in peoples lives. It can change your life, too.

Faith is the key that opens the doors of possibility. If you had faith that you could do anything, what would you do? Would you walk right up and talk to your dream mate? Would you embark on a new career? What would you do if you knew you could not fail? If you knew you could not fail, you could do anything in the world. I once saw the most ridiculous thing and it stuck with me. For years I used to go by a certain man’s house in Detroit to seal his asphalt. The man was a printer who did the same job day after day, and he did not seem particularly enthusiastic about it. After six or so years of working for him, I went by his doorway and saw him wearing a Hawaiian shirt and sunglasses – not the sort of blue-collar outfit he usually wore.

“What are you doing?” I asked him.

“I sold my printing business, sold my house, and bought a deli in the Bahamas. I’m leaving tomorrow,” he told me.

Now that’s faith – taking control of your life, following your heart, and doing what you want to do.

It is far better to make mistakes and fail than it is to not try something. You are almost always better off taking steps in the direction of the life you want than not taking any steps at all. You will always be better off from having learned lessons and exercised your faith.

The most important characteristic of any leader is faith, specifically faith that they can bring the people they are leading the result they are seeking. The greatest business minds have mastered the art of having faith. For example, when Bill Gates was at Harvard, he decided he no longer wanted to go to school. He was more interested in computers. Having faith and nothing more, he dropped out of school, found someone who had invented a computer but had no operating system for it, and purchased the rights to the DOS program. He knew making a computer work would create profound results, and he had faith in the future. He ended up becoming one of the richest men in the world and changing the world through his contributions.

When Sam Walton opened his first Wal-Mart, it was a disaster. One of the first days he was open, he had a watermelon sale and stacked hundreds of watermelons in front of the store. It was so hot, however, that all of the watermelons were exploding, and when people pulled up to the store it looked like there had been a mass murder. Nonetheless, Walton had faith in his idea and pursued it.

It is not just businesses which require faith, however. It is you. You need to have faith in who you can become. You need to have faith that you will get the job you want and live the life you want. You need to have faith in your future. There is something remarkable about the power of faith: the power of faith changes everything. Faith is not logical. You cannot live your life with logic alone. Faith is what drives people to do things when they have no idea what the end result will be. When you have faith you act because you know the universe will take care of you. You do not act because you are certain of the result.

There are lots of people who live their lives certain of the results they will achieve. Not much ever happens with these sorts of people. They never even come close to reaching their full potential. You can live your life with certainty but, if you do, you will never know how fulfilled you can possibly be and how much you can achieve.

The present is not the future. Faith is what gives us a future that is different from the present we have today. Step into the future and decide what you want from it. Once you have decided what you want from the future, it is important you have faith and set about going after your dreams. You need to put yourself on the line. You need to see a better tomorrow.

After quitting my job, I still did not know what I was going to do. My law firm told me to stick around for three months and look for another job because they did not think it sounded rational for me to just leave. So this is what I did. I went out and interviewed with other law firms, but I did not take any jobs because I was not interested in practicing law. I spoke with recruiters while I was looking for a job, and the more I spoke with them, the more their jobs looked interesting to me. What ended up happening, of course, was that I chose to start recruiting.

I remember about three months after I began recruiting a few of my wife’s friends were at the house. At the time, my wife had started to think I was insane. I had left a job paying over $150,000 a year and was now running a recruiting business out of our family room. The problem was the business was not doing all that well. In fact, I had scarcely gotten any candidates interviews and had been at it for three months. In addition, I had hardly any money left. I had taken out a home equity loan during my final weeks of practicing law and this money was almost gone. I had long ago maxed out my credit cards. My wife’s family used to call her and she would walk out to the front lawn to talk on the phone. We had only been married a few months at that point, and I think she thought she must have made a real mistake. In all fairness, she had signed up to be married to a lawyer, and that was not what was going on at the moment.

In a manner that implied some concern, a couple of my wife’s friends walked up to my desk and asked me how I was doing. I started telling them about how I had recently gotten a new candidate and how wonderful the candidate was. I told them I was in the middle of putting together a long letter about the candidate and the more I learned about the candidate, the more impressed I was. The funniest thing happened after I told them about the candidate. I was sitting there with probably 10 Diet Coke cans spread across my desk and piles of paper on the floor. I had not shaved in a couple of days, and I was very involved in the work I was doing. I remember I looked away for a second and, when I looked back, one of my wife’s friends was looking at the other friend with his finger pointed at his head moving it around in circles like I was crazy. I must have looked crazy. Everyone thought I was crazy for pursuing my dream like this. But I had faith.

The entire basis of Christianity, Islam, and most major religions of the world is faith. The greatest accomplishments in the world are achieved when people have faith. When you have faith in yourself and faith in an idea, anything at all is possible.

One of the most exciting places in the world is Disneyland. There is an institute there where employees can take classes and learn about the founding of the company. The story of the founding of Disneyland is one of the greatest stories of the power of faith there is. According to one account:

With Disneyland, Walt Disney envisioned a place where parents and children could go to enjoy themselves and see fantasy become real. Disappointed with the quality of amusement parks he visited with his children, Disney wanted his park to be clean, well-organized, and family-friendly. He first planned to build the park on a lot in Burbank, but he soon realized that he needed more space, so he bought an orange grove in Anaheim, California.

No one thought his idea would work. He was advised by other amusement park officers the park was doomed to failure. He could not convince financiers to invest in the park because his dreams offered “too little collateral.” Even his brother, who handled the studio’s finances, refused to spend company funds on the project.

In spite of the opposition, Disney refused to give up. He cashed in his life insurance policy and sold his family home to raise the $11 million required for the park’s construction. When more money was needed, he signed a contract with the American Broadcasting Company to air a weekly show in exchange for ABC’s investment in the park. He bet every penny on the success of the park and remained determined to make it a reality. Driven by his zeal, construction of the park began July 21, 1954, and it opened almost exactly a year later, on July 17, 1955.

It appeared the doomsayers had been right. Opening day was a disaster. Worse, there was national TV coverage. Tickets were counterfeited, resulting in 28,000 guests instead of the 11,000 invited. Rides broke under the stress of operation. Plumbers were on strike, so bathrooms and drinking fountains were not working. The asphalt roads, having been poured the night before, were still soft and trapped ladies’ high-heeled shoes.

Disney was not swayed by the park’s disastrous opening. He fixed the problems and continued to plan and build better attractions. He continuously found new ideas that kept people coming back for more. After 10 years, more than 50 million people had visited Disneyland, and today it remains a national attraction. More than that, as historian Larry Schweikart has observed, “Disneyland set the standard by which future parks were judged.” Against all odds, Walt Disney had built an amusement park that had become an amazing success. (Source: http://www.mackinac.org/article.aspx?ID=7164)

When you have faith in yourself the impossible can happen. Disney, for example, has left behind a huge and lasting legacy with Disneyland and his company. He put his faith and mind behind the power of an idea and stuck with it. Faith is what changes the world, and faith can change your life as well. The more you believe in something and the more faith you have in it, the more your mind will attract similar thoughts. These similar thoughts will build upon each other, get stronger and stronger, and get you closer to what you are seeking. This is the power of faith.

Your life and your future begin with thoughts. Faith is the most important thing you can have. When you have faith you can do absolutely anything. Regardless of what is going on in your career, or your life, you need to have faith.

After four months of recruiting, I still had not made a single placement. My credit cards were maxed out, my home equity loan was maxed out, and my wife was beyond freaked out. One Monday morning, I answered the phone and it was a law firm. They told me they were making an offer to one of my candidates. The next day the same thing happened and on Thursday and Friday it happened again.

In less than one week I had made four placements and the business was up and running. It was one of the most wonderful weeks of my life and really taught me the power of faith. When you believe in yourself and what you can do, anything is possible. You need to start believing in what you can do right now.

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.

Choose Your Frames of Reference Wisely

I spent the summer following my first year of law school working at the Department of Justice (the “DOJ”) in Washington, DC. The entire summer and the events leading up to it resulted in one of the strangest experiences I have ever had. After I got the job with the DOJ, I was required to undergo a security clearance with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. After contacting and questioning many people I knew in the past, the FBI also required me to take a physical and a drug test.

In late spring, I went in for the physical when I was studying for my final exams. It was like something out of a Frankenstein movie. There was a skeleton hanging by a wire inside the doctor’s office and the whole place was very disorganized. He started telling me strange stories about grisly things like a decapitation case he had been involved with at the morgue, for example. The doctor looked like a mad scientist—his hair was disheveled and his comments were bizarre.

I was the last patient of the day on a Friday afternoon. The doctor had to let me out of the building because everyone was gone for the day. On Saturday I went to the library around 5:00 pm and did not return until around 1:30 am. When I got home there was a message on my answering machine. The machine said it had been received about 45 minutes previously, at 12:45 am:

“Hello, this is the doctor who did your physical on Friday. It is important that I speak with you right away… please call me immediately! Your exam was fine. This is about something far more urgent!” He left no number, and I searched frantically for the number of the clinic. I could not imagine why the doctor would be calling me at such a strange hour. I called the clinic and an answering machine picked up. I did not leave a message. On Sunday I called again and the machine picked up again. I still did not leave a message.

On Monday I came home from the library around noon or so and called the clinic again. This time someone did pick up. I asked to speak with the doctor.

“Who is this!?” the person on the other end of the line demanded.

“He left me a message early Sunday morning,” I replied.

“That’s impossible,” the person said. “He was found dead this morning in the office. He had been dead since Friday night.”

This was the start of my bizarre summer at the DOJ.

A few days into my job at the DOJ, my boss (an important government official who had been appointed by the president) came into my office and told me he had heard I was living in a skid row hotel and that I could stay at his house if I watered his lawn and fed his bird. At the time, I was paying $100 or so a week to stay at the hotel – the cheapest place I could find at the time.

My boss wanted me to live in his home while he and his family traveled throughout Europe for the summer. I took up residence in his basement, where I was surrounded by boxes and a collection of hard liquor bottles. Despite the surroundings, the living conditions in the basement were much better than the skid row hotel.

There were lots of things I did not enjoy about working with the DOJ. In addition to the supernatural death experience with the doctor a few weeks before, and the time I spent in the skid row hotel, I was now living with a bird in a basement surrounded by liquor bottles and boxes of old albums. My job was strange as well. I was working in a huge building with hardly any windows. The pay was low and the people I was working with did not appear happy. (There are numerous different divisions within the DOJ, so my experience was perhaps not the norm; however, I found the entire experience thoroughly unpleasant.)

One of the strangest things about my experience working with the DOJ was the group of people with whom I shared an office. Every day a very large woman would come in with a man who looked no more than 20 and they would sit in the office with me all day. They would do nothing but spend the majority of their time eating and looking at me. There were no computers on their desks and I never saw them on the phone. As far as I knew, they did nothing.

When I would type, they would seem annoyed. “Gotta hit those keys,” one would say. “Yep, hit ‘em up!” the other would chime in.

I was involved in research projects that made no sense to me. One of them involved a bunch of hypothetical questions about nuclear powered airplanes exploding over subdivisions in North Carolina. The job, the people, Washington, DC… none of it was very appealing.

Many of the people I was working with seemed like zombies.

I remember the phone ringing in the house late one evening, and I rushed upstairs from the basement to grab it. It was a relative of mine I had not spoken to in some time who was working overseas. There was a delay in the communication because he was in Poland at the time (I think for the CIA) and he was calling on what sounded like a satellite phone.

I told my relative I was not interested in working for the government, the pay was low and that the work was not that exciting – and was, in fact, bizarre. This was, of course, due to the division I was working in at the time, not just the government affiliation. I will never forget what my relative said to me.

“Isn’t this the most you can expect out of your life? If you do this, you will have really succeeded.”

For me, this was not what I wanted in my life. At that moment this person was trying to provide me a reference claiming this was what I should expect out of my life and was the best I could do. This was not the reference I wanted. My idea of what it meant to be a lawyer was much more than this. Had I chosen to believe this relative and accept that assessment, I may have spent my life doing something I did not enjoy.

I have provided you so much detail about my experience because I quickly created a reference for myself that the worst possible thing that could happen to me was to work for the government. I had such a strange and bad experience I came to believe I needed to expect something far different for myself. Working for the government had gone from being my dream to my nightmare.

This makes no sense, of course. Working for the government offers incredible opportunity, but our references are what control how we think about things. People (like my relative) provide us with references as to how we may choose to view our lives, and we can either accept them or deny them. Here, I reacted with rage.

“Are you kidding? This is the last freaking thing I’ll ever want for myself!” I think I may have hung up on the relative and not spoken to him for weeks afterward.

I know my relative must have been perplexed by my reaction. His implication that this was the best I could expect made me furious. I did not want to be judged as being part of the government world.

When I got back to law school in the fall, I made sure I did everything I possibly could to get a great job with a law firm. I tried to get as far away from a government career as I possibly could.

How has your career been shaped?

Have you allowed yourself and your career to be shaped by early experiences you have had?

Have your early interpretations of the world and what has happened to you made you a better or a stronger person?

In your career, have you been so turned off by certain early experiences that your version of the world and your place in it is different from what it needs to be?

Are you allowing early interpretations of the world to shape and control your destiny?

We need to take what we experience and frame it in a way that makes us stronger and makes life work for us the way it should work.

At the age of 21, Billy Joel had been playing in bars for seven years. The life he saw in front of him was something very depressing to him. He was not always treated well in bars and, according to one account, drunks had actually spit on him when he was playing the piano. He had a series of misfortunes, was drinking too much, and simply wanted to die. He was not even making a very good living playing piano. In a 2002 essay in Time magazine, Joel wrote:

“The band thing wasn’t working. I had no money. I had had a series of jobs like oystering, landscaping, pumping gas. I was homeless. I slept in laundromats or in cars. I was crashing at friends’ houses. I’d sneak into my mom’s house and sleep there. I didn’t want to move back home; I didn’t want to admit defeat.

I actually tried to commit suicide at 21. I drank furniture polish. I had no purpose in life, and I thought it was all over. I checked myself into an observation ward [in a hospital] for a while because I knew I was suicidal. I wanted to get some help, and I had an epiphany. I saw people who had profound emotional problems. These people were manic-depressives and paranoid schizophrenics. I looked around and said to myself, I don’t have any problems. I realized all I was doing was being absurdly self-absorbed and giving in to self-pity, and I wanted to just get out. So I told them what they wanted to hear. I took the medicine. I walked around with the bathrobe open in the a__, like in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. People were moaning and groaning all night, and I thought, please, just let me get out of here, and I’ll never be that stupid again.

This experience was one of the best things I have ever gone through. I have never given in to any kind of self-pity for longer than two minutes since then. I realized I can solve my own problems. It showed me that what I thought was my own hell was nothing compared with the hell of others. I have taken that 21-year-old with me throughout my life. He has helped me through the deaths of friends, family matters, personal-relationship issues, minefields of the music business, writer’s block.”(Time, Jan. 21, 2002)

The most important things we have in our lives are references. What determines the quality of our lives is how we evaluate our situations. When I think about Joel, I also think of my early experience with the government. I formed beliefs about what the government was like and used this to propel myself away from it. Joel used his experience “going crazy” to propel his mind away from feeling sorry for himself and towards being grateful for what he was and the life he could have. The reference and association he made in his mind made him change the way he approached life and his place in it.

Years later, of course, Joel would go on to be one of the most famous musicians in the world, become fabulously wealthy, and marry one of the most beautiful women in the world, Christie Brinkley. How can a man go from drinking furniture polish at the age of 21 to the heights of stardom and greatness that few ever experience? According to Joel, having seen people who were really suffering made him realize there was no reason why he should ever feel sorry for himself again. By having seen the other side, he very quickly realized how much his life meant and how much he had to look forward to.

I have never used drugs, or even tried them. There is a reason for this. When I was growing up, I saw numerous lives practically destroyed by recreational drugs at a very young age. A drug-crazed maniac shot and killed my stepsister when I was in second grade. My school also had a program where the police came around a couple of times a year and showed people in our class pictures of drug related deaths. Speakers came to our school and talked about the dangers of drugs, how people died or had their lives otherwise destroyed by them. From the time I was seven or eight years old until now, I have always been terrified of drugs – my reference to drugs.

The references you have for the way the world is will impact everything that happens to you. These references will shape your life. The people who achieve the most in the world are the people who are empowered by, and not dragged down by, references. One of the best things you can do is allow your references to empower you in a positive and not a negative way. So many people create negative references from their experiences, and their lives are paralyzed and hurt forever by these references.

One of the saddest things that can happen to a person is to be sexually abused when they are young. While growing up, I knew two girls who had been sexually abused by their own fathers. Each girl reacted differently to the experience. One gained a lot of weight so she would not be attractive to men and became angry, hateful, and bitter. The other girl became incredibly attractive and also promiscuous. After years of therapy, the promiscuous one told me she had used sex as a control mechanism over men to prove she owned her body and her father did not. She viewed sex as a way to have control instead of something that was about bonding. Both of these women allowed a bad experience and reference to control the course of their lives and affect how they saw themselves in the world and interacted with it. I often think about these two women because the contrast is so remarkable.

People use their experiences and what happens to them in different ways. Some people use their references for good and others for bad. People who achieve the most in the world and in their lives do so because of the references they hold in their mind.

Your references do not need to be things that have happened in the past. They can also be references you set up for your future and what will happen in your future. When Sony first started marketing radios in the United States in the middle of the 1950s, Bulova offered to purchase 100,000 units, but insisted they be marketed under the Bulova brand name. This was to be the largest order Sony had ever received and would give the floundering company money to grow and prosper.

At the time, Sony co-founder Akio Morita barely had any money. With some of the last money he had to his name, Morita called Sony headquarters in Japan from the United States and told them about the order. They encouraged Morita to take the order. Morita was firm he did not want to accept the order and told headquarters that he was not going to take it. Headquarters thought he was crazy.

When Morita told Bulova about his decision, they stated, “Our company name is a famous brand name that has taken over fifty years to establish. Nobody has ever heard of your brand name. Why not take advantage of ours?”

Morita remained steadfast in his views and refused to accept the order.

His rejoinder to Bulova: “Fifty years ago, your brand name must have been just as unknown as our name is today. I am here with a new product, and I am taking the first step for the next fifty years of my company. Fifty years from now I promise you that our name will be just as famous as your company name is today.”

The references you create for yourself about what you will be and what you can be control your destiny. The filters we view life and the world through have a stunning effect on what ends up happening to us and shaping our futures. Your beliefs and values come from the references you give yourself. We use references to give us certainty about the way things are.

When Thomas Edison was designing the light bulb and failing again and again, he did not say “Aw, what’s the use?” Instead, he told himself he was one step closer to creating the light bulb each time he failed. He used failure as a reference to show he was getting closer to his goal. How do you interpret the world around you?

You succeed in life by creating references that empower you rather than dragging you down. In my job with the government, I could have taken my early experience to mean there was something “supernatural” about me working there and that people would “come to my aid,” such as my boss who offered me a free place to live. I could have decided I was working on the most incredible projects of all time, projects that would shape national policy and what happened in the world. I could have told myself my experience was something that could lead to me being the President of the United States and to helping millions of people both in our country and around the world. I could have easily given my experience that meaning.

You can do the same thing with your work and life experiences. Let your experiences empower you. Give them positive, not negative, meaning. When you look at your past in a way that empowers you, every single day is a new opportunity for growth. When you look at your past in this way, you may realize the worst days of your life were actually your very best.

Link a different meaning to your experiences so you can be stronger. Billy Joel took a horrible event and linked something incredibly positive to it. The transformation of this experience made him strong and gave him a life that would empower any one of us. He also used this experience to empower the world through his music. You can rationalize any experience you have the same way Joel did.

When I was growing up, I was exceptionally good at soccer. At one point I was so good I was not allowed to play on regular teams. Instead, I was on a special team for all of Detroit that traveled around playing different teams in other parts of the state.

After a couple years of this, however, I rapidly lost all interest in soccer and sports in general. It was too much pressure. Too much was expected of me, and the game was no longer fun. It was so competitive and brutal I would feel badly about myself after virtually every game, unless I got a “hat trick” (three goals). Because I had great talent, I was expected to practice all the time.

After a while, I intentionally stopped doing as well as I could at soccer and instead sabotaged myself. I did not play as hard as I could and started to fail at the game.

My life was never the same.

Although I played varsity soccer my first year of high school, I stopped playing after that and was no longer interested. I did not want the pressure. I made different kinds of friends and dropped out of the game forever. I became friends with the sorts of kids who did not play sports and got into trouble. I was escaping life as an athlete. It made no sense.

I formed the wrong references and made the game represent something other than what it was. The fact is we give things the meanings we choose. Have you ever stopped doing something at which you were talented? If so, the chances are very good you stopped doing it because you allowed yourself to form a different meaning of what it was. We view things through the lenses we choose. Everyone looks at the world based on the experiences they have had in the past and what they mean.

Different religions view the world in different ways. If you were to eat a steak in India, a Hindu would be horrified. If you tried to shake the hand of an Orthodox Jew of a different sex, they would pull their hand away in shock. If you tried to take a practicing Mormon to a bar and have a drink with them, they would be repulsed. We view the world based on the sorts of experiences we have had and what we tell ourselves the world and different things mean. We view the world through filters, and it is important we realize the filters we are using are not always the correct ones. We use references to create the filters we use to see the world.

I want to encourage you to stand guard at the door of your mind. Do not let your past represent something negative that can hurt you now. None of us have had perfect life experiences. There is something inside of you, however, that is holding you back from reaching for the stars in your career. You are capable of so much. How different would the memories of high school been for me if I had allowed myself to be a star soccer player? How different would Billy Joel’s life have been if he’d allowed himself to stay depressed? How different would your life be today if you allowed your past to empower you? How different would your present be if you knew you were capable of greatness and accepted nothing but the best for yourself, like Morita of Sony?

There is no limit to your life except the limits you impose on it. Your career and the world are wide open to you. Try to look at everything you have done in the past as a powerful lesson that is making you stronger and better today. Never allow yourself to be limited by your own mind. Allow your mind to interpret the world for your benefit, and not your detriment.

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.

Your Job is a Game: Make Your Opponents External

What You Will Learn Your ability to play the game and be part of the team will determine your success or failure. Ensure you are playing by the rules in your company and you are always seen as part of the team. People who consistently work hard and play by the rules are always viewed by the team as valuable players. Leave it to other people to get involved in the political innuendos and other negative goings-on in your company – work hard and do not participate in the politics.

After being in the workforce for many years, I’ve come to realize that all of our jobs are, quite simply, games. In every job you have ever had you are part of a game. Your ability to play the game and be part of the team will determine your success or failure. The ability of your employer to externalize the game and the opponent will determine the success or failure of the enterprise. Games consist of rules, freedoms, barriers, and opponents.

Every organization has a certain set of rules by which it operates. These rules determine how you should do your work. If you violate these rules, you can be kicked out of the game (fired) much like a soccer player can be ejected from a game for doing something improper. Your employer will typically have a set of rules for when you are supposed to be at work, how the work is to be done, and the number of tasks you are required to complete (in a sport we might call these points).

Every organization and business also has a series of freedoms and barriers. The freedoms are the actions you can take and the things you are allowed to do. The barriers are the things you cannot do. The freedoms are given much like a sport assigns different freedoms. For example, in soccer the goalie is the only one allowed to touch the ball with his hands (a specially designated freedom), while the other players are not allowed to do so (a barrier). In corporations, different people typically have different rights, depending on their given position within the corporation.

The most significant part of any game is the presence of an opponent. If you don’t have an opponent, it’s not a game. It’s just practice.

One of the most interesting things I have seen in the workforce is that organizations tend to have opponents who are both external and, unfortunately, internal. A business and its people are “fired-up” and motivated primarily by the presence of outside opponents, and the need to overcome them. Businesses and their people also become more cohesive by coming together against their opponents. If this does not occur, the organization most often fails.

Most companies have a series of external opponents. For example, Yahoo!’s external opponent would be Google and vice versa. Amazon’s would be Barnes & Noble. Apple’s is Microsoft. The presence of external opponents serves to bring people within corporations together to fight for a common purpose, and to motivate the people in the company to work hard and believe in what they are doing. Fighting the good fight helps motivate people to get up in the morning and to get excited about going to work.

Organizations generally operate under the belief there is an external opponent to be fought (i.e., the “established company”) in a given space. However, if there is no established force for the organization to fight against, problems often develop.

Another issue that develops in virtually all companies – especially companies with no external opponent – is that people inside the company start manufacturing internal opponents instead of external ones. This most often occurs in companies without well-defined external competitors. In my opinion, the internal opponent phenomenon is among the more important things to understand when it comes to work and your success in both getting and keeping a job.

Several years ago, I started getting calls from associates in a large law firm in Los Angeles that, at the time, was called Troop Meisinger. This was a very successful law firm that was also considered a very good place to work in Los Angeles. While I am not aware of the specifics of how the firm was run, many parts of the firm had been pieced together from numerous other law firms (i.e., groups had joined from other firms or through mergers). When these groups joined, they were often viewed as competitors for the firm’s work and profits, and were treated as outsiders by the senior staff attorneys. Eventually, the firm became a group of numerous factions that were all working against one another. Instead of competing against outside law firms, all of these factions were competing against one another.

The calls that came to me from the firm’s associates were always about a different internal opponent within the firm. With so many internal opponents, the firm eventually imploded. When many of these groups found new jobs at other firms, they started creating the same sort of problems out of habit and did a lot of damage to the firms they joined.

As the old adage states, “Two is company and three is a crowd.” This is often true. A group of two people often collaborates better than a group of three. I think what tends to happen in a group of three is two of the people will find a slight to major degree of fault with the third person and, as a consequence, will come together to exclude the third person in some way.

The same thing happens in many organizations. Someone always seems to be on “the outs.” When someone is on “the outs”, they become an opponent to the group. It is like an athlete who is playing badly. The team members start talking about how this player is harming the team’s overall chances for success. The team may make the decision to sideline the player unless he or she changes and rises to the occasion.

I read somewhere that every year General Electric ranks its employees, and that the employees in the bottom 10 percent each year are given one year to improve. If they fall into the same bottom 10 percent the next year, they are dismissed. This is a method by which the company ensures that people who are not performers are eventually excluded from the team.

Unhealthy organizations can also find opponents in a paranoid way from time to time. These organizations allow rumors to flourish and enemies proliferate. If a manager arbitrarily fires people (regardless of whether or not they have been playing by the rules), people in the organization may start manufacturing internal opponents, often for no reason at all. No one knows who can be trusted in unhealthy organizations, and the process can get out of control.

This brings us back to you, and how you can find success in your career. You do not want to imagine the people you are working with as opponents, but as teammates. Externalize the opponent. Don’t look for an opponent among your co-workers. You want to ensure you are playing by the rules in your company, and that you are always seen as part of the team. If you’re not, then the team will quickly turn against you.

When you are interviewing for a position, you need to stress you’ll be part of the team, not someone who will be excluded from the team. When you are doing a job, you need to do everything within your power to ensure you’re always winning favor with the team, and that you are an asset. This means you should be doing things publicly that demonstrate you’re trying to help the team. You should also never speak negatively of your team members.

One of the best ways to tell if someone will be good at a job is to look at their employment stability. This is even more important than where someone went to school, how well they did in school, or even how prestigious their last employer was. Employment stability shows the ability to be a successful team player. Working successfully with most employers is like avoiding a hot ball that is always moving around. If the ball touches you, you will lose favor with the team, and you’ll be ejected from the game. The best workers are always the people who have the most stability, and who are able to consistently avoid the hot ball. I think this has a lot to do with the simple fact they’re able to work well with a team.

The people who have the most employment stability have very similar profiles. These people join “teams” rather than get jobs. When they are looking for a new job, it is usually because the owner of the company retired, or due to some other factor beyond their control. When they are hired, it is almost like their presence alone brings positivity to the organization they are joining. I have seen the résumés of people who have joined one company after another that failed. I’ve hired people like this and it’s almost as if they’ve brought a cancer to our company. They are negative and polarizing. I wonder sometimes if extremely negative people inside a corporation can actually cause that company to fail.

When I observe people who’ve had a lot of employment stability, I notice they never participate when people start speaking negatively of others. They simply do not get involved. I’m amazed at how well they navigate the waters and stay employed when others around them do not. It is also worth noting the people who tend to do well are also the people who consistently work hard and play by the rules. The team always views them as valuable players.

In order to become employed and stay employed you want to be part of the team. You do not want to be on the outs with the team. Instead of talking about internal opponents, find external ones to concentrate on. External opponents bring you and the team closer as you work toward a common goal. In order for your company to succeed it’s important it has an external opponent to drive it towards victory.

My career advice is to leave it to other people to get involved in the political innuendos and other negative goings-on in your company. Work hard and do not participate in the politics. This is a sure way for you to score big in your career.

Never Fib or Stretch the Truth on Your Résumé or in Interviews

No man has a good enough memory to be a successful liar.
-Abraham Lincoln

What You Will Learn Don’t exaggerate your qualifications on your resume or in your interviews – in case of getting caught, it weakens your case dramatically in the eyes of an employer. Achievements and what you have done are important, but the most important thing is how likable you are. Come across as someone who tries hard, makes an effort, learns from mistakes, is loyal, helps the company, and who is going to be a stable addition to the company. People are not hired because of some isolated accomplishment from their past. It is very important to be yourself and to present yourself as a likable individual and a team player.

Don’t exaggerate your qualifications on your résumé or in your interviews. The fact of the matter is there is no good reason to do this. I have a secret to tell you, and it is something far too many people fail to understand when they are conducting a job search. It is something that can change how you approach your job search forever. Before I share this with you, however, I want to tell you a quick story. It is a story that has stuck in my mind for a long time, and it relates to why you never need to exaggerate in interviews or on your résumé. Several years ago, I was once interviewing with a New York law firm for a position. I went out to lunch with a group of associates and they told me that the attorney I would be speaking with after lunch “did not like anyone.” They also made some statements about how strange the guy was. When I went into the attorney’s office (he was a tax attorney), I immediately noticed that the chair he asked me to sit in was turned at an odd angle to where he was sitting at his desk. Essentially, this meant that I had to turn my head very awkwardly to the side in order to speak with him. The sight of me sitting in such an awkward position probably would have appeared freakish to any onlooker.

Given the extreme order of his office, I realized before I even sat down that I should not move the chair. I understood that this attorney had a sense of order that could be considered obsessive, and that I should not disturb that sense of order.

Around this same time I had read a book about neurolinguistic programming (NLP), which discussed how we tend to like people who are like us. The meaning of NLP is much more complicated than this; however, it essentially states that we can better relate to people by “modeling them” in terms of their posture, body movements, breathing, language, and so forth. I liked what I read about NLP and believe that, in some respects it did work in terms of helping me gain trust and get into the minds of other people.

Sitting there in that chair, I tried to imagine why this guy would want me seated in such a strange posture. I looked at his desk and noticed that everything was very well centered. The books were in excellent order. I realized after a short time that he probably liked me sitting the way I was because of the fact that it made him feel like he was in control, and that I could not make any sudden movements towards him. It made him feel like he was guarded and protected.

In my interview I spoke about the importance of order, the importance of protecting oneself (in general terms) by doing good work, and other topics I thought he would appreciate, in response to his questions. I could tell this made him very comfortable, and it seemed to make him like me a great deal. What I realized right then and there was that it did not really matter how good my qualifications were or how good my résumé was. What mattered most was that I was likable to this interviewer.

Over the years, having worked with thousands of people as a recruiter and having spoken with thousands of individual employers about their interview experiences, I do not think I have heard more than a few times of an interviewer complaining about someone’s qualifications. What I have heard employers complain about, however, is that an interviewee was awkward, rude, or bragged too much. This response, which I have heard from numerous employers, has shown me how important a candidate’s likability in the interview is–over his or her résumé.

A few years ago I was interviewing a potential manager for our company. Everyone around this manager thought that he was exceptional in all respects. His mind picked things up very well and he was always able to rapidly recite various statistics about his department. All of his statistics were accurate and he had, by all accounts, a lot of potential.

When he interviewed, I had left the decision of whether or not to hire him to other managers at our company. The other managers made the job offer to him, and then came back to me stating that the individual (who was already very highly compensated) would not accept a new job unless he was paid an additional $200 a month. His justification for this demand was that he was changing jobs to make more money than he was currently making with another employer.

I told the managers right then and there that I did not approve of this hire. I told them the manager would probably leave for a higher-paying job the second it came along. The man also told me he was leaving his current job because he needed to gain more experience. All of these reasons signaled to me that the guy would probably be doing the same if he worked for our company, regardless of how the job went. Despite my protests, the manager was hired.

The manager started and, after a year, he was doing very well. I was spending a lot of time with him discussing various projects. One day I asked him how he liked his job.

“I am getting very good experience here,” he told me. “Which is good for my résumé.”

When I heard this I knew the manager would not be around for much longer. I was reminded of the events that had happened when he was hired. I realized that this was a person who would simply move on, in order to gain more experience or better pay.

Every few months, I get calls from former employees asking for references. I want nothing more than success for my former employees because their success is a reflection on me. In these telephone calls, the former employees often ask me to lie about their experience and responsibilities at the company. I have had people who work in my call center ask me to say that they were computer programmers for our company. I have had people who were recruiters ask me to say they had previously worked for us, managing a team of twenty people. Of course, this was not true either.

What is so sad about these telephone calls is, deep down, I know that the employee must feel a profound sense of inadequacy. I have always cautioned employees and job seekers to be truthful. People are typically hired because they find common ground with an employer and they are likable, not because of some isolated accomplishment from their past.

Achievements are important. What you have done is important. The most important thing, however, is how likable you are. This is generally why people are hired. Your achievements can be shaded any way the interviewer wants to shade them.

The thing that upsets me most about people who lie on their résumés or exaggerate their achievements is that they are missing the boat. All of us are human, and no one is perfect. You don’t need to exaggerate. Potential employers will either sense in an interview or find out shortly after you are hired that you do not have the skills or experience you boasted about. My career advice is that it is more important to be yourself and to present yourself as a likable individual and a team player.

The most important thing you can do when going into interviews and writing your résumé is come across as someone who is interested in trying hard and making an effort. Someone who learns from mistakes. Someone who is going to help the company and be very loyal. Someone who is going to be a stable addition to the company.

Your résumé is what it is. There is no need to embellish it. There is no need to try to make yourself out to be more than you are in an interview. You want people to like you. You do not want to be seen as insecure or pushy. You want the company to like you. Being caught up in a lie or exaggeration is not in your best interest and it weakens your case dramatically in the eyes of an employer.

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