Harrison Barnes » law school http://www.aharrisonbarnes.com Sun, 12 Feb 2012 05:01:50 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.1 Weight Loss, Security Guards, Hard Work and Your Career http://www.aharrisonbarnes.com/weight-loss-security-guards-hard-work-and-your-career/ http://www.aharrisonbarnes.com/weight-loss-security-guards-hard-work-and-your-career/#comments Sun, 25 Jul 2010 05:01:38 +0000 Harrison Barnes http://www.aharrisonbarnes.com/?p=10727 10727 In the Midwest, where I am from, many of the men and women there tend to start getting bigger and bigger, and wider and wider, when they hit their 30s.  I am not saying they all do, of course, but there is a definite trend there that I believe is much, much more “pronounced” than in other areas of the country. On the block where I grew up, a group of these women got together and decided to do something about it by exercising.  For hours each day, in a group of five or more, they would walk around the neighborhood in plus sized sweatpants with water bottles.  Rain or shine, I would see them out there meandering around the neighborhood.  It must have been a lot of work.  In the  winters, I would see them sitting on indoor bicycles at the gym peddling away while watching soap operas. However, when I saw these same women at neighborhood picnics they would eat all sorts of sweets, carbohydrates and other unhealthy items.  It does not take a rocket scientist to know that exercise does not change anything if you do not change your diet.  If anything, a lot of exercise might even make you eat more and gain more weight.  For years I watched these women walk around the neighborhood without losing any weight.  They worked and they worked and nothing ever happened. To me these women are a very good metaphor for what most of us do in one way or another with our careers: We may work a lot but we do not get anywhere.  We do not get anywhere because we are not willing to do the “hard work” to get ahead. In the case of weight loss, the really “hard work” is resisting the temptation to eat when you are hungry, changing your eating habits, eating less, eating less satisfying foods.  That is easier said than done–but this is where success or failure comes from in terms of losing the weight.  It is not the amount of work you that matters … it is how hard you work that matters.  Resisting the temptation to eat when you are hungry is much more difficult than walking around the neighborhood at 2 miles an hour while gossiping with your other friends. The skill and ability to fight the urge to eat is difficult and hard work.  It is in hard work, though, that we get our real results. When I was in college, our fraternity used to have parties with 500+ kids every Friday night.  They were a “for profit” enterprise and we invited the whole school, served cheap beer and used the funds from the party to subsidize the expenses of running the house. Since there were so many people at the parties, we used to hire a retired Chicago policeman to stand by the door in case there were any problems, fights and so forth. He would show up around 9:00 pm and stand in the doorway until about 1:00 am and then leave.  He would not talk much and would stand there in cold, heat and all sorts of weather just waiting until the party was over.  Despite being in his 60s, he was a large man and always carried a gun.  He looked menacing and served as a deterrent for people getting out of control and trashing out house. At the end of the party, we would pay him $150 for his “security” services.  He was more expensive than other guards we could have hired because he carried a gun.  We thought it was “cool” to have a guy at the party with a gun and a good deterrent in case something went wrong. I was the Treasurer of my fraternity my junior year of college and used to be in charge of paying him.  I thought that $150 seemed like a lot of money to pay him for standing around.  One day I told him that I thought he had a pretty good job standing there doing nothing for a few hours. That was the only time I ever saw him get mad: “I’ll tell you something,” he said.  “When you are my age you will not be spending your Friday nights standing on the porch of a fraternity house.  I guarantee it.” I have thought about this statement numerous times throughout the years.  He was right, of course, but I felt there was a lot more depth to what he was talking about than I was seeing.  The policeman was working hard and making a major effort—working all Friday night—and yet he was not really getting ahead. However, there were not many other expectations for the policeman beyond standing there. He was not expected to engage in long division.
  • He was not expected to sell anything.
  • He was not expected to perform surgery.
  • He was not held responsible for the results of a marketing campaign.
  • He was not charged with helping people understand their problems.
  • He was not responsible for merging two companies together.
  • He was not responsible for giving complex stock advice.
  • He was not given complex tasks to think about when he went home that evening.

He was just expected to stand there.  For the most part, he could think about what he wanted, when he wanted.  No one was controlling his mind. Towards the end of his life—after a tragedy struck his business, my grandfather was a security guard and sat in a booth at the entrance to a factory every evening not doing much of anything.  He just sat there and there was no expectation that he engage in any type of complex thought, movement, or likewise.  He was just expected to sit there.  After having had a rewarding and exciting career, his life suddenly changed when he was expected to do nothing.  He died a short time after starting the job. Just about everything that you can do that is going to provide substantial economic and societal rewards is going to be difficult, taxing and hard work. It is going require that you remain focused and use your mind in ways that others do not.  It may require that you take risks.

  • It may require that you think so hard that you get tired.
  • It may require you organize people to help you.
  • It may require you move far away.
  • It is going to require you do work that others do not want to or cannot do.

When I was growing up, I always heard about how doctors and lawyers made a lot of money.  I never understood why.  Now I do.  Why do they do so well?  Because they do work that others do not want to do and the work they do is hard. First, they have to go to school and stay focused for a decade or more.  They have to sit through classes and do well in them.  They have to take tests and study a lot.  They have to do all this instead of working and potentially enjoying the fruits of their labor right away. Not only do they have to invest all of this effort in school, but they invest all of this effort and risk failing.  They may not get into a medical school or law school.  They may flunk out of medical school or law school.  They may not pass their medical boards or the Bar Exam.  All of this is tough. And it is risky. Second, they have to work very, very hard when they get out of school.  In the case of a doctor, they may have to stay up for 48+ hours several times a week and be responsible for peoples’ lives while they are working. In addition, they need to spend years working for low wages before they even can get a decent salary. A lawyer may work 3,000+ hours a year for years inside of a law firm reading papers, filing things, being yelled at and more.  The work is difficult and it is not easy.  The work has a price.  And even after all of this the lawyer is not guaranteed a good job, salary and so forth. The components that make doctors and lawyers highly paid are Hard work

  • Sacrifice
  • Risk
  • Using their mind
  • Always being available
  • Committing to something for a long period

…and more. This is far different from what the typical security guard is expected to do.  Most security guards are just expected to stand there. None of the hard work, commitment, sacrifice and so forth is at all necessary. When the most successful people in the world go to work—whether it be Warren Buffet, Steve Jobs, or otherwise—they probably are not working longer hours than you or I are working.  However, the quality of their time and the way they use their minds during work is going to be drastically different than the way we use our minds and time.

  • They are going to be more focused.
  • They are going to be engaged in complex thoughts and pushing their minds instead of daydreaming.
  • They are going to confront difficult issues and concepts instead of avoiding them.
  • They are going to be honest with themselves about what they are doing right and wrong.
  • They may force themselves into a difficult routine even if it is not comfortable.

The people who succeed are willing to work harder.  It is like this with everything.  The quality of the work you do is about how hard you think, the The most successful salespeople, for example, spend lots of time prospecting.  They follow up with past clients.  They send out birthday cards.  They go out to lots of dinners.  They make phone calls even when they do not want to.  They take pains to make sure they have the best appearance and dress.  They read and think about sales.  They push themselves in ways that people who are not successful do not.  In contrast, the person who is not successful may spend their time not being as “productive” and taxing their mind to the same degree. This is the difference. In your career, you need to do the “hard stuff” and make sure that you are doing what others will not.  This is the key to success and it is going to make all the difference.  You need to use your mind when others are not.  You need to take risks when others are not.  You need to be “on the ball” when others are not.

]]> http://www.aharrisonbarnes.com/weight-loss-security-guards-hard-work-and-your-career/feed/ 0 You Need to Be Able to Close http://www.aharrisonbarnes.com/you-need-to-be-able-to-close/ http://www.aharrisonbarnes.com/you-need-to-be-able-to-close/#comments Thu, 14 Jul 2011 05:01:04 +0000 Harrison Barnes http://www.aharrisonbarnes.com/?p=2150 2150 The ability to ‘‘close’‘ and get the sale is the most important skill in selling. It is something that few people know how to do. Many people can get a consumer, an employer, or others to the cusp of making a purchasing or a hiring decision; however, it is the final ‘‘push’‘ that makes all of the difference. It takes a tremendous amount of skill to sell yourself and get a job. It takes a tremendous amount of skill to go from someone who a potential employer will consider for the job to someone who is hired. Your job in getting hired, in getting a better job and when looking for a job, is to push the employer over the fence and make them hire you. This is all there is to it. You need to get hired. There is nothing wrong with developing the skills of a master salesperson and ‘‘closer’‘ in order to get the best job you can. The desire to get a good job and ‘‘close’‘ the deal is a desire for employment, which leads to a richer and more abundant life and the desire to better yourself is praiseworthy. If you do not desire to have a better job or to find a job when you are unemployed, you are not living up to your full potential. It is absolutely essential that you give your best efforts to ‘‘closing’‘ and getting a job when you go out on interviews and apply to jobs. If you neglect to do this, you are not fulfilling your duty to yourself to be everything you are capable of being. When I was around 18 years old and starting the asphalt business, I did what anyone in the business was doing at the time. I drove around and put fliers in all of the mailboxes in front of every house with asphalt that I could find. Once I did this, the next step would be to wait for the phone to ring. I would put around 100 brochures in mailboxes for every phone call I received. Once someone called me I would then go out and give them an estimate. I would have to drive to a home at an appointed time, measure their asphalt and write up a complicated one or two page estimate describing all of the work I was going to do. For twenty minutes or more, the person would want to stand on their driveway and talk about what might happen were I to do the work. After I gave the estimate I would then hope the person chose me out of the three or four other estimates they might be getting. Since the work was rarely more than $300, a few dollars here or there could make the difference as to whether or not I actually got the work. I would then wait some more for the person to call me. Under this business model, someone in the asphalt business spends most of their time driving around, giving estimates and waiting for the phone to ring, and very little time doing work. When you are waiting for the phone to ring you are not working. At some point I decided that this did not make any sense. I wanted to make money and I did not want to have to sit around not working. I needed be be able to ’‘close’‘ people and I needed to be able to close people on the spot. Instead of waiting for the phone to ring each day, I changed my approach. I decided I would only try and sell a homeowner on asphalt service once each year. I would go down a street and knock on every single door and announce that I was going to be on the street the next day, and the next day only. In return for allowing me to do the work the next day I would charge them half of my normal price for the work. I would also leave them a bill and they could send me a check if they were satisfied with the work. This method of closing worked incredibly well. Here is what I would do. I would not measure the driveway. I would drive down the street around 6:00 to 8:30 pm when everyone was home and state the following when someone answered the door: ‘‘Hello. My name’s Harrison Barnes. I come down this street once a year doing asphalt work and because I do several driveways at once, I typically save homeowners at least 50% over what they would pay if you called me and I had to come out and give an estimate. I’ve looked it over and your driveway is something I would normally charge $300 for. I will be on your street tomorrow and will do it for $150. I will leave an invoice and you can send me a check when you get around to it.’‘ Here is what 95% of the people said in response to this:
  • ‘‘Sure’‘
  • ‘‘Yes.’‘
  • ‘‘Go ahead.’‘
  • ‘‘Please do it.’‘
  • ‘‘You’re hired.’‘
  • ‘‘Great.’‘
  • ‘‘Excellent.’‘

I was always paid and I never spent more than 5 minutes at each house ‘‘selling‘‘ and ‘‘closing’‘ the homeowners. Since the product I was selling was my labor, and the stuff I put on the driveways cost only a few dollars per house, my profits were great no matter what I charged. I went from doing one or two houses on a street each year to doing virtually every single one of them. My business boomed and I am confident I became the largest residential asphalt sealing contractor in Michigan almost overnight. Each night I would come home and there would be so many checks in my mailbox the postman would have then banded together with rubber bands. None of this would have happened if I had not developed the ability to ‘‘close,’‘ push homeowners over the fence and turn them from casual snoopers into buyers. This is about the ability to ‘‘close’‘ and get the sale. In your business the most important ability you can have is the ability to ‘‘close’‘–without the ability to close very little is likely to happen. You will be on the sidelines and others will be hired instead of you. It is easy to get in the door anywhere. Getting in the door, however, is only 1% of the battle. The most difficult thing to do once you get in the door is to close the sale and move the employer from a ‘‘browser’‘ to a buyer. In a poor economy, the price of things typically starts coming down. The reason for this is that stores and other merchandisers are doing everything within their power to ‘‘close’‘ you and get you from someone who may not purchase something to someone who will. A short time ago a local Ford dealership in Los Angeles discounted a bunch of new Ford Mustangs by around 50% to move them out quickly. This gimmick works. When I drive down the street in Los Angeles these days I have been seeing people standing on corners promoting incredible going out of business sales at various businesses, offering 90% off of retail price in many cases. Low prices are a very effective tool for closing consumers. One of my favorite scenes in the movies that highlights the incredible importance of closing, is from the 1970s movie, Kramer v. Kramer. In the movie, the protagonist, Ted Kramer, is going through a divorce and is unemployed. He wants to get custody of his son, but his wife is about to tell the judge in an upcoming hearing that he is unemployed and she should be granted custody. Ted has to get a job immediately. He first goes to an employment agency and finds the only job available in the entire city, but the recruiter tells him that now is not a good time to set up an interview. Ted fights with the man in the employment agency and finally manages to coerce the man into setting up a very quick interview. Ted manages to get a few minutes with some hiring personnel while they are having a Christmas party on the Friday before Christmas. He goes into the interview and knows this is his one shot. Here is the dialogue from the movie script 

91    INT. OUTER OFFICE, J. WALTER THOMPSON -          LATE AFTERNOON          The large room is crowded with secretaries, junior          executives, researchers, editors, ad-men, etc., etc.          They all have drinks in their hands and there is a good          deal of kissing and general conviviality going on.          THE CAMERA TRACKS WITH ACKERMAN as he steps out of his          office, closes the door behind him and makes his way          across the room to MR. SPENCER, the Advertising Director.          At the moment, Spencer stands with his coat over one          arm and a drink in his hand talking to a very pretty          young woman. Ackerman approaches him, whispers some-          thing in his ear. Spencer shakes his head and points          to his watch. Ackerman says something else and finally,          with a look of weary resignation, Spencer excuses him-          self from the pretty young woman and follows Ackerman          back to his office. THE CAMERA FOLLOWS THEM. As          Ackerman opens the door to his office, THE CAMERA IS          ANGLED so that we can SEE past them, into the office          where Ted stands waiting.                                ACKERMAN                          (as they enter)                    Mr. Spencer, Mr. Kramer.                                 SPENCER                         (not wasting any time)                    So you're the go-getter. All                    right, you've got ten minutes.          As the door closes behind them, blocking our view, THE          CAMERA PANS UP to a clock over the door. It reads          five-fifteen.                                                     MATCH DISSOLVE TO:    92    INT. ACKERMAN'S OFFICE - LATE AFTERNOON          ON A CLOCK--which now reads five twenty-two. THE CAMERA          PULLS BACK TO REVEAL Spencer, now sitting in Ackerman's          chair, his feet on Ackerman's desk. Ted has just          finished his pitch.                                SPENCER                          (sipping his drink)                    That's very interesting, Mr.                    Kramer. I must say, it's very                    interesting. Let me think about                    it. I'll let Jack...                          (indicating Ackerman)                    ...know and he'll get in touch                    with you.          Spencer gets to his feet, starts to retrieve his coat.          ON TED--as he decides to take a gamble.                                TED                    Excuse me, I believe you said                    I had ten minutes.          ON SPENCER--almost at the door, looking around.                                SPENCER                    Well?          ON TED--checking his watch.                                TED                    That means I've got two minutes                    left. I understand you're paying                    twenty-five.          Spencer nods.                                TED                          (a deep breath, then                           a real huckster)                    All right, I'll tell you what                    I'm gonna do--I'll take the job                    at twenty-two-five. Now, that's                    twenty-five hundred less than                    you're offering. The only thing                    is, you have to say yes right                    now. Not tomorrow. Not next                    week. Not after the holidays.                    It's worth it to me for a                    yes right now and I'll take                    twenty-five hundred less.          There is a long beat of silence as Spencer and Ackerman          look at one another. They were clearly not prepared          for this.                                TED                          (watching them)                    Today only. One day only.                    Twenty-two five.                                SPENCER                    Mr. Kramer, can we talk privately                    for a moment?                                TED                    Certainly.                                                     CUT TO:    93    OUTER OFFICE - LATE AFTERNOON          ON TED--as he steps out of Ackerman's office, sits down.          Now, all of the fear, all of the anxiety that he has          been fighting down comes welling up. What if he pushed          too hard? What will he do if he doesn't get a job?          If Ted Kramer could fall to his knees and pray, he          would.          CROSS-CUT WITH THE CHRISTMAS PARTY-- that swirls around          him. We notice in particular, one very pretty young          woman flirting with a number of men. She is wearing          a dress with straps, one of them has broken and she          has patched it with a piece of masking tape.          Finally the door to Ackerman's office opens and he          steps out.                                ACKERMAN                    Mr. Kramer?          Ted jumps to his feet, starts into the office.                                                     CUT TO:    94    INT. ACKERMAN'S OFFICE - LATE AFTERNOON          ON SPENCER--He looks at Ted carefully for a long time,          then:                                SPENCER                          (grins)                    Welcome aboard, Mr. Kramer.          C.U. TED--There is an instant of relief, then, with          astounding cool:                                TED                    Well, gentlemen, I'm pleased                    to be with you.          ANOTHER ANGLE--as they shake hands, say their good-          byes. THE CAMERA TRACKS WITH TED as he makes his way          through the Christmas party that is still going strong.          Then, suddenly, as he passes the very pretty woman we          noticed earlier, he turns and kisses her.

This is one of my favorite scenes from the movie because it shows the absolute power of ‘‘closing’‘ in getting a job. In this particular example Ted used money to close. He also used the power of a deadline. This is similar to what I did in the asphalt business by telling the homeowners they had to make a decision ‘‘right now’‘ and not later. The ability to pressure people to make decision now, and not later, is one of the most important things you can do in ‘‘closing.’‘ However, it is not something that is always going to work in getting a job like it did with Ted. I would like to tell you a quick story about how I once hired someone and how this person ‘‘closed’‘ me to get a job. It is an unusual story but it is something that taps into something that I believe is one of the more powerful methods out there of ‘‘closing’‘ to get a job. I used to work in downtown Los Angeles and worked in a building called the Oviatt Building, which was directly across the street from the Los Angeles Athletic Club. The Los Angeles Athletic Club is a nice club, however, anyone can join for the most part. I believe at the time it cost $500 to join the club and then cost around $100 a month to keep your membership. This is in contrast to several other ‘‘downtown’‘ social clubs which could cost $30,000 or more to join and sometimes require years of evaluation and references from other members in order to be accepted. I was perfectly happy with the Los Angeles Athletic Club but the longer that I was around people in Los Angeles and got familiar with the scene downtown, the more I realized there was a giant pecking order among clubs. In fact, the people who were from the oldest families and the more prestigious people in terms of their professional accomplishments and so forth tended to belong to these more prestigious clubs. The situation was compounded by the fact that you had to be invited to the more prestigious clubs by a current member, then they introduced you to current members and then a board would vote on you after a certain length of time. One day I had been with a recruiter of ours from Texas and we had walked into one of the more prestigious clubs to see what it was like and how to join. We were kicked out of the club and they threatened to call the police since we had come in from off the street. It was at that point I realized that there was an entire subculture in my midst of extremely private and exclusive clubs in downtown Los Angeles. They were far different than the Los Angeles Athletic Club. One day I was interviewing a man a few years older than me for a position in our company and the interview ended about 5:00 pm. The man was from an old waspy sort of Los Angeles family and was pretty classy and well spoken in all respects. Generally, if an interview ended around 5:00 p.m. I would take someone out for drinks or to dinner, but on this occasion I simply asked the man if he had plans. He told me he was going to his club to exercise and I asked him which club. He informed me that it was the same club that I had been kicked out of with the recruiter from Texas just a few months previously. He then did something extremely smart: ‘‘Would you like to come to the club with me and have a look around?’‘ he asked. This is something I was definitely interested in. He took me to the club and then proceeded over the next few weeks to introduce me to other members. In the process, I ended up hiring him. While he was very qualified for the job I hired him for at the time, I am not sure if from an economic standpoint he was someone that made sense for me to hire. He was a great guy, but at that point the company simply was not at the level where it needed him. In retrospect, and this is a sad thing to say, I think a part of me hired him because I had a desire to belong to his group which I had been an outsider of previously. This brings me to you and ‘‘closing’‘ and getting a job. When someone is hiring you or making a decision about whether or not they should hire you, one of the things they are always asking themselves is ‘‘What’s In It For Me’‘–or WIFM. You need to look at getting hired and getting a job from your perspective, and from the perspective of the person who is doing the hiring. I once heard a well known copywriter, Ben Mack, say something along these lines. I wrote this down so these are probably not his exact words, but I wanted to share them with you because they are so powerful: People will follow you anywhere to the extent you encourage their dreams, justify their failures, allay their fears, confirm their suspicions, and help them throw rocks at their enemies. For the past several years, a great deal of my time has been spent interviewing and working with the very best-educated attorneys throughout the United States. One of the things you will find in the resumes of attorneys who went to law school from the 1990s onward is that, if they went to most of the top 10 law schools, they generally have an extreme amount of liberalism in their background. By this I mean they are extremely liberal politically and were involved in very liberal organizations in college. They generally were the head of these liberal organizations. Why this is relevant is due to the fact that most of the administrators and admissions officers at top law schools around the United States are extremely liberal as well–I do not know why this is, but it just is. I know this because I have met most of them. It probably has something to do with the fact that a good portion of these admissions officers were student activists during Vietnam. If the admissions officers are young, their predecessors were probably activists during the 70s and hired their replacements based on having similar views. When these liberal admissions officers are making admissions decisions for top law schools they are faced with an overwhelming number of highly qualified applicants. Accordingly, they need to ‘‘look beyond the numbers’‘ when they are making admission decisions. What I believe happens is that they do everything they can to admit people who share their same ultra liberal views and this is what their ‘‘looking beyond the numbers’‘ means. Admitting ultra liberal students:

  • Encourages their dreams of a liberal society
  • Helps confirm their belief that social action is necessary
  • Helps them ‘‘throw rocks’‘ at their conservative enemies.

These are the people who ultimately ‘‘get the job’‘ and get into many of the best law schools. This same thing also occurs at most top colleges throughout the United States. Admissions officers are seeking to admit the most liberal people they can among a pool of similarly highly qualified candidates. I once worked for a very conservative federal judge. Most of the people that he hired to work for him were also extremely conservative. I once worked in the office of a law firm where almost everyone was the Catholic religion. What ends up pushing many employers over the fence is a powerful group affiliation. Why does this occur and what does this mean for your job search? People who are offering you a job want to hire people who they believe are part of the same group as them and confirm the way they feel about the world. This is something that is incredibly important for your potential employers and they will be more likely to hire you, and you will be more likely to ‘‘push them over the fence’‘ and close the deal, if you are able to identify with a particular group or cause that is important to an employer. When I was in high school I remember being invited to a college to spend the night there as a prospective student. Something very strange happened when one of the hosts (who was a college student) came up to me and said: ‘‘You seem too white bread and boring. This school wants people with passion.’‘ Actually, I am the opposite, but I was acting very subdued because that is what I thought it was going to take to fit in. When you are yourself and have passion one way or another, that is something that often closes the deal. The student who told me I was ‘‘white bread’‘ was right in many respects because he was pointing out that the more normal we seem the less likely we are to influence people one way or another. Pushing an employer over the fence to make a hiring decision is no easy thing to do. There are a million closing techniques that I could write about, and a discussion over every closing technique could compose a 1,000 page book. I think you have the ability to close because we all do. Your ability is instinctual. What you need to do is tap into your instinctual closing ability and push employers over the fence to make them hire you. You need to push employers that little extra bit to ensure you get the job. Anyone can go out on an interview, but only the most talented can actually close the deal.

]]> http://www.aharrisonbarnes.com/you-need-to-be-able-to-close/feed/ 5 Consistency and Commitment Beat Brilliance and Talent http://www.aharrisonbarnes.com/consistency-and-commitment-beats-brilliance-and-talent/ http://www.aharrisonbarnes.com/consistency-and-commitment-beats-brilliance-and-talent/#comments Mon, 04 Jul 2011 05:01:03 +0000 Harrison Barnes http://www.aharrisonbarnes.com/?p=1271 1271 When I was growing up in Detroit, I went to school with kids whose parents were the Chief Executive Officers of major auto companies and were in other high level roles. Sometimes I would turn on the television and see the same men I’d eaten dinner with at a friend’s house on the nightly news giving a press conference in Washington, or speaking about an issue of national importance. Another one of my friend’s father was the CEO of a major national bank and, by the time I was 13 or 14, I was smart enough to realize I could learn a lot from these men. I figured they must all be enormously gifted intellectually and have other skills which I could learn. In my spare time I read books such as Iacocca, about Lee Iacocca, and when the Publisher’s Clearing House mail came to my mother’s house I ordered Forbes, Business Week and a ton of other business magazines so I could impress these nationally important men and talk to them about their careers and what they did. I remember after reading a book about Lee Iacocca, and having spent months reading business magazines, I had the opportunity to speak with one of my friend’s father. He used to work for President Ford writing speeches, and he now worked directly for Henry Ford writing his speeches. Because I had read so much, I realized after about an hour, I knew much more than even he did about various aspects of his business. When I was 13 or 14, I dominated dinnertime conversations at my friends’ homes spinning off facts and figures and entertaining major figures in various auto companies. The more I talked about business with these men, the less I realized they knew. I could not believe men who might have gotten MBAs from Harvard Business School knew so little. I figured that, based on their lack of knowledge about arcane business facts, none of them must be all that intelligent. Most of these men were from all over the country and had joined, right out of school, automobile companies, banks and the other institutions they would one day lead. In at least one incident I recall, one man worked on an automotive manufacturing line in a factory during college. In another case, one of my friend’s father even went to a school called General Motors Institute (no longer in existence) which was a college run by General Motors. Every day, these men got up early and drove into Detroit. They came home late each evening. Once a year, they took vacations for a couple of weeks, usually skiing in Colorado or at a ski resort in Michigan. At the same time, most had wives who never worked and stayed at home raising the children and providing their husbands with the sort of environment that would enable them to succeed. By the time I met many of these titans of business and industry, they had been getting up at the same time to go to work and living the life they lived for over 30 years–more than twice as long as I had even been on the earth. And there I was sitting at their dining room tables uncovering how much information they did not know and believing they were stupid. The more I realized these men did not know about arcane business facts, the more I read. One thing I quickly realized was none of these men were angry, and all of them seemed to enjoy learning what they did not know from a child. In addition, there was a very gentle way about them because, despite the fact I must have looked like an idiot spewing forth various facts and figures, they never sought to correct me. They were always quite diplomatic in all respects. Just because I was aware of more facts and figures, it certainly did not mean I was more talented than these men. On the contrary, they were actually busy leading their lives and careers while I stood on the sidelines simply reading about it. Now some 20+ years later I can reflect on what was going on:
  1. I certainly have never been on the evening news giving my opinions before the United States Congress.
  2. I do not sit in the office of the President of the United States and give him advice about what to talk about in speeches and write speeches for him.
  3. My actions and opinions are not mentioned weekly in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal.

I now look at these men with profound respect because the lesson their careers hold is something I have certainly learned from, and you can too: Work ethic and consistency trump brilliance and talent. There are many people with a lot of talent, or who know a lot. These talented people may know more than the next person. They may be better socially. They may have a better idea of what needs to be done. They may have better educations. They may be better sales people. They may be more connected. But when it comes right down to it, none of this really matters if the talented person cannot simply “show up” and do the same thing over and over. The people who win and become the most successful are the ones who generally put in a massive effort over the long run. Nothing is more effective than being consistent. The Grand Canyon could never have been built by one giant flood. Instead, it was built over millions of years by a consistent flow of water that applied a small amount of pressure and erosion over time. So, too, it is with your career. If you are consistent, you will achieve a lot more over time than if you are not. Talent and brilliance have sex appeal. Talent is something that blows us away. Several years ago, I was sitting in the living room of my mother’s house in Detroit, and in the other room was a man who was providing one of the most brilliant analyses of the meaning of the world I have ever heard. The more this man’s mind worked through an idea, the more brilliant I realized he was. At the time, I was 27 and had been through college and law school. In addition to practicing law, I was also teaching in a law school. I had heard a lot of very brilliant men speak in my career, but the person I was listening to was incredible. As I listened to this man speak, I was firmly convinced he was the most brilliant man I had ever heard. After he left, I found out he had an extraordinary IQ and had received a PhD from Princeton. However, he had never applied his skills. Instead, he was living in a small $350 a month apartment and had lived there for years. He did not use his brilliance in his job and, instead, his talent went to waste because it was not being consistently applied. He had worked in multiple jobs in his career. What if this man had decided to spend his career writing? What if this man decided to spend his career teaching? He did none of those things and, despite incredible talent, nothing ever happened. We need to apply our talents. Talent is fickle. Sometimes talent shows up, and other times it does not. In contrast, being consistent requires a high level of tenacity. You need to keep plowing through. You cannot give up. Anyone can be a better performer in one thing or another for a short time. What really takes skill is to consistently perform over time. This is what my friends’ fathers were all doing. Imagine 30+ years of doing the same thing and climbing within the same organization. This consistent effort is what creates the best results and enables people to win over time. Only certain people are born with brilliance and incredible talent, but anyone can exercise their option to work hard. When we are consistent, we make small bits of progress on a daily basis. Making small daily bits of progress are what transform careers and lives. Anything you focus on consistently will make you better. Many people lack the ability to consistently focus over time, and instead believe one small flash of brilliance or talent will make a difference. This is almost never the case. Consistency and work ethic always trump brilliance and talent. THE LESSON Consistency and commitment trump brilliance and talent; the most successful people are those who put massive long-term effort into their careers. Only certain people are born with innate talent or brilliance, but consistent effort lies within the reach of anyone and is ultimately a much greater factor in success. Anything to which you apply consistent focus will show progress.

]]> http://www.aharrisonbarnes.com/consistency-and-commitment-beats-brilliance-and-talent/feed/ 9 Have Trust in Others and Be Ready to Seize Opportunity However it Presents Itself http://www.aharrisonbarnes.com/have-trust-in-others-and-be-ready-to-seize-opportunity-however-it-presents-itself/ http://www.aharrisonbarnes.com/have-trust-in-others-and-be-ready-to-seize-opportunity-however-it-presents-itself/#comments Sat, 24 Sep 2011 05:01:06 +0000 Harrison Barnes http://www.aharrisonbarnes.com/?p=1567 1567 Trusting people and being ready to take advantage of opportunity when it presents itself are two of the greatest skills anyone can have.  My life has been enriched in so many ways by often trusting people I should not have and by being aware of opportunities.  I have always been eager to trust people who do not appear to be trustworthy, because I know that in the act of trusting them I can allow them to see themselves as better people.  It also feels good to show people that you trust them.  Fundamentally, I have a belief that deep down all people are good.  There are also a ton of people out there who society judges to be evil and unworthy of help.  Many of these people are good as well.  One of the biggest challenges many of us have is realizing that deep down people are in fact good. When you are taking a job, any job, you have to have faith and trust in your employer.  You also have to trust yourself that you have the ability to do the job. The employer may tell you that they are planning on this, or planning on that.  You should trust them.  Regardless of where you are working, you are putting your trust in an enterprise and the people within it.  This is something that is extremely important and that will serve you well if you are in the right organization. The opposite is most often the case, however.  Most people do not trust their employers and, consequently, they paint themselves into a hole. Several years ago I came out of work to discover that a car had backed into my car and severely dented the back fender.  The person who had hit the car was nice enough to leave a note. The note read something like: I’M AT FAULT!  I WAS GOING TOO FAST!! BIG BUMMER! : (  PLEASE CALL ME AND I WILL FIX IT! A few days later I called the number the person had also left. The person was really chilled out and told me how they did not look where they were going and were “spaced out” when backing up.  It took them like 10 minutes to relate how they did not look where they were going, should have adjusted their rear view mirror, felt horrible about it and how work was “stressful” that day because their boss was ”schizo” due to some issues with some bad laser eye surgery.  They then told me to go and get a few estimates before seeing whether or not they wanted to report it to their insurance company.  The first estimate I received was for around $5,000.  The next estimate was for around $5,500.  I called the person and they were understandably disappointed. “I guess I’ll just report it to my insurance company then!” they told me. A few days later I was in a shop suggested by the insurance company.  The insurance company called me after the estimate and told me that they had determined there was about $5,000 in damage and would be sending me a check which I could do whatever I wanted with.  The check duly arrived and I started to spend it on things other than the car. At the time I was living in a house that was no more than 500 square feet in Hollywood Hills.  It was a house that was originally built by a child star Ricky Nelson because he was so popular and girls had been crawling into his parent’s home in Beverly Hills.  His agents had determined that having a house literally perched on the side of a cliff with no windows facing the street would make this impossible in the future and give him the peace and quiet he wanted.  (Ironically, Ricky Nelson would die in a private airplane crash years later and it was rumored he had set the plane on fire while smoking cocaine.).  The house had incredible views of the City of Los Angeles. The only part of the house that was physically touching the ground was the front door and the rest of it was on stilts.  When I had purchased it I had saved about $35,000 because I had the luck of having an inspector who was insane.  He may have been senile, I am not sure.  I am sure he was at least in his late 70s. “My god!  This thing is going down it is not secure!! It also has gas lines going into it.  One small earthquake and it is all over.  It will fall off the cliff and explode!” Both the current owner and I were scared out of our pants by the inspector.  Even though I did not have the same issues that made the house so attractive to Ricky Nelson, I was in love with the little house because it was what I could afford.  I was not at all concerned about this.  I figured that if the house really did detach I would have a very easy time making it out the front door before it rolled down the cliff. I had found him in the Yellow pages and did not even realize what a blessing it would be. I used him on another house a few years later and realized he was insane. I purchased a house that had been owned by a professor from CalTech.  He tried the same thing and got called out on the entire situation and this was quite embarrassing for me and the inspector.  I think he used the word “liquefaction” which did not go over well with a world famous geologist.  A few weeks later the inspector sent me a letter saying he was retiring.  In this particular instance, however, it actually worked wonders. “What if I take $35,000 off and throw in the big screen television?” the owner asked me.  The owner was a developer who was not really that concerned about the house.  The big screen television was huge.  It looked like it was from the 1970′s.  He could have offered me just this and I would have accepted the offer.  But that and $35,000 was too much to pass up. “Sure, I’ll still buy it,” I told him.  “I just hope there’s not an earthquake.” The house must have been directly over a fault line because at least a couple of times a month it would start shaking for no apparent reason, but it never fell off the cliff.   One of my neighbor’s homes did, however.  When I moved into the house in December of 1997 there was a rain storm that seemed to last two straight weeks. One rainy Saturday afternoon I was sitting in the house and I heard a bunch of helicopters and sirens.  I turned on the news and learned that one of my neighbors homes had fallen right off the cliff.  It also made the national news that evening.  There was still an abandoned lot there a couple of years ago when I drove by. My girlfriend at the time was working at home and it tended to get pretty loud listening to her type away and talk to clients.  The home had a small driveway and I figured the best thing I could do for her was to build her a little office on the driveway.  I went to a local paint store where I met a guy named “Carlos.” I brought him over to the house.  He had been standing in front of the paint store looking for work.  I hired Carlos because he had a truck and most of the guys had paint on them. I did not want them riding in my damaged Porsche with paint all over them.  When I got back to the house, Carlos explained to me that he was a painter and was not too experienced with building offices on driveways.  I told him that sounded good to me and I could probably save some money then.  We negotiated a rate for his work and then I took Carlos to Home Depot and we bought a bunch of stuff for the job. Over the next week or so I had Carlos build a box on the driveway that doubled as an office.  Normally, it would have been cheaper to put a ready-made shed there but there were severe space limitations which is the reason for the small box.  It was the most amateur piece of construction imaginable. It had windows going sideways, a roof made of tin, was painted crudely and more.  What’s worse, I spent money on ridiculous things like special lighting, little paintings to go in the office and a sunroof!.  The office was not more than 5×5.  My girlfriend told me that I had built her “a box on the driveway.”  At one point I realized that the office I had built her actually had a smaller footprint than my big screen television.  The thing was that it worked.  Moreover, it was on the driveway.  Since she worked so much we agreed that in the event the house fell off the cliff as our neighbor’s home had, she would be perfectly safe. I am sure I found other uses for the money from the accident as well. Within a few weeks, however, I had spent all of my insurance money destined for the repair of my beloved Porsche.  I was very disappointed in myself.  I had accomplished something of significance, though, I put my girlfriend on the driveway and freed up over the half the house.  It was probably a little dangerous putting her there but I figured she would be okay. The first night I moved into the house I heard someone pounding on my door at around 7:00 am.  There had been a lot of loud noise outside for several minutes before the pounding began.  I opened the door and a girl with an incredible amount of facial piercings looked at me directly in the eye and said “I’m seriously fucked the fuck up.”  She appeared to be swaying on her feet. She was dressed in a jean jacket with patches from various rock bands on it.  Her eyes were half closed as she spoke. I was very calm.  “I see that,” I said calmly.  “I will be right back.”  Very slowly I closed the door and ever so lightly locked it and walked towards the phone inside the house. I called 911.  I was one of the few people who had a cell phone in 1997.  I had originally started using one in 1990 when I was doing asphalt work.  Back then it used to cost like $500 a month to use one.  It was expensive.  I liked having one back then because no one had one and I had one for several years at that point.  I stopped using one in 2000 when everyone started talking on them everywhere.  Now I prefer not having a cell phone.  That day I had to use a cell phone to call 911. I spent the first couple minutes of the call explaining to the operator that I was calling from a cell phone and that was why the number I was calling from was Michigan (where I got the cell phone).  (If you have ever called 911 in Los Angeles it is really something.  A recording comes on and tells you “Your call is important to us! We will be with you in just a minute! We’re currently serving another caller and will be with you in just a moment!” ” The recording then proceeds to play happy music like little ballerinas or something are dancing in the background.) A friend of mine, Eric, who was from Scotland had recently moved to the United States and was staying with my girlfriend and I.  Eric had purchased a brand new little BMW convertible when he got here that I think I may have co-signed for it since he did not have any credit in the United States.  The first night he had the car someone took a knife and cut the top off and carved up the paint to destroy the car.  He was living in Venice at the time.  It was really an outrageous thing to do to the car. I felt really sorry for the guy.  He had gone to Harvard Law School and never had any money. The first thing he ever purchased for himself ended up getting destroyed.  He had a huge deductible on his insurance and did not get the car fixed for over 18 months. Eric’s father was from Africa and had very white skin. He did not look black at all. “This attack was racially motivated,” he told me.  At that point I did not even realize that his father was from Africa because he did not look the least bit black.  He started wearing lots of African clothes and stuff after the attack and had become very sensitive to any perceived racial slight. “They are messing with my car again!!” Eric shouted when he heard the girl banging on the door.  He got up ready to fight for racial justice. “Do not go out there!” It is just a messed up girl, I told him. Less than 3 minutes after I got done arguing with the 911 operator there were at least 5 or 6 police cars in front of my house. I walked outside in my bathrobe to explain to them what was going on and several of the police drew their guns and told me to put my face down on the ground. I was not sure what was going on. “Don’t you move pal!!” a police officer started screaming at me as he was frisking me in my bathrobe.  I was lying face down in the street.  I cannot imagine what my new neighbors must have been thinking. Eventually, the entire situation worked itself out.  A woman showed up who was a “rape counselor” who looked very concerned for a few minutes and rushed towards the girl with a blanket.  About 5 minutes into the intervention the rape counselor suddenly because very emotionally unavailable and walked away in disgust.  Apparently, they thought the girl had been raped.  Instead, she was just on some pretty powerful drugs. This was my first taste of living in the Hollywood Hills. It was my first night.  Over the next year or so I would have many incredible experiences that would culminate in the sale of the house 18 months later.  We would find needles and syringes on the street while walking our dog.  On another occasion my girlfriend and I were getting in the car to go out to dinner and a couple of men in their 30′s, who looked like bikers, walked by our house without shirts on, in dirty jeans, carrying baseball bats.  When my next door neighbor was getting ready to move he put his house on the market and we went and toured it.  He was a journalist from Germany.  Left out in the open in a small walk in closet was an industrial size package of latex gloves with 4 or 5 large bottles of Astro Glide next to it.  I cannot even imagine what was going on.  When I sold the house I sold it to an 19 year old kid who was a famous actor; he purchased it for his 30 year old boyfriend. One day I was at a bank in the Hollywood Hills area taking out some money and there was a man sitting in the parking lot in a late model, blue GM pick up truck with his wife. In the rear window of the pick up truck he had curtains which looked Indian.  He was looking at the severe damage to my Porsche outside the window of his truck.  Next to him was his wife, who was very large and looked pretty mysterious.  The man had skin which appeared to have suffered an incredible amount of sun damage throughout the years.  You could not see much of his skin, however, because he had a ton of facial hair. “I can fix that massive dent you have in your car in 15 minutes,” he told me learning out the window as I walked back from the ATM to the car. “Really, how would you do that?” I asked. The man started telling me how he and his ancestors were from Romania and had traveled throughout Europe as skilled metal workers for hundreds of years.  He said that since he had been a young boy he had been a “miracle worker” with shaping metal and could fix anything.  In between talking with me he would speak back and forth to his wife in some strange mother tongue I had never heard anyone speak before. I had spent the $5,000 from the insurance company and wanted to get my Porsche fixed.  It was my prized possession.  I also knew that this might be the only chance I had to get it fixed. “How much will you charge?” I asked the man. “No more than what you just took out of that machine,” he said smiling and picking his teeth with a toothpick. I love people who take advantage of opportunity wherever it presents itself.  This man was a hustler but sometimes you can really benefit from being a hustler.  If you can make a couple of hundred dollars doing nothing then all the power to you.  Since I had spent a good portion of my life knocking on doors asking people if they wanted asphalt work, I knew how to hustle.  I was enjoying meeting this man.  Far too few people out there are always on the look out for opportunity.  You need to be on the look out for every potential opportunity that presents itself to you.  Just as this man was on the look out for opportunity, so too was I. “How about $200?” I asked. “I took out $300 but need to take my wife out for dinner tonight.  I can only take out $300 a day and my credit cards are maxed out.” “Sure friend,” the man said. He wanted to follow me back to my house because he said it was not good for him to be working in public.  I did not ask a lot of questions.  The man did not look all that trustworthy.  I have lived in Europe before and this man reminded me of the Gypsies I had gotten to know a bit while living in Spain. Come to think of it, it occurred to me while I was driving back to my house, this man and his wife were most likely Gypsies. When we got back to my house, the man reached into the bed of his pick up truck and grabbed a brick.  He started rounding the edge of the brick by scraping it along the street. I had no idea what was going on. “Are you sure you know what you are doing?” I asked him. “Yes, I am a master metal smith …” he said. Within a few minutes he had shaped the brick and was now busy pounding away at the car with a hammer and had the brick positioned behind the metal.  A couple of doors down I saw one of my neighbors come out of his house and start walking towards me.  This neighbor of mine was pretty funny.  He was a guy with a beard in his mid-50s who lived in a house similar to mine, but which was perched over a ravine and not a cliff.  He was someone who did some sort of work for the music industry that involved him sitting in front of a bunch of equalizers he had set up in his living room (all over his entire living room) and mixing music into television shows.  He was also about 350 pounds and had a massive beard.  As far as I could tell, he smoked pot constantly.  He would walk his dog down the street at 8:00 am smoking a joint.  He was a really nice guy.  A few months previously he had taken an illegal trip to Cuba (it was illegal for Americans to go there at the time) as a vacation.  Since he had returned he had decided that he had some sort of solidarity with Fidel Castro and the Cuban people.  So he wore these military green t-shirts constantly. He walked up to me and my car. “What the hell are you doing?” he asked as he watched the man pounding away at the car. “I’m getting my car fixed,” I told him proudly.  There was also a touch of humor to my voice since the situation looked so strange. “Are you out of your mind?  That is an expensive, exotic car.  This guy is a Gypsy.  He has no idea what he is doing.”  He looked upset. As I looked at the car the dent had actually almost magically disappeared.  In fact, with a little paint it would probably be as good as new.  I could not believe my eyes.  He had been working on the car for only a few minutes.  Maybe he really did have a magical touch. “You better get out here,” the man said to the guy working on my car. “You have no business taking advantage of this kid!” What happened over the next few minutes was all a blur.  The two men started arguing and they were screaming at each other for several minutes.  My fat neighbor was telling the guy who had been working on my car that he was going to call the police.  They were starting to scream at each other so loud several neighbors had gathered on the street.  It was sort of a comical thing until the wife of the Romanian man got involved. At some point she had gotten out of the truck and came running towards my neighbor.  She ran towards him and threw the contents of a pouch at him which appeared to be some sort of dust.  My neighbor looked astonished and the argument stopped. “GOD WILL STRIKE YOU DOWN!!” she screamed at him.  She then fell to her knees in the middle of the street and started screaming “GOD STRIKE THIS EVIL MAN DOWN!! STRIKE HIM DOWN!!!”  She them started mumbling and rocking back and forth, and side to side with her eyes closed while screaming in whatever language she was speaking. My neighbor looked a little frightened but was smiling. “I guess you’re on your own!” he said to me and began walking back to his house.  Both the man and his wife were now screaming at him in their native language.  Within a few minutes they had gotten into their truck and taken off.  I think they were worried they might be about to be imprisoned. Strangely enough, a few weeks later I heard that my neighbor ended up in the hospital.  I never saw him again because I moved out of the neighborhood a short time later.  I never found out what happened to him. After I had gotten my center back and my neighbors had all gone back to their homes, I went out and looked at the car.  While it needed some paint where the work had been done, the dent looked entirely gone.  The next week I took the car around to the shops I had taken it to initially and I was amazed.  None of the estimates to complete the repair on my car were more than $350.  It just required simply some sanding and paint.  It was as if a miracle had been worked by the man who I met in the parking lot. I ended up getting a job that should have cost $5000 done for about one tenth that, and it turned out fantastically well.  None of this would have happened if I had not been willing to trust someone and take advantage of an opportunity when it presented itself.  So many of us are afraid to trust others and cannot take advantage of opportunity when it presents itself.  You need to be ready for opportunity when it appears, and trust others.  This is one of the most important skills anyone can have. I have spoken to the early employees of Google before.  Some of the earliest employees reported it as a company with no business model for making money and zero revenue.  It was disorganized and had leaders with zero management experience.  But they trusted the company and ended up very, very rich.  The same thing with Ebay and other great companies.  Someone out of a patrician background looking for a stable company where they would be guaranteed a certain salary and have a massive level of stability would never have accepted one of these jobs.  People did, and it paid off for them. Opportunity presents itself in strange ways.  Generally, if there is a risk, there is going to be a reward to compensate for this.  Every risk we take has a potential reward at the other side.  Generally, the greater the risk you take, the greater the reward.  Here, I made $4500 from taking a risk.  I also took a risk when I purchased the house on a cliff.  It was actually “ok” I found out later and I made over $70,000 when I sold it 18 months later.  For someone my age, that was an incredible amount of money–especially since it was tax free.  I took the risk of potential death and also destroying my prized car, but my risks ultimately paid off. So too is it with your life. You will generally only get ahead if you are taking risks.  The greater the risk the greater the reward.  I grew up in a city called Grosse Pointe, Michigan.  The way most of the city is organized is that there are streets that run from Lake St. Clair and directly away from it.  The farther away you get from the lake, the smaller and closer together the homes get, until eventually the homes are less than 1,000 square feet.   On the lake, the houses might be up to 20,000 square feet a have yards that are several acres large.  The goal of most people in Grosse Pointe was always to live on the lake.  When I was around 18, I started an asphalt business where I would do work for people in the small houses and also in the largest homes.  One thing I quickly noticed that was unmistakable was that the people in the giant mansions overlooking the Lake had always taken huge risks with their careers.  They had done things like stake their life savings on buying a piece of land that they later turned into a cemetery, and then had taken risks like this again and again.  A block or so from the Lake you might find successful doctors or lawyers.  The farther away from the Lake you got, the less risk peoples’ jobs would have.  When you got really far away, you would see people living in the smallest homes, having very predictable jobs, like working as janitors in the Post Office. None of this is to say it is bad to be a janitor.  My point to you is that the more risk you are able to tolerate, and the more faith you are able to have when taking risks, the greater results you will have in your career.  You need to be very aware that in the end you will have to take some risks and trust in the outcome in order to succeed at the highest level possible. THE LESSON Trust people, and take advantage of opportunities however and wherever they present themselves; these are the two greatest skills that anyone can possess. You must have faith and trust in your employer when taking a job, and recognize that opportunities will frequently present themselves in strange ways. Every risk has a corresponding potential reward, and you generally will only succeed if you are taking risks to get to those awards. Have faith in others and take as many risks as you can, because greater risks tend to offer greater rewards.

]]> http://www.aharrisonbarnes.com/have-trust-in-others-and-be-ready-to-seize-opportunity-however-it-presents-itself/feed/ 3 Do Not Be Controlled By Your Need to Feel Significant http://www.aharrisonbarnes.com/do-not-be-controlled-by-your-need-to-feel-significant/ http://www.aharrisonbarnes.com/do-not-be-controlled-by-your-need-to-feel-significant/#comments Mon, 29 Aug 2011 05:01:01 +0000 Harrison Barnes http://www.aharrisonbarnes.com/?p=1715 1715 When I was around 15 years old, I was in front of an ice cream parlor in Grosse Pointe, Michigan and there was a large group of kids around my age gathered around a well-dressed man who appeared to be in his mid 30s.  The man was wearing a good-looking dress shirt, khakis and good shoes.  I quickly realized, however, that the kids were all making fun of him.  The man was quite off emotionally, and all he kept saying was that he used to work for a United States Congressman.  The kids were all making fun of him and asking him about what he did for the Congressman.  The man would list various details about what he had done for the Congressman but after a few minutes would begin acting crazy again.  The kids were not being nice to this man.  Based on his mannerisms and other things, it was obvious to me that the man had experienced some sort of nervous breakdown.  For weeks I would see him around the city nervously puffing a cigarette.  Kids would always stop him. “Tell us about how you went to Yale Law School,” they might say.  The man would then launch into a monologue that would slowly descend into his insanity.  For example, he might start talking about how he went to Yale Law School and then somehow segue into a story about how he had worked on a project for the Congressman where he was fighting against rapists being chemically castrated.  Then he would start talking about his own anatomy.  That was one I remember.  The man was clearly insane, but by all accounts, had at one time associated with, and worked with, some incredibly important people in Washington. All he kept talking about, however, was how he worked for a Congressman. I learned later that the man was from a very old and extremely wealthy family in the city and was living with his family after going crazy.  No one knew how he went crazy, but he did. After watching the chemical castration monologue, I never chatted with the man again or joined the groups of kids who would taunt him.  I felt very sorry for the man and was not interested in participating in this.  Kids thought it was funny talking to him, and I viewed it as cruel. What occurred to me back then, however, was that all the man wanted to talk about was what he had been.  He had a need to feel important and significant.  As I have gone through my life, I have come to realize that one of the most important things to any human being is to feel important.  We all need to feel important and will do whatever it takes to feel important.  I have a lot of people in my family who have done great things, such as Laura Ingalls Wilder (the author of Little House on the Prairie), a former United States Senator, Amelia Earhart , a former President, and others.  The thing about this, however, is that no one in my family has really done anything of great significance like this for well over 100 years.  However, to this day, many members of my family define themselves entirely by someone else’s past achievements.  This is something that makes them feel extremely important.  I have watched many of them tell anyone who will listen, even within a few minutes of meeting.  Other relatives have gone to Harvard, Yale, important East Coast prep schools, like Andover and Exeter, and to this day will tell the people they encounter about their achievements in attending these schools within moments of meeting them.  There is nothing wrong with this.  Every single person does this.  We all have a profound need deep inside of us to feel important. We try to feel important based on who our families are.  If this does not work, we may try and feel important based on the groups we are associating with.  We may join the Army or Marines to feel important.  We may become doctors or lawyers to feel important.  We may convert to a different religion to feel important.  We may convert to Orthodox Judaism to feel important.  Regardless of who we are, most of us are doing something to do everything we can to feel important.  Everyone I know does this.  Feeling important is one of the most fundamental human needs that there is.  In fact, for people who are motivated by achievement (presumably you are if you are reading this), feeling important may govern their entire outlook on life. I want to talk about you and your job.  If you have ever lost a job, then a major source of your identity and importance has been shaken.  If you are in a good job, then a good part of your identity and significance is most likely related to this job.  If you are an attorney, a good measure of your importance in the world is likely related to the prestige of your background and your current employer.  Our sense of importance is incredibly tied up with our careers and how we are doing in these careers.  For most of us, there is nothing more important to our sense of importance than our careers. One of the hardest things in my career is dealing with the incredible anger and sense of betrayal that people experience when they lose their jobs.  Although I deal with people who lose their jobs and are making career transitions for a reason, I also run several companies and am ultimately responsible for final decisions as to whether or not someone stays or goes in the company.  One of my greatest personal successes and failures is having run companies that have boomed and then have experienced setbacks due to forces beyond my control.  For example, a couple of years ago I was running a large student loan company.  All of a sudden, the financing for this company dried up.  For months, I tried to make the company work and kept many employees on.  When the company finally could not hold its own anymore, I was faced with letting hundreds of employees go. The employees who lost their jobs became incredibly angry, and many are still angry with me to this day.  In fact, based on what I have seen, some have dedicated their lives to being angry with me.  I do not harbor these people any malice.  I know that when they lost their jobs, their very foundations about what made them feel significant and important in the world were shaken.  Since they know I am the ultimate decision maker, they have let their anger out on me and, in trying to tear me down, this makes them feel more important.  I hope for their sake it is working and wish them well despite their attempts to harm me. We all need to feel significant and will do so in every means we possibly can. Before we go further, however, what I would like to encourage you to do is explore what makes you feel significant in the world.  The more you understand this the more you will not allow your need to feel significant work against you.  You need to make your desire to feel important work to your advantage and not against you.  Consider what you are doing to feel significant?  Many people will try many different things in their push to feel significant.  You need to realize that the most important thing you can do is skillfully apply your need to feel significant.  I love the study of Buddhism, kundalini yoga, meditation and other mind enhancing personal development tools.  What one begins to realize the deeper and deeper one goes into these studies is this: You need to surrender all attachment in order to truly be free.  This is a crucial observation because the more attached you are to feeling significant and the more you concentrate on this attachment the unhappier you are likely to be.  True happiness really does come when we can just be.  Notwithstanding, hardly anyone knows how to just be.  Instead, they are constantly pushing to feel significant. Your emotional state shapes you and what happens to you and your life.  You need to choose how to control your mind.  When you are looking for a job, the most important thing you can do is move away from being attached to the need to feel significant and move, instead, to a position where you are not attached. I want to discuss something briefly that I believe is relevant to your need to feel significant.  I have spent almost my entire career working and living in Los Angeles. I was young when I first moved here and saw countless people who desired to be famous actors and actresses, writers in the movie industry and producers.  I know so many people who have done this that I am having a hard time recalling them all right now.  One of the clearest patterns I have noticed is that most of the people who want to become involved in the movie industry come at it in an arrogant and superficial level.  They act as if they are incredibly important and are, quite simply, full of attitude.  They are also incredibly calculating.  Others come with a strong desire to just be in the entertainment industry.  Their desire is not about being better than others.  It is just to share their talent with the world.  The pattern I have seen over and over again is the people who are clearly focused on their own significance never make it–and if they do, it is never at a high level.  The people who are focused on the work go to a different level of stardom and rise to a higher level.  They are focused on the work and not how it sets them in relation to others.  They are able to go into the “zen” state where they are only focused on the work and their need for significance does not factor into the equation.  These are the people who most often succeed at the highest levels from what I have seen. Being focused on the work is incredibly important.  Being focused on your own significance is attachment, and all attachments eventually result in disappointment. One of the most important things for any human being out there–you included–is to feel significant.  In fact, this need is so important that most of us will do whatever we can to place ourselves in a position where we feel important.  While this is something that is fairly widespread, I have learned to recognize this more among the highest achievers than others.  In some cases, going to excellent schools, or having worked for the very best employers can actually be something that drives people more and more to find reasons why they are significant and important in the world. Your need to feel significant may have created for you a life that you do not deserve.  Since I am involved in the legal industry, I know how to recognize good attorneys.  I know someone with the most amazing legal skills who never finished law school who, in my opinion, would be an incredible lawyer.  This person thinks like a lawyer and has a mind that works in a way that is quite brilliant from a legal perspective. Unfortunately, this person grew up believing that the most important people in the world are those who work as executives in large corporations.  This person’s career has been incredibly unfulfilling and marginal due to this.  He was working in large corporations because this was his idea of what would make him significant.  This person could be a world famous attorney today if he had pursued his real skill. I chose to go to law school because I believed that lawyers were very important.  I took the law school admissions test and, despite months of studying, did horribly.  I took the business school admissions test and did exceptionally well despite not studying. I struggled to get into law school because my test scores were so sub par.  When I applied to business school, I applied only to Stanford Business School (at the time it was ranked the #1 business school in the country) and got in.  I believed, however, that lawyers were more important, and I would be much more significant if I was a lawyer and always pursued this despite my better judgment.  For three years of my life, and three years of law school, I did something I hated because I believed this was what would make me significant.  I was never unhappier in my life. What have you done with your career and life out of the need to feel significant?  How well has this served you?  People will do all sorts of things to feel significant, and you are no different.  What have you done to feel important. I believe that the need to feel significant is one of our most important needs as people.  In law school, I had the opportunity to view patients in a mental asylum, as well as people who were being evaluated after murdering people.  When people start disassociating and actually going crazy, what happens most of the time is that they start imagining themselves as far more important than they actually are–like the former aide to the Congressman I met.  They start telling you how they know this famous person or that famous person, how they are related to this important politician, or how they are actually this famous person.  When I was studying these people I always understood that these people were just trying to feel important. Listen to the people around you and how they talk about various things.  The need of people having to feel important will come out when they tell you how they know this piece of information you do not, how they socialized with this person, how someone complimented them about something–and more.  Most people are literally obsessed with feeling important. As part of my job, I often have to entertain men who are clients of our company.  If you go out for a steak dinner with a group of men in a strange town, it seems that about 90% of the time, one of the men will suggest going to a strip bar after dinner if you are in an area where there are a bunch of them.  When men are together in a group, saying that you are morally offended by this sort of thing is generally not an option. I am not trying to offend anyone–this is just how things are. I went to high school in Bangkok, Thailand for a year when I was growing up, and I am totally not interested in strip bars anymore.  They say that people in France never become alcoholics because they are given wine from the time they are are old enough to hold a cup.  This is in contrast to Scandinavians, Americans and others who are denied alcohol as if it is sinful and end up going crazy when they are exposed to it.  So, too, is it with me and strip bars.  I cannot even begin to express to you how messed up it was going to school in Bangkok at the age of 16.  All the boys and girls in my class did all weekend was hang out in strip bars.  This was literally the meeting place for our class on the weekends.  The entire class would be in strip bars on Friday and Saturday nights every single weekend.  As such, in this day and age, I tend to just sit there bored while the people I am with go crazy dancing with girls and throwing money at the stage. By the time I was 17 years old, I had probably spent the equivalent of 20 lifetimes in strip bars–and strip bars in Bangkok back then were insane and not something I should be talking about.  The stuff that went down on stage was just plain wrong and makes even the gaudiest and wildest strip bars in the United States look like G-rated movies. A couple of months ago, I was on a business trip in Atlanta, and a girl at one of the strip bars came up to me and started talking to me.  Typically, the girls will strike up a conversation with the objective of giving you a “lap dance” and charging you $10 per song or something along those lines.  I was not interested in this, and have not been in decades, because I know the drill and have lost interest.  I am also married (but I can tell you from experience this does not seem to bother 99% of the men who go to these strip clubs.)  In any event, a girl who looked exactly like Marsha Brady on the Brady Bunch sat down and started talking to me.  Given the fact that my profession is getting people jobs, when I meet new people (especially in fringe professions (stripping is one of them), I am interested in learning about how they wound up doing what they do and also what their job entails.  This particular girl was at a bar ordering a drink across the room.  She made eye contact with me and smiled, took a hit of her cigarette, walked over, grabbed a chair sitting next to me, turned it around so the back of the chair was facing me, and sat down backwards. “Do you want to see my tattoo?” she immediately said. She took another long hit of a cigarette.  I was sitting with two other men, and they were also watching this spectacle.  She had a shirt on and pulled it up standing up to show me her belly.  On her belly, just above her crotch, was the most incredible tattoo:

PROPERTY OF EDUARDO   ↓

Apparently, Eduardo had claimed everything starting at her waist down as his property.  This giant tattoo made this clear. “Wow, how does Eduardo feel about you working here?” I asked her. “We’re divorced.” she said. “Oh, you better get rid of the tattoo then,” I told her. “Would you like to lick it off?” she asked. I almost fell out of my chair!  That was very original.  Over the next 30 minutes, however, I started learning more about her career and particular aspirations for her life.  What I found most interesting about the entire conversation, however, was how she kept coming back to the fact that Eduardo had been associated with a certain brutal gang that had chapters all over the United States.  She bragged to me about how the gang frequently cut peoples’ heads off in Mexico, and anyone who crossed the gang was likely to be in severe trouble.  She literally could not stop talking about the gang and how the gang was the most brutal and serious gang the world had ever known.  At the time, there was a lot of violence going on in Tijuana (several killings per day), and she bragged to me that this particular gang was involved with this epic violence.  She was also very proud of her association with Eduardo since he had been such a high-ranking gang member. What I realized about 20 minutes into the conversation was that her “claim to fame” and what she felt most significant about in her life was the association with this gang.  It was the most important thing she had in her life.  She had left home when she was very young and did not have any meaningful contact with her family.  She also did not have an education.  All she had to feel significant about was the fact that she had been married to a member of a brutal gang.  That was it. Had I been trying to impress her, I am pretty confident that anything I would have told her about myself would have paled in contrast to her former association with this gang.  She had so ingrained this into her need for significance that there was nothing I could really do that would measure up to how important she was due to the gang affiliation. Have you ever met someone who is incredibly angry at the United States?  Have you ever met a criminal?  Do you know why people do bad things?  Deep down, most of the evil in the world is related to peoples’ need to feel significant.  The fastest way to become important, for many people, is to point a gun at them.  “Okay, you’re in control!” you might say to them. One of the most amazing experiences in my life was the day someone tried to kill me.  When I was around 17 years old, kids in Grosse Pointe, Michigan developed a tradition of holding “keg parties” at banquet halls around Detroit.  The banquet halls were typically in terrible neighborhoods.  The kids would go out and purchase a bunch of beer kegs, rent out a banquet hall, and then charge kids admissions to get into the hall.  The kids who would go to these parties were all from Grosse Pointe, which at the time was almost 100% white and a middle- to upper-middle-class suburb.  One Saturday evening, I picked up a friend of mine to attend one of these parties.  Since I was attending  school in a different part of the Detroit area, I did not see him very much anymore.  He had become a very good student in the past few years and was quite proud of himself.  As we were walking into the banquet hall, two African American kids from the bad neighborhood pushed ahead of him in the line we were standing in.  They were apparently thinking they might like to attend the party, as well.  My friend said something to the kids, and they started arguing. I do not remember what the argument was about.  Some of the kids who were hosting the party came out and told the African American kids to leave and that it was a private party.  As the African American kids were walking away, my friend said the most offensive and incredible thing I had ever heard him say: “You guys better be careful how you act because one day you are going to be working for me.”  The kids did not flinch, looked at him and walked away. Sometime later we exited the party.  I was still a little shook up about what my friend said.  As we were walking towards the car I noticed the kids my friend had made the remarks to were sitting on a snow pile.  They appeared to have been sitting there for some time. “These kids are going to kick our asses,” I told my friend. “Just look down and keep walking,” he said. I got into my Yugo and my friend did, as well.  We were parked in an alley, and I started the car.  A second or two later, I heard a knocking on the windows.  It sounded like metal tapping on glass.  I looked up and saw a gun barrel pointing directly at my face. “Who’s in charge now!!!” I heard the kid with the gun scream.  I will never forget how terrified I was at that moment. I am still terrified thinking about it to this day.  I think the car must have already been in gear because within less than a second I had peeled out and was driving like hell away. I had thrown my body in my friend’s lap and was not even looking out the window.  As we drove away, I heard several gun shots, and one of then hit one of the lights on the back of the Yugo. Had I been a second later in starting the car, I am confident my friend or I would have been killed. What was going on here?  My friend had said something to these guys that had implied he was more important than them.  They responded by showing him a gun which instantly made them more important.  This is how most violence works, I think. We want to feel important. I have been sued before by people who have lost their jobs in our company in nuisance lawsuits.  Some of these former employees worked in places in our company where I never actually met them–such as in our warehouse.  When it really gets down to it, I believe I have been sued because someone feels unimportant when losing their job and wants to level the playing field.  The lawsuit gives them more power, and they suddenly are significant.  This works.  It is no different than pointing a gun at someone: Suddenly you have instant power. I read recently a study that doctors who spend more time with their patients socializing, and are less professional and more likable, get sued much less often. They study concluded that they probably get sued less because they do not hold their superiority over the patient, and allow the patient to express themselves and feel more important. They listen and show empathy for their patients.  More professional and more distant candidates do the opposite and get sued more often. Practically every person out there has a massive need to feel significant, and they will do this at whatever cost they can.  I recently read some excerpts from the biography of the woman who played Marcia Brady on the Brady Bunch, Maureen McCormick.  What really struck me about this biography was that after the series had ended, her life spun out of control in a downward spiral of sex and drugs.  Nothing really significant or important at all happened in her life after the series ended.  As she is reflecting back on the life she had, she appears to be looking for any significance apart from the work she did on the television series.  What struck me about this life after the television series was that one of the most “significant” things that appears to have happened to her is a date with Steve Martin. Martin had asked for McCormick’s phone number through Chevy Chase.

“I remember him being a very good kisser,” McCormick writes about Martin. “But I was insecure and either high or spaced out (most likely both), and I didn’t laugh at his jokes. “Though Steve was too polite and confident of his talent to say anything, I’m sure my inability to carry on a normal conversation or respond intelligently put him off,” she writes. “We never spoke again after that date. I’ve always regretted my behavior because he impressed me as an extraordinary guy. I would’ve enjoyed a second date.”

People look for significance in the smallest details and do everything within their power to feel significant.   We all have the need to feel significant and this need is something that really controls and governs many of our lives. Think about the people around you (and yourself) and what these people will do in order to feel important.  The list of things that people do in order to feel important is almost never-ending:

  • People will collect material possessions
  • People will get involved in certain extracurricular activities
  • People will do drugs
  • People will get tattoos
  • People will associate with certain groups
  • People will run for office
  • People will go to certain colleges and schools
  • People will associate with certain types of people
  • People will criticize others and tear them down
  • People will contribute money or time to organizations

We all want to feel that we are unique and special in some way.  This makes us feel as if we have a purpose and meaning for our lives.  One of the largest challenges of our lives is making sure that we do not meet our need to feel significant in a way that is destructive.  For example, many people in their need to feel significant will try and be critical of others.  Another popular thing that people will do in order to feel significant is to manufacture all sorts of illnesses.  Throughout my life I have witnessed numerous people who would come down with all sorts of sicknesses and ailments that, in my opinion, were related to getting the care and attention of others–so they could feel significant. According to one definition I found on Wikipedia:

In Münchausen syndrome, the affected person exaggerates or creates symptoms of illnesses in themselves in order to gain investigation, treatment, attention, sympathy, and comfort from medical personnel. In some extremes, people suffering from Münchausen’s Syndrome are highly knowledgeable about the practice of medicine, and are able to produce symptoms that result in multiple unnecessary operations. For example, they may inject a vein with infected material, causing widespread infection of unknown origin, and as a result cause lengthy and costly medical analyses and prolonged hospital stay. The role of “patient” is a familiar and comforting one, and it fills a psychological need in people with Münchausen’s. It is distinct from hypochondria in that patients with Münchausen syndrome are aware that they are exaggerating, while sufferers of hypochondria believe they have a disease.

I have a distant relative that never ceases to amaze me.  I love him and he is a very nice person.  I do not know how to judge the truth of the things he has told me, however.  For example, in the past couple of years he has told me stories about people he knows who have murdered people and about the number of gangs he has been associated with in New York.  Some time ago, I was in his home, and he started showing me all sorts of things.  One thing he showed me was a sword that had allegedly been stolen from a house several years ago during “a job” that his friend did.  He told me the sword was from a general in the Ottoman Empire and probably worth millions of dollars–I am sure this made him feel very significant.  The only problem is that the blade on the sword looked brand new.  Who knows if it is genuine or not?  The point is that this person was trying to feel significant by something he was dreaming might be worth millions of dollars–much more than he has ever seen in his life.  In realty, the sword is probably not more than 20 years old–who knows its value. You need to understand that your need to feel significant is something that controls your life.  The best thing you can possibly do for your career is detach from this need to feel significant and realize how this is controlling so much of what happens to you.  More importantly, you need to do the work you love and live the life you want without being controlled by a need to be significant.  This will change everything for you and allow you to contribute to the world in a productive way. THE LESSON You should not be controlled by your need to feel significant. The need to feel significant is universal and powerful, and most people will do anything necessary in order to achieve this sense of importance. To achieve actual success, you must detach yourself from this need and realize the extent to which it dictates your actions. When you devote yourself to the work you love and stop worrying about your sense of importance, you free yourself up to make substantive changes in the world and your life.

]]> http://www.aharrisonbarnes.com/do-not-be-controlled-by-your-need-to-feel-significant/feed/ 13 The Importance of Sharing Ideas http://www.aharrisonbarnes.com/the-importance-of-sharing-ideas/ http://www.aharrisonbarnes.com/the-importance-of-sharing-ideas/#comments Fri, 02 Apr 2010 06:14:08 +0000 Harrison Barnes http://www.aharrisonbarnes.com/?p=2290 2290 When I was in law school, I went into the library one afternoon and took a seat at a desk across from a guy I knew quite well. We were not great friends but I had been over to his home a few times and he was a likeable guy in all respects. Both of us were in the same Property class and we had an exam coming up in about two weeks. In your first year of law school, Property is one of the more difficult classes and requires a lot of study and preparation because it is a different way of thinking. In law school, the way people typically study is through outlines. An outline is essentially a distillation of the reading in class and insights from the Professor. Because there is so much to learn, what typically happens is groups of students get together to create them over a 15 week semester. For example, 15 students will get together and one week one student may do the outline and the next week another student will do the outline. After about 15 minutes, I looked up and realized that the outline he was studying from was absolutely incredible. It was incredible because it was very well organized and was tracking both the Professor’s comments and everything that had happened in the class very closely. It appeared to be something that was made in a prior year and had distilled the same class the professor had taught over and over again in a really good way. I asked my friend if I could see the outline. When I asked him this he hesitated a little bit and I could tell it was not something he really wanted to show me. Before he showed it to me he looked around the library to see if anyone was watching us. When he realized we were alone, he handed me the outline but not before telling me that if anyone walked up to not let them see me looking at it. I thought this was unusual but agreed. As I looked through the outline more closely I realized this was something that would really make my study of Property go a lot better. The outline was exceptionally well done in all respects. I immediately realized I needed this outline. “Can I copy this outline?” I asked. “I promised the people I got it from I would not let anyone copy it,” he said. “Are you kidding?” “No, I’m sorry. I can’t.” This sounded absolutely ridiculous to me. For the next 10 minutes or so I sat there and eventually talked him into letting me copy the outline. In order to copy the outline he made me promise to drive to a city called Culpepper, that was around 30 minutes outside of  Charlottesville, Virgina where I was going to law school. He was absolutely paranoid that someone who had given him this outline would see me with it and then blame him for giving me the outline. “These people are vicious … ” he told me. A few hours later I had copied the outline and drove over to his home and dropped it off. I chatted with him for another 10 minutes or so about where he had gotten this outline and who else had the outline. Incredibly, he informed me that he had gotten the outline from the same group of people who were in my outline group for property. He did not name all of the people, but he did name around 10 of the 15 people who were in my outline group as all having it. They had been having a “study party” or something along those lines that he had showed up at, and they had all been using this outline. They allowed him to copy it but made him promise never to give it to anyone else. As far as he knew, only these 10 people had a copy of the outline. The reason these people did not want others to have the outline was because the outline was so good. They believed that this outline was something that gave them an advantage and would enable them to perform much better in the final exam in the Property class. Essentially, the idea was that if they had this and others did not then this “artificial advantage” would enable them to do better, get a better job and be more successful. The next day in Property class, I looked around when the class began and watched those 10 people very closely. The classroom was a podium and I always sat at the very back of the classroom, so I could see everyone in the class and also look down. About 10 minutes into the class, those 10 people all had this “secret outline” out and were taking notes on it and so forth. A couple of days later, before the class started, everyone was waiting out in the hall of the classroom for the doors to open. Individually, I went up to several of the 10 people who were in my outline group but also possessed this “secret outline” and asked them if they had any other outlines except the ones that our group was making each week. Each one said something along the lines of the following: “No, but if you come across any other outlines, please let me know. I could use one.” I was amazed by this. Some of the people who were claiming not to have outlines were people I thought were my friends. This was something that was quite incredible to me because not only were these people lying to me, they were all sticking together. It almost seemed that they had coordinated responses for anyone who asked them about the outlines. It was not cheating, but it almost seemed worse. What made this so upsetting to me was that these were people who were in an outline group with me, which I mistakenly believed meant that we were all cooperating together to achieve something. I was wrong. I was in charge of doing the last outline in the Property course. In this week, the Professor decided to cover “new developments in Property law” and discussed some new cases that had happened over the course of the past year. None of this information was on the special outline that the students were hoarding in my class. The last class took place about three or four days before the final exam, if I remember correctly. The final exam was “open book” meaning you could use your notes and other information. Notwithstanding, it was also extremely important to know what the Professor had said. After the class, I dutifully made my outline. I spent several hours on the outline and made it the absolute best I could. I made 15 copies so that I could give one to each of the members of my outline groups. I put them in their mailboxes in the student commons. However, as I started putting these in the boxes, I decided to play a little bit of the same game that had been played with me. I decided I would not give my outline to the students who had lied to me about not having an outline. I remember throwing away the extra outlines in the trash, right near the mailboxes in the student commons. This was one of the biggest mistakes I ever made. Without getting into a lot of details, those people became extremely upset with me because about 30% of the final exam was devoted to the last class and things the teacher had talked about in class. Because the last class was so close to final exams, many people had not bothered to show up because they were studying or sleeping in after a late night studying. Many of those people probably believed that they had everything they needed in their “secret outline”. I will never forget when I got out of the Property exam and was standing in the hall. A girl who was in my outline group came up to me all red in the face, with watery eyes. She was actually was a pretty nice person, besides the fact that she had hid the outline she had from me. She started screaming at me and told me that I had ruined her life and she had probably failed the exam due to me not giving her the outline.  I got many mean looks from others who exited the exam, who I had not given the outline to. One guy came up to me and told me my outline had saved his life. But for the most part, I had done something I was not proud of. In retrospect, I really feel like this is one of the worst things I have ever done. I simply should not have played these games with them by withholding information like what had been done to me. Even when the next school year started, there were people who were still upset with me. I remember someone else coming up to me at a party and getting angry with me, telling me they had gotten a horrible grade in property due to me. Then I remember confronting the person with the fact that they had lied to me about their outline and seeing a large group of people actually turn against them. A lot of people learned about this story, and a lot of people were on my side. Still, in my opinion the “tit for tat” was the wrong thing and not something I should have done. In one quick moment, by not providing information to people, I had made several enemies and changed my law school experience in a negative way. It is largely due to this experience that I run my career the way I do today. I am happy to share any and all information I know about getting jobs. I never hide the ball or hide information from anyone. I provide people with as much information as I possibly can about everything I know. My goal is to put as much information out there as I can–with jobs, with advice and everything. I have taken what was a bad experience and turned it into something to help others. The idea of hiding information is something that starts very early for many of us. I am reminded of when I was in elementary school and students put their arms around their papers during tests to prevent others around them from seeing their answers. This idea of “hiding answers” and hiding information is something that stays with many of us throughout our entire lives, and ends up having a major influence on our entire lives. It is the same with our careers. Many people are very secretive about information and their ideas. They do not want others to take credit for what they are doing. When you hoard information, you are constantly playing a “political game” where you are judging if one person or another can know something. In addition, people who hoard information constantly seem to have stale ideas because you only get their information when they deem it is relevant to tell you about them. There are a lot of people out there who are secretive with information. I cannot believe how much I saw this when I was practicing law. I still see it in my job today. One of my biggest beliefs is that if you are continually giving away all of your ideas, then you constantly put yourself in a need to replenish your ideas. This forces you to be creative and come up with new ideas and information and develops a psychology within you where you are always looking to share what you know with people, instead of looking to hoard what you know. When you share ideas others also tell you their ideas, and this gives you access to more ideas. That is, the ideas you share with others end up coming back to you in the form of access to more ideas. Several years after graduating from college and after having ended my career as an attorney, I decided to go to business school. I enrolled in Stanford Business School and packed my bags and went up to the school. Prior to classes starting, they had an orientation where all of the new students spent the weekend together getting to know each other and also had the opportunity to meet all of the students who were getting ready to graduate from business school. I remember going to a cocktail party that was being held for the entering students to meet the exiting students. I was excited to see what the exiting students were doing. I was also assigned a “mentor” who was an exiting student I could call with any questions I had. I spoke with my mentor and asked him what he was doing after graduation. I was very curious. He told me he was starting a business, but that the business was so confidential he could not even tell me what it was about. It was a strange experience standing there, and I wondered what the point was of going to school with someone who could not even tell me what he was doing. I spoke to several other people at the party and I remember another guy did the exact same thing with me. I felt it was very unusual to have no interest whatsoever in sharing what you were doing. It really left a bad taste in my mouth. “Is this what business is about?” I wondered. In the book Love is the Killer App: How to Win Business and Influence Friends, author Tim Sanders writes:
Over and over I have discovered that the people in the bizworld who are most successful, and happiest, are the lovecats. These are the people who you always like the most, the ones who are passionate from 9 to 5, or 8 to 10, or whatever their hours. They are the ones who are most generous with their knowledge, their address book, and their compassion.

There are real benefits to sharing what you know. Ideas are open knowledge that anyone should have access to. There are never any benefits in not sharing most knowledge with the people around you. I have always believed in the power of sharing ideas and have found that the more I have done this the better our companies (and I) have done. In closing, I want to share with you an email I sent to every member of our company this morning. It is about ideas and the importance of sharing. I send this email (in one form or another) each year as one of our companies, BCG Attorney Search, completes a book for every law firm in the United States:

Good Morning, I am happy to enclose The 2009 BCG Attorney Search Guide to America’s Top 50 Law Schools(the “Guide”). Special thanks go to Lalita and her team. Indeed, they have spent the past year working on this important project that signifies what BCG Attorney Search and our other companies represent. Each year since BCG Attorney Search’s inception we have written the Guide and sent it out to every law firm in the United States. I remember first working on the Guide when the company had less than 5 employees. Providing the Guide to law firms each year and working on the Guide is more of a symbolic act than anything. First, it is something that insures that our company always has very strong research skills and is “going deep” and knows how to work with voluminous amounts of information. This focus on research has enabled us to venture into numerous fields where these skills are valued that I never could have imagined–whether it is job sites or researching hiring contacts for Legal Authority. Recruiters who know how to do good research and find information that others do not know about typically do the best here. Our sites which are best at researching information (LawCrossing) also do much better than newer job sites that are not as good. Our company has been benefited tremendously by the power of research and the more and better we have become at this the better we have done. Second, working on the Guide each year forces us to pay attention to writing well and our editing skills. Writing is something that is incredibly valuable. Our recruiters are expected to write well. Our companies write hundreds of articles each week. We are always improving our writing-related skills—even in something as simple as how we list jobs. For example, last weekend we did a giant project to eliminate junk characters in our job listings. The more we have written the better we have done. We owe a lot of our success to our ability to get search engine rankings which has a lot to do with how much we have written. Search engines and others look at us and say “these guys have a lot to talk about” and people come and they listen. We need to always be sharing what we know and writing and speaking. This is an important core value of BCG Attorney Search and it has made our recruiters strong. Third, the Guide is about sharing information. Our company has always believed and continues to believe that it is best to share information rather than hold it close to the vest like so many other do. We want people to know what we know. Sharing information brings people to us and allows people to see us as authorities in our field rather than dabblers. We want people to know what we know and we are not afraid to tell them that. If we feel someone cannot get a job through BCG Attorney Search because they do not have the pedigree, our recruiters are happy to share with them another way to get a job. This is not something many other recruiters will do. Our recruiters share information, however, because this is who we are. Fourth, the Guide is about providing value without expecting something in return. At BCG Attorney Search we spend a great deal of money and time working on the Guide each year and provide it to law schools, law firms and others for free. We want them to benefit from interacting with us and we want to be seen as someone who is an asset and not someone just interested in short term rewards. It is important to always be providing value. We want to provide value at every turn. I once read something written by Joe Vitale, a well known copywriter. Vitale started a habit of giving away books to people. Pretty soon he realized that the more books he gave away the more books came back to him. He constantly was giving away books and he realized after doing this for some time that for every book he gave away he received far more books back than just one new book. His library just kept growing and getting bigger and bigger. And if he gave away a book about one idea someone would give him a book about a related idea that he knew nothing about. The point he was trying to make was that the more you give away and the more you share the more comes back to you and the more you ultimately learn and know. This is an incredible concept but it is something that can really change your life and change our business. It is something that the Guide represents and, if anything, it is its greatest meaning. A lot of who BCG Attorney Search is and what our companies represent is signified in the Guide. As we go into an incredible economic storm and watch companies and law firms around us that once seemed invincible collapse, I am confident that what is signified by in the Guide is something that will enable us to continue growing and provide for our future. The more our companies have steered towards the values signified in the Guide the better they have done. The more we have strayed the worse we have done. I believe in these values and that is why I am so proud to present you with the Guide yet again this year. Providing you with the Guide forces me to think about our values each year and what really matters. –Harrison

THE LESSON You must share information freely, and never hide information from anyone. When you give away all your ideas you create the need to replenish them, which opens the door to creativity and innovation. Furthermore, sharing your ideas with others give you access to more ideas. People who hoard information tend to have stale ideas because they only share or seek innovation when relevant, meaning that their own store of information stagnates.

]]> http://www.aharrisonbarnes.com/the-importance-of-sharing-ideas/feed/ 11 My Lesson From the Missionaries http://www.aharrisonbarnes.com/my-lesson-from-the-missionaries/ http://www.aharrisonbarnes.com/my-lesson-from-the-missionaries/#comments Tue, 14 Jun 2011 05:14:11 +0000 Harrison Barnes http://www.aharrisonbarnes.com/?p=1345 1345 Several years ago, I was working at a law firm and virtually from the moment I arrived a woman I’ll call “Linda” used to come into my office for a few hours a day to talk. Her topic? How bad things were at the law firm. She would share one rumor after the other about how many bad things were going on at the law firm. I was treated to information about allegedly corrupt activities, affairs, who did not like who, incredible insights into who was about to be fired, what different people had said to her, and more. Most of these conversations would occur behind closed doors, and after she left I often wondered to myself what I was doing at such a horrible law firm. Her visits would always leave me a little depressed. I wondered what I was doing with my life, associating with and being involved with such a horrible group of people. I had actually joined the law firm thinking it was a great place and in many respects, it was. I was able to push aside what Linda was talking about generally about 45 minutes after she left and continue to enthusiastically pursue my job the best I could. When I would get back to work not more than an hour or two later the phone would ring and it was Linda. “Guess what?” she would say. She would then proceed to relay to me another rumor of some sort. I even made pretty good friends with Linda, and these meetings eventually turned into conversations where she started telling me about men in the office she was interested in, antidepressants she was taking, and who she had previously been involved with. On the weekends she would call me, and my fiánce at the time would hand me the phone as Linda related yet another rumor about the law firm she learned about over the weekend. I have no idea how Linda managed to get any work done at the law firm. I also had no idea why she had chosen to come to work there. She was literally spending every spare moment gossiping about how bad the law firm was. Then Linda started going on interviews with various employers. She was very well-spoken, had gone to the #1 ranked law school in the country at the time, and was quite attractive. She very quickly got numerous job offers. She then gave notice at the law firm and if I recall correctly she “let the law firm have it” in terms of telling them everything she thought was wrong with them. Her “vent” was pretty epic and involved all sorts of observations as well as deep psychological-type analyses of her supervisors and others, which left the powers that be in the law firm stunned. After this incredible episode she still wanted me to pal around the law firm with her by sitting with her in the law firm library and walking past the offices of the same partners in the law firm she had bitterly put down when she resigned. This was all too much for me. She had really upset a lot of people. “Linda,” I told her. “This place is not really that bad. I think you have just been making it bad by looking for all of the bad stuff. Everyone is really upset with you right now. I am trying to have a career here. I’d really appreciate it if you didn’t hang out with me all the time at work. I need to hold on to my job. I’m getting married soon and will have a wife to support, a mortgage to pay, and other responsibilities. I really cannot afford to be associated with this.” I had reached this decision because I knew my association with Linda was really hurting me. I knew her attitude was casting a negative light on me to some extent. Looking around me at the law firm, I could see numerous people who had been there for decades. Could the place be so bad if there were people who had managed to work at the same place for so long? I knew the answer to this particular question was “no” and that much of what was being seen was simply through Linda’s eyes. How do you think it makes you feel about your job if someone is coming in a couple of times a day and telling you how awful your workplace is? What if your phone were ringing off the hook with gossip about your co-workers? Even if these things were true, do you think this does you any good? There are generally people in all organizations who seem dedicated to walking around spreading rumors of doom and gloom. I have witnessed it throughout my career–even in organizations that were doing well. I wonder how these people get any work done. It seems more like these people are involved in a soap opera than anything else. They are constantly doing everything within their power to spread fear among their co-workers. I certainly witnessed this sort of thing when I was working. It is going on everywhere. Several years, I was attending a wedding in rural Utah about 90 minutes outside of Provo. My cousin was marrying a lovely woman from this area who had moved to New York City to become an on-air news anchor at a local television station. The videographer walked up to me and started talking to me. “I’ve done only a few weddings for 12 year-old girls, about twice as many for 13 year-old girls,” he told me. “I’ve done many 14 year-old weddings. I just did one last week,” he told me gruffly and matter-of-factly. He was referring to the fact that older men were marrying women at that age. (I would learn later in the evening that some of the men getting married to these 14 year old girls not only often had 5+ other wives, but also that many of them were in their 50s.) Videotaping the weddings of young girls to older men was a very normal thing to him. I could not believe it. You hear about this sort of stuff on television and in the movies but I did not realize how prevalent this actually was. I was mesmerized by this particular conversation and others that led me to question if I was really part of the United States. You can learn so much by talking to people, especially in rural Utah. As the man and I continued to speak he told me that he was very involved with the county and the workforce services part of the county. In fact, he was in charge of recruiting employers from out-of-state to come to his county to hire people. He explained to me many people chose to live in this part of the country because of their Mormon faith. He said many of them actually go away to schools like Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) then come back because family is so important in their religion. He then explained there were incredibly talented people in the county who were interested in working for sophisticated companies. This was music to my ears. I really liked the people I was meeting because they were much more wholesome than the people I was accustomed to dealing with in Los Angeles. I had also had an experience several years ago with some Mormon missionaries that made me decide I would do whatever I could to help Mormons in the future. I had been living in Bay City, Michigan, working for a federal judge and one Saturday while I was watching a football game and immersed in a bowl of Doritos with a bunch of empty Diet Cokes in front of me, I heard the doorbell ring. I did not have a lot of friends in Bay City and was eager for any company I could get. Into my apartment walked two of the nicest guys I had ever met. They had name tags on, white starched shirts, and little black bicycles. I let them in and they gave me a Bible and some literature. At the time my fiance was out of town, and I was pretty bored and enjoyed the company. They told me they would stop back in a couple of days to talk to me some more. After a couple more visits during which they related to me fascinating information about their religion, they gave me an ultimatum. I really liked these guys and Mormonism sounded great. I grew up Episcopalian and at the time I was not too happy with the religion. My uncle is actually a pretty famous Episcopal Priest and had agreed to officiate my wedding which was scheduled to happen in about six months. Then he’d told me he didn’t want to because he disliked my father. This was really a bit too much for me. I thought religions were supposed to be about peace and love. These Mormon guys were very likable. What I liked best about their religion was they promised me if I converted, after I died I would get my own planet with my wife and children. Listening to stuff like this really fascinated me. It was like playing Dungeons and Dragons–only it was real. I also liked their values, the structure, and felt it was an all-in-all great religion. I still like Mormonism to this day and feel a strong connection with it. “We’d like to have you down to our church. However, before we can go any further with you we are going to have to ask you to have your fiance move out of the house. You are living in sin and this is impeding your spiritual development.” “Are you kidding?” I asked. My fiance and I had been together for years and she moved to Bay City with me from Charlottesville, Virginia, and we were engaged. There was no way this was happening. I looked at these guys and realized they were quite serious. A week previously they had requested I not eat or drink anything (even water!) for a day–I obliged. They were also hinting that I should never drink coffee or my beloved Diet Coke any longer. They also told me I should be prepared to give them 10% of all the money I made. Finally, they told me I should never drink alcohol. These guys were beginning to get annoying. I told those nice 18 year-old guys I appreciated their spiritual lessons but did not think they should continue. There was no way I was asking my fiance to move out. About three months later the guys stopped by again. It was spring at this point, and I had brought out from storage a 550 gallon tanker I towed behind my Suburban that I filled with asphalt sealant each year. To the horror of my neighbors it was sitting directly in front of my apartment looking mean and ugly. I had been doing asphalt work since the age of 18 and was excited to get back in business during the weekends while working for the judge. The thing about this tank is that you can never get all of the sealer out of it at the end of the season. Because it snows in Michigan you cannot apply the sealer to asphalt then. The asphalt sealer in the tank hardens up and turns into a clay-like material. You have to climb inside the tank and scrape all of the material out. There are agitators and other things inside the tank that do no work unless you do this. It typically took me about15 hours to do this each year. “Is there anything we can do for you?” they asked after we exchanged some pleasantries. “Yeah, you can scrape that stuff out of the tank sitting there,” I told them. “Other than that I do not have any problems I am concerned about at the moment.” I was kidding of course. The next day I came home and apparently all the missionaries from miles around had come and climbed in the tank and cleaned it out. They did not leave me a note or anything. I never saw the missionaries again. I promised myself from that day onwards if I ever had a chance to do anything for Mormons in my life I would. This was an incredible gesture of kindness and I appreciated it. They had done this expecting nothing in return. As the videographer at the party talked, I told him I was in a position to hire people. I remembered the kindness the missionaries had shown me and wanted to give back. The videographer told me how high the unemployment rate was, and I told him I would do everything I could to hire people in the town. A few weeks later, I showed up with several of my managers and made arrangements to come to the unemployment office and start interviewing people. We found office space and made preparations to shift a substantial majority of our operations to this rural Utah area. A few weeks later, we proceeded to hire at least 10-15 people from the unemployment office. We rented a truck and went to Sam’s Club in Provo and purchased computers, desks, chairs and tens of thousands of dollars worth of equipment for our new office. All of the new employees helped us set up the office. Metaphorically, it was almost as if my experience with these wonderfully nice people years ago had caused this religion to create this office sitting there. A few weeks into the process, I started realizing there were problems. Most of the people whom we had hired had been unemployed for months, and in some cases years, before they were hired. The small staff I had hired on a mission of goodwill started talking like they should be unionized. An incredible number of destructive rumors started going around the office that made it back to our headquarters in Pasadena, California. The people we had hired often started disappearing for hours during the day. Absenteeism was extremely high. Errors were high. The office was sitting in the shadow of one of the largest and most significant temples in the Mormon religion. In fact, with the exception of one employee in the office, the work was the worst I have ever seen. There were other issues there going on as well. We even had an issue where a married couple was sexually harassing a young employee in our call center because they wanted her to be part of a polygamous relationship with them. When I heard about this, it was the last straw. The fact that such people were producing negative news and negative energy in addition to the sexual harassment stories was too much to handle. I sent a couple of trucks from Pasadena and some managers to Utah and packed up everything in the office and closed the office down. The same day I decided there was one good employee there who was actually exceptional and kept her. She is still working here to this day and has risen to become one of the most exceptional managers in the company. She rebuilt the office there and it has been very, very successful. It is one of the best things I have ever done for our business. What I learned from this, however, is that there are people who should not be hired. The people from the unemployment office were unemployed for a reason: they were cancerous to their organizations. People who spread negative energy and news are like cancers to companies and to their co-workers. One of the best hires I ever made was almost brought down by this cancer. You need to be very careful about cancerous people because they can hurt you. Stay away and keep your job. This was an important lesson I learned in Utah. Today we have a great operation there and it is filled with great people who have good attitudes. The company has learned it’s important to keep only happy and enthusiastic people around. Most of us are put in positions where people are planting negative thoughts and ideas in our mind. You cannot afford to be associated with this at work. Negative information, rumors and so forth are like a cancer. They will spread to you and take you down as well. Positive energy is the opposite. Positive energy creates good and makes things better. The positive energy of the Mormon missionaries created the office we currently have in Utah. The spirit of giving they emphasized is something that has created millions of dollars in payroll for a community that is probably 99% Mormon. This would not have happened without their positive energy. The negative energy of the chronically unemployed I hired almost took all of that away. The rumors, innuendo and scheming could have seriously damaged the company. While good always wins out in the end, you want to be on the side that is growing and productive – not on the side that is bringing things down. If you follow this advice you will have much fewer bumps in your career. THE LESSON You cannot afford to be associated with positions in which people implant negative thoughts and ideas in your mind. Negative information, rumors, and so forth can spread like a cancer and destroy your life; positive energy is the exact opposite and works to improve everything. Be on the side that is growing and productive, not the side that is bringing you down; doing so will do much to smooth your career path.

]]> http://www.aharrisonbarnes.com/my-lesson-from-the-missionaries/feed/ 9 Harmonize With the People in Your Environment http://www.aharrisonbarnes.com/harmonize-with-the-people-in-your-environment/ http://www.aharrisonbarnes.com/harmonize-with-the-people-in-your-environment/#comments Tue, 27 Dec 2011 05:01:24 +0000 Harrison Barnes http://www.aharrisonbarnes.com/?p=3597 3597 One of the most unusual candidates I ever worked with back when I was a job recruiter, was someone who had basically worked for five different law firms in a five-year period. He had absolutely stellar credentials, having attended the best schools, and having worked at the best law firms. The only problem was that it seemed he could not last more than a year at any place where he worked. When I started sending him out to various law firms, all the prospective employers came back and in no uncertain terms told me they were not interested in the guy. It was the strangest thing and I could not understand it at the time. On paper, the candidate looked like someone who would easily secure at least a handful of interviews. He was also very personable. One day I was driving down Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles near the federal building and I saw a man with a giant sign: “KICK THE JEWS OUT OF ISRAEL AND GIVE IT BACK TO PALESTINE!” He was screaming at cars while waving the sign in the air to get everyone’s attention. Incredibly, it was that candidate. When I recognized who it was, it suddenly made sense why nobody was interested in hiring the man. He was apparently a complete rebel who did not care to fit in with those around him. Since there is probably no law firm in Los Angeles without a substantial number of Jews in it who would be deeply offended by this guy’s views, I realized this guy was going to have a really hard time fitting in anywhere. Marching against the people who are likely to also be your employers and clients is probably not ever a good idea. Over the years I have seen many attorneys like this who, for whatever reason, make a decision to really stick out. They lose jobs and quickly develop a “do not touch this person with a ten foot pole” reputation that follows them wherever they go. Law firms want people who are going to fit in and simply get the work done. They do not want to offend clients. It is the same with any job–you need to fit in with the people you are working for and they need to see you as fitting in at all times. If you do not fit in and harmonize with others in your work environment, it can create serious problems for you. Several years ago I hired an employee who came across as a very quiet library type. He did excellent work and was quickly given raises and increased responsibility. He was a nice guy who kept a very low profile at work and seemed to be respected by his peers. Apparently he had gotten romantically involved with a coworker. One day a few weeks after I heard the two had ended their relationship, the female coworker and I were talking about something unrelated, and suddenly she started saying negative things about the guy in a roundabout way, making subtle digs. I was not interested in listening and attempted to change the conversation. Then she brought up something that really shocked me: “He has tattoos across his entire chest of skulls and stuff.” “Excuse me?” I said. “He is covered in tattoos. You have just never seen them because he has kept them covered up all these years at work.” She knew this would shock me. She then proceeded to tell me that the guy liked to hang out at industrial Goth-type clubs in Hollywood. The reason she was telling me all of this was because at the time our company was somewhat formal and comprised lots of attorneys. I am not the sort of guy who is generally into tattoos and the woman could look around and see that I did not have any other tattooed employees, as most of the staff was pretty conservative. This woman was trying to get me to form a negative opinion of the guy and I could tell she was also trying, as best as she could, to get him fired. In essence, what she was implying was “here among you is a traitor!!” She was trying to send me a signal loud and clear that this guy did not fit in, and that he was not who he represented himself to be. The girl did not stay with our company very long and a short time later the guy she had tattled on got a significant raise–and a year or so later, another raise. I was incredibly impressed with him and what he had been able to achieve. Not once did this guy come across as the sort of person who would have a bunch of tattoos and be interested in strange night life, vampires, and whatever it was that interested him. He was an impressive, intelligent person who, when at work, did his job very well and served as a role model to his fellow employees, especially the younger ones. The fact that his ex-girlfriend had seen him with his shirt off and could testify that he was covered in tattoos did not make the slightest difference to me. In fact, it made me think even more highly of him. He had managed to completely fit in at work and play the work role that was expected of him. When I was in college,  the entire time I dated a girl who was Jewish. One time she came home with me over Christmas break and we went to a family Christmas party. My girlfriend, mom, sister, and I had driven from Detroit down to Ohio to visit the family of my mother’s second husband. We were in Toledo, Ohio, celebrating Christmas with this large Irish family in a very small house and at some point I wanted to get out of the house and get some fresh air. Down the street there was a giant church and I thought it would be fun to go look at it. My girlfriend and I decided we would go look at it and I informed a couple of my relatives that we were going to make the visit. It was about 3:30 in the afternoon and several of them were pretty buzzed on Miller High Life at that point. One walked up to us and said: “Why would she be interested in a church? She’s Jewish!” “Huh?” she said. “That’s right. We all know your secret. What’s it like seeing Christmas celebrated? Are you even allowed to go inside of a church?” Right then and there I realized we had been at this house the entire day and although not once did anyone say anything about her religion, it was clearly on their minds. Try as they might have, once the beers got rolling, they felt like they needed to make an issue out of it. My girlfriend ended up laughing it off; however, the conversation, short as it was, made us both feel incredibly uncomfortable. It had been nothing less than a tacit statement that my girlfriend did not fit in and was not one of the tribe. She thought the entire thing was pretty humorous but for me it actually felt a little menacing. People around us are always looking closely to see if we fit in. They are judging us and making assumptions even when we are not aware of it. In many cases, especially in the working world, it is important that we do our best to fit in at all costs. It can become a matter of survival. A couple of months later my girlfriend got back at me, albeit unintentionally. She took me to a Passover Seder in Chicago. My girlfriend had been raised a very conservative Jew. She spoke and read Hebrew and was incredibly well versed in her religion and all its traditions. The Hillel Center at the University of Chicago had a program where students could go have Passover with local families around Chicago. That night was really unusual to me; I had no idea what was going on. In the reading of the Haggadah I was unable to read in Hebrew and the people at the table looked very surprised. I managed to mess up virtually every ritual involved in the Seder.  At the end of the evening, the man who had hosted the event approached me and started asking me all sorts of questions such as which synagogue I went to in Detroit and so forth. It was his subtle way of letting me know he knew I did not belong at the dinner, and it was very unwelcoming. I felt so uncomfortable. Some incredibly awkward moments followed. Clearly this man was insulted that he had opened this sacred event to include a non-Jew. I am not sure why he felt this way and in my experience with Judaism this is certainly not par for the course; nevertheless this particular person was very angry. In fact he became downright hostile. The following day someone from the Hillel Center called my girlfriend and told her that she should not have brought me to the Seder. The next year they also posted an “addendum” on the sign up form for the Seder, which explained that it was “bad judgment” to bring non-Jews to the Seder. Throughout my relationship with this girl, she broke up with me numerous times at her parents’ and family’s request because I was not the same religion as her. Many groups go a long way to protect this ideal, because  maintaining the sense of solidarity within their group is so incredibly important to them. What these two events taught me–my family at Christmas and my girlfriend’s family at Passover was that people are incredibly sensitive about people fitting in with them. And every group seems to have both implied and expressed rules about who may or may not be allowed to fit in, based on how a person acts, looks, speaks, or believes. I ended up marrying another girl who was Jewish, several years ago. I had a Jewish wedding and during this wedding I could see that a lot of my relatives were confused as to what was going on. For most of my relatives, this was the first Jewish wedding they had ever attended, and for most it felt like a completely alien culture and set of traditions. I could relate to this because it was how I had felt too, before I had learned about and experienced it all first hand. A month or so ago I was having dinner in the Harvard Club of New York to celebrate my cousin’s birthday. At one point in the evening, my great uncle came up to speak with me and I noticed he had some information written on a piece of paper. He had gone to Harvard and Phillips, Andover, and was from a very old American family, out of which had come the first American Senator from Kansas (and the President pro tempore of the Senate)–among other things. My great uncle is a really nice guy who is always curious about various ideas. Recently, he decided to have some genetic testing done by some group affiliated with National Geographic. For the past several weeks he had been pondering the results: It turned out that his mother’s side was Jewish, which meant that my father would have been Jewish due to blood lines. My great uncle was very intrigued by this, and he told me how this side of his family had come over from Holland hundreds of years ago and must have been Jewish. He was actually in a state of disbelief–not sure what to make about any of this information. A couple of years ago I also took a genetic test and got interesting results: It came back that my mother was Jewish. My mother, of course, had no idea and for days sat puzzled in front of the computer. She had been raised in a small town in the Midwest and did not understand how her mother could possibly have been Jewish. When my wife and I went to visit her last Christmas she had put a Star of David on her window and appeared to be going with it in terms of what she had discovered. My point is not to instruct you based on my religious learning and what I have discovered about my roots. Instead, my point is far more general and far-reaching. Historically, at least in terms of the places my family has lived (Michigan, Kansas), Jews were treated poorly and not given the same opportunities as the rest of the general population. What I am surmising is that in order to get ahead, what many Jews ended up doing is converting to Christianity and abandoning and even forgetting about their roots. Consequently, a generation or more later we find guys like me who, through the modern miracle of genetic testing, discover that they are actually Jewish. When I was in law school, I was once visiting a friend of mine with the last name Goldstein. He had always pronounced this name the exact way you would think it looks and is pronounced. One time during a break I was sleeping on a couch in his apartment and I heard him talking to a girl he was being fixed up with. I did not know the situation but when I heard him pronounce his last name to her I could not believe it. He said his last name very quickly: “Gosin,” I heard him say. “Yes, Gosin.” I was not sure what was going on there but I got the feeling that he did not want the girl to know, for whatever reason, that he had an obviously Jewish last name. It made me uncomfortable hearing this because my friend was the last person I ever suspected would try and gloss over who he really was. But isn’t this something we all do in one form or another to fit in? Don’t we all at one time or another go out of our way to be someone we are not in order to be seen as someone other than who we are? One of the most important things that society seems to demand of us is that we harmonize with our environment. In order to do this, many people will abandon their religions, cover up their tattoos, and do all sorts of things to look the part. While I am not condoning that people do this with their religions, this is something that people all over the world do in order to fit in. Don’t ask, don’t tell is an example of a military policy that forces soldiers to fit in and harmonize with their environment. If you were a flamboyant homosexual, the odds are pretty good that you would not be comfortable working as a motorcycle mechanic in a Harley Davidson dealership. And if this were your chosen profession you would probably do what you needed to in order to fit in–and then you would be a completely different person outside of work. One day when I was in college, I remember the President of the student counsel of the entire University of Chicago, who also belonged to a fraternity, was seen cavorting with another man in a gay bar that some of his fraternity brothers went into as a joke, when they were drunk one night. They were astonished to see one of their own frat brothers in the gay bar, brushing up to another man. For all intents and purposes, this guy had covered up who he was, and had never been his real self in public. It must have been very difficult for him to have looked up and seen his fraternity brothers, realizing at that moment that his secret was completely out in the open. In heterosexual fraternities, you cannot really fit in if you are a gay. In your employment environment and to get the jobs you want, you need to harmonize with the people around you. You need to be what they are and you need to go along with whatever the environment supports. Your work and how you are judged by the people around you will have a giant impact on your fate in the workplace. I wonder if my great grandfather, John James Ingalls, would have been an American Senator and President pro tempore of the United States Senate if he had been known as a Jew in the 1800s. Today there is a statue of him in the Capitol Rotunda in Washington, DC. It is one of two statues of famous Kansas residents. I wonder if any of this would have occurred if he had been known as a Jew at the time. When he was a senator he was a strong advocate of freeing the slaves. Perhaps a part of him wanted to help that part of him that was also oppressed in the dominant society at the time. My great grandfather was probably ultimately able to do more good, and to accomplish more in his life by fitting in, than had he not fit in. His son later followed in his footsteps, and became the governor of Kansas. If you saw pictures of this family, the last thing you would expect was that they were Jewish. And at some point they probably forgot or covered up the fact. There is nothing more important to your career than blending in and harmonizing with the people in your environment. It is only by harmonizing with the people in your environment that you can achieve your career goals. THE LESSON You need not only to fit in, but to be seen as fitting in with your coworkers. Harmonizing with your work environment is one of the most important things you can do for your career, and failing to do so can cause you serious problems. Achieving such harmony, however, will ultimately bring you closer to your career goals, and is among the primary things that society demands of its participants.

]]> http://www.aharrisonbarnes.com/harmonize-with-the-people-in-your-environment/feed/ 2 Hypnotists, Worry and Living Your Life Today http://www.aharrisonbarnes.com/hypnotists-worry-and-living-your-life-today/ http://www.aharrisonbarnes.com/hypnotists-worry-and-living-your-life-today/#comments Sat, 03 Apr 2010 06:14:33 +0000 Harrison Barnes http://www.aharrisonbarnes.com/?p=2275 2275 I took my wife to Las Vegas about a year ago and we decided to go see a hypnotist show. I had gone to see a hypnotist who had performed for the entire university when I was in law school and had really enjoyed it. The show was fascinating to me and really drove me to a further study and interest in the subconscious mind–something I had been studying off and on since the age of 16. If you have not been to a hypnotist show, they are a lot of fun. At the beginning of the show the hypnotist typically stands up in front of the audience and tells some jokes. Then he proceeds to bring several volunteers on stage and starts trying to hypnotize them. When my wife and I were in Las Vegas, we were the first to volunteer to be hypnotized. This was something that we were very interested in doing–especially in front of several hundred people. After around 5 minutes the hypnotist started tapping various people and asking them to leave the stage if he believed they would not be hypnotized. I was one of these people and was sent down off the stage. “You’re not even trying,” I remember the hypnotist said to a guy sitting next to me who was also sent down off the stage. My wife was not sent off the stage. Instead, she seemed to be in full blown hypnosis. I sat down and grabbed a Diet Coke and started enjoyed the entire show. I was very into the show and watching people make fun of themselves, until they sent my wife into the audience with a group of about 20 other people who were hypnotized. The hypnotist had led her to believe she was a gorilla, so she was jumping up and down in the aisle. This was too much for me. I grabbed her and started shaking her as she was going down the aisle on all fours. “Wake the hell up! You are hypnotized!” There was so much going on that very few people saw this because they were busy laughing at the other people in the audience. It was a good thing that I stopped this. She did wake up and the hypnotist made her sit down. Right after that he had all of the people under hypnosis start telling the audience about their various sexual fantasies. It was very funny–I am just glad my wife was not there for that. I probably would have rushed on stage, punched the hypnotist, and gotten arrested. I was so fascinated by this hypnosis demonstration that when I got home from Las Vegas I read another book or two about hypnotism, and then decided to find a local hypnotist. I found one right across the street! For a couple of months, for about an hour every Tuesday, the woman would hypnotize me. This is not typically the sort of stuff I do, however, at the time I was under a lot of stress and had been doing a lot of reading about the subconscious mind. I had never been to a hypnotist so I was very interested to see what would happen. It was an enjoyable experience. I would go into her “office” (which was a spare bedroom) and sit down on a lawn chair, put a blanket over me and she would start talking. In the background she would always have on “spa type music” that would make me quite sleepy. Within about 10 minutes of her starting, I would fall asleep and I would wake up around an hour later. I do not remember much of what went on with the hypnotist because I was hypnotized. But one of the more interesting experiences was when she would make me be a caterpillar and I would be lazily climbing through the trees and so forth. This was a lot of fun until I fell asleep. Each session would last an hour. I decided that going to sleep during the middle of the day for an hour was not really productive for me and stopped seeing this hypnotist after a few months. However, more so than the hypnotism, the most beneficial thing that this hypnotist ever taught me was when I started talking to her about her profession and what she did. She told me that almost all of the people who use her are doing so because of worries that they have. They are worried about things like:
  • Quitting smoking
  • Losing weight
  • Performing well in athletics in the future
  • Overcoming various anxieties

The idea she was making clear to me was that everyone worries about things, and her role was really to help them stop worrying. If they are quitting smoking, they are worried about how they will deal with tension or social situations if they do not have cigarettes. If they are losing weight, they are worried about being hungry if they are not eating the things they like, or not being able to use food to deal with tension. Regardless of the reasons for the person going to see the hypnotist, the real reason almost all of them went was due to worry about something that they were unsure about how to deal with. She was from Eastern Europe and I assumed had originally learned hypnosis there. I would question her about her profession, what she knew about hypnosis, and what her beliefs were about the discipline and people. She then told me a long story that I no longer remember, but which she seemed to feel very strongly about. The conclusion of the story was very simple, however, and the story ended with these words:

All things will pass, so it does us no good to worry now.

The hypnotist spoke about these words with a considerable amount of passion and believed that understanding them was the key to happiness in life. In fact, the hypnotist seemed to believe that this was all we need to know and understand about anything in order to experience true happiness. A few months later I was speaking with a well-known author who had just taken a class called The Sedona Method. He could not stop talking about how this had changed his life and was incredibly enthusiastic about this. He sent me a bunch of information and free tapes about it. I was amazed that essentially all the Sedona Method involves is a process of asking yourself a few questions about when you are going to “let go” of various things you are worried about. All you do in the Sedona Method is identify an issue you are worried about, and ask yourself the following questions:

  1. Could I let it go?
  2. Would I let it go?
  3. When?

That is about all there is to it. This was all this guy could talk about and he was incredibly enthusiastic about how much this had permanently changed his life. All he had done was identified a way to let go of worry. The Sedona Method is a big business and teaches thousands of people each year how to use these questions. I was amazed that something so simple could be so popular. It was like what the hypnotist taught me: the biggest problem facing most people is simply worry. I am sure you have been around people who worry a lot–you may even be one of them. I have been in business meetings before, or interviewing people, when all of a sudden I look down at their hands and I can see that their nails are bitten to the fingers. I have interviewed people before (more than once) who have shown up to job interviews in the middle of the day drunk and smelling like liquor. What are these people so worried about? There are also people who will look at any situation and decide that something awful is going to happen in the future. I have met people who believe the world is going to end in less than a year and they are worried about it. When I meet the person who has bitten their nails down the their ends, I have a lot of compassion for them. A worrier like this is someone who is likely very concerned about how their actions affect others. They are probably also a good person, and will have thought through their actions before they do something. The person who shows up drunk to an interview is also someone who wants to do well. They are overwhelmed by stress, and worried that in their natural stressful state they may not perform well in the interview. Both people are worriers. Being a worrier does not mean you are a bad person. In my opinion, being a worrier does not even mean you will be a bad employee. What is most wrong with being a worrier, however, is that it is not good for you.

  • If you are worried about finding a job, you need to stop being worried.
  • If you are worried about losing your job, you need to stop being worried.
  • If you are worried about the economy, you need to stop being worried.
  • If you are worried about how you will look to others if you do this or that, you need to stop being worried.
  • If you are worried about something wrong you did in the past, you need to stop being worried.
  • If you worried about how you will be accepted by others, you need to stop being worried.
  • If you are worried about what is going to happen in your job next month, you need to stop being worried.

When you meet people who are constantly worrying, you can usually see the signs very easily. Some of the signs of worry are things like:

  • Insomnia. People who worry a lot will tell you they are having problems sleeping, and it is often because their minds are worried about this or that.
  • Incapacitation. Many people who are worried just shut down because the stress of life is just too much for them. These people can become extremely depressed.
  • Irritation. People who worry a lot may become very bothered by people around them and situations around them.
  • Irresponsibility. Some worriers become irresponsible to escape the stresses they are facing. They leave jobs and relationships, and may develop different types of addictions.
  • Illness. Many people who worry incessantly will simply get sick. Bodies cannot constantly deal with stress and many people who worry constantly will start developing all sorts of illnesses.

You may have your own signs and symptoms of worry. People worry and the signs emerge in different ways for numerous people. What ways are you worrying? Virtually every single person I know is worried about something. If you go out at lunch hour in any American city and listen to two friends sitting together at a table while having lunch, you will generally hear them talk about something they are worried about. They may be worried about their jobs. They may be worried about their health. They may be worried about one of their children. Regardless of what they are talking about, a substantial portion of most conversations will be punctuated by some sort of worry. We all worry. Worry and anxiety can be extremely disabling for many people and serious, medical-level worry, is something that really affects some people. According to an article I recently reviewed in Psychology Today:

For millions of people, worry disrupts everyday life, restricting it to some degree, or even overshadowing it entirely. An estimated 15 percent of Americans suffer from one or another of the anxiety disorders. These include generalized anxiety, specific phobias, obsessive-compulsive disorder and flat-out panic attacks. As a group, anxiety disorders constitute the most common disorder in the country.

The fact that almost 15 percent of people are suffering from worry to the extent it has become a medical condition is an alarming statistic. This statistic does not even take into account the vast number of people who are suffering from worry to the extent it is not a disorder. We are all worried to some extent. Worry is just not something that really does us much good. Worry is a huge trap that many people fall into. Worry often affects many of the people who are the most motivated and want to be the best in whatever they are seeking to do. People fall into the mistaken belief that worrying is something that will motivate them to do very well. However, this is simply not the case. Instead, people who are worried all the time are constantly looking towards the past and various alternatives. What ends up happening is they become distracted and not focused on the task at hand, and are lured in the trap of thinking without doing. Worry is confusion and makes it difficult to get anything whatsoever done. One of the most interesting things you will see when you meet very successful people is that they have an incredible ability to control worry. I have seen this with the most successful Wall Street executives and leaders in virtually every field I have studied. They look at what is in front of them in the here and now, and are not as concerned about what might happen tomorrow as they are doing the best they can today. None of this is to say that the secret of success is not worrying about tomorrow–it is not. You need to prepare for tomorrow, but cannot worry about it all the of the time. Your efforts are better put into doing the best you can with what lies before you today, and this will lead you into a better tomorrow. Most of the time, worry is not something that does us any good . It paralyzes us and makes our current moments of life much less enjoyable than they could be without worry. In addition to worry, most of us are focused on some sort of different life in the future instead of focusing on what is in front of us today. We should enjoy each day instead of worrying about tomorrow. When we are young we say “when I am older”. When we are in college we say “when I am out of college.” When we are single we say “when I am married.” When we are working we say “when I am retired.” Soon all you have to look forward to is death. Tomorrow will always come, but there is no use waiting to live and enjoy life until some distant point in the future. You need to live your life today. Instead of worrying about life in the future, worry about life now. THE LESSON An ability to control worry is a common trait of many of the most successful people. Worry, for the most part, does not do anyone any good, as it makes people constantly look to various past alternatives. Rather than worrying about the future, you must focus on life now and not wait until a distant date to live and enjoy your life.

]]> http://www.aharrisonbarnes.com/hypnotists-worry-and-living-your-life-today/feed/ 5 Never Try to Be Someone Different from Who You Are http://www.aharrisonbarnes.com/never-try-and-be-someone-different-than-you-are/ http://www.aharrisonbarnes.com/never-try-and-be-someone-different-than-you-are/#comments Sat, 22 Jan 2011 05:09:44 +0000 Harrison Barnes http://www.aharrisonbarnes.com/?p=14369 14369 A few years ago, the Dean of the law school I attended took me out to lunch.  He was in town because his son was attending a math camp.  He told me his son absolutely loved math and the Dean was nurturing his skill.  Reflecting on his son’s math skills, he said something like: “He’s having a little bit of trouble catching on to complex integers and his skills get a little sloppy in longer problems, but he’ll get the hang of it.” I had a hard time believing what I was hearing.  How many parents understand their child’s math skills this well? The Dean had attended MIT for college and during the lunch I could not help but think that the Dean’s father had raised him in a similar way—with math camps, insight into his math skills, and so forth.  At a genetic (or similar) level, I am sure the son had some natural skills in math.  Most parents would not have the slightest idea about what a math camp is.  I had never heard of math camp until the Dean told me about his son. Kids who go to schools like MIT and become great engineers, often have parents (like the Dean) who are able to nurture their natural skills—just like you too probably have some natural skills that someone may have tried to nurture along the way. By the time the Dean’s child is around 18 years old, my guess is that he will understand math so well that probably less than 1 in 1,000 people could even hope to be his equal in math.  He will have a highly developed skill and gift and be doing something that he loves.  The longer he does math, the more skills he will develop and the more insight he will have into it. Most of us have things that we are good at and love doing.  Everyone does.  Most of us have skills that we have developed over a lifetime—everyone is good at something.  The biggest mistake we often make is coming to believe that we should be someone different from who we are, with a different set of skills than we in fact have. When I was 26, I started practicing law.  I hated it but I tried my very hardest at it.  For some reason, I felt I needed to be an attorney.  Despite having an incredibly successful business that I loved doing, I made the decision to go to law school.  Once there, I could not believe my misfortune. I was very much unlike the kids who chose to enroll in law school. When I started working in a law office, looking out the window from ten floors up was upsetting for me.  I would see various businesses down on the ground and get excited about how these businesses could be improved. I would go to the bookstore some days during lunch and buy business books. I would even be excited if the manager came up to me in a restaurant to ask me how my meal was so I could talk to him about the business the restaurant was doing. Clearly, I was doing the wrong sort of job sitting inside a law office. In my job, I watched some very gifted attorneys who seemed to really love what they were doing.  These attorneys were not interested in business, and instead, seemed to just love the sort of work attorneys do.  They would become visibly animated and excited about the prospect of going to court, or giving a client legal advice.  These people were in the right profession.  This is exactly how it should be.  You need to do what you enjoy and what comes naturally to you.  We owe ourselves this. Something I have noticed through the course of being an entrepreneur is that numerous people I have hired in the past decide that they want to be just like me.  Instead of doing what they were hired to do (because they were gifted at this and had a history of doing this), they decided that it is better to be an entrepreneur. Perhaps they feel being an entrepreneur is sexier, perhaps they believe that being an entrepreneur is a better way to make a living. Everyone has their own rationale; however, what I do know is that I have seen numerous people quit whatever company of mine they are working for and set up competing companies.  Their thought seems to be that it is better to do what I do than what they are trained to do and understand and love to do. Sometimes, this is the correct decision for people—but most times, it is not.  Being a manager, or an entrepreneur, is a completely different job and it may not be what you are good at. An analogy to doing something different from what you are skilled at because it looks better might be the difference between being a world-famous professional athlete and being a coach.  Professional athletes can earn more than $40 million a year with their salary and endorsements.  Moreover, they have incredible and unique athletic gifts that entertain audiences.  Nevertheless, these athletes need to report to practice and answer to their coaches. What if certain professional athletes in their prime decided that they would prefer to be a coach and quit the team at the peak of their success? They might reason, for example, that a coach is “in charge” and that they want to direct the team. Most people would agree that this is insane. A coach has a completely different skill set than the athlete.  Moreover, by being a coach, a great athlete would be depriving the world of his or her skills as an athlete.  Finally, a coach would be lucky to make even a small percentage of what the best professional athletes do. Something I have never understood is how people can be happy and successful and then end up sabotaging their success by believing another type of job is better than their own.  I have seen people do this more times than I can count.  Someone is happy doing a job and is good at their job and then, all of a sudden, decides they need to be something different in order to be happy. Most people who put themselves on a path that does not match their skills become extremely unhappy.  If you are doing something that does not make you happy and does not make use of your natural gifts, then the odds are very good you will be unhappy doing this. Your career is a spiritual practice.  What you do for a living is about taking something invisible and making it visible—and this is something that I believe is “spiritual” in nature.  When you are doing something you truly love and that gives you pleasure, you are drawing on something deep within you that excites you. The problem with many people is that they think of their jobs as work.  They believe it is important to be very professional and serious, for example, or that work should not be fun.  When you think like this, work becomes unfulfilling and dull.  In contrast, when you are doing something you love and that makes use of your natural talents, you are likely to be far more fulfilled. Everyone has various gifts and skills.
  • Some people are born to be good managers.
  • Other people are born to be entrepreneurs.
  • Other people are born with a certain talent that could be sales, or music, or  athletics, or law.

The biggest mistakes happen in our careers when we want to be something that does not match our natural gifts and skills.  We believe we need to change and be something different.  We grow unhappy with who we are and decide that we need to change.  This sort of thing is always occurring and there are an incredible number of people out there who seem to believe they need to be something different than they currently are. Whatever your skill is, you need to embrace your gift and not try to be something you are not. Rejecting what you are good at leads to unhappiness. For example, if you do a job just to make money, you are likely to be extremely unhappy.  You may have “success,” but you will not be fulfilled doing the work.  Success without fulfillment is failure.  What you get never makes you happy in the long term—who you become makes you happy (or, if you make the wrong decisions about who to become, sad). From a young age, I have operated and started various businesses.  I have always enjoyed doing this and I gravitate toward it. This is just something that I seem to enjoy and I find myself thinking about doing this sort of thing quite a bit. When I was around 8 years old, my stepfather opened a small nautical gifts shop and I spent a lot of time in the shop watching him and learning about being an entrepreneur.  I saw him almost go out of business and I also saw his successes. I learned about the sense of possibility that went along with being an entrepreneur—and about the potential for failure.

  • I remember when things were going well for him and he went to look at a Rolls-Royce, and another time when he was looking at giant yachts you could land helicopters on.
  • I also remember when things went poorly and all sorts of people were showing up at the door of our home asking for money.  I remember that I was asked to answer the door back then, even as a young child, so the people calmly went away.

When you grow up around something like this, you learn to understand it.  You can deal with the emotions of it, and just being around this you end up improving.  You see patterns other people do not and you get a sense of things.  You find joy in aspects of the job others might not.  In my case, this is what I found. For me, entrepreneurial work was the sort of thing I gravitated to and what I enjoyed. Several years ago, I was meeting with a famous lawyer about something.  He had become incredibly successful as an attorney and I admired him.  We were walking around his office in Century City in Los Angeles and I looked around and admired all the work that was going on.  I expressed to him that a part of me wished I had stayed an attorney doing the sort of work he did. “No, that’s the last thing you should be doing,” he said.  “You have a different gift than I have.  You need to do what comes naturally to you.” He was absolutely right.  The thing about doing the stuff that we are gifted at and good at is that it can make a huge difference in our lives.  When you are doing the things you are good at, you will love yourself much more than if you are doing something you are not good at.  Moreover, when you love yourself, you will also have more love to give others.  When you connect with yourself, it is also far easier to connect with others. You need to find your true gift and go with it.  You should never try to be something you are not just because it seems attractive from afar. THE LESSON Never try to be someone who you are not, or something that does not match your natural gifts and skills. Embrace your skills, whatever they are, rather than rejecting what you are good at and setting yourself up for unhappiness. Find your true gift, and run with it.

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