You Need to Bring a Singular Focus to Everything You Do

What makes a person really good at something? The answer to this question is identical to the reason for exceedingly high success in any profession.

There are people who are really good at finding jobs. People who are good at finding jobs bring an incredible level of focus to their search. This is the level of focus I want you to bring to your job search as well. In order to get the position you are seeking, you need to be focused and follow one very simple rule.

In order to be good at your job you need to be focused as well. No one becomes good at something and stays that way without focus. If you understand the rule I am about to share with you, you too can be at the very top of your chosen field.

Those Who Do One Thing Well and Those Who Do Many Things: The Fox and the Hedgehog. The Greek poet Archilochus wrote: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” Isaiah Berlin’s famous essay “The Hedgehog and the Fox” based on Archilochus’ quote analyzes the differences between foxes and hedgehogs. Berlin believed people can be classified as either foxes or hedgehogs.

In the fox and hedgehog parable, the fox is always trying to get the hedgehog. Day after day, the fox is in pursuit of the hedgehog, devising means to catch the hedgehog. The fox is, by all appearances, a highly intelligent, crafty and resourceful creature. Indeed, compared to the rather dull hedgehog, the fox appears to have every advantage. The hedgehog is a small, awkward animal that lives a simple life and spends his days taking care of his den and finding food. Each day, the fox tries a new scheme to catch the hedgehog and each time the hedgehog simply bundles up into a ball of sharp spikes—foiling the fox’s attempts.

Berlin believed foxes “pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in some de facto way, for some psychological or physiological cause, related by no moral or aesthetic principle.” As a consequence of this outlook, foxes “lead lives, perform acts, and entertain ideas that are centrifugal rather than centripetal, their thought is scattered or diffused, moving on many levels, seizing upon the essence of a vast variety of experiences and objects for what they are in themselves, without consciously or unconsciously, seeking to fit them into, or exclude them from, any one unchanging, all-embracing, sometimes self-contradictory and incomplete, at times fanatical, unitary inner vision.”

In contrast, Berlin believed hedgehogs “relate everything to a single central vision, one system less or more coherent or articulate, in terms of which they understand, think and feel-a single, universal, organizing principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance….”

Jim Collins, a noted management theorist and a former professor at Stanford Business School, discusses the concept of the hedgehog and the fox based on Berlin’s famous essay in his book Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don’t. Collins notes his conclusions formed from Berlin’s essay by Princeton professor Marvin Bressler during his interview with him:

“You know what separates those who make the biggest impact from all the others who are just as smart? They’re hedgehogs.” Freud and the unconscious, Darwin and natural selection, Marx and class struggle, Einstein and relativity, Adam Smith and the division of labor—they were all hedgehogs. They took a complex world and simplified it. “Those who leave the biggest footprints,” said Bressler, “have thousands calling after them, ‘Good idea, but you went too far!’”

To be clear, hedgehogs are not stupid. Quite the contrary. They understand the essence of profound insight is simplicity. What could be more simple than e = mc2? What could be simpler than the idea of the unconscious, organized into an id, ego and superego? What could be more elegant than Adam Smith’s pin factory and “invisible hand”? No, the hedgehogs are not simpletons. They have a piercing insight that allows them to see through complexity and discern underlying patterns. Hedgehogs see what is essential, and ignore the rest.

Do you have any fox and hedgehog stories? As a young attorney, I spent approximately one year working almost exclusively for a partner at a world class law firm who never lost a case. The partner also had the reputation for burning out associates very quickly. While I could spend considerable time dissecting how this attorney operated, the simple fact is the only thing that mattered to this attorney professionally was ethically winning every case he took. Everything else was superfluous.

A case would generally start with this attorney being given a fact pattern which seemed insurmountable. These were the types of cases the attorney generally handled. The reaction of most attorneys would be to settle the case after a few short hours of research. But this attorney refused to give up. He kept pushing. He would question every single aspect of the case and the law. We pulled every legislative record necessary to determine if the law was being implemented the way it should be – even if there were 30-plus years of case law against him. He carried this fanatical focus and attention to detail to the extreme. This push could go on for months or even years.

After numerous months of researching the seemingly inconsequential—and questioning the truth—something would emerge that enabled this attorney to win the case. It always worked that way.

Another great attorney I know, who is considered one of the top lawyers in America, once told a client in my presence: “If I take this case, I will eat, sleep and drink this case. It is all I will think about.”

This is the essence of the hedgehog as I see it. Any person or group of people who achieve greatness in any calling generally do one thing and are focused on doing one thing. They do it the absolute best it can be done.

Many people and organizations go through their existence trying different things and pursuing different goals. Their thinking abilities in this regard are often flawed, in my opinion.

Truly stellar law firms and truly exceptional attorneys also tend to be hedgehogs. The firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, for example, has made its name doing essentially one thing. Conversely, the great majority of law firms in the country have far lower profits, but work in numerous areas of the law. Wachtell’s profits per partner are also higher than any other similarly sized firm in the world. The top partners in the best law firms also tend to be hedgehogs who do one thing really well. They are also quite focused on their careers. Few of these partners probably dreamed incessantly about going in-house when they were practicing, for example. They focused on the here and now and being the best at what they do.

When you search for a job, do one thing and do it well. At its core, the difference between people who are best at looking for and finding jobs can be related to the distinctions between the hedgehog and the fox. In order to really succeed in your job search, you need to be concerned about one thing and one thing only: Getting the best job possible for you. Everything else is superfluous.

In order to do what you do well, you cannot do multiple things at once. You cannot look for shortcuts and you simply should not do anything to which you are not 100% committed. You need to focus on what you do in a strong, singular way, blocking out all distractions. Once you do this everything else falls into place. In order to explain the process of being a hedgehog, I would like to tell you about something I love–legal recruiting.

At its highest level, legal recruiting is a very sophisticated and serious business. While the average legal recruiter makes less than $100,000 a year, there are a small handful of legal recruiters in the United States (less than five, I believe) who make well over $1,000,000 a year. These recruiters move around practice groups, important partners, some associates and are even instrumental in merging entire law firms. These recruiters can call managing partners of large national law firms and get through right away. As professionals, these recruiters are given a high degree of respect because they can influence the future of entire law firms.

There is a contrast to recruiting at its very highest level, however. People go into legal recruiting for a variety of reasons. When I started legal recruiting several years ago, it was my perception that the great majority of legal recruiters were not bringing the high level of focus needed to truly excel in this business. As recently as 2000, what was once ranked as one of the top legal recruiting firms in the United States did not even have a formal office. Moreover, I would frequently reach my recruiter in the middle of the work day on her cell phone when she was doing trivial things such as buying a dress.

There also appeared to be no organization in the profession and few legal recruiters even truly knew the type of work their candidates did. Most recruiters did in-house placements, law firm placements and would even place legal secretaries and paralegals. Some recruiters also placed executives in corporations. In short, these recruiters would do whatever they could to make a fee.

When I questioned these recruiters about why they did this, their response was generally that they believed the money was good and they were “people persons.”

This is not to say all recruiters are like this. However, for the most part, the legal recruiting profession has not benefited from the high degree of focus and organization that characterizes many other professions. In addition, I believe there is somewhat of a bias in this country—which is largely a product of the fact most attorneys are so solidly middle class—that makes most attorneys believe they must practice law to have respectability in society. Anything less would be extraordinarily wrong to these sorts of people.

Accordingly, it’s not really a surprise that many legal recruiters went into the business feeling that they’d somehow failed in the practice of law. Indeed, one of the first legal recruiters on record went to an unaccredited law school in California and could not pass the bar exam even after numerous attempts. Accordingly, the job of a legal recruiter—even at its outset—was associated with failing.

I am not faulting the way this system works. Indeed, this is generally how most of the world works. This same analogy could probably be carried over to law firms. Not every young attorney is good enough to get into Wachtell. Not every young attorney is good enough to get into an AmLaw 100 law firm. Some attorneys do personal injury law—others do not. This sort of class system is all around us and pervades the profession.

The lesson I learned from talking to recruiters while practicing law is that very few were committed to practicing the art of legal recruiting like I had been taught to practice law. Far from being true advocates for their candidates and pushing their expertise—and questioning everything about the attorney job search process to reach true levels of excellence—most recruiters were simply happy to be doing something they enjoyed and did not regard as particularly taxing.

When I started legal recruiting, I worked seven days a week at it. I routinely started work at 5:30 in the morning and worked until at least 10 or 11 p.m. seven days a week. I am often so happy when my candidates get offers I get choked up. This business has invested everything it has—and will continue to do so—into making BCG Attorney Search the best it can be. We have attempted to translate the vision of the way recruiting should be throughout the country. Being exceedingly focused on what we do, and what BCG Attorney Search does, is the only way I feel recruiting should be done.

This is how the BCG legal recruiters think about their work. Doing our jobs to the absolute best of our ability is our single-minded obsession. This is the only thing that matters and it is something we take extremely seriously. Here at BCG Attorney Search, we practice legal recruiting the way we were taught to practice law.

The idea that legal recruiting is a break from the practice of law is about the most foreign concept imaginable. A good recruiter has chosen the recruiting industry as his or her profession. It is not a safety catch — it is the focus of their career. For them, recruiting is not just a unique alternative to practicing law, but an alternative just as challenging and demanding as any in the legal profession. It is a place in the legal community to be innovative and to work at the highest level of the profession. It is this drive that pervades their work on a daily basis. To a good recruiter, recruiting is a powerful and essential industry in its own right.

A good legal recruiter knows the market. In Los Angeles County alone, there are over 3,000 law firms. There are an additional 5,000+ companies that hire attorneys. These numbers grow exponentially as one covers the United States. In order for a recruiter to get a candidate a job, they need to know where the jobs are and where their candidates are likely to fit well. This is an extraordinarily difficult task. Indeed, the knowledge a recruiter must have at their disposal is profound.

When you think about how most recruiters operate, you may wonder how a recruiter in Los Angeles could possibly monitor over 3,000 law firms. This is especially true if the recruiter also makes in-house placements. How on earth could a recruiting firm comprised of maybe just two or three individuals monitor all this activity? Meanwhile, firm names change, people leave their jobs, and so forth. Accordingly, the answer to this question is that most legal recruiters do not.

Because most legal recruiters do not monitor the entire spectrum of the market, they generally monitor only a few firms. The firms they monitor are also, incidentally, ones with which you’re familiar. In addition, they also have a few key relationships.

At BCG Attorney Search, we divide the United States into numerous regions and station recruiters in those regions. We believe it would be impossible for a legal recruiter to know what is going on in different areas of the United States at one time.

To be good at your job and your job search you need to bring a singular focus to it. The lesson here—and the lesson of the fox and the hedgehog—as I see it, is you need to do what you do as well as it possibly can be done. This is also the lesson of BCG Attorney Search and our present and ongoing success. This is also the lesson you need to understand in your own job search and career as well. The more focused you are the more successful you will be.

If You Really Want Success, Go through Unpeopled Ground

What You Will Learn Think differently and chose a job which others will not bother to give importance to. Be in a job which is unchallenged and has less or no competition. Be surrounded by people who are not competing for the same advancement. Make sure you are exclusively valued for your abilities and that there is no chance of you being replaced.

In The Art of War, Sun Tzu says, “To go one thousand lives without fear, go through unpeopled ground.” To me, this means when you go forward, you should move through open space that is undesired or uncontested. When you move in this way, your movement will not be challenged by others and you will experience success.

Several years ago, I was an asphalt tar contractor in Detroit doing very, very dirty work. It was strange to me this work was so profitable and so easy. Literally no one was interested in doing the job. One of my main projects involved heating up tar to 250+ degrees in a cauldron that I towed behind my truck, using a crack router to clean out cracks on roads and parking lots, and filling the cracks with sand and hot tar.

When I was working for a federal judge in Michigan, I got a call from one of my customers, Tony Randazzo, who owned a giant apartment subdivision in Rochester Hills, Michigan. I’d filled all of the cracks in the apartment subdivision, charging less than half the going rate for this work, giving Tony an outstanding deal. For the next six months, Tony sent me a check every month to pay for the work I had done. Those checks ended up being more than I was receiving for my work with the judge each month. Keep in mind getting the job with the judge had required me to go to college and law school, where I was expected to do well. In addition, I had to get up at 7 a.m. and go to work for the judge five days a week. I also had to deal with office politics and coworkers.

This inconsistency really got me thinking.

When I started practicing law after my clerkship, I frequently saw many coworkers working all night. Most of the people I practiced law with were doing the work just for the money. They had all gone to good law schools, which had required years of hard work. Each year, the law firms I worked for would fly around to law schools and interview and hire scores of hungry law students. There was literally an endless supply of lawyers willing to do the work I was doing. I loved the practice of law, but the fact is there are a LOT of people who want to do it.

When I was working with my hot tar kettle in Detroit, Michigan, I was in serious competition with really only two or three people within a 100-mile radius. In some areas, I was in competition with no one. I literally drove around in a truck playing with fire and tar and listening to classic rock on headphones. I was doing the work I loved and I was paid thousands of dollars a day. Keep in mind working with hot tar is dangerous and something that is scary to a lot of people. You need to know how to keep the tar heated properly and prevent it from catching on fire. Often, it’s very hot outdoors and there are other dangers. However, when I did this work there was practically no competition, and I loved it.

There are tons of people motivated to work blue-collar jobs in Michigan and, at the time, auto plants and suppliers were constantly laying off workers. There were plenty of people who needed work. Nevertheless, I still had very little competition. Had I not chosen to become a lawyer, and continued to operate in this particular niche, I would have made a much better living than most lawyers, and I wouldn’t have been competing with an endless supply of competitors. I would even have had a couple of months off every year since it is impossible to apply the tar when there is snow on the ground!

I was so successful at this job because no one else was interested in doing it – a characteristic common to many good jobs.

In the legal arena, where I used to work, there were so many people interested in competing with me. Inside law firms there was even competition to see who could get the most work! In large cities, perhaps one in every 100 people who start at a large law firm will make partner some day. When these people make partner, they face even greater pressure to get business, and many end up losing their jobs once they have made partner.

If you are experiencing problems in your career, or if you feel like it is extremely hard for you to get ahead, my bet is you’re in a profession or a geographic location where you’re simply competing with too many people. One of the best pieces of advice I can give is to find a place where there is no competition for what you do, and go there. Or, change professions completely and compete in something else. The less competition you have, the better.

One of the easiest ways to get ahead is to move to a market where there is no competition for what you do. For example, say you are an attorney on Wall Street, practicing corporate law, and you just lost your job. You have outstanding skills that are going to be in demand somewhere. You could really blossom if you were in the right atmosphere. Go to a small or medium-sized city where there is less competition! If you go there, you will likely be appreciated more. Your skills will take you further and you will get ahead faster. You will be considered unique for your skills and not just one of hundreds or thousands with the exact same skills. Your hard work and background will make you special and you will stand out.

There are immense benefits to relocating to different geographic regions, or working in a smaller firm or company. Your skills will likely be unique and appreciated and you will not simply be a commodity. Your self confidence will likely improve, and as your self confidence improves you will likely continue to get better and better at what you do. You may even become famous in your field. When you’re in an atmosphere where you’re surrounded by people competing for the same advancement, you could be replaced at any moment.

For example, say you went to Harvard Law School. In New York City, you can find multiple attorneys who went to the same school working in virtually every building in the city. They are everywhere. In Bay City, Michigan, where I clerked for a federal judge, however, I don’t think I ever encountered a single attorney who went to Harvard Law School.

An attorney from Harvard Law School in Bay City, Michigan, would be a complete star in my opinion. He or she would be sought out by businesses and others just based on where he or she went to law school. The political establishment of the city might even try to get him or her nominated for a local seat in the United States Congress. I am not kidding. If the attorney worked on Wall Street for a few years, local companies and businesses would probably consider him or her close to an oracle. The attorney could charge practically anything he or she wanted and would have more business than he or she could handle. He or she would have a large house, probably do things like investing in real estate on the side, and be prosperous in all respects. The attorney would have a great life in Bay City, Michigan.

Conversely, this laid off attorney could sit around in New York looking for a job for months, perhaps. He or she might be living in a relatively small apartment in New York, spending his or her days at Starbucks reading the paper and screwing around on a laptop, exchanging emails about nothing and ostensibly looking for a job. The attorney might become depressed and start going to therapy a couple of times a week. He or she might start writing a book and never complete it. Ultimately, he or she might get a job with a small boutique firm in New York after six months or so, and might only work there for a few months before the firm went out of business.

I hate to sound so bleak, but I have seen scenarios like this so many times it makes me sick. You need to compete where your skills are most valued, and this often means a change of location. When you are competing where your skills are most valued, you feel better about yourself. I think this is the smartest thing anyone can do.

If I were interested in being a United States senator at the age of 30, I would move to South Dakota, not California. It is much easier to achieve your dream in areas where there is less competition.

The people who have the most secure jobs and continually prosper year after year typically do not have a lot of people competing with them. Did you know that morticians make pretty good livings? It is not too hard to find a job as a mortician, and people are always dying. There are lots of jobs to which you can adapt your skills, which will give you security year after year. These are the sorts of jobs you should seek.

There are jobs in every industry that no one else is all that excited about. I wonder if any doctors really go to medical school saying their dream is to become a proctologist. My feeling is they probably realize somewhere along the line isn’t a lot of competition in that specialty, and choose it for that very reason.

Sun Tzu’s advice to “go through unpeopled ground” can change your life and career if you really take the time to think it through. Unless you are confident you can win, you are often best served by pursuing your career in areas and specialties where there is less competition.

This is one of the easiest ways to succeed and it is something far too many people fail to realize.