You Need to Bring a Singular Focus to Everything You Do
March 9, 2010
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.
You Need to Stop Competing and Seeing Differences Between You and Others
April 20, 2009
What You Will Learn
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If you are looking for a job, trying to improve in your current job, or simply wish to experience a better life, there is one thing you need to do: You need to be friends with everyone you meet in business, and stop competing and seeing differences. This is a statement that falls on deaf ears for most people. In fact, this is the exact opposite of the way most of us think. Instead, we view others as competitors and the slices of pie as limited. We view opportunities as few and limited, and feel the need to compete for what little there is.
What are the rewards for looking and seeing commonalty between you and others? They are incredible. In the Year 2000 I started a legal recruiting firm. I did not start the firm until around March of that year. I had no legal recruiting experience and knew absolutely nothing about about the market. Since I had been a practicing attorney for years, the fact that I was now recruiting seemed almost surreal to me in many respects. I had decided to just enter a zone where I did not care what happened to me. When you are in the recruiting business, what typically happens is that law firms will call you in a very formal way to tell you they have no interest in a candidate of yours. The conversations will typically last no more than 30 to 45 seconds.
“We are calling to let you know that we have no interest in John Smith,” they might say.
“Thank you,” would be the standard response.
After several weeks of this I began to feel that the entire situation was somewhat absurd. This is what recruiters do all over the country. I decided that the best thing I could do was mix it up.
“We’re calling to let you know we have no interest in John Smith,” a caller might say. The callers were typically women in their mid-20’s to early 30’s who were called “recruiting coordinators” inside law firms.
“You know, I was just outside having my third Diet Coke in the past hour and I realized that I have not heard your voice in some time. I really like your voice, how are you?”
“Fine,” they might say, still a little stiff.
“I am not sure how much longer I am going to be doing this recruiting thing. It is really exhausting. Law firms are really uptight. Do you enjoy making all these calls? It must be a real buzz kill just calling a bunch of recruiters all day. I cannot believe you and I are doing the jobs we are doing.”
This is what I would do with every caller. Eventually, I would get into my personal life and they would start to talk about themselves as well. A few months into this I was astonished when some of these women called me on the way home from work on their cell phones just to chat about random stuff, unrelated to work. One woman’s husband was going to be building a deck on the back of her house that weekend; one man who was a recruiting coordinator was going sailing; another girl was leaving her job because she wanted to ride a motorcycle across the United States.
I did the same thing with my candidates. (I actually ended up marrying one of them a few years later.) My candidates and I would talk about the most random stuff. Only about 1-2% of my time on the phone with my candidates and law firms was ever about anything having to do with actual business. I enjoyed what I was doing and made numerous friends. I looked at the entire process as something that was meant to be fun, establishing connections and nothing more.
Prior to becoming an attorney, I had been an asphalt sealing contractor around Michigan for over 7 years. Much of my job involved going door-to-door and selling my service. Someone I had never seen before would answer the door and I might say something like:
“Hi. I’m here to sell you the service of putting some asphalt sealer on your driveway but I am not in a very good mood right now. My girlfriend from school is working in Washington, DC and she just broke up with me so she can see other people this summer. I’m not too happy about it.” This is the last thing people expect from a salesman.
I would show up at the home of the person, well dressed and looking professional, and invariably the person would start talking to me about my personal situation and offering me advice. I would never have to sell the person anything. I would slip in how much the service was going to cost and the person would always agree. The next year I would show up at the person’s front door and they might ask me about my personal life and I would tell them what was going on, and they would do the same thing. Using this particular method of selling asphalt sealing, I was able to become probably the largest residential asphalt sealing contractor in Michigan in less than a couple of years. It is all about treating people as your friend.
I never talked about the service. I just disarmed myself, exposed a vulnerability of some sort and let the person start consoling me and offering advice. I liked getting the advice.
In the legal recruiting industry I was amazed at how fast the business grew by me just mellowing out and being disarmed. By the end of 2000, with less than 7 full months of recruiting under my belt, I had made 29 placements which had generated over $1,000,000 in fees. The most prestigious and well known recruiting firms at the time all wanted me to merge my recruiting firm with their recruiting firm. The phones were ringing off the hook with referrals and people wanting to work for me. I had people flying to Los Angeles to meet with me and seek my advice about how to get a job from places as diverse as New York and San Francisco. It was as if I could do no wrong in the work I was in. None of this was just due to the economy being really good, either. In the year 2002, I ended up placing every single candidate I worked with. The legal market was horrible in the year 2002.
I am telling you this to show the power of chilling out, going with the flow and treating everyone you are dealing with as a friend and not a competitor. Make yourself vulnerable and figure out how to deal with everyone you are encountering in a pleasant, happy way. Your career depends on this. You have no competitors. The world is yours for the taking, but you cannot take it in a way which views the world as having limited resources and opportunities.
The competition in law firms to become partner is something that has always interested me, because I am an attorney and also have spent the majority of my career in the legal industry. When most people think of becoming a partner in a law firm, they view the competition as internal between them and different attorneys in the law firm also competing to be partners. The young attorneys almost invariably view themselves as competing for a limited slice of pie. The idea in most law firms is that they can only make a limited number of partners per year. Accordingly, the attorneys inside the law firm will work as much as they possibly can and play one political game after another to get the people they are competing with off of the partnership track, getting themselves ahead. The competition these attorneys go through with each other can last years and it is brutal.
Few attorneys in this competition really ever step back and take the time to realize what they are competing for: They are competing for a share of the law firm’s profits. In this respect, however, law firms only make money when they have clients who are willing to pay for the law firm’s services. The easiest way any of these attorneys could virtually guarantee that she will make partner, would be to bring in a tremendous amount of business and concentrate on this the second he/she got out of law school. An attorney with enough business can work in virtually any law firm out there, and they will be welcomed as a partner in almost any law firm.
If you have enough clients, it does not matter where you go to school and it does not matter how good you are at political games within your firm. The person who brings in the money and the clients is the one who ultimately controls everything. In fact, one of the largest law firm collapses of 2009 (Heller Ehrman) happened because one partner with a tremendous amount of business left the firm. As a January 26, 2009 story in the Wall Street Journal recounted:
Heller’s management focused on trying to merge with a bigger, stronger competitor, concluding that it was the only way the firm could stay alive amid continuing lawyer defections. At a shareholder gathering last spring in Colorado Springs, Colo., Heller’s chairman, Mr. Larrabee, said the firm had plenty of choices of merger partners. Last summer, Baker & McKenzie LLP, one of the nation’s largest firms, emerged as a serious candidate. But after weeks of negotiations, the deal cratered in August, partly because of business conflicts. Heller lawyers had sued many of Baker’s clients.
A new suitor soon emerged. On Aug. 21, Heller gathered 40 key lawyers at the San Francisco Ritz-Carlton to discuss its potential white knight: Mayer Brown LLP, an 1,800-lawyer firm. The mood was upbeat.
But another problem cropped up. Robert Fram and Robert Haslam, whose intellectual-property group was among the firm’s highest grossing, had said they were considering heading to another firm. Heller attorneys implored Messrs. Fram and Haslam to stay. If they left, some lawyers believed, the Mayer deal would crumble.
M. Laurence Popofsky, a Heller lifer who was the firm’s chairman from 1988 to 1993, recalls telling Mr. Fram over lunch: “People’s pensions are in jeopardy. Employees are at risk….If you do this and don’t give the merger a chance, you will hurt an awful lot of people.”
Mr. Fram says Mr. Popofsky and others tried to persuade him to stay. But his team, he says, didn’t want to join Mayer and then jump ship if they were unhappy. “We didn’t feel like that was something we were ethically comfortable doing,” he says. On Aug. 29, Mr. Fram informed Heller that he was leaving.
Here, one of the oldest and most respected law firms in the United States collapsed primarily due to the departure of an important partner. The importance of having business inside of a law firm is paramount and of incredible importance for an attorney’s success. The entire success of a law firm can hinge on whether or not it has business. What this means is that the competition inside law firms between people seeking to be partners does not really have to be internal. The only thing that the associates seeking to be partner need to do to guarantee their success is go out and get as much business as they can. Indeed, their true success or failure is almost entirely based upon their ability to bring in business. There are no internal opponents and no external ones either. There is is a huge pie of opportunity out there (business waiting to be claimed) and all someone needs to do is go out into the world and claim this opportunity for themselves. The attorneys engaged in brutal competition with one another at law firms all over the country would be well served to step back and realize that all they have to do is stop competing with the people inside their own law firm and go out into the world and get clients.
You need to understand that you have no opponents. Your success will largely be determined by you ability to go into the world, find commonality and make friends with the people around you. Establish commonalities and do not look for differences.
Using this one simple idea in business can have profound rewards. It can literally change your career and life. You must abolish from your mind the idea that the people you are dealing with in your career and in business are your competition. You must eradicate the idea from your mind that you even have any competition. A quote from Wallace Wattles in The Science of Getting Rich is instructive in this regard:
Intelligent Substance will make things for you, but it will not take things away from someone else and give them to you. You must get rid of the thought of competition. You are to create, not compete for what is already created. You do not want to have to take anything away from any one. You do not want to drive sharp bargains. You do not have to cheat, or take advantage. You do not need to let any man work for less than he earns. You do not have to covet the property of others, or look at it with wishful eyes; no man has anything of which you cannot have the like, and that without taking what he has away from him. You are to become a creator, not a competitor; you are going to get what you want, but in such a way that when you get it every other man will have more than he has right now.
It easy to find enemies out there. It is easy to be suspicious of people. It is easy to not take extra time with people. It is easy to find reasons not to be friends with people. This is what most of what the world does. This is what we are trained to do. We look for differences. We want to find how people are different than us and not the same. This is a path that is not going to take you anywhere and will not help you. If you want to experience the most incredible success you have ever known, if you want your career and life to change, you need to find commonalities between you and everyone you come in contact with. People will open doors for you when they identify with you.
Over the past several years I have watched Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen rise from nothing to become two of the most important and respected best selling authors of all time with their Chicken Soup for the Soul series of books. Chicken Soup for the Soul was the #1 book on the New York Times’ best seller list for over 100 weeks and is one of the best selling books of all time. Canfield and Hansen have made millions of dollars through the sale of these books, and have also done countless other projects related to these books.
The publication of these books has rocketed them from small time to international stardom practically overnight. I study success for a living so that I can share it with you and change your life. I have been to several of Canfield and Hansen’s seminars because they typically have pretty good speakers and are somewhat interesting. One of Hansen’s most popular seminars is his Mega Book Marketing Seminar, where hundreds of people spend three days learning how they can hopefully write and sell a best selling book. Hansen has been doing this seminar for years and each year gets up and does a Power Point presentation about what a great marketer he is due to the incredible sales of this book. Sometimes his partner, Canfield, gets up and shows a photo copy of a million dollar check he received from a publisher. On the several occasions I have seen Canfield speak, he also always shows a picture of his house and tells everyone how it cost $5,000,000.
I like these guys and they really do seem to have a bit of an interest in helping people. Canfield is also featured in the movie The Secret where he talks about how he was able to make his book popular by landing an article in the National Enquirer about his book.
Yesterday, I found some marketing inside a magazine sent to me called Radio-TV Interview Report and saw a testimonial from Canfield and Hansen. Essentially, what this magazine does is allow authors to advertise the fact that they are available for radio and television ads if producers or anyone it interested in interviewing them. The testimonial they put in this magazine really threw me off for a reason I will share with you in a moment:
We’ve done several things for marketing which worked well, and advertising in Radio-TV Interview Report was one of the most effective tools we have used. When our book was first published, no one knew who we were. But all that changed after appearing on hundreds of radio and television talk shows. We averaged anywhere from 3 to 4 radio phone interviews a day for that first year. We’re convinced that this ongoing barrage of radio and television publicity helped create the word-of-mouth necessary for our book to become a national best seller!
Our ads in Radio-TV Interview Report helped us hit #1 on the New York Times best seller list, and we’ve stayed there for 100 weeks and counting! But none of that would have happened had we not been willing to do several interviews a day every day on stations large and small–a commitment we continue to do to this day. We highly recommend RTIR whenever we advise authors and speakers who want to get publicity easily and inexpensively.
Despite having attended a few of their seminars, this was the first time I realized that they had grown their business so fast through advertising in this particular publication. Notwithstanding, what is so interesting to me about this is that according to Canfield and Hansen, most of their success was due to simply chatting on the phone with various radio stations across the country. This is no different than a major cause of the success I experienced as a recruiter or asphalt contractor. When you just mellow out and do everything you can to start relating to people and connecting with them, a lot of stuff happens. If you think about it, 3 to 4 radio interviews a day takes a lot of time. In fact, this is how it looks like they spent the substantial majority of their time for at least a year. The key to their success, then, was establishing affinity with others. There is nothing standoffish about this. This ability to connect with people rocketed them to having one of the best selling books of all time.
One of the easiest ways to get a job is to establish lines of communication with the hiring personnel or people who work for the employer you want to work with. Once you establish communication, having the people you are working with feel comfortable and develop an affinity for you is even more important. Once you have achieved affinity and communication, then you are not only in a good position in terms of getting a job, but can excel in the new position as well.
It is very easy for me to tell the relative health of companies and firms. When you go into a firm and see people getting along very well, joking and having a good time, you are generally in a successful company. The reason is because the people inside the company are communicating, and feel comfortable with one another. When you go inside a company and there does not appear to be solid communication between people and groups of people, you are most often in a company that is in trouble to some degree.
Having open lines of communication is among the most important thing you can possibly do, and is something that will consistently get and keep you employed. Be friendly with everyone you meet. Stop looking for differences, and do everything within your power to find affinity with other people. This will change your career permanently and take you to a far different place.
Robin Hood and Appealing to an Employer’s Noble Motives
March 3, 2009
What You Will Learn
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I grew up in a suburb of Detroit and went to school with several Italian kids whose parents were in the Detroit Mafia. I would name them but to be completely honest I am afraid that if I did I might turn up dead. I do not want to upset these people with any slight–no matter how insignificant. I know they were legitimate members of a mafia family not just because when I was growing up everyone talked about it, but because years later when I started working for the Federal Government I met a US Marshal who told me all sorts of stories about the parents of the kids I grew up with. He had done stakeouts in front of houses in my own neighborhood when he was working for the Detroit Police in a previous job and had shocking stories about the stuff the parents were involved in.
One of the funniest things about the parents of these kids was that they were always quite generous. They would give money to the schools their kids attended. They would have birthday parties and invite people from their Church. The fathers who were running ruthless criminal enterprises would jump around like rabbits and play with the children at birthday parties. They would go to church on Sundays. When I would go to the Symphony with my parents I would see the names of some of the families listed as benefactors in the guides.
Until it went off the air, one of my favorite television shows was The Sopranos. In many of these episodes the family would be seen in a Catholic church attending mass for a funeral. One of my favorite episodes of the Sopranos was when Carmella Soprano received a telephone call from Columbia University where her daughter was attending and went to meet a man from the school. The man asked her to donate $50,000 to the school and she went to her husband and he gave her $50,000 for the school. I loved this episode because it was such a perfect contract between good and evil. To me it seems incredible that on the one hand someone would steal and murder and on the other hand would hand over money to school like this.
Watching the mafia families around me when I was growing up I can also see that they too wanted to be seen as nice people. They wanted to be seen as good church going people. They wanted to be seen as supporters of the schools and the arts. However, in the community itself they were likely involved in things like selling drugs and prostitution and extortion.
The idea that the most evil people in the world also want to see themselves as good was an idea that really stuck out with me. The longer I have been in business and the world the more I have seen that everyone wants to believe that they are good.
One of the biggest insults for me when I meet people in business or people that I am interested in hiring is when they tell me how much money I will make if I do things a certain way. I have interviewed multiple people who sit in on interviews and tell me how much money they are going to make me if I hire them.
I remember several years ago I was interviewing someone for a Human Resources Director’s job. At the time, in Los Angeles, for a company our size a position like this paid around $80,000 a year. I was interviewing a guy and I liked him a great deal and thought he would do pretty well. He was currently making $50,000 as an HR Director of another company.
“What sort of salary are you looking for?” I asked him.
“I will not accept a job for less than $120,000″, he said.
“I do not understand. You’re currently making less than half of that,” I told him.
“Yes, but I will be getting a job making $120,000 a year. I am different than other HR Directors you could interview because all I care about is making you money. I have a great personality and am going to make you a lot of money. I will hire and fire people based on their ability to make you money. ”
There was a lot wrong with what this guy said and did to me on multiple levels; however, the worst thing he did was ascribe to me the idea that all I cared about was making a lot of money. At the time what I cared about most was creating a good work environment for the employees and that was why I was looking for an HR Director. More importantly, my life’s mission has involved finding ways for people to get jobs because I believe this is a higher motive. I am interested in doing something that is good and meaningful for the world and this is what makes me tick. I am, of course, not averse to making a living but my primary motivation does not involve trying to make money at all costs.
Most people are like I am, like the Sopranos were and like the Mafioso I grew up with are: People want to believe that they are doing something positive and good for the world. In fact, just about everyone I have ever met wants to believe on one level or another that there is something “noble” to what they are doing and that their work “serves a higher purpose.” People want to believe in the significance of what they are doing and their place and meaning in the world. Deep down we all want to believe that we are good people and not bad people. The evil will usually justify their actions in one way or another as something that is related to doing well.
One of the greatest legends in history is of Robin Hood. There are writings dating back as far as 1283 that talk about Robin Hood. There are numerous different variations of the legend of Robin Hood and the story has been handed down for centuries. During the time of Robin Hood, King Richard was on a crusade in Jerusalem and left his brother, Prince John, in control during his absence. Prince John was known for his greed for money and considered evil. He taxed the people so much that they even had to use the little money they had for bread to pay him taxes. One day after Robin was returning from a crusade he came across a poor peasant in Sherwood Forest who had just killed a deer. The deer of Sherwood Forest were meant only for the King to hunt. The peasant was being pursued by the King’s guards for having killed the deer and taking pity on the peasant Robin Hood killed the king’s guards and became an outlaw. Robin Hood ended up losing his wealth, land and everything he had in the whole world. Robin Hood ended up living in the forest and stealing from the rich and giving to the peasants.
This story has been handed down for over 800 years in Western culture and as myth likely carries the power it does for so many people due in some part to the fact that it shows that people who are off in the world doing things that may appear evil actually have a high regard for themselves. Robin Hood is celebrated due to the fact that his stealing and murder actually became something that looked like a good thing in his and the world’s estimation.
Your employer too wants to believe they are a good person. Your potential employer wants to believe they are a good person. Everyone wants to believe that deep down they are a good person and that they stand for something positive in the world. This is the nature of the world. The greatest politicians appeal to people’s higher motives and the greatest public speakers, motivational coaches and others also appeal to these motives as well. In 1896, George Pierce Baker wrote in Principles of Argumentation:
“Choose the highest motive to which you think your audience will respond. If the speaker feels it necessary to appeal to motives not of the highest grades he should see to it that before he closes he makes them lead into higher motives.” Professor Barker illustrates with Beecher’s Speech at Liverpool, in which the orator during our Civil War was struggling with a very hostile audience of Englishmen. He argued that if slavery were abolished in the South, England would find a better market there for her goods, but “he connected this appear with the far higher motives of mere justice and the good of humanity … What gives its significant to [this] suggestion … is that few men are willing to admit that they have acted from motives considered low or mean. Even if they suspect this to be the case, they endeavor to convince themselves that it is not true. In an audience each man knows those about him see what moves him in a speaker’s words and therefore he yields most readily to a motive which he knows is generally commended–religious feelings, charity, devotion to one’s country, etc. . . . Since, then, men yield more willingly to motives generally commended, and since unanimity of action is more easily gained when the highest motives are addressed, this corollary to the suggestion last made may be formulated: The larger the audience, the higher the motives to which an appeal may be made.”
Similarly, in James Winans’ 1911 book Public Speaking, Principles and Practice, he writes:
While motives are frequently mixed, we need not cynically attribute right actions to selfishness, ambition or fear of public opinion. The average man really intends to do the right thing once his sense of responsibility is aroused. While most of us let down a bit when not under observation, we have certain principles of conduct, duty, honesty, honor, courage and generosity, in accordance with which we must live if we are to retain our self-respect.
… The moral is: Do not fear to appeal to the best sentiments in your hearers. Assume they are better rather than worse than they are. They may respond to lower motives, but may also rise gladly to a higher plane.
When you are interviewing with companies it is always important that you ascribe good motives to the hiring of you. One of the most common hires that I make is in the legal recruiting industry. The legal recruiting industry, like all industries, is an industry where people can either make a lot of money or not much money. Since recruiting is somewhat of a sales-type position, many people applying to the work believe that what they are doing is all about sales, “closing” and making money. In terms of the way that I think about legal recruiting this could not be further from the truth. When I was younger I remember running an asphalt business and hiring people in drug rehabilitation centers in Detroit and teaching them about work and how to work for a company. Many of these people had grown up on the streets and had never worked in their lives. It is a real source of pride that I was able to make an impact, no matter how small, in the lives of these people. This is something I feel good about to this day because using my spirit and the energy inside me I felt like I was able to bring light into the lives of many of these people. When I became a legal recruiter I believed that I was also helping people. I felt that I was helping the people who had played by society’s rules make the most of themselves and that they deserved to have the best possible recruiter working for them. I felt that the work I was doing held a higher purpose and that I could positively impact the world by insuring that the attorneys with the most talent and soul ended up getting the best jobs. This is how I thought about my job and it is still how I think about my job today. Now that I run job boards and other career services I believe that I am creating opportunity and work for millions of people. I feel very good about what I am doing. I justify my actions and my life in terms of what I consider a higher purpose.
This is why when people come in to speak with me for recruiting positions, for example, they demean me when they ascribe to me ideas such as they will make a lot of money in recruiting. When people cut corners in recruiting I feel the same way about their actions. If people are just focused on making money and so forth they typically do not do well in our organization. I believe people need to be working for higher motives.
I do not consider myself special or all that unusual. When it comes right down to it, most employers will tell you that whatever they are doing there is some sort of noble purpose in what they are doing. A corporate attorney may tell you he prevents companies from being taken advantage of. A gas station mechanic will tell you he fixes cars so people can spend time traveling with their families. A stock broker will tell you he helps people invest money so they can retire. There is likely some noble and higher purpose to whatever any company or organization is doing.
My challenge to you is to always think in terms of what the employer you are interviewing with or working for is doing that serves a higher purpose. When you understand this higher purpose, speak in terms of these in interviews and in your daily work. This will set you apart from most people and will put you on a
higher and different plane than others. It will also make you appear to be a better choice in most instances for hiring and promotion. Everyone wants to be associated with what is good and noble. Being this person will have tremendous rewards for you in your career.
The Importance of Planting Seeds: My Experience With the Scientologists
January 19, 2009
“And when much people were gathered together, and were come to him out of every city, he spake by a parable: a sower went out to sow his seed: and as he sowed, some fell by the way side; and it was trodden down, and the fowls of the air devoured it. And some fell upon a rock; and as soon as it was sprung up, it withered away, because it lacked moisture. And some fell among thorns; and the thorns sprang up with it, and choked it. And other fell on good ground, and sprang up, and bore fruit a hundredfold. And when he had said these things, he cried, He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.”—Luke 8:4-8.
What You Will Learn
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For several years I underwent a ritual throughout various suburbs of Detroit that year after year resulted in my dramatically increasing my income and customer base in the asphalt business. This ritual became effective year after year due to the power of “planting seeds” in my prospects’ minds. I have continued to use the power of “planting seeds” throughout my career to start businesses and expand various businesses year after year. When you plant seeds in prospects’ minds, they are far more likely to think of you when a need comes up in the future than if you do not. An extremely effective secret to getting a job, getting a raise and more is based on planting seeds in your prospects’ minds. In this case, your prospects should be the potential employers you would like to work for as well as your current employer if you are seeking more money or responsibility.
So few people understand the power of planting seeds, however. The inability to plant seeds is one of the biggest weaknesses of most people in the world–whether they are businesses, or individuals seeking a job or advancement. So many people out there are simply so short term in their focus that they are only looking for instant gratification. If someone or something cannot provide them instant gratification they are not interested. This movement between one form of instant gratification to the other is something that hurts businesses and people.
Yesterday I walked into a store called “Chrome Hearts” in the Malibu Country Mart in Malibu. I have been looking for a money clip for the past few years because my current money clip is getting near the end of its life. When I walked into the store a beautiful woman walked up to me and asked if she could help me. I told her I was interested in looking at money clips. She told me they had two sizes “small and large” and I told her I was interested in seeing the small.
“It’s $825,” she said.
“$825! Wow that’s expensive,” I said. There was no way in hell I was going to spend $825 for a money clip; however, I thought it might be something I could ask my wife for when we had our anniversary in a few years, for example.
“I guess not,” she said rudely. She then disappeared and completely lost interest in helping me and turned around and left me standing there. I was still interested in seeing the money clip but was extremely turned off by her attitude. I will never go into the store again. Had the sales person showed me the money clip, let me touch it and been nice to me I would have likely found my wife and brought her back and suggested to her this might make a good anniversary gift for me one day. Instead, I was completely turned off and turned away.
In my asphalt business, I had a tradition that I would always leave a brochure with every single house in the neighborhoods I worked in once a year. It did not matter if the owner was home or not, I always left a brochure. When they answered the door I also went through the same routine each year.
“I can help your driveway,” I’d tell them, my teeth gleaming in the sunlight, my khaki pants and white oxford shirt fresh from the dry cleaners (heavy starch), my hair slicked back smelling like mangos. In front of their house I would have my Chevy Suburban with its emergency yellow roof beacon twirling. This was real urgent. Sometimes people would rush outside and grab their children and hustle them inside.
“Is there a gas leak in the neighborhood!?” people would sometimes shout from their porches in alarm.
“No, but if you don’t do something about your driveway…”
I would always hand the homeowners a copy of my brochure. The cover to the brochure warned:
Less than 48 hours from now it will be too late to seal coat your driveway. We only come by once a year! Less than three months from now, the Michigan winter may kill your driveway.Call 1-800-SEAL-NOW and your driveway will be sealed in the next 48 hours. Guaranteed. Don’t let ignorance let you make a decision you’ll forever regret!
In addition to the brochure, I always included some helpful information about asphalt that I had written that year. It might be something about how to take care of your asphalt, tips about how to hire someone like me and more. For years I left this information at thousands of peoples’ homes regardless of whether or not they were at home. Easy year for almost a decade I performed the same ritual with the same brochure. In the first year of doing this ritual a lot of people had me do their driveways. After several years of doing this people actually would rush up to my truck like it was an ice cream truck to make sure that I did their driveways. They felt like they already knew me because I had been giving them information and dropping hints to them about doing there asphalt for years. I had been dropping seeds. By the time I stopped doing this business I had people practically throwing money at me begging me to do the work.
The secret I had been following was planting seeds. None of my competitors ever planted seeds like I did. Their seed may have consisted of a small advertisement in the Yellow Pages. By giving people useful information I was consistently planting seeds and by following a ritual I made sure that my potential clients also knew how to act.
I have managed and run a legal recruiting firm for almost a decade. During that time, the substantial majority of people who have become recruiters in the company are the same people I have placed. While I hate to say this, these hires have for the most part come from my ability to also plant seeds. On the few occasions when one of the attorneys I have been working with has shown promise to be an exceptional legal recruiter I have said something like:
“You should consider legal recruiting in the future. I think you would be really good at it.” Invariably, one or two years later most of the people I have said this to in the past have called me and told me they want to be legal recruiters. Some of them are subsequently then hired. This is all the result of planting seeds.
Another thing about the exercise of planting seeds is that by the time these recruiters come to me to discuss being recruiters they have already spent the past couple of years thinking about being legal recruiters. Consequently, they generally hit the ground running and are far more effective than the average recruiter because they have been thinking about working for our company for the past couple of years. In addition, they are more committed and better at their jobs.
Think about the times you have planted seeds in peoples’ minds and the results this has had. Think about the times that people have planted seeds for you.
Several years ago I was on bar on the Detroit River speaking with the older sister of a good friend of mine. She was depressed and talking about how she could not find a good boyfriend, how she had been through one bad relationship after another and other things. The girl was quite attractive and also very intelligent. At the time I would guess she was around 28 and I was around 18. I had no interest in her and she was already well into a full blown career and life. I knew that the problem she was having was how she was visualizing herself and that if she started seeing herself differently everything could change for her. I thought of the most effective thing I could say to turn her around and then I said:
“You do not deserve the life you are having. You deserve a life of country clubs, international travel, big houses, fancy cars and to be treated like a princess.” My thought was that this statement would change how she viewed herself and make her take advantage of her full potential. Unfortunately, however, this seed I planted ended up having an unexpected side effect. She started calling me and hinting she wanted to date me. She got drunk one evening and was hanging all over me telling me she wanted to marry me. Other stuff happened too and it got pretty out of control. I am still uncomfortable about the after effects that remark had to this day. The point is, however, that the remark worked and it inspired her.
When I am working with a candidate seeking a legal job I believe one of my greatest skills is planting seeds. When very good recruiters are deep into their work, they have a very good sense of where their candidates are likely to get interviewed and hired. I will start saying things to my candidates like this:
- “If you can get a job at this firm you will really have done something special.”
- “You would really fit in well at this firm.”
- “I think you are going to do the best you have ever done in an interview when you interview with this firm.”
- “They are really going to like you at this firm.”
This almost always works. The candidate I am dealing with ends up going to the firm I am promoting in their candidate’s interest. This is in all cases the result of planting seeds.
When I was 16 years old there were a bunch of advertisements running on television showing volcanoes (representing breakthroughs) and saying stuff like “Increase your IQ by 30 points–page 124!” The promise was that if you read a book called Dianetics by L. Ron Hubbard all sorts of miraculous things would happen to you. At the time I was incredibly motivated and worried about being able to get into Harvard College. This was beginning to look like all but an impossibility given my performance in chemistry, for one. To this day I do not know how I passed that class. In any event, I picked up Dianetics and read it. None of the promised changes happened and the book did not make a tremendous amount of sense to me. At the time I knew nothing about Scientology but was very interested in anything that could help me pass high school chemistry and get into Harvard College.
I am not proud to admit that I used to purchase clothes at Goodwill when I was in high school. One day I was in Royal Oak, Michigan after school and wandered out of the Goodwill with a sweater or something I had purchased for a few dollars. I came across a little Scientology store front that had a sign out front that stated “Free Personality Test!!” This was too much to pass up. Since I had also tried to decipher some L. Ron Hubbard recently in the book with the volcano on front, I decided to take the test. I went inside and took the personality test. As I was waiting for the test to be graded, I was taken into a basement, seated on a plastic fold out chair and shown a film about the evils of psychiatry. There appeared to be a family living in the basement and several children scurried out of the room as they prepared an old projector for me to watch the film. The film scarred the shit out of me. I still do not remember much about it to this day; however, I do remember something about a football player getting horribly injured and people saying stuff like “he’ll never walk again!” when the football player was unconscious. Sure enough, the guy never walked again after being treated by a succession of evil psychiatrists but did walk after being introduced to Scientology.
After some time the guy who had given me the test came down to speak with me and bring me up to his office. “Are you sure you read Dianetics?” he asked me.
“Yeah, I read it,” I said matter of factly.
“Well your test is among the worst we have ever seen. Your graphs are alarming. I will go over them with you right now.”
He sat me down and explained to me that I needed an emergency Scientology intervention because a bunch of psychological things were wrong with me. It must have taken him an hour to tell me how messed up he thought I was. Then he started asking me if I could somehow come up with $2,000. I needed something called “auditing” and a few courses immediately or I was going to crash and burn. He asked me what my parents did and if they would be interested in paying for all of the services I needed.
“How much is all this going to cost to fix these issues?” I asked him.
“Well $2,000 to just get you functioning normally and at least $30,000 to effectively address the issues.”
He showed me a couple of tin cans hooked up to something called an “E-meter” that they planned on using on me (if I came up with $2,000).
Given the fact that I was in the position of shopping for school clothes at Goodwill, I knew there was absolutely no way my parents were going to give me $2,000 to give to the Scientologists. Since I could not afford the services, I became interested in learning about the guy I was speaking with. I found it fascinating that he was living in a store with what appeared to be a couple of other families and was telling me I was screwed up. He told me he had read Dianetics while on a ship in the navy and this had changed his life. He volunteered to work for the Scientologists after this great read. Between periodically telling me about himself, he encouraged me to investigate other options for coming up with $2,000, such as selling my car. That was a nonstarter. While I was understandably upset with the results of the personality test, I knew there was absolutely nothing I could do.
I had nothing to give.
A week or so after this I received my first correspondence from the Church of Scientology. It was a brochure or a book or something. This was 1986. Over the past 22 years I have moved at least 15 times (more times than I can count). I have moved to numerous different states, lived in dorms in various schools, lived in various apartments and homes. Within a few weeks of arriving at these addresses correspondence from the Church of Scientology suddenly appears. They send me voluminous amounts of information and it just keeps coming–in 2000-2007 I received information from them almost every single day. While the information has slowed down recently, I am confident that they have communicated with me via mail thousands and thousands of times. They send me magazines, brochures, offers, pictures of L. Ron Hubbard and just about every piece of mail they probably ever printed.
At least three or four or my assistants have tried to cancel the mail from the Church of Scientology but they cannot. My ex-wife got so upset with all the mail she wrote them several letters and was at one point asking me to sue them when I was practicing law.
I do not have opinions about the Scientologists one way or another. I have actually known some who were good people and I am sure they do a lot of good for some people. What is so astonishing to me, however, is how aggressively they have been “planting seeds” with me for over two decades. This is an example of being extremely proactive. The more proactive you are and the more seeds you plant, the better you are likely to do in the long run.
What were the Scientologists attempting to accomplish with all this mail? While you would have to ask them, to me it appeared as if they were doing everything within their power to convince me that if I ever had a problem, or needed a new religion, I should think of them. They wanted top of mind awareness. They have succeeded in getting top of mind awareness with me. I am writing about them right now.
How is this relevant to you and your career? You need to plant seeds and make sure that the people around you are aware of what you have to offer. You can do this in a ton of ways. You can send people copies of articles you have written or read, that are applicable to them and many more things. The point is you want to insure that you are always there for the people who are your potential employers. Top of mind awareness is huge.
One example of something that can be very effective is after you interview with someone and find out something the person may be interested in, you can cut out a small article and send it to the person with a note that you thought of him or her while reading it. This sends a message that you care. Planting seeds is extremely effective and is something that helps people remember you. Remember, the world is huge and you need to do everything within your power to stick out.
Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss it, you will land among the stars.