Communicate With Relevance and Connect With Your Audience
February 2, 2010
One of the biggest secrets in marketing is the more relevant your communication, the more willing people are to respond. You can read and study everything you want about marketing, but if you are not communicating with relevance to your audience, nothing else really matters.
When you apply for a job, or when you work for someone, you need to make your communication as relevant as possible.
I’d like to tell you a quick story about someone I hired four years ago who communicated to me with relevance.
One day, I received a phone call from a man in Europe, telling me he intended to move to the United States for work. He told me he’d researched our organization and was impressed. He told me what areas of the organization needed work. He communicated in ways that were relevant to me and despite the fact I didn’t know this person, I opened up and began speaking about our company.
He then told me if I would like to speak further with him, I was welcome to fly him to the United States for more discussions. When I took him up on his offer, he discussed with me what he felt the organization needed, and he continued to communicate with relevance. I ended up having this person come to work in the U.S. I had him live in my house for six weeks of training, and even paid all sorts of immigration and other expenses to bring this person over. He now manages one of my most important companies. Since he started with the company, his salary has doubled.
This person never sent me a resumé.
This person never applied in response to an advertisement.
This person contacted me, the CEO of the company, by calling and doing everything he could to make a connection.
This person never would have been hired had he simply sent a résumé or gone a more traditional route. He might not even have been hired had he volunteered to fly himself over. Making our organization pay for the flight got the company invested, and certainly made me pay attention.
This person probably never would have been hired had he not researched exactly what our company did, or exactly who we were and what made us unique. The fact he was able to speak in terms of what made us unique was very meaningful to me, and also established a connection.
And here’s an incredible secret: I hired him despite the fact the company had no openings whatsoever. In fact, this person was hired for a company that was not even operational, which only got off the ground about 30 months after the person started! Companies and employers will hire people who go out of their way to make a connection.
When I was at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco in 2008, I learned about the different ways people communicate, and how it relates to the future of the Internet. I saw the founder of Facebook, the CEO of Twitter, the CEO of Salesforce.com, and several other very high ranking people in the Internet sphere. As I looked around at these people, I thought, why are sites like Facebook so popular? Why is Twitter so popular? Why are so many sites on the Internet growing so quickly? The growth of sites like Google and others is absolutely stunning.
There must be something these sites and the people behind them are doing that others are not. There must be a common thread that drives their success. What do these companies mean for you? What does this have to do with your job search?
These companies are surrounded by legions of venture capitalists and others who are not only interested in giving these companies money, but also in understanding what they do. What these companies do is really something that is as old as the hills, but far too many people miss that.
What companies like Facebook, Twitter, and others do is allow people to reach each other. They allow people to form connections. Companies like Google allow advertisers to communicate with relevance when people are searching for information. It used to be if you wanted to find car buyers, for example, you needed to put a huge advertisement on television and hope the buyers would see it. Today, a manufacturer can sponsor ads for, say, “four-wheel drive, hybrid pickup trucks,” and every manufacturer that has relevant products can reach this demographic. Businesses and brands that communicate with relevance are the ones to which consumers always flock.
The importance of communicating with relevance has always been around. Direct-mail advertisers have long known that the more focused and personally directed an advertisement is, the more likely you are to open it. Publisher’s Clearinghouse, for example, would write: “HARRISON BARNES OF PASADENA HAS WON $1,000,000!” on its envelope, in order to get me to open their package when it arrived.
When looking for a job, the more focused you are on exactly what the employer wants, the more likely you are to get the job. Facebook allows users to connect with people they know. Like Facebook, you need to connect with your “audience” – in this case your future employer, through commonalities and direct and relevant communication.
When you are on the job it is also important to connect. Professionalism is stressed in many workplaces, but you also want your employer to understand you and to know who you are. This connection is necessary and is what makes you human. It is much harder for an employer not to give someone a promotion or to fire someone with whom he or she has made a sincere and legitimate connection. You need to make a serious connection with your employer both before and after getting hired. It’s important to understand your employer’s motivations and to let him or her know that, on some personal level, you share those motivations.
In the 2008 presidential election we saw two very different candidates. If you think back over the last 100 years, this election was no different from many others. The person who connected with the most people ultimately won. ‘Connection’ means different things at different times and places. Our recent election winner was the one who did the best job of communicating. He text messaged his supporters and communicated in the language of the people whose approval he was seeking.
Always communicate with relevance and you will connect with your audience.
Be Proactive in Business and in Your Job Search
January 14, 2010
The gloomy estimates you’ve heard about business failures are not exaggerated. As many as half of all small businesses launched in the United States this year will not be around by the end of next year. These businesses will remain as little more than painful memories in the minds of the people who launched them. The big question is why do so many businesses fail? Is it because of lack of venture capital? Bad location? Inexperienced ownership or management? Simple miscalculation of market demand?
Every week for as long as I can remember, there is a giant pullout advertisement for an electronics store called Fry’s in the Los Angeles Times. I have not seen giant ads for any other electronics stores in the Times – just this one. In the past five years, I have also read in the same paper about one electronics store after another experiencing major financial troubles, and eventually closing. I think Fry’s has probably survived for one reason: the company does not sit passively and wait for customers. Instead, it goes out and finds customers by advertising as aggressively as it can every single week, all year round.
You need to be just as proactive with your career. If you are looking for a job, you need to broadcast yourself to everyone the way Fry’s does. Fry’s may have the best locations in Southern California. Fry’s may even have the best merchandise, the best managers, and the best salespeople in its stores. But none of that matters if Fry’s is not being proactive and letting people know it exists.
In late 2008 the unemployment rate in California was above 7.8 percent. Today, in 2010 it has risen to over 10 percent. When you see unemployment numbers like this and read the related stories, you always see something else as well: the papers talk about a percentage of people who have simply given up on looking for jobs. This is the last thing I would ever want you to do. I do not want you to give up. I want you to be proactive.
The main reason people fail in their job searches or in business is due to a lack of proactive strategy. You need to be proactive in order to survive.
First, make sure you are in fact seeing all of the job openings available. If you are spending your time on job boards like Monster or CareerBuilder, you need to realize you are seeing only the jobs that employers are paying to have advertised on those specific sites. You need to look at all job search sites, in all newspapers, and on all employer websites. You need to have complete access to every available job in the market. Not being aware of every available job in the market is a huge mistake that can lead to missed opportunities.
This is what we do at EmploymentCrossing: we consolidate every job in the market that we can find into one place. We gather jobs from employer websites, newspapers, and other job boards.
However, being proactive goes further than this. You also need to apply to every single job you can possibly find for which you think you may be a good fit. Even if there is no current opening – give it a shot. Most people only apply for a few jobs when seeking employment.
I have seen people refuse to apply to a company because they knew someone there who did not like the management. This is not a smart decision. Companies have numerous departments and depending on the company’s size, potentially hundreds of different supervisors. Refusing to try a company due to one person’s bad experience, or even a group of people’s bad experiences, is not wise, and there is no place for this within a proactive strategy.
In addition to applying for every open job you can find, you need to track down “hidden” and unseen job openings. How many times have you made an impulse purchase? How many times have you purchased something because you saw it at the right time? The same idea applies to how employers often make hiring decisions. Someone happens to be at the right place and time, and they are hired.
One of the most effective ways to get a job, in my opinion, is through the targeted mailing of your résumé. This is what our company, Employment Authority, does. This almost always generates a significant number of leads when someone is looking for a job. Targeted mailing involves sending your résumé to a group of employers in the area who match your career interest. For example, if you were searching for a bank teller job, you would mail your résumé to a group of companies in a given city that typically hire bank tellers. This method of pursuing employers is most likely to secure you the sort of job in which you are most interested, and it is highly proactive.
When you cold call an employer, or send an unsolicited résumé, you are also being proactive. You will stick out in the employer’s mind much more than the average person who is applying for a job in a classified ad. The employer is also likely to believe that you are interested in them specifically. Furthermore, the employer is given the chance to evaluate whether or not they have a need – all without having to do any advertising, since you are going to the employer proactively.
Businesses often fail for the same reason that people fail to get a job: a lack of proactive measures. Be proactive in your job search. Do everything you can to track down a position and get hired.
Being Able to Start from Scratch is a Gift
December 15, 2009
What You Will Learn
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One of the hardest things for any of us to do is to relearn something and become infinitely better at it the next time around. Few of us ever allow ourselves to do this because we are in a comfort zone, which often does not allow us to move, improve and change. People are motivated primarily by two things, pain and pleasure. The desire to avoid pain is very strong and keeps most of us from going outside this comfort zone.
When I was around 14 years old, I was exceptionally good at tennis. I was on the tennis team at a private school my parents managed to send me to, and I always played singles. A few of my peers at the time were even ranked in the state, and traveled around during their summers, playing competitive tennis. I never lost against any of these ranked players. The thing about my tennis game, however, was that I picked up my game in parks and other locations around Detroit with various kids; I never had any lessons. I also played a lot of tennis with my father on the weekends. I was wandering around the streets with an old wooden tennis racquet, and just happened to be good at the game.
In contrast to the way I played tennis, my opponents on the tennis court at the private school had the best equipment. They dressed like professional tennis players and most of them had been taking lessons at private country clubs and other special places, the likes of which I had not seen since the age of 4 or 5. These kids had all grown up playing tennis and learned how to play tennis the right way.
I worked hard to win the games that I won. I did not have the proper tennis strokes, and only made my first serve in around 10% of the time. When it went in, however, scarcely anyone ever could return it.
One summer, my father was going to work in Saudi Arabia for the summer, and he picked me up one evening (my parents were divorced) and drove me over to a local country club. Once we were there, he spoke with one of the tennis pros and then proceeded to write him a check for $1,000, for him to give me a series of private lessons over the summer. This was a nice, surprise gesture on my father’s part. I am sure he did this because he realized that I had a lot of potential in the game of tennis and that, if I were going to get good at the sport, I would need to drastically change my game.
I had my first tennis lesson of the summer and was extremely discouraged. Before the lesson started the instructor hit the ball with me for several minutes. He then had me approach the net and told me something I will never forget:
“You are at a crossroads right now. With your athletic ability you could probably become a professional tennis player. You could even become a household name. But your game is not sustainable, and you are going to fall apart if you continue to play like this. You need to relearn everything, and it is not going to be easy.”
The tennis pro told me that I needed to relearn everything I was doing. I needed to hold the tennis racquet differently. I needed to stand differently. I needed to hit the ball differently. I needed to serve differently. Everything needed to change.
I started doing what the pro recommended and it was as if my entire game had fallen apart. I was playing like a 5 year-old with no coordination. Nothing I hit went in. Nothing I hit had any power. The game did not seem fun anymore.
One of the things he taught me was to not hit the ball hard anymore. Instead, I was expected to hit the ball high and long so it would bounce over my young opponents’ heads. This was about the only shot I learned.
I ended up getting extremely discouraged. I did not want to have to relearn all of my strokes. I was emasculated because I was being told I could no longer hit the ball hard, and everything I had formerly loved the game of tennis, I could no longer do. All of the passion that I formerly put into hitting the ball was suddenly ineffective under this new way of playing tennis.
I stopped looking forward to the lessons. Eventually, I stopped going to the lessons completely, despite the fact that the tennis pro would call me on the phone to schedule time with me.
I did not want to play anymore. I simply did not want to change my game.
I never really played a lot of tennis again after that summer. I played in a tournament at a public tennis club that winter and won first prize. However, when I started playing against the seniors and others on the high school tennis team, I realized that they were going to be better than me. This frightened me away from trying out for the team, even though I am confident that I would have made the team, even as a freshman in high school.
The realization that I needed to completely change how I played took my heart out of the game. To this day I do not play tennis. This is because I was confronted with the fact that I could become really, really good at something, but that in order to get there I would have needed to change completely.
The idea of changing completely how we do something is more intimidating and difficult than it sounds. It is almost impossible for many people to do this.
One of the more remarkable things to me is seeing people who have managed to lose a lot of weight and keep it off. All throughout the Midwest where I grew up, there are countless people who are a hundred pounds or more overweight. Many of these people are my own relatives. Year after year, these people continue to get larger and larger. They suffer from all sorts of health problems related to their obesity and they visit doctors who treat these health problems, but not the obesity. These people die early and do not live the lives they are capable of, due to their weight issues.
Why do these people continue to gain weight and put themselves through this?
I am going to go out on a limb here: it is because they do not want to change. They need to eat differently. That is it 95% of the time. If you eat less, or eat foods that will not cause you to get fat (for example, low carbohydrate foods), you will not gain as much weight. This is a plain and simple fact. However, these people are generally more comfortable eating a lot of food and not changing their diets. I understand this because I am no different from these people. This concept is no different from me not wanting to change my tennis game. I was afraid of changing because I would have had to give something up in the process–a part of who I was, and what I believed.
Growing up, I saw many people struggle with alcohol and drugs. I have never used drugs at all in my life, but I saw numerous people start using them. Once people start using drugs, they rarely stop, at least in my experience. I am not saying this does not happen; however, it is generally rare. Why? Because not using these substances, once someone becomes addicted, forces the person to give up his or her way of coping and dealing with the world. Once the person stops using, he or she is forced to deal with the world in an entirely new way.
The person who is overweight faces the same problem. They use food for coping and dealing with the world, and if they are forced to adopt new eating patterns, they will no longer have this ability to cope.
You may be in a position at the moment in which you are eager to change, to become something better and something different. You may want a new job, or a new career. You may be faced with being unemployed and not knowing what to do if you are looking for a job. What all of this is forcing you to do, right now, is to confront the fact that you may need to change–and you may need to do this right away. I am not talking about a small change–I am talking about a fundamental change that requires you to do absolutely everything differently and alter your entire approach to life and the world. Imagine if you had to learn to ride a bike again from scratch without any understanding of the way things could be.
I remember when I was on the tennis court and the instructor was trying to show me how to hold the racquet differently and how to approach the game in a new way. I was hitting the ball all over the place and making one mistake after another. I could no longer control the ball. I could no longer hit the ball as hard. The way I had to keep my feet was very difficult compared to the way I had kept them before. My grip was different. All of this was extremely uncomfortable. What I realized was that when I would hit the ball using the new methods suggested to me by the pro, the results were better and more controlled. I did not do this often, but I knew that over time I would be able to hit the ball correctly–if I did not give up. I knew that I ultimately would become a much better player; it was just going to take some time.
There are areas of your life and career that could benefit from starting from ground zero and completely rebuilding yourself. You have so much potential inside of you, and you could do such great things if you would take just a few things you are doing well, and allow yourself to rebuild your skills in the correct manner, without employing the bad habits, and without doing things an improper way. You will find you can do much better.
If I had the time in my schedule (and I need to make the time), I would go see a professional coach once a week to help me work on my weaknesses and rebuild. I currently do this for other people, and should be having the same done for me. The reason it is important for people to see coaches, psychologists and others is due to the fact that these people can help us reframe our model of the world and show us where we are weak. Once we see where we are weak, then we can work towards making new progress and completely rebuilding ourselves.
In the early 1980s, my father purchased a computer that he used to write novels. I would use the computer during the evenings, when he was not occupying it, to write papers for school. One of the most maddening things that happened with the particular computer that he had purchased for word processing was that it always had the habit of crashing, and I would end up losing all of my files and all of the work that I had done. This could be avoided by pressing the F9 key while I was writing the paper, but I always forgot to do this and ended up losing an incredible number of papers over the years.
What I noticed over the years was that when I lost a paper and ended up rewriting it from scratch, the new paper was always better than the paper I had written before. The new paper would always better explain the points it needed to make, be shorter in the right places and longer in the right places. It would be a much better piece of work overall. The reason was that the new paper would force me to rethink something from the beginning and make the point in a much more effective way.
It is this way with your life and career as well. The most beneficial and helpful thing that can happen to many people is to lose a job. When you lose a job, you are put into a position in which you need to rethink everything and test every assumption. Some people lose jobs in industries in which they are unlikely to ever find a job doing the same thing again. These experiences can change the world as you know it. They also force you to rethink old assumptions.
I read an article yesterday about someone who got a job in an automotive plant at the age of 18 years old, making $60,000 a year. This person is now in his 30s and has lost his job at the auto factory. He knows that he will likely never get a job like this in an automotive factory ever again. Because he was making so much money at such a young age, he never saw the need to go to college or to do anything like this to improve himself. He knew that, even with a college degree, the odds of him getting as good of a job back then were incredibly slim. So he stayed working at the auto plant and has been there until recently, when he lost his job. Now he is going back to college. Going back to college in his 30s is now forcing him to rebuild his model of the world and start from scratch. How exciting this is! He may have the skills of a brilliant mathematician or something else inside of him. There may be so much more that he can do and contribute to the world now that he is being forced to recalibrate and reevaluate his role in the world. This is an amazing thing. This young man’s destiny is about to be reshaped for the future, and his career will never be the same. If he is smart, he will rebuild what he is and what he is doing, and will become an even better and more productive person going forward.
I could have been a professional tennis player, perhaps, had I been willing to change my model of tennis.
People can only reach their full potential when they are willing to forget what they know and to start from scratch. If you are ever forced to start from scratch, it is often the greatest gift you can receive because what lies at the other side is a better you.
Concentrate on the Process, Not the Results
November 4, 2009
What You Will Learn
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Some time ago, I was listening to a seminar about a company that was in the furniture business. This company decided that because it was doing so well, it should expand into the piano business, and also sell pianos. They went out and purchased a Steinway and took the piano apart to study all of the pieces. Then they made the same pieces themselves and built a piano. When they finally had built their own piano and tried to play it, nothing but thuds came out of the instrument. Discouraged, not knowing what they possibly could have done wrong, they decided that they would no longer go into the piano business.
They reassembled the Steinway Piano so they could return it as well. When they reassembled the piano, however, the same thing happened: only a thud came out when they tried to play it.
This is how it is with many people and businesses. We only look at the results, and not the process that goes into creating a particular result. In order to build a piano, you need to have studied instrument- making for some time, and to really understand a lot about the process. You also need to understand and study musical theory. It could take generations for a family to become proficient in making a great piano. There is just so much that goes into it.
This is how it is with everything. You cannot just call yourself a piano company and start making pianos. You cannot just decide that you want to do something and expect immediate success just by trying to copy an outcome. You need to understand the complete process that goes into what you are trying to do.
My first year as a legal recruiter, I generated over $1,000,000 in fees. This means, essentially, that for the work I did personally, I sent out over $1,000,000 in bills to law firms for my services. Since the average bill for recruiting back then was probably around $30,000 or so, this means that I made a tremendous number of placements. When you are doing well, it tends to attract more business to you.
Within a few months, I had hired various people to help me with recruiting, and pretty soon the word had gotten around that our team was really good. Soon after that, various local attorneys around Los Angeles started calling me. Several people I know of copied me and went into the business only to fail pretty quickly.
I loved recruiting and I am sure I had some natural skills for it. However, by the time I started recruiting in an office, I had already essentially been doing the job in one capacity or another for almost 15 years. Since a young age, I had run an asphalt business that had required me to sell door-to-door to people, businesses and others. Sales skills were really important in that business. While asphalt and recruiting are very different in many respects, in actuality they have a tremendous number of similarities. Here is the biggest similarity:
If you emphasize the process over the results in the recruiting and asphalt business, you will succeed.
One of the biggest mistakes many people make in business is emphasizing results over process, or style over substance. The more people concentrate on the process and substance of their work, the better they do:
- The more people concentrate on their intended results, the worse they do in the long run.
- The most successful job seekers are the ones who have the ability to excel in their work process.
- The most successful companies are the ones who have the ability to excel in their work process.
- The most successful workers and employees are the ones who have the ability to excel in their work process.
- The most successful asphalt contractors are the ones who concentrate on their work process.
- The most successful legal recruiters are the ones who concentrate on their work process.
I am not saying that results do not matter; they do. But what ultimately matters most, and what makes people successful is focusing on the process and how things are done.
A lot of the problems in the American economy have been caused by a massive emphasis on results rather than process. For example, the Wall Street practice of emphasizing quarter-by-quarter profits and gains has been extremely dangerous to our company in numerous respects.
I believe that in business, in your job search, and in everything else–process is the most important thing. It is how you do things that matters, and not just the result you hope to attain.
Process in the Asphalt Sealing Business. In the asphalt sealing business there is essentially one thing you are doing: You are putting black stuff on people’s asphalt and then leaving.
This is the result of what happens when you do the work. This is what most contractors and others concentrate on, and it is why most of them fail or eek out poor livings at best.
In the asphalt sealing business, there are a lot of tricks that contractors can do. When you are putting asphalt sealer on a driveway or parking lot, essentially what you are working with is a black coating that fills in cracks and pores and makes the surface look good. More importantly, the coating serves to protect the surface from oil spills and other things. This material is typically purchased from a factory in a raw state, when it is very heavy and thick like molasses. The contractor has to water down the material in order to make it the proper consistency to be used on asphalt.
From the consumer’s point of view, it does not matter how much water you put into this concoction, within limits. After the material dries on someone’s asphalt, it is generally going to look quite similar, regardless as to how much water was used in the mix. Contractors can save a tremendous amount of money by watering the material down more heavily. This is something that many contractors do. The difference is that a few months later, the material that has been applied ends up looking very bad, which does not do the customer much good.
There are other tricks of the trade as well. One of the most outrageous scenarios involves people traveling from city to city purchasing used motor oil (which used to be practically free) and then putting this on peoples’ driveways and parking lots. They would get paid for the work, and the customer would have a piece of pavement that looked decent when the “contractors” left, but the asphalt would never dry and the job would end up having been a complete waste of money and time.
Here are some other tricks of the trade:
- There are chemical thickeners you can buy to bulk up watered down sealer, for example.
- Using a squeegee will apply much more sealer than a brush, but it costs more.
- You can fill cracks with sand instead of tar (which is more expensive).
- It is better to put the material on when the asphalt is cool because it can cure longer (but this means you cannot work when the asphalt is hot, unless you have cooled it).
I could create a long list of the various things that contractors do to cut corners when they are doing this work. However, it is really never a good idea to cut corners. This is what most people and contractors do, however.
Asphalt contractors who emphasize the process of the work they are doing always do much better in the long run. They come back and work for people year after year. There is a certain confidence they exude in their work. They are craftsmen, not salesmen. They take pride in their work. They build careers, and meaningful careers at that. You can do very well financially (and in many other ways) as an asphalt contractor. However, very few people truly do well in the asphalt business. In fact, not only do most asphalt contractors fail, the contractors who do not fail end up making mediocre livings at best.
Every year tens of thousands of people go to law school. They all graduate and compete for the same jobs. How many people choose to become asphalt contractors? Hardly any. You could learn most of what you need to know about this job in less than a week. There are some complex areas of the job that require engineers to work on roads and stuff, but basically anyone can do the work or run a business doing this. When a state or city needs to build a road out of asphalt, they will get bids from a contractor. Most times there are only a few people bidding on many of these jobs because there are just not a ton of people in the business with credibility. The reason is that most people get a single job and simply try and make as much money as they can as quickly as they can. They cut corners. The people who do not cut corners get good reputations and end up doing better in the long run.
Process in the Legal Recruiting Business. In the legal recruiting business, there is essentially one thing you are doing: Finding an attorney and making an introduction between the attorney and a law firm or a legal employer.
This is the result that occurs when you do the work. This is what most legal recruiters in the business concentrate on, and it is why most of them fail to even moderately reach their full potential.
When I got into the legal recruiting business, I quickly noticed people cutting corners, just like people do in the asphalt business. If you were looking at the profession from a distance, without any form of understanding, you too would likely think that all that recruiters do is find people and make introductions. I remember one of the most upsetting interviews I ever had was interviewing someone for the job of being a recruiter, who told me that the job sounded great. He told me that he thought he could spend time out on the golf course doing the work, forwarding résumés around on his Blackberry between strokes. This person simply thought that all the job involved was forwarding résumés from one person to another.
Incredibly, the more I learned about the business, the more I saw that most recruiters seemed to feel this way. In fact, this sort of idea was indeed how most recruiters seemed to approach the entire business. They would put a little advertisement on a job site, or in a legal newspaper, and then forward someone’s résumé to an interested employer. Others would simply cold call attorneys. The idea was that they were simply going out and plucking people from one firm, and sending them over to other firms.
This simplistic understanding of the job characterizes the way many people approach it. Without going into too much detail, however, there is a much more in-depth way of looking at the work:
- The best recruiters are constantly writing and lecturing about recruiting-related issues and their industry.
- The best recruiters put together very compelling and in-depth presentations about their candidates.
- The best recruiters meet with employers on a weekly basis.
- The best recruiters know about the industry and the most important things happening in it.
- The best recruiters are constantly networking at industry events.
- The best recruiters have highly developed research skills to find jobs.
- The best recruiters have highly developed research skills to find candidates.
- The best recruiters never compromise their integrity.
- The best recruiter help people, even when it does not mean a short-term reward.
- The best recruiters are committed to working hard throughout their careers.
There are actually thousands of little things like this that the best recruiters are constantly doing in order to excel at their jobs, and all of these details are what make them incredibly good at their job. Most of these things are not, however, related to simply emailing résumés. They are related to the deeper process of recruiting.
When you speak with recruiters who are process rather than results oriented, you can always tell. They are not focused so much on getting résumés out the door or making money. They are doing a good job at all “touch points”.
The importance of process in recruiting also has a huge impact on the bottom line. The best recruiters do well in all economic climates due to their emphasis on process and not results.
Process and Your Career and Job Search. Just as a successful piano maker, contractor or recruiter needs to concentrate on the process in order to be successful at their trade, so too do you in both your career and job search. Good results only come about when you concentrate on the entire process of what you are doing, refine each step of the process, and ensure you are getting better and more skilled each step of the way.
A job search ideally should not start, for example, when you are looking for a job. There are thousands of data points that go into finding a job and ensuring that you get a good job when you are looking for one. For example, you need to consistently be building relationships, and building every single relationship you can over time. The more relationships you build both inside and outside of work, the more people you are going to have to call upon when you are interested in getting a new job.
The harder you work in your existing job, the more people are going to be interested in helping you when you are looking for a job. People will come to your defense and do everything they can to help you when they believe that you are someone who will work hard. When you do the right thing and always make a good effort, this will come back to help you.
This is the opposite of what many people do, however. Many people are only out for short-term rewards and “quick fixes” at every turn. They do not think in terms of building long-term relationships with those around them. In your career, you need to be consistent, to give results and perform over time–not just in the short term.
When you are looking for a job, the quality and the depth of work you put into your résumé matters. The quality of the letters that accompany your résumé matters. Whether or not you apply to enough employers, to increase your odds of getting a job, matters. Your interviewing skills matter. The entire process that you follow matters and the better that you do at each step, the more likely you are to get the results you want.
Think about the manufacturing a world-class piano. A lot of thought goes into each little component of the piano. Whether it is the wood used, the thickness of the wood, the polish of the wood, where the wood comes from, how the wood is sanded, how the wood is fitted into the piano, the glue that is used in the piano, the dexterity of the person working with the wood, the machine that the wood is compressed on (if it is compressed) and more–the thought that goes into each part of the process matters. Every data point is refined and studied and probably has been refined and studied for a long period of time.
You need to make sure that you continually improve every single data point that is involved in the process of your seeking a job, or growing your career.
Several years ago, in the late-1980s, I was taking a test drive of a Corvette with the President of a German car company. He thought the American Corvette was a piece of junk, and did not like the car at all. He told me a story about how his company operates, contrasted with how a typical American automobile company operates.
He said that American car companies build a car model, and then completely change up the model the next year. They may throw a different transmission in the car, a different engine, radically change the styling and so forth–the idea being that they are trying to show progress and innovation, although, in reality not much is really changing. In contrast, he told me that when his company builds a car, over the next decade or so they keep refining it and making it better and better. They figure out a way to make the transmission better and to make small “almost invisible” changes that continually improve the car. They are concentrating on the process of improvement in building a car, and the result is that when you get in one of their automobiles, it feels very different. The cars also last longer. They run better. There are a myriad of powerful things that make these cars superior, and they are all the result of concentrating on the process.
You need to be focused on the process in your job and job search. Pay attention to the small, almost invisible things that collectively make a difference. Think of yourself as an instrument, like a fine piano. It is the attention to everything that goes into you that will ultimately produce the best notes.
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.
The Use of Testimonials and Endorsements in Your Job Search
March 30, 2009
What You Will Learn
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When I was in my final year of high school, I remember that in English class one day the teacher handed me back a paper I had written and it had a B+ on it. While there were a lot of classes that I would have been incredibly happy if I received this grade in, English was not one of them. In fact, with the exception of a horrible play I had written for one English class, I had not received a grade of less than an A- in any English class for years. I decided that I needed to meet with the English teacher and go over this. After all, I figured that something must be seriously wrong.
The teacher asked me to meet him for lunch, and so a few days later, I was sitting there with the teacher having lunch. We spoke for some time before the grade came up and when it did I said, “Listen, I have not received a grade this bad on any paper I have ever written in any English class. There has to be some mistake.”
I then proceeded to list all of the other teachers I had taken classes from, including this teacher’s boss who was the head of the English department of the school, and rarely if ever gave “As” in any of his classes.
Incredibly, the teacher looked at me for a few seconds, grabbed the paper and crossed out the “B+” grade and changed the grade to an “A”.
“I know that grade was ‘out of line’ I guess,” the teacher said. “I just wanted to motivate you to try harder. Of course you are also going to get an “A” in the class. Just keep up the good work.”
I will literally never forget this episode because it was something I used in college as well. I would take a class with the head of a department and work my tail off. Then I would take classes with the people who worked for the head of the department. If I got a grade less than an “A,” I would meet with them and tell them about how their boss had given me a perfect grade and how well I had done in this class or that class. In addition, the more classes I took, the more ammunition I had. In every single instance where I did this, I ended up getting my grades raised from “B’s” to “A’s”. I did not know anything about psychology at the time. All I knew was that this worked. The principle was very, very simple: Other peoples’ opinions about my academic work mattered more than the opinion of the people who were my teachers at the time. This sounds incredible and hard to believe, but this is something I quickly learned. Teachers seemed to believe that the opinion of others were more important than their own.
I can still remember some of the teachers’ faces to this day. When I would bring up the judgment another teacher had about my work who was considered better known, more influential, or more powerful than my own teacher, they would suddenly look uncomfortable. They would make loose statements justifying why they had given me a grade lower than an “A”. It was an incredible thing to witness, and it is something I did several times.
Why was this occurring? Well, a paper is a subjective thing. The differences among them relate to things like the logic used in reaching conclusions, writing style, the ability to understand details of what is being written about and more. However, when it comes right down to it the grading of a paper is pretty subjective. There are many obvious differences in the quality of given papers but, for the most part, the grading of papers is subjective. Therefore, the person grading the papers is often in a position where they are questioning reality and are unsure that they are evaluating reality correctly. When this person is provided “cues” that outside authority thinks something is exceptionally good, then they will follow these cues. The idea is that reality is something that is quite subjective and providing testimonials or outside authority for people to understand reality is something that can be of tremendous benefit to helping you convince someone to your way of thinking.
In fact, all of us are somewhat confused about the actual state of reality and how to judge various things. We are always looking for the opinions of others, in most cases, to help up make up our mind. We use what other people think and believe to form the basis of our own opinions. We do this because it helps us make sense of the incredible amount of information out there.
I would like to reveal to you one of the most incredible tools for success that you have available to you. I have personally witnessed numerous businesses and careers transformed by this tool. This tool can work for you no matter who you are and no matter what you are seeking to do. If you employ this tool, you will have many more interviews than your competitors. You will get more job offers than your competitors. You will also look upon your job and the work you do as an opportunity to constantly build on your expertise and sell-ability. You will alienate fewer people along the way, and you will be more confident in everything that you do in your career. The tool I am talking about is PROOF.
About every 1 in 1,500 to 2,000 resumes I review has letters of recommendation attached to them. Some of these resumes also have one or two pages of references attached to them. Others have quotes from various people who have worked with the particular individual. These resumes always stand out to me. They are incredible because they give life to the resume and much, much more depth than they would have without these “letters of recommendation” and other testimonials. Any evaluation that I have of a particular individual is given even further credence by the recommendations of other people. In fact, one of the most helpful things is when there are recommendations by famous people. For example, if someone attaches a recommendation from a Congressman or a Senator, I am generally very impressed. The idea that a senator is writing a recommendation for me to review makes me feel important. We give a tremendous amount of weight to the opinions of others and even more to the opinions of well known, important and famous people.
If you do nothing else as the result of reading this article, get people who can be solid and important references for you in your job search. Get testimonials on your resume or attach a page with testimonials describing what a good worker you are, what good work you do and so forth. If you do this and nothing more, your job search will become probably ten times more effective than without this. By this I mean that for every resume you send out, you will be ten times more likely to get an interview than if you did not send the resume. It is that simple. Testimonials and positive references are something that can bring you incredible results.
I know what you are thinking. What if you got fired from your last job? What if you do not have any testimonials and solid references? What if you did not get along with all of your coworkers? Then remember you will have to fix this in you next job. You want to build up a long line of references and positive testimonials. Your entire career can be built upon a steady stream of outstanding testimonials. The more testimonials you have, the stronger your applications will be. You want the ability to stand out and get the same jobs that others are not getting, and there is no more powerful way than with testimonials.
There is something in our genetic makeup that makes us extremely influenced by testimonials. I have loved watching how various people use testimonials for the longest time, because of an experience I had when I was younger. My father and I used to take trips to New York from Detroit about once a year, because he would need to go there for business and would bring me along when I was around ten years old. While I loved going to New York, the trips were exhausting because we would spend hours walking around. My father loved walking the streets and seeing all the sights and sounds. I will never forget one day when we passed a man who had set up a small table on the sidewalk. He was playing a game where he would shuffle a ball between three different cups and then have people guess which cup it was under when he was done. There were two or three people gathered around him who looked as if they kept winning money.
“This is fantastic! I’ve already won $150!” one man said to my father.
“And I’ve won $200!” a woman exclaimed to my father.
We sat there watching this sidewalk spectacle for a few minutes before someone said to my father:
“You ought to try it too!”
“Yes, start out with $40!” the man shuffling the ball around said.
It made no sense, of course. The man shuffling the ball appeared to be just standing there losing money hand over fist. My father reached for his wallet and put his hand on some $20 bills and was prepared to put them down. Instinctively, however, I knew it did not seem right. Sometimes young people can see things that older people cannot because they have not been so jaded by the world. I grabbed my father by the arm and pulled him away from the game. The man in charge of the game started coming after us.
“You have to try this!” he exclaimed.
For someone apparently losing so much money he certainly was eager for new players.
I am in Las Vegas today and went to see Chris Angel last night. Chris Angel does all sorts of magic tricks. Over the past several years, I have been purchasing various books to learn about the sort of tricks that he does and have learned several of them. The same books that I have read studying many of his tricks have also taught me about the simple science behind what was going on with the man with the ball under the cup on the street corner in New York. The man was using an ingenious tool of “social proof” and testimonials from others out there to convince my father that it really was possible to win. He was giving fake testimonials, in effect. I have seen this sort of act occur on street corners in New York more times than I can count in the several decades since I first saw this. The reason people keep doing this scam over and over again is because it works. We are influenced by testimonials.
When you see an infomercial on television they are using testimonials to influence you. Every advertisement you see on television, with limited exceptions, uses testimonials. The advertisements that run in magazines and are successful are almost always using testimonials to make their point. The reason all of these people are using testimonials is due to the fact that they work. The testimonials work because we are influenced by what others believe about something. You have been influenced by testimonials and are probably being influenced by them on a daily basis. I am not just talking about testimonials found in advertisements. I am talking about a friend of yours who tells you they used something and it works exceptionally well. I am talking about someone you know who appears to be enjoying using a certain product or service, which you also decide to use. We are incredibly influenced by testimonials and, like it or not, we cannot help but be. Most of us give others’ opinions about things almost as much weight as our own–if not more.
If you do not make use of testimonials, references and so forth in your job search, you are straining to get work and convey your specific virtues in a way that makes no sense. You can have people do the heavy lifting for you by talking up your various virtues. This is not a job you need to do yourself. Let other people talk about how great you are. Others can easily make your case, and this is a heck of a lot more effective than if you try and do this yourself. Allow others to make your case.
Another powerful thing you can put into your application materials is information about your performance ratings. For example, “I was the top-rated executive in my division 7 out of 8 quarters.” There are numerous techniques you can use in this regard, but talking about what others have said about you that is positive is enormously helpful. Including comments by supervisors in quotes such as “What Others Have Said About Me” and then listing numerous positive statements that coworkers and supervisors may have made to you formally, or informally, can be incredibly powerful in making your case to a potential employer.
From the time I was 18 until I was 27 years old, I always did asphalt work during the summer. A good part of this work involved selling my asphalt service door-to-door in residential neighborhoods. I thought this was the easiest job possible. All I ever needed to do was show up at a door and tell people how I would like to do their driveway, and that I had done work for numerous neighbors of theirs over the years and continued to do work for their neighbors. While it was more involved that this, using “inferred testimonials” of others was something that worked like magic for me.
I cannot tell you how many job seekers, salespeople and others I have taught the power of testimonials to. However, this is still something hardly anyone uses in their job search. I simply cannot understand why, but it is what it is. For someone in the sales industry, for example, using testimonials like this might double or triple their income. For someone looking for a job, they might get three or four times as many offers–or even more. The power of these testimonials, references, implied endorsements and so forth is like gold. You should use them every single chance you can possibly get.
Flow, Your Ego and Your Career
March 22, 2009
What You Will Learn
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Artistotle believed that more than anything we seek to be happy. There are some individuals who do their work and continually find happiness in this work, and for whom work takes on a meaning that transcends what most of us experience in work. These people feel completely involved in the work they are doing and are completely focused. They do not experience emotional turmoil when they are doing their work. In Mihhaly Czikszentmihalyi’s book “Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience” (1990), he described a state of “flow” where people involved in an activity “forget themselves, the time, their problems.” Flow is something that athletes experience when they are at their best, artists experience when they are at their best and we all are capable of experiencing when we are doing something that we love.
According to the great soccer star Pele, during his best games he felt a strange calmness he hadn’t experienced in any of the other games. “It was a type of euphoria; I felt I could run all day without tiring, that I could dribble through any of their teams or all of them, that I could almost pass through them physically. I felt I could not be hurt.”
Flow involves a state where we are able to concentrate with little effort, and where we are able to complete a certain task with very little effort. Another important component of flow, and I would argue the most significant, is that when some people are in flow they lose self consciousness. Instead of being conscious of themselves in relation to others, they move into another sort of state. This state Czikszentmihalyi also seems to believe, is “a loss of ego” (p. 122). According to Czikszentmihalyi, loss of ego is a rare transcendent experience.
What is this state of “loss of ego” in our work? How does loss of ego translate into our professions and lives? I know of numerous people whose careers are defined by this state of flow. They do their work in a manner that seems to not involve their ego and, instead, seems to transcend individual and self-seeking types of behavior. They are able to do their work in a way that is similar to the way many people worship. Their work is not calculated, and people around them feel good by their presence. They are extraordinarily good at whatever they do. Their ego is not involved in their work–their work is not about them, but about the work itself.
People who are able to enter a state of flow in their work become “egoless,” and do their work unconcerned with
Power or titles
Personal recognition
Profit
Their identity
Competition
This may sound like an incredible state to be in; however, this is a state that numerous people are able to enter into when they truly love something, and can get into a state of flow. Paradoxically, it is the people who do not care about power and money and other things, and are able to enter into this state of flow, who most often end up achieving the most, financially and otherwise. These same people often then become controlled by their egos and quickly lose whatever it is they achieved, and subsequently lose flow. It is the ability to remain in flow and egoless that I believe is one of the greatest determinants of being successful. Since so few people are able to do this, and since this is so relevant to your career, I believe understanding flow and the ego is something that can change your career and life.
One of my first memories as a child was when I was playing outside our apartment in Lansing, Michigan, and my mother called me inside for a few moments. My mother had recently purchased me a yellow Tonka Bulldozer toy, and I had been playing in the bushes of the apartment complex with the toy. Across the way, I noticed there was a boy perhaps a few years older than me also playing with some toys. I went inside for a few moments and when I came back outside my truck was missing. I could not have been more than three years old at the time; however, I can remember to this day how upset I was. I cried and cried, and I remember my mother comforting me about this. I am sure the boy across the way stole my truck.
The fact that this is one of my first memories is quite striking to me. I would argue that this is something that was one of my first true introductions to my “ego” and the idea that I, like almost everyone on this planet, was getting a piece of my identity from forms, objects, titles and other things that are not part of me at all. Indeed, my pain related to this little truck being stolen was there because of the fact that I identified the truck as an extension of myself. As I grew older and older, I came to identify with more toys and other objects that I was given by my parents. Then, I would start to see friends with better toys and objects, and start feeling a profound sense of lack because I did not have toys and other objects that were as nice. As my life progressed, I would start to admire people who had better houses than I had, more important parents than I had, went to better schools than I did, and so on.
When I was old enough to understand advertisements in magazines and on television, I would start to want things there, too. I remember when I was no more than 12 years old I saw a picture of the most expensive car ever manufactured at that time, an Aston Martin Lagonda, and I dreamed of my parents owning this car and driving me around in it. I thought this car was something that would be really meaningful. Several years ago, I purchased one of these used cars for not more than thirty thousand dollars, and spent another thirty thousand dollars restoring the car. I did this, I am sure, because there was a part of me that really wanted something for my ego from this car. When you see old men driving around in old cars they have restored, this is what they are most often doing–it is related to their ego and a sense of lack they are trying to fill from the past with a material object.
My stepfather ran a small boating business and around our small two bedroom house he always had scattered magazines with pictures of bigger and better boats that he could buy if he ever made enough money. One day my stepfather came home with a 1977 Chrysler New Yorker, which was the biggest and worst car I had ever seen. Within a few months I remember a Rolls Royce dealer in Palm Beach, Florida kept calling our house because my stepfather had indicated he might want to trade the new car in for a Rolls Royce. We never could afford any of this stuff, but my stepfather always dreamed of these things and wanted them. He was never ever satisfied. Was he any different from any of us?
When I got older, I started comparing my bicycles with other kids’ and always wanted the best bike. I never felt like my bike was good enough. I wanted to have the very best bike. In fourth grade or so, when people started having girlfriends in school, it was very, very important to me to have the most desirable girlfriend in the school. I would get into fights on the playground with kids over girls. I would continue fighting men in one form or another over women for the next 20+ years until I settled down. When video games came into vogue, I started competing with other kids as to who could have more video games. I always wanted to have more and better video games than other kids. Soon, designer jeans came into vogue, when I got into seventh grade or so, and I wanted the most pairs of designer jeans–Jordache, Calvin Klein, Sergio Vallente jeans. I wanted nothing more than for my mother to take me shopping each weekend to get more clothes. Soon I wanted a moped as well. I dreamed about getting a moped incessantly.
As I got older and progressed through my life, there was one thing after another that I wanted, and there was always something else. It never ended.
The friends I had.
The people I associated with.
It soon became titles like “President” of my class.
It became recognition for various achievements.
It became where I went to school.
Then it became what I did for a living.
How much money I made when I started as an attorney.
What sort of car I drove.
Where I lived.
How prestigious my employer was.
How big my company is.
What school my child goes to.
On and on and on …
Do you see the madness in this? It is all around us and we are all part of this madness. There is a huge problem with this, and it is related to the drive that all of us have on both a conscious and subconscious level to somehow add to who we are by possessing or associating with something outside ourselves, such as an object, person, place or title. Most of this drive is due to our persistent identification with people, things and other forms outside of ourselves. We subconsciously or consciously believe that our self worth comes from outside of ourselves and not inside of ourselves. We are persistently trying to find ourselves and our identities in things that are outside of ourselves, and the struggle seemingly never, ever ends. It is a sickness, and it is something that almost all of us suffer from. We continually want more and more.
I have been around the world and visited shrines, monasteries and other sorts of places. Even in the places that seem the most enlightened, people are constantly wanting more and more. Throughout the years I have become involved with various spiritual organizations in my quest to improve my mind. I have gone to groups that preach that we need to be in here and now and not look outside ourselves for value. However, it almost always happens that within weeks of attending one of these seminars or events my phone starts ringing. People learn I am the CEO of a company and assume I must be rich. They call and write wanting money and donations. They talk about how they need a new this or a new that. People visit me at home unannounced, seeking donations and constantly come looking for alms. These are the same people whose message often is “everything is within you.”
It is almost impossible to find anyone, or any group of people, who is not constantly striving for more and more, and striving to fill some void. There is something missing in almost all of us and in almost all of our groups. You can be part of one religion or another and they may preach to you about how Jesus preached that we are complete with God, for example. The message is comforting, and our image of Jesus is someone who walked around in sandals and a robe, and was not concerned with wealth. However, regardless of what church you are a part of, they almost all expect you to give them money. There is nothing wrong with this in substance; however, they often use the money to build giant and incredible monuments that boggle the mind with their size and ornateness. You wonder why these same organizations do not use their resources to support the poor. No matter how much they are given, most religious groups will continue to ask for more and more. It never stops. They will soon want a new building, a new wing to a building and more. Their hunger will never, ever end.
This is no different from us. We soon want new cars, new televisions, the latest fashions and more … we too are never satisfied. As long as we seek to be complete in objects and forms outside of ourselves, we will never be complete.
People and groups are continually trying to complete themselves by acquiring things, titles and more. The problem with this line of thinking, though, is that it simply never works. Whatever rewards we receive through possessing one thing, or getting one title, quickly go away and we find something else that we are interested in and “need.” We are living in a society that is dominated by consumerism and the need to possess things. Our measure of progress in our society is almost always related to possessing more and more. We simply spend most of our lives trying to fill a gap that we perceive we have between ourselves and people who we think are better than us.
For the past few years I have employed a driver. I live about an hour or two from my office, depending upon the level of traffic that there is each day. For me, being productive in the car (i.e., my time) is worth more than spending three to four hours sitting behind the wheel each day. I am in Los Angeles and throughout the years I have had a variety of drivers. I have had professional drivers, who were committed to being drivers, and I have had people who did not really seem to have any interest in driving. This never comes out in the interviews, as much as I would like it to, but it always comes out.
When I first started interviewing people to be drivers, I started seeing a lot of guys show up that really deep down wanted to be actors. You could see this from their resume. I did not hire these guys, and their interest in being a driver was to make money and then, hopefully, also make some connections through the driving that would lead to future acting work. I was smart enough for the most part to avoid this. Then I hired one guy I did not think would be interested in other things, and within about a month of hiring him, I discovered that he was in a band. He started giving me CDs of his band playing, asking for days off to go play various gigs, and his work just got shoddier and shoddier in so many respects. It became clear to me that he had no interest in what he was doing.
When he would not show up for work I would call a car service I have been using for some time. The drivers of the car service were all guys who did this sort of work for their careers, and they were incredibly enthusiastic. They would have Internet inside their cars so they could check traffic. They would know all sorts of special routes they could take. Their cars would always be spic and span. They would wear dark suits and always hold open the doors for me. Their service was fantastic and many of these guys had been doing the work for 20 years or more. These guys were also very happy. They had interests and could talk about a lot of things. They loved their jobs. They had an almost “instinctual” relationship with the road and understood how to avoid various traffic in certain locations. In a word, they were passionate about their work and in a state of “flow” as far as I could tell. When you were with them, you could tell they were “in the zone” and the drives with them seemed to go faster, and the entire experience was just better.
I contrasted this with the guy I hired from the band whose interest lied in being somewhere else.
Most people in most jobs are interested in being somewhere else …
Then I hired a guy who was from El Salvador, and he showed up and had complete enthusiasm for his work. He told the person who interviewed him for me that he wanted nothing more than to be a driver and was incredibly enthusiastic to be working in the United States. A few weeks into me hiring him, however, he started asking me the “secret” to my success and all sorts of other questions. He started telling me that this was the last thing he wanted to do. He wanted to be someone else, and one day, he was going to have a driver like I have one. All he spoke about was how he was capable of so much more than simply being a driver. I noticed that he started getting really shoddy about his work, and making a bunch of stupid mistakes. He too did not really care what he was doing. Then I noticed this same pattern in the next person I hired. This person too wanted to be somewhere else, and be doing something else. I heard them on their cell phone talking about starting businesses, doing other things and more.
None of this is to say that the people who are drivers are wrong in wanting to do whatever it is they wanted to do. But the point is that most people go through life not present in their jobs and always feeling a profound sense of lack, and wanting to be and do something else. As a consequence, they never succeed in what they are doing. This sense of lack and a need to be something different ends up permeating their entire lives and controlling them as long as they are alive. There is always something else they need to feel good about themselves–whether it is a job, title, person, place or thing. There is just a continual sense of lack.
This is their ego talking to them, and I do not think it is productive, and I do not think it helps them.
We are not just attached to things. I know people who spend their days and nights driving around from place to place, because they feel like they need a ton of friends in order to be happy. This struggle to meet new people and be popular almost never ends. Others work all the time so they can accumulate material possessions. Others have a cadre of different lovers, hopping from a sense of completeness from each one. People need something outside of themselves and chase after this throughout their lives in order to get a sense of completeness they feel is missing inside of them. It is good to have a lot of friends, but there is something wrong when all of your time is consumed by the need to have more and more friends.
One of the most persistent things among most people is our identification of self worth with objects outside of ourselves. This includes not only the material things we possess, such as cars, houses and other things, but also things like our job, our titles, the awards we have received and where we went to school. We endow things with a sense of self and our importance and feelings of self worth come from objects outside of ourselves.
In movies, television shows and others there is always a character it seems who is a sex addict, drug addict, gambling addict, or alcoholic or has some other disorder. Our culture is obsessed with the addictions of stars and others. One of the most interesting shows to come along in years is the show called “Intervention,” which follows people with various addictions. What is so interesting about all of these cases of addiction is that what most people are doing with their lives with drugs, sex, gambling, or liquor is the exact same thing that most of us are doing with our lives: Seeking a sense of fulfillment in something outside of ourselves. We watch people on shows like “Intervention” who come close to killing themselves with substances and other addictions, and we cannot help but recognize part of ourselves in them: No matter how much they get of whatever it is they are addicted to, they are never going to be complete and happy. No matter how many titles, wealth, friends–or whatever it is we are seeking–we too will never be happy. We will always be seeking more and more to make us feel complete as well.
Most of us are no different than a skid row heroin addict who needs one fix after another. The heroin addict does some heroin and for a time feels good. But then he eventually needs to go and find some more. The only difference is that what the heroin addict is seeking causes visible damage to them, whereas what we are seeking is a psychological disorder.
I am continually witnessing society’s desire to find fault with others. My wife subscribes to various magazines such as “Us Weekly,” “People” and others. Each week these magazines contain all sorts of incredible gossip stories about this celebrity or that celebrity. The majority of these stories are unflattering. We read about horrible break ups, public spats and more. Consider, for example, the public’s fascination with Brittany Spears and the things that have happened with her. There are, of course, more such stories. Why are we so fascinated with these things? I think this has to do with the fact that when we hear bad information about others it makes us feel superior to them. Our self identities are so fragile that just as we are seeking things outside of ourselves to complete ourselves, we are also obsessed with those we believe have more, or are more than us, being weaker than us on some level. We all do this. We are obsessed as a culture with people who we perceive are above us, suddenly having less.
Several years ago, when my company began to get quite large, I started hearing all sorts of rumors about myself from various employees. There would be rumors of affairs, rumors that I was involved in something illegal, rumors that I had done this or that. The larger my company grew, the more I started hearing rumors like this. When certain employees would get fired they would persist in these rumors. For a long time I used to be incredibly upset by these rumors because they seemed to be malicious. I realized, though, after some time what was going on. Most of the people who were involved in spreading such rumors had been fired, or were people who I considered poor employees and let them know I thought this. When I confronted these people, I wounded their ego and how they perceived themselves. Their revenge and way of feeling “complete” again was to find some level of superiority to me in whatever way possible. This meant an interest in rumors and whatever weaknesses I might have. Our interest in others’ weaknesses often adds something to our need to feel complete. We love hearing negative stories about our enemies and people whom have made us feel inferior.
When you are in conflict with anyone, it is usually due to the fact that you have somehow wounded their sense of self of vice versa. On its crudest level, you could injure this person or kill them so you can feel better about yourself and be “complete” (and people do). On another level, you will turn against them and attack them verbally, or undermine them in order to establish your ego and how you feel about yourself. This is something that we all do in one sense or another, and it is something that characterizes most of our lives. We want to be right about various conflicts because if we are right, we somehow feel validated as people. Deep down we want to feel better than others, and we get this through being right. When we are right and the other person is wrong, who we are is validated as a person.
When I was growing up, my mother used to sit at the kitchen table or on the couch smoking cigarettes and talking on the phone to her friends for hours at a time. All of the conversations would almost invariably revolve around some perceived insult my mother had received, or given, or something that had happened–or vice versa with one of her friends. The entire conversation would go on for hours at a time, and she would either be supporting her friend, or her friend would support her. They would talk and talk, back and forth, until some sort of consensus was reached that my mother was right about something, or her friend was right about something. My mother would then feel better. If it was my mother’s ego that was involved, she would then call a few other friends after the conversation to see if they too thought she was in the right. She would always get their agreement, and then would move on. Other conversations I heard my mother having growing up involved rumors about other friends, or bad things that had happened to people they knew. These sorts of conversations I think dominate our consciousness and what we are doing, because they make us feel better in relation to others and make up for this sense of lack that we are constantly seeking to fill inside of us.
“Sure she is beautiful, but she is not very intelligent.”
“I would not want to have the responsibility he does. It would be horrible to be scrutinized all the time.”
“They may appear to be a happy family, but she is really a pill popper and addicted to prescription medications.”
“That was a good performance, but she is also anorexic.”
“They cheat on each other.”
“Oh, he is rich, but he has to work all the time and is really very unhappy.”
On and on and on … how many statements like this have you heard? I have certainly heard a lot of them. Why is it that we need to denigrate others around us? Why is it that our self worth is often tied up in what others are doing? How can this be explained? We do this because there is a profound sense of emptiness and need for us to feel better than others. This is a collective disease. Religions do this, and are well known for this. Orthodox Jews, for example, feel superior to Jews who are not as observant and do not cover their heads. Extremely Orthodox Jews feel superior to other sorts of Jews who are not as observant. The same can be said for people of most religions.
It is important that in our lives we get into a state of “flow” where our ego is not involved in what we are doing. We need to be detached from the ego and, instead, just concentrate on what is before us. I think this is the highest state of being in both our lives and careers. The idea that we are complete and do not need outside verification in any form in order to feel successful. We do not need to feel in competition with others.
The people who experience the most problems in their careers are those who are more concerned with being recognized, paid and getting more and more–rather than the work they do. The fact of the matter is that once you start down this road, enough will never be enough. An executive who asks for a raise once due to having done something well, will likely ask for a raise a short time later if he does something right. Pretty soon, this executive will start concentrating on how much others at similar companies are making and feeling a sense of lack. He will ask for more and more raises, and then will start looking for another job. He will find a new employer who pays him a better salary, and then the same process will repeat itself over and over and over again. The executive may settle down at some point, or he may not. Because of this executive’s continual focus on what he lacks, he wastes his energy and never is able to get in a state of “flow” in his job where he could truly reach his potential. His work is shallow and nothing more than something that simply leads to immediate paychecks, raises and bonuses. The work cannot possibly ever be the quality that it would be if the executive’s ego were not involved.
The executive never learns to truly appreciate the work he is doing. Others in the workplace are viewed as competitors, and not people to cooperate with unless there is a secondary motive. The ego seeks out only immediate rewards and views others as people to compete with, and not work with, unless they can appear as if they can lead to rewards that will enhance the ego. If the employer is not viewed as prestigious in the market, the person will feel personally hurt deep down because their ego is tied up in the employer. Their identity is in their employer and they are not necessarily one with their work.
I would encourage you in your career to release and get in a state of flow. You need to step back from your ego and realize that no employer and no job can even fulfill your ego. Your greatest satisfaction in your career and life will come when you are able to be one with your job and what you are doing. Be in the here and now.
Your Brain and Your Career
March 20, 2009
What You Will Learn
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In our job searches and careers, there are a variety of forces that can hold us back. However, in almost every single case the thing that can hold us back more than anything is ourselves and our own minds. In fact, your brain and what it is doing–how it thinks and the way it processes information–is the single greatest determinant of what will end up happening to you in your career and life.
I would like to go a “little deep” with you today and discuss something with you that is pretty far out in terms of your career but which, at the same time, is the largest single thing determining what is happening with you and your career: Your brain. This is a crucial determinant in your success or failure. What is most interesting about your brain is that may be you are being benefited, or held back, on either an organic or a psychological level by your brain.
Natasha Richardson, a well-known English-born actress, died after a skiing accident in Canada this week. She apparently fell down and lightly hit her head. After the injury, she declared she was fine and refused any medical care and went back to her hotel room. However, around an hour later, she started complaining of a really bad headache. She was then taken to a hospital in Montreal and then a short time later, flown back to New York City, where she ended up dying. According to Scientific American:
“…The tragic story, if confirmed, is a reminder that even minor blows to the head can lead to devastating bleeding that can cause strokes or otherwise damage brain tissue. One possibility, sometimes called “talk and die” syndrome, is that the actress had delayed bleeding between her skull and her brain stem, which sits at the top of the spinal cord and regulates consciousness, breathing, and the heart and connects the brain to many of the body’s sensory and motor nerves. Another possibility is that there was a tear in the inner lining of her arteries, causing blood clots. To find out more about Richardson’s potential injury, we spoke with neurosurgeon Keith Black, chairman of the Department of Neurosurgery at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles….”
How fragile life is and how quickly things can change for people at the blink of an eye! Richardson apparently died of what is called “talk and die syndrome”. In “talk and die syndrome,” someone hits their head and initially they are OK; however, they eventually end up dying when blood gets between the skull and the brain, which is called an epidural hemorrhage. What ends up happening is that there is a pressure on the brain as the blood builds up, and this pressure eventually can end up killing the person.
I think this episode is chilling because it is a metaphor for the experience of many of us in our lives. There is something horribly wrong with some of us but we do not know it and continue forward in our lives as if everything is fine. What is wrong with us is often invisible, we cannot see it and others may not know about it either. Yet, here we go through life with some weakness, some fatal flaw, or something else that will end up killing us. It is something that is small at first; however, it ultimately ends up being something that has a massive impact on our entire lives and may actually kill us. For others, we may be impacted by seemingly small events that took place years ago, and we do not even realize they are impacting us today.
I am sure, 100% sure, that there are both positive and negative things that may have happened to you in the past that are working their way through your career and life right now. These things are affecting you and how well you do in your career and how well you do in your life. These things are psychological in nature and affect your entire view of the world. The good news about these things is that you can fix them. You can learn about these weaknesses and how they are affecting you in the world right now and can do everything within your power to fix them. This will take care of the situation right then and there. The bad news is for people who have suffered traumatic brain injuries, for example, is that many times there is nothing they can do to fix these injuries. They are in a state that they simply cannot easily snap out of.
While Richardson did not survive this incredibly tragic injury, many people who experience brain injuries do end up surviving. These brain injuries can have traumatic results on their lives. I am not sure what it is, or the reasons for this. However, I have seen this happen with people throughout my life and read story after story of this. A bad blow on the head can do tremendous damage to people and their lives.
For as long as I can remember, I have been incredibly interested in the brain and how it functions. The reasons I have been so interested in the brain are numerous; however, one of the main reasons I have been so interested in the brain is due to the fact that what happens with our brain can have an incredible impact on not only our lives, but our success and other factors. My career has been dedicated to human achievement and helping people make the most of themselves, who they are and what they can accomplish. It is for this reason that the most upsetting thing for me of all is when people are impacted by their brains in a negative way.
Several weeks ago I was speaking with a neurosurgeon in his late 80s who showed up at my daughter’s birthday party. He told me a very interesting story about a man whom he had treated when he was a military doctor several decades ago. He had been stationed at a base where there was a soldier who had simply turned quite mean. The soldier had been a nice, quiet kid from the Midwest whose personality had undergone a complete metamorphosis.
He became quite violent and had to be restrained in his bed 24 hours a day. The soldier would buck around so much that the hospital had to weld the bed to the floor. For hours a day, the man would scream obscenities and mean things at anyone who came near him. He was an incredibly evil man and had become very, very angry. His family had tried visiting him on more than a few occasions but were given such a barrage of savage insults and mean statements that they stopped coming to see the guy completely. For the past few years, he had been in this military hospital, strapped down to a bed and was “the meanest son-of-a bitch” anyone had ever seen. He simply could hurl one insult after another at various people, and the only thing he seemed to care about was how he could insult people.
The neurosurgeon, however, had to sleep in a part of the base where he was woken up by this guy’s blood curling screams each morning. While his job was not to treat patients who had apparently gone mad, he decided after months of listening to this man’s screams and being awoken by them each morning, that he wanted to investigate what was wrong with the guy. The doctor, I also sensed, was a very good person and wanted to help everyone he could.
He tracked down the man’s doctor. Apparently, the man had been injured in a simple fall on the base and over weeks and weeks had become progressively meaner and meaner. No one seemed to know what was wrong with him, and the man was now incredibly isolated and alone. He was just incredibly angry and perpetually so. The neurosurgeon asked to look at the man.
At the time, there apparently were not modern CAT Scans, so the neurosurgeon arranged for the man to have his head x-rayed. When the x-rays were developed, the neurosurgeon discovered that there was a blood clot that was isolated over a portion of the soldier’s brain. This small blood clot was activating the portion of the brain associated with anger. Incredibly, the surgeon was able to do a small operation on the man and relieve this blood clot. Over the next several weeks, the man returned to complete normalcy. He had been so incredibly mean to certain members of his family, however, that many people refused to ever speak with him again.
What is so vivid about this example is that everything that happened to this man was completely organic in nature. His brain was able to be easily repaired, and once this occurred, he was right back to normal. We think nothing of approving of a medical intervention like this to operate on someone with a sick brain. Nothing whatsoever. We expect it and know that a simple operation can rapidly bring this person back to normal. Why is it, then, that so many of us are unwilling to look inside ourselves and see what it may be that is holding us back? What it may be that is preventing us from reaching our full potential? What it is that if we changed would make us the best we could be?
Someone I knew growing up fell down a flight of stairs one day in their house. For the next 30 minutes or so the person laid unconscious. When they woke up, they went into the hospital. They were put under observation for a few days and eventually the hospital decided that they were ok and let them go. While the change in this person was slight, the person lost their job a short time later. They became very hostile and undermining of their superiors. This occurred throughout the person’s career, and they never really recovered. To this day, this person in someone who is very hostile to other people like this to the point of spending their days on gossip boards defaming anyone who they perceive is against them. The person is incredibly isolated and alone. It is very sad, but all of this is almost certainly the result of a similar brain injury. Our brains are complex and can really mess with us and screw up our lives. What if this person was to get a CAT scan? Would that change anything? Maybe none of this is related–maybe it is.
A woman I was once very close to, was travelling down the freeway one day in a small sports car. I received a call from the accident scene where she had totaled her car. She had woken up from the accident after being unconscious for around 5 minutes, and her head had been violently thrown against the windshield. When she woke up, she appeared completely normal and was able to speak with people in a coherent way.
A few days later, however, she started acting really bizzare. She started crying a lot and did so about issues that were quite paranoid. She started believing that everyone in her neighborhood was talking about her. When she drove down the street, the woman thought people were looking at her. Finally, one day she declared she needed to get the hell out of where she lived because everyone was staring at her and moved out of her house. She lived in one place for a few months and then decided the people there were out to get her. The last I checked, she had moved several times. Everywhere she goes, she is suddenly under the belief that people are out to undermine her and get her. Is she crazy? Not exactly. You can speak with her and she can carry on a completely normal conversation. It is what is going on in the depths of her mind that is so frightening. She has changed and become a completely different person.
These episodes are scary to me. They are frightening due to the fact of how common they are. In fact, if you personally are suffering from numerous different symptoms, they could be related to issues with your brain that could have occurred due to a fall or some other accident. One of the more interesting books that I have read in the past few years was a book by neuroscientist and psychiatrist, Dr. Daniel Amen, called Change Your Brain Change Your Life. In this book, Amen reviews and discusses the fact of how our brains are wired and can have a profound impact on our emotions and our thoughts. What Amen does in his studies and clinics is brain imaging studies on people having various issues.
For example, many of the common problems that people suffer from, such as distraction, worry, anger and more, are often related to a brain malfunction. People who have anxiety and are plagued by this often have issues with their basal ganglia. People with trouble focusing typically will have issues with their prefrontal cortex. People with a bad temper may have issues with their temporal lobes. People that have issues connecting with others may have a deep limbic problem. One interesting passage of the book relates:
When the limbic system functions properly, people tend to be more positive and more able to connect with others. They tend to filter information in an accurate light and they are more likely to give others the benefit of the doubt. They are able to be playful, sexy, and sexual, and they tend to maintain and have easy access to positive emotional memories. They tend to draw people toward them with their positive attitude.
When the limbic system is overactive, people tend toward depression, negativity, and distance from others. They are more likely to focus on the most negative aspects of others, filter information through dark glasses, see the glass as half empty, and less likely to give others the benefit of doubt. They tend not to be playful. They do not feel sexy, and they tend to shy away from sexual activity due to a lack of interest. Most of their memories are negative, and it is hard for them to access positive emotional memories or feelings. They tend to push people away with their negativity.
Positive Limbic Relational Statements
“We have a lot of good memories.”
“Let’s have friends over.”
“I accept your apology. I know you were just having a bad day.”
“Let’s have fun.”
“I feel sexy. Let’s make love.”
Negative Limbic Relational Statements
“Don’t look at me that way.”
“All I can remember are the bad times.”
“I’m too tired.”
“Leave me alone. I’m not interested in sex.”
“You go to bed. I can’t sleep.”
“I don’t feel like being around other people.”
“I don’t want to hear you’re sorry. You meant to hurt me.”
“I’m not interested in doing anything.”
Change Your Brain, Change Your Life:
The Breakthrough Program for Conquering Anxiety,
Depression, Obsessiveness, Anger, and Impulsiveness
pages 260-261
When your brain works right, then you work right. If your brain has trouble, then you are likely to have trouble. Exercise, sleep, stress, smoking, too much caffeine, negative thinking, how you think moment by moment can have a negative impact on your brain. Your diet, social connections and being with other people can help your brain. Is your behavior helping or hurting your brain? Day in and day out people are either hurting their brains or helping their brains. Focusing on what you love, being grateful and meditation can help your brain.
When you are looking for a job and when you are in a position where you may be seeking a job, it is important to understand that your brain is influencing the things that happen to you. If there are persistent issues that are holding you back in your job search or causing you problems, then it is important to understand just how serious these problems are. It is possible, for example, that there is more wrong than that which just meets the eye. There may be certain variables in your brain that are influencing what happens to you and these may be organic–or they may be psychological.
My advice to you today is to watch out for your brain. There are psychological things that are likely influencing you, and there may even be organic things that are influencing what is happening with you. Getting to the bottom of your brain and what is going on inside of you may be among the most effective career moves you will ever make.
Carrot Peelers, Sales, Personality and Your Job Search
March 17, 2009
What You Will Learn
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A couple of years ago, I started seeing a bunch of articles in Vanity Fair,the New York Times, The Village Voice and other publications about a guy named Joe Andes. Here is a portion of one profile of him from the May 2006 Vanity Fair:
In the early 90s a man named Joe Andes began showing up in the bar at the Pierre, Manhattan’s famously posh hotel on the corner of Fifth Avenue and East 61st Street. Joe liked the crowd at the Café Pierre, but the real draw for him was Kathleen Landis, the dimpled, piano-playing house chanteuse who still entertains there five nights a week. Joe was a five-nights-a-week man as well, always seated at the same round table with a front view of the baby grand and a back view of Landis. He drank only champagne, and never alone. His usual brand was Veuve Clicquot. On most nights he casually ordered a bottle, which always appeared with two champagne glasses—one for himself, the other for Landis.
Even by the standards of café society, Joe cut a noticeably soigné figure in his classic, British-made Chester Barrie suits and bold shirts and ties from Turnbull & Asser. The clothes went well with his English accent and late-period Sean Connery salt-and-pepper beard. He looked so distinguished and was so free with the bubbly that the Café Pierre crowd, Landis included, at first had him pegged as one of the “owners”—the tycoons who actually live at the Pierre in stupendously high-end co-op apartments.
The Café Pierre was way off about Joe, or so it decided after some probing. If no one was brave enough to ask him where he lived, quite a few people asked him what he did for a living.
Holding his glass of champagne by the stem, Joe would say simply, “I sell potato peelers.”
The probers had a good chuckle over that. “Right,” they all said. “Now pull the other one.”
…
Joe pushes his gear through the streets on a hand truck, which he in his English way calls a trolley. He and the trolley are often stopped by strangers ready with a heartfelt line: “Sir, you’re the greatest salesman in New York!”
The reason so many magazines and publications were paying so much attention to Joe was because he is someone who was able to make a great living selling carrot peelers on the street. When Joe died a few years later, publications all around the world ran obituaries about him. The idea that someone could live in a giant apartment on Park Avenue, dine in the finest restaurants, and do all of this while selling carrot peelers on the street seemed to be something that was unusual to many people.
There is nothing unusual about Joe at all. In fact, I am about to tell you what Joe knew that 99% of all job seekers and people out there do not know. It is easy to be like Joe if you know what you are doing.
I want to tell you one of the most powerful and fun job search and employment strategies you will even learn. In fact, this is an extremely simple lesson and it is something almost no one ever learns. I have no idea why people do not do this because it can make a gigantic difference in their career and job search. If you understand this secret, you can dine in the finest restaurants and live the life you want always. You can get the jobs you want, and you can live and work wherever you want. The most successful people out there in just about every single profession understand this secret, and you are about to as well.
The secret is salesmanship.
That’s right. Nothing more than salesmanship.
People who know how to do this never fail. You can drop them in the middle of the most expensive city in the world, and they will succeed. You can put them anywhere, and they will succeed. People who understand salesmanship always do well. Every single time. You need to understand this as well.
It’s very simple and basic: Your number one weapon in looking for a job is salesmanship. This is the number one and most overlooked thing that people miss when they are looking for a job. You need to find out what your potential employer needs and desires … you need to establish trust and credibility, and you need to stand out when the employer sees your application and sees you in a way that makes the employer want to act and hire you.
The best marketers and salespeople in the world understand this, and it can be learned. Learning to sell is incredibly important to your job search and life.
It’s really easy to create a resume and go into an interview and get the employer to think to themselves “Hey, this seems like a nice person, and they would be a good employee”. But this does not mean the employer will hire you and offer you a job.
What you want the employer to say after seeing your resume and interviewing you is — “Wow! This person sounds fantastic. When can you start!!?”
Most hiring decisions are made in an emotional part of the employer’s brain. People will explain their purchase in terms that are rational, and will give reasons why they think the person is a great hire.
But getting someone to commit to hiring you, spend time with you each day for what could be years, entrust you with the future of their business, pay you a salary rain or shine, provide you and your family health insurance, give you vacation time each year … is a much more complex process. There is no need for you to understand everything that goes in your potential employer’s brain when you are trying to get the job, but you do need to realize that getting hired and closing any deal requires some salesmanship.
None of this is difficult. It’s just that most people do not do it. The potato peeler Joe does it. You can do it to.
I am about to teach you some essentials of salesmanship that once you understand them, can change your career and job hunting experience forever. I want to teach you how to close the deal and get hired.
The world is littered with people that failed because they did not know how to get people to hire them. These poor people live in poverty or, at least, in a state where employers and others have not hired them for jobs which they are capable of. They do not achieve everything that they are capable of, do not get the jobs that they should, and do not have access to to the same opportunities that others do who understand salesmanship.
If you understand the basics of salesmanship, you can persuade an employer with the desire to hire you more than any other person they will interview. Whatever results you are getting in the job market will be multiplied several times over when you understand how to sell.
You could fill a large library with books about how to sell. I am not going to waste your time teaching you any of those tricks or boring you with long treatises about salesmanship. If there is anything I have learned about salesmanship it is this …
You Need to Have a Personality. If you have a personality then everything else will come into place.
Someone who goes into an interview and is completely normal and like the next guy will not stand out. The same thing goes for someone who makes their cover letter like the next guy. People that have personalities end up getting hired and getting lots of jobs. You need to stand out. There is a way to stand out and sell yourself, and it is simply to have personality.
I spent almost a decade being a legal recruiter. I cannot tell you how many ”suits” I have interviewed throughout my career. These boring lawyers show up and they all look the same. They talk the same and act the same. Boring! The first interesting attorney I interviewed I actually ended up marrying … she was so different I was like “we need to go get something to eat and hang out!” I’m not kidding. A couple of years later we were married. When I meet an attorney who has just a modicum of personality, I am so psyched because I know I can get them hired in a jiffy. If you have personality, and it comes through, then you are going to go to the moon. You are going to get more jobs. You are going to be someone who gets more promotions.
I had the strangest experience several years ago. I was hired by a particular law firm, an extremely prestigious law firm, to go out and find them a certain type of attorney. They paid me like $45,000 up front as a retainer to find them the attorney. After I received the retainer, I went in and met with the law firm and the managing partner of the entire firm. He was a very powerful guy and one of the more powerful attorneys in the United States. He was also very young and in his 40s which, for a job like that, is quite unusual. He was also very tan, so tan that his teeth appeared to glow. The managing partner was a very animated guy and seemed a little too happy to be an attorney. I had a very interesting meeting with this guy and, after the meeting, I had a long discussion about him with another partner in the law firm.
“What is he interested in?” I asked the partner.
“Tanning,” the partner said.
“Excuse me?”
“He is interested in tanning. He loves tanning beds. He has a tanning bed in his home. He goes tanning at lunch sometimes. This is what the guy is about. Tanning! He is passionate about it!”
We were speaking in a wood panelled room inside the law firm that was so quiet the only noise you could hear was the faint sound of the ventilation system. We were surrounded by all sorts of expensive looking art, and the law firm atmosphere was as serious as they come. However, what I was hearing seemed so at odds with all of this. Their leader who was ostensibly supposed to be reflecting these values was interested in tanning! In fact, the guy had an obsession with tanning.
When I started calling people around Los Angeles about working in the law firm people started saying stuff like “Hey, I know that firm. Isn’t that the one where the managing partner loves to tan? Ha, ha! Sure, I’ll talk with them. That place sounds hilarious!”
It was the strangest thing I ever encountered. A powerful lawyer who was well known throughout the legal community due to a love of tanning beds. But you know what? This guy stuck out and people knew who he was. He was one of the youngest managing partners of a major law firm in the entire city. People loved him. They thought he was funny because he liked to tan. He gave his firm a personality. People remembered him.
When you think of tanning, you think of a guy concerned about his looks, but also relaxing and enjoying life. The image is completely at odds with what most people think about when they think of an attorney who is captaining one of the most important law firms in the world. But it is an image that sells. It makes the guy stick out, as strange as it seems!
Here is what most people do when they are applying for jobs and going out on interviews: They act like they think they should. They are not themselves and instead act like some cardboard cutout who is like everyone else. When you decide to be someone interesting and be yourself, unique stuff starts happening in your career. If you put some personality into your resume and interviews, you will be far, far ahead of everyone else you are competing with for a job.
Personality and being unique works. It will increase the number of interviews and job offers you get by far. Employers are inundated with boring resumes and interviews all day long. Put yourself in the shoes of the person who is interested in hiring you. Would you want to interview someone who is not interesting? Would you want to hire someone with no personality? If you had to spend an hour of your time interviewing someone, I bet you would prefer to be spending that hour interviewing someone extremely interesting compared to someone who is boring.
You need to be the resume that is read. You need to have the cover letter that people pick up and read. People do not want to deal with people who are all stiff and make them uncomfortable. People are human and want to deal with other humans and this is exactly what happens when people start considering hiring you. When a potential employer understands that you are someone who is also human and has passions, fears and is able to communicate that as well, you will do well.
I used to sell asphalt services door-to-door, and I did this for over a decade. I loved doing this and was very good at it. I did not start getting exceptional at it and making the big money, however, until I learned how to sell and brought some personality to my work.
When I did not know what I was doing, I would show up at someone’s front door and say:
“Hi. My name is Harrison Barnes. I would like to know if you are interested in having your asphalt repaired and sealed.”
“No thank you!”
“No thank you!”
“No thank you!”
“No thank you!”
That is all I heard again and again and again. However, when I changed my approach, I started doing much better. I would show up and say something like the following:
“Hi. My name is Harrison Barnes. You may not recognize me because I am usually covered with tar, but I am sure you have seen me around your neighborhood doing driveways. I am not in a very good mood today because I just got in a bad argument with my girlfriend but, like all of us, I have to work. So, here I am.”
This would open up a conversation. My girlfriend would be discussed. People would ask me how I got the tar off my body at the end of the day. We’d discuss the neighbors’ homes I had worked on and the neighbors themselves. Gossip would be shared, and I would get the job. Always.
I went from making maybe $1,000 a week to making $5,000 to $10,000 a day just by injecting personality into what I did and how I sold my product. I did this when I was 20 years old.
Having a personality and selling yourself is easy. Anyone can do it.
When I was 27 years old, I was living and working in Northern Michigan and decided I wanted to move to Los Angeles. I got multiple jobs in Los Angeles within a few weeks. It was a horrible job market at the time. I had not even taken the California Bar Exam. I wrote all of the best law firms in Los Angeles a letter. Here is what it said:
Dear [I added the name of the hiring partner here],
I would like to work for you.
Sincerely,
A. Harrison Barnes
P.S. I am committed to practicing law at the highest level.
Huh? Yeah, that was it. It worked like hotcakes. I had written one page letters, two page letters and more, but none of them ever even came close to this one. My phone rang like mad. I got numerous jobs. I went into interviews and everyone mentioned my cover letter. They thought it was very funny. No BS or anything. Just personality. Let me be clear with you: Moving from Northern Michigan to Los Angeles to get a job is no easy feat. Law firms in Los Angeles have almost no reason to hire you because they have their pick of locals. But I was able to stick out and get a job here. What was the reward?
- I tripled my salary …
- I got to go to the beach each weekend …
- I got out of a cold climate …
- The firm I chose to accept a job from paid my moving expenses …
- The firm I chose to accept a job from paid me for four weeks while I studied for the Bar Exam …
- I was given a $10,000 starting bonus …
I can assure you with almost 100% confidence that none of this would have happened unless I had injected some personality into how I looked for a job. My silly little cover letter made me stand out, and it was something employers remembered.
Personality works, and it can work wonders for you too. There is no greater skill than selling, and it all starts with your personality and making sure this personality comes through in everything you are doing. Your life and career will begin to change when you inject some personality into your job search. Nothing sells like personality.
A few days ago a guy sent me his resume to review so I could help him get a job. In case you are wondering, I get emails like this several times an hour and I just cannot respond to them. I guess my email address is out there in cyberspace somewhere. However, there is one email I received a couple of days ago that I cannot stop thinking about, and I really want to respond to because I am so impressed with how they guy approached me. In the subject line of his email he wrote:
“THE GREAT JOHN SMITH!”
I made up the name, however, this is what he wrote. I thought it was hilarious and brilliant. I cannot personally spend the time with this guy that it will require to get him a job, but I can tell you that if I had a job opening, I would bring him in right away. He is memorable. If I met him and he was memorable, as well, I would also bring him in. Personality and people who have personalities sell because they get our attention.
You need to have a personality in your application materials and this needs to come through when you are looking for a job. People with personalities end up winning every single time. I want you to stand out and get jobs. People want to hire people with personalities. People like other people with personalities. A personality is something that sells and can get you a job every time.
How Using the Power of Routine Can Make You a Top Performer
March 12, 2009
In the early 1990s, a very rigorous scientific study was done in Berlin on music. The study’s objective was to understand why certain violinists were more talented than others were. This study is related in a fascinating book by Geoff Colvin called Talent is Overrated: What Really Separates World Class Performers from Everybody Else.
In order to do the study, the researchers created three groups of violinists–best, above average and good. Each of these three groups were spending the same amount of their time involved in music-related activities.
One of the most interesting things going into the study was that the violinist all seemed to know what particular activity mattered most in order to make them better at the violin: Practicing alone. In fact, all of the violinist seemed to know this but, of course, they all did not do it. The researchers quickly discovered that the amount of time the various groups spent practicing alone varied dramatically.
What You Will Learn
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The study discovered that the advantages of consistent practice built-up over time. All of the test subjects were asked to estimate how much they had practiced. The results were significant
- Best Violinists-By the age of 18 these violinists has accumulated 7,410 hours of lifetime practice on average as a group.
- Above Average Violinists-By the age of 18 these violinists had accumulated 5,301 hours of lifetime practice on average.
- Good Violinists-By the age of 18 these violinists had accumulated on average of 3,420 hours of practice on average.
The study concluded that
The differences between expert performers and normal adults reflect a lifetime period of deliberate effort to improve performance in a specific domain.
The reason this study is so significant is due to the fact that it flies in the face of the idea of innate talent. While many people work hard, this study also shows that the people who work the hardest typically end up doing the best. The harder you work, the better your will typically do.
One of the biggest secrets of the most successful people that is almost invisible to most other people is the power of routine and practice. You cannot become extraordinary and incredible at anything unless you are using the power of routine. The person who practices violin more than the next person is following just such a routine. Routine, however, is not necessarily enough. You must have “deliberate routine” and your routine must be somewhat demanding. The routine does not necessarily have to be fun. The routine should be something that pushes you.
For example, in the field of practing a musical instrument, playing the instrument four hours a day would not be enough. Instead, the person practicing the instrument would do far better if they were pushing themselves to learn difficult tunes instead of easy ones they already understood. They would also do much better if they were having their work critiqued and getting constant feedback.
What most of us generally do when we practice anything is we do not push ourselves. We simply do something in a way similar to the way we have always done it. This does not necessarily help us. What we need to do is make sure that we are able to both see, hear and understand more. The more we have a routine that is constantly pushing us, the better we are going to do in most cases.
I remember when I was in fourth grade. A student who was in my class in third grade had left our public school to go to a very demanding private school on the other side of town. At the time, this private school was very difficult to get into and was also quite expensive. For some reason, the student came into our fourth grade class to spend the day and tell the other students what going to the private school was like compared to going to the public school. I remember this quite well to this day.
He said that at the private school they were doing all of the same work, but just that he would be assigned a few hours of homework every night instead of hardly any homework at the public school. This was the entire difference. Years later, I attended this private school and I had the same experience. I had to do hours of homework each night and, at the public school, I rarely had to do any homework at all. The private school sent legions of kids to schools like Stanford, Harvard and Yale each year. The public school, which had probably 20x more students in my town, was probably lucky to get a student into any of these schools once in a decade or more.
What this meant to me is that there is an incredible power to practice and routine. The more we practice something, the better we get. The kids from the private school probably ended up performing much better in the long run precisely because they were forced into a routine of doing lots of homework each night. They ended up getting smarter and more effective in standardized tests and everything else over time due to this exposure.
This is how it works. Top performers in all fields are exposed to a tremendous amount of long-term practice and continually push themselves to get better and better. They do this through routine. Top performers have a better understanding of what they do than average performers because they practice it more.
For example, marathon runners typically have larger hearts than average runners. Most people look at this characteristic and may presume that this is something they have naturally and this is what helps them be better runners. However, the opposite is true. After years of training, the hearts of endurance runners actually end up growing after having practiced for years and years.
Routine is perhaps among the most powerful weapons in terms of your success, your job search, or anything for that matter you are trying to do. When you use routine, you are using the force of incremental improvement and consistency. Routine is among the most powerful career forces in the universe. However, one of the more important things with routine is that you have to pick what you want to do. You simply cannot practice and become an expert in everything. You can be exceptional at a limited number of things if you apply yourself over and over with the power of routine. You have very little prayer of becoming exceptional at anything unless you are completely committed.
The biggest challenge in becoming great at anything is designing a system of practice where you do it over and over again. You need routine.
Routine forces you to address something you are doing each day and continually push in the direction you are trying to go. Moreover, the power of routine is something that the more you do it the better you will become in whatever it is you are doing. You will make small, incremental improvements everytime you do something. This routine is incredibly helpful, and it is something that you need to become world-class at whatever it is you do for a living. Being great at anything is not something that is reserved only for a preordained few. Instead, it is available to everyone.
Whatever you are doing and whatever your profession is, you can get better at whatever it is you are doing by using routine and making sure a deliberate routine that challenges you is incorporated into your life virtually every day. The better you use routine and the more you make routine work for you, the better you are likely to do. What makes one person do better than another is almost always
- Not general ability
- Not inborn abilities
- Not experience
Instead, what makes one person much better than another is most often the power of the routine they follow and how much work they do with their routine over and over again. It is often that simple. By following a routine you can get incredible results in everything that you do.
The odds are that you and most of the people around you are not exceptional at whatever they do. The fact of the matter is that almost no one around you, or you, will ever very likely achieve greatness at whatever you are doing. The world is inhabited almost exclusively by dabblers and those who never are able to really ever focus on one thing.
A couple of years ago, I decided that I needed to be healthy and in good shape. I am in my 30s and I heard about a couple of people I grew up with dying of cancer and another when his heart stopped. I also live in Malibu, California, and there are a lot of healthy people here. Being healthy seems to be an obsession with a lot of people I know. I wanted to be healthy, too. For the past decade, at least, I had spent the better part of my life indoors and behind a desk all day. I decided I needed to be healthy. The whole idea really wore off on me. I stopped eating dessert every day. I stopped drinking alcohol when I went out. I took a sauna and went swimming daily. I started making myself a health juice drink every day. I started exercising seven days a week. It is the exercise I am most proud of because it is so much work!
Every morning I get up at around the same time, 6:30 am. I exercise very hard for a short period and then I go running later in the day. I also do some yoga each day. I exercise at the same time every day. I started doing this a few years ago. Despite the fact that I am getting older and am at an age where I should be slowing down, I keep getting healthier and healthier. I can run faster. My weight keeps going down by a little bit every year. I just got life insurance and the insurance agent had to give me a reduced rate because I qualified as “super preferred” after getting a physical. A few years ago, before I started my aggressive exercise, I was in poor shape and my mental and physical outlook was not as good. I know this has everything to do with exercise and routine. I simply started something and made sure that I repeat it each day.
I keep pushing myself in my exercise as well. I exercise a little bit harder each month. This is what you need to do in order to keep improving. It takes practice. I feel healthier due to the steps I have taken with my health. I set a goal to get healthier, and the only way I knew I could do this was to follow a routine. I do my routine day in and day out each day. I do this at the same time each day because it is a routine. I look forward to my routine. My body loves to exercise and actually wakes me up to do it each day. Around 6:00 a.m. each day I get up and I lie awake because my body is eager to start exercising.
Professionally, I have other goals as well. Another thing I wanted to start doing around six months ago was start writing more. I used to love writing articles about getting jobs in the legal profession and, years after writing these articles, strangers used to write me various emails thanking me for these articles. I got these emails a couple of times a week at least, and it made me feel like I was contributing something to the world. Since I am in the job search industry and have been able to give people lots of useful advice about finding jobs in the past, I decided to start writing articles about how people could find jobs each day. I set aside time from 7:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. each day for this and then 9:00 a.m. to 10:00 a.m. each day for this.
Is this a good use of my time? Maybe, maybe not. But it is something related to the companies I work for, and I enjoy it, so this is something I do. I write for two hours each day, everyday without fail. This is also part of my routine. The longer I have done this, the more I have enjoyed this. This routine I follow is also consistent with my goal of being passionate about getting people jobs. It enables me to put something out there each day that can help people in even the smallest possible way.
Religions use routine. One of the reasons that many religions continue for thousands of years, I think, has a lot to do with the power of the routine that is part of them. For example, in Judaism during the weekly Shabbat from sundown on Friday until sunset on Saturday people are not supposed to work. In Mormonism, the family is supposed to spend the evening together on Mondays. There are various holidays throughout the year. The holidays and routines all serve a purpose in these various religions and are something that give these religions a great deal of their power. Without routines, such as Sunday services in Catholicism, for example, many religions might fall apart.
So it is with your life as well. If you do not follow a routine, you may be directionless.
Routine is something you need to incorporate into your life. Preferably, your routine should be related to an activity or something you enjoy doing immensely. In your career, your routine can also make all the difference in the world.
The best people in the world at anything are most often the people who have immersed themselves in whatever it is they do, continually learn more and more about it, and continually get better and better at it.
When you are splitting a large rock with a hammer, it generally is not going to split the first time you hit it with the hammer. Instead, you need to hit the rock again and again and again. It may take 1,000 or more hits before the rock splits but, at some point, the rock will split in two.
You need to incorporate routine into your life and push yourself in one direction. This is a secret of huge success in any undertaking. If you are looking for a job, for example, setting aside a certain amount of time each day to network, a certain amount for applying to jobs, a certain amount for brushing up on your interview skills and a certain amount of time for following up could be an extremely useful strategy. I can guarantee you that probably few to none of the people you are competing with for jobs will be doing this–but you will. Putting in consistent effort like this on a daily basis will make a huge difference. The power of routine is not just about applying for a job, though, it is actually more about doing the particular job. The more you focus on improving and getting better and better at what you are doing, the better off you will be in the long run at everything you do.
Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss it, you will land among the stars. 