The Holidays Are the Best Time to Search for a Job

If you are serious about finding a job, it is entirely possible that your search may extend into the holiday season. To many people, conducting a job search during the holidays may seem like a bad idea. After all, employers have other things on their minds during the holidays, right? The last thing they are thinking about is hiring. I disagree with this rationale. In fact, I believe the best time to look for a job is during the holidays. If you could pick the perfect time to look for a job, I would say the holidays are it. There are [Read more]

Garlic Olive Oil, Craigslist Massages–and Doing Your Homework

I’ve decided that I am never again going to have a masseuse come over from Craigslist. It’s just not worth it. A few weeks ago I was at a conference in Chicago. I was staying at a so-so hotel without a spa near the airport. I called the front desk to see if they had anyone they could recommend for a massage and the receptionist recommended that I find someone on Craigslist. Since I am in the career business, the only part of Craigslist I have ever spent any time on has been the job listings; however, Craigslist has a lot more than jobs listed. As I quickly realized, you can find just about anything there. I found a masseuse that seemed really good: She had a bunch of statements on her description about how she worked near the airport, and that there was no sex whatsoever associated with her services. After looking at the first few massage listings of other people I realized why she felt the need to have such an explicit sort of “NO SEX!” advertisement: Many of the pictures in the other ads were borderline pornographic, and it was clear that much more than massage would be occurring if you called certain people. In fact, it seemed like many of the people were not actually offering a massage at all. When the woman arrived for the massage, I saw that she was a very serious seeming, petite German woman who was ready for business. She brought sheets that appeared to have creases ironed in them. Everything seemed very much in order. Within a few minutes she set up a massage table and started giving me a massage. It was one of the greatest massages I had ever had in my life. In about 10 minutes I had completely dozed off. When she woke me up I could not believe I had slept through the whole massage. “How long was I sleeping?” I asked her. “Two hours,” she said. I was astonished that I had slept for so long. Shortly thereafter, the masseuse had packed up and was ready to go. She told me the cost of a two-hour massage. I paid her and tipped her for having done such an excellent job, and she was gone. To get all the oil off my body I took a shower. When I came out of the shower I glanced at the clock on the nightstand and realized that only around 50 minutes had gone by since the woman had shown up. It was only 8:50 and she had arrived at 8:00. So, I had paid for a two hour massage that had only been around 40 minutes. I could not believe I had been scammed by a masseuse. By the time I realized this, the woman was long gone. That was my first experience with getting a massage on Craigslist. I had my second experience a couple of nights ago. I have always enjoyed getting a massage now and then. For about five years I lived directly across the street from a Ritz-Carlton resort. Every few weeks I would walk over there and get a massage. Around three years ago, I moved away from that neighborhood, and I now live far from any hotels or spas. Unfortunately, the only place I have found nearby is run by a man in an office complex, who does something called “Rolfing.” Rolfing is not like typical massage and is instead a very painful sort of muscular manipulation meant to make you stand up straighter and improve your posture. It hurts while the entire process is occurring, but after the two-hour session, you feel pretty good. The practice is more of a medical/chiropractic sort of thing than a massage, but the end results are excellent. I have noticed myself thinking clearly and feeling much more relaxed after these sessions. It is much more effective than any other sort of massage I have ever had. Rolfing is meant to be a series of sequential sessions. For example, the first session concentrates on opening your chest, the next session focuses on your legs, and so forth. Following several sessions, you are supposed to feel a major change in your relationship with your body. Rolfers have to go to school to learn how to do it properly, and I believe one of the only schools for the discipline is in Colorado. Because of the duration of the schooling and other factors, there are simply not many people out there who do Rolfing. The man who does Rolfing near my house eventually made it big with investments. One of the last times I visited him, he was talking about a mine he had invested in. Also, from what I understand, he is pals with all sorts of celebrities, whom he has “Rolfed” in our community. He apparently pals around with these people, flying around to all sorts of places in his spare time. He does not seem that committed to his work anymore. A couple of years ago, he gave me a few Rolfing sessions then got injured and stopped working for a year. I remembered a few months ago that I had never paid him for his last session, which was a year ago (he only takes cash) and one day when I was near his office, I saw someone inside working. I stopped by and paid for the last session I had had, because I happened to have the money on me. The woman working in the reception told me that the owner had not worked in over a year, but that he “might” be willing to take on a few new select patients. He called me a week or so later and I started going to see him again. A month or so ago, he completely fell off the face of the earth–again. I have no idea what happened. Because I am eager to complete all of the Rolfing sessions, I asked my assistant to start researching to see if it would be possible for any qualified person to come by my house to do some Rolfing. Realizing from my experience in Chicago that there are “massage-type” people on Craigslist, we decided to look there. The only person we found was on Craigslist, and she had a listing of at least 25 different types of massage that she offered, in addition to Rolfing. “Are you sure she does Rolfing?” I asked my assistant as I looked at the list of all the types of massages the person supposedly knew. “Yes, it says right here on her Craigslist advertisement that she is certified in Rolfing,” she told me. Sure enough, it did. A few nights ago, the woman showed up at my house to perform a Rolfing session. She was in her early to mid-50s, I would guess, and quite normal looking. There was not anything unusual about her, as far as I could tell. She took a massage table and set up in a spare room in our house. I got undressed, put a towel around my waist, and walked into the room a few minutes later. My wife was putting my daughter to bed in the next room. “Okay, make sure all of your clothes are off and lie on your back face up. I am not going to put a towel over you, if that is all right, because I want to have access to your entire body.” The idea of lying on the table without wearing any clothes whatsoever, face up, was a bit more than I could handle. I had never seen this woman before in my life. When I had had Rolfing done in the past, I had always been in my underwear, so I did not understand why I was expected to be nude for this. “I am not sure I am comfortable with this,” I told her. She then said something that convinced me permanently to never ever call a masseuse from Craigslist again: “Don’t worry,” she said. “I am not going to do any ‘tantric release’ this session. While I do not need to, I generally like to sit down and discuss tantric release with my clients’ wives before doing this. People have strange feelings about sexual matters and I find this is best.” I was in a bit of a state of shock, and I decided to push a little further. “What is ‘tantric release’?” I asked her. “Genital manipulation,” she said. “Oh, of course. How silly of me,” I said. As she had correctly guessed, this was not something I wanted to experience. I told the woman I was going to go change and would be back in a minute or so. I put on a pair of running shorts and tied them very, very tightly around my waist. Once the “massage” started, I realized that the woman knew very little, if anything, about Rolfing. In fact, I could tell she knew very little about massage. She told me that she preferred to use water instead of massage oil, and started massaging me with water. I have a lot of hair on my body, and she kept pulling all the hair on my back. The entire process was excruciating. It was even worse because she was talking the entire time about her past lives and a bunch of other nonsense. She said something about being on a raw meat diet that was so effective it had made a bunch of warts fall off of her back. The whole experience was completely bizarre. Because the massage was so painful, at some point I had to ask her to stop and get some oil or something. “She was probably using water because she is too cheap to buy massage oil,” my wife said later. The woman did not seem happy about this, but she told me she would use olive oil instead of water. She started massaging me with olive oil and my eyes started to water. It smelled like garlic. I told her it smelled awful. “It’s garlic olive oil. It’s all I have,” she told me. I could not believe I was being massaged with garlic olive oil. I smelled like a bowl of spaghetti. Several days later the room still smells like a bowl of spaghetti. My shower still smells like a bowl of spaghetti, and so do I. In fact, I cannot get the smell of garlic off my body. She even used the oil in my hair to give me a scalp massage. Wherever I am I can smell that garlic. For example, I was sitting there watching television last night, and suddenly got a whiff of the smell. I hate the smell of garlic; just thinking about it gives me a headache. It has been days since the garlic massage, and even as I write this, my eyes are watering. The only way to keep my eyes from watering is to be on the move. “She probably purchased the garlic olive oil because it was on sale,” my wife told me later. My experience with looking for a massage on Craigslist is no different from someone looking for a job on any [Read more]

Use Personal Stories to Connect with an Employer and Get a Job

Whenever I meet a merchant, the biggest question I often have is how much something costs. Lots of merchants refuse to tell you how much something costs until they have shown you what they are selling and all of its various features. Many merchants also often want to tell you a quick story about the product they are selling. No one is more notorious for doing this than the merchants who sell rugs in the Middle East. I think Middle Eastern rug merchants are about the best salesmen there are. The way these merchants conduct their business [Read more]

The Benefits of Failure

Several years ago I was working with a distinguished law firm partner who had been given a few months to find a new job by his existing firm. The partner had not looked for a job in probably twenty-five-plus years and I think his confidence was  shaken by losing his job. The attorney was quite marketable and was used to earning close to a $1 million a year, and I knew that he would not have a very difficult time getting another job. I met with him on several occasions and gave him a list of about fifteen [Read more]

Mike Tyson, Distractions, Your Career and Life

I saw the most interesting documentary on Mike Tyson recently, James Toback’s Tyson. A review of the film in Time magazine relates:

At first he was a variation on the proverbial 97-pound weakling: an overweight street kid from the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. He got beaten up regularly by the local toughs—”Very few of them,” he says, “are functioning adults right now”—who lured him into street crime. As a 12-year-old in a detention home he was discovered by Cus d’Amato, who had trained and managed Floyd Patterson to the heavyweight boxing title in the ’50s. Cus saw potential in this soft-spoken junior thug, and Mike went along with the program because “I was afraid of being physically humiliated in the streets again.” In d’Amato, Tyson found the father he never had. “He broke me down and rebuilt me,” Tyson says of his coach, who adopted him, raised him with the d’Amato family in the Catskills and gave the boy focus and purpose as a boxer. Tyson was an apt pupil: he obsessively studied old films of boxing legends, learned the spiritual side of the warrior mentality and, he says, “restrained myself from having sex for about five years.” He tore through the amateur ranks, knocking out one opponent in a record eight seconds, and was heavyweight champ before he was 21. (His mentor died just before the big fight.) Those victories helped him realize that “I don’t have to worry about anyone bullying me again.” http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1893622-1,00.html

The most interesting thing to me about the documentary was listening to Tyson talk about how d’Amato trained him to become a boxer. Instead of defining boxing to Tyson as a mere physical conquest, the coach taught him that boxing was a spiritual conquest. As Tyson trained with d’Amato, the coach would constantly drop suggestions to him on how to increase his self-confidence and his self-image as he boxed. These suggestions would be short little blurbs about how Tyson was the best, the strongest, and so [Read more]

Ducks, Semi Trucks, Upscale Doctors’ Offices, and Your Destiny

I have been keeping ducks as pets for some time now. I purchased the ducks when they were full grown, from a woman who raised them with chickens, and I migrated them into the little collection of farm animals that I have. These ducks were born and raised on dry land. They are perfectly happy waddling around on dry land; however, I am sure they would be happier if they were swimming in a pond, doing what ducks naturally do. Nevertheless, these ducks are happy, since they are fed well and have a lot of room to move around.

The few times that I have left the gate open for the ducks they have waddled out, looked around, and then found the pool and jumped right in.

• The chickens I keep have never jumped into the pool.
• The goats I keep have never jumped into the pool.
• The sheep I keep have never jumped into the pool.

Only the ducks have jumped into the pool. What do you think a goat would do if it were thrown in the water? Do you think it would be happy? What about the sheep or the chickens? It is great fun seeing the ducks jump into the pool. They start quacking, splashing and swimming about, obviously enjoying themselves in all respects. They could not be in a better environment. Once they are in the water, their dispositions change. They move a little faster, quack a little louder, and are clearly more content.

The reason the ducks jump right into the pool is that being in water is in their nature and it is something that was programmed into them long before they were born. Despite being raised on dry land their entire life, these ducks know instinctively that the water is a place where they can go and swim. Ducks are meant to swim in water and this is just what comes naturally to them.

I drive around in a Ford F-450 pickup truck. This truck is meant to carry a ton of weight and it is meant to tow huge loads. I usually drive the truck without any loads in it, though. Consequently, the truck is always very bouncy and extremely uncomfortable. The few times I have towed things, the truck has actually ridden very smoothly–like a luxury car. The reason the truck rides so much better when it is pulling a load is that this is exactly what it is made to do. Some engineers sat down and designed the vehicle with this primary intention, and they achieved their desired result.

Have you ever been in a semi truck that is not pulling a trailer? I have. I have relatives who drive semis for a living. The first time one of them picked me up in a semi truck without a trailer attached, I could not believe how bumpy the ride was. I was bouncing all over the place, and every word out of my mouth was a vibration. Like my ridiculous pickup truck, a semi truck is not made to drive around without a trailer. You would go crazy if you had to drive a semi truck around without a trailer all the time. The semi is designed and engineered to have a giant trailer attached to it. This is its nature. This is what it is meant to be doing.

You too have something inside of you that tells you what you are meant to be doing. If you are in a career or living a life wherein you feel that something is wrong, the chances are that you are doing something that does not come naturally to you. You see, every person has some extraordinary and profound gift inside–some incredible talent that comes naturally. You are no exception. There is a profession out there that you could do remarkably well, and feel incredibly comfortable doing. I have spent my career talking to people looking for jobs, and I am very involved in this industry. I have yet to meet a person who does not have some sort of unique natural skill or ability, nor someone who could not undertake some specialized profession with happiness and comparative ease.

I am not saying you have to be the best at something; I am simply saying that there are things that come naturally to you, things that do not come naturally to everyone else. Every duck knows and enjoys swimming. A duck does not swim because he is better than the other ducks at swimming; he swims because this is what comes naturally to him, and he enjoys it. What do you enjoy? I am sure there is something out there that you enjoy, which comes naturally to you. There is something for everyone.

I meditate on most days. When you meditate, you often go back in time and revisit episodes from when you were growing up. For some reason, most of the stuff that comes up for me is from when I was eighteen or younger. I am sure you remember what it was like back then for you too. Some of the lessons from when we were younger are so simple, yet we carry their extremely profound messages with us into adulthood. I remember how I hated science when I was in school, although math was okay, and I loved literature. Had I chosen to become a scientist, it would have been a horrible thing. For some reason I have always disliked science, and it does not come naturally to me. If I were a scientist I would do everything I could to write about science, instead of performing experiments and doing whatever else the job entails. This is just what is in my nature.

When I was in college, there were kids whose parents pushed them to be doctors. These guys hated the science classes they were taking and usually got Bs and Cs in them. In psychology, English, or other classes, they would excel. But if you told these people that they should be in a profession other than in the medical field, one that made use of their gifts and allowed them to do well, they would tell you that they had been studying all their life to be a doctor. Imagine how many people are in professions and are doing jobs they hate, because they believe they should be doing something they do not enjoy.

I am a former lawyer. A large proportion of the attorneys I know hate their jobs. Most make good livings but are afraid to do anything else because they believe they are doing what they should be doing. But if being an attorney is not in their nature and they do not like it, what are they doing with themselves?

Whenever I meet and spend time with doctors, engineers, architects, lawyers, executives and others, the one thing I keep hearing over and over again is that they all want to start their own businesses. I can scarcely leave the house for a few days without hearing this, as I meet various people throughout the week. It is as if the entire world is bent on starting a business, and at the same time everyone is making excuses for not having a business. There is nothing wrong with someone wanting to start a business, of course. The problem is that when I hear this, it is usually coming from people who are already doing something that they are very good at, which they enjoy; yet these people seem to believe they should be moving into something that they do not enjoy, for one reason or another.

Recently, I met a doctor who told me that he wanted to build a huge chain of clinics in expensive, upscale neighborhoods. The doctor had a business plan he wanted to share with me and was bragging that the clinics could be making millions of dollars a year within a few years.

“Do you enjoy being a doctor?” I asked.

“Oh, yes. I love it. I cannot wait to get to work most days. I feel like I am in the right profession.” He began to perk up when he started telling me about how much he enjoyed being a doctor.

“Why did you become a doctor?” I asked.

“Because I always excelled at science, and deep down I feel very compassionate and caring toward others,” he said.

“What does that have to do with managing all sorts of people, taking huge risks, firing and hiring, leveraging yourself with a bunch of real estate, marketing your medical services, managing vendors, and purchasing medical equipment and making enough money to keep everything going and growing?” I asked.

There is always a moment or two of a pause when I ask a question like this. Then the person says something like “I can do it. That stuff is easy!” Then the person generally gets a little uncomfortable and walks away.

Most of the people who start businesses like this fail. I am not saying it is impossible to start a business; it is not. But people who start businesses that become successful have generally had a passion for doing the things that go along with running a business, for their entire lives. It is natural to them. People need to focus on what comes naturally to them.

Having your own business requires a completely different set of skills from what is required for most jobs. It requires a different mind-set from being an excellent employee. Most people know instinctively whether or not they would be good at a certain job. There is nothing wrong with the doctor being a doctor. There is nothing wrong with the doctor who really deep down does not want to be a doctor as much as he wants to run a chain of clinics. The point is, however, that the doctor who wants to run a chain of clinics needs to make sure he feels as comfortable with all the risks, administration, and other responsibilities involved in running a chain of clinics, as he would be simply being a doctor. If the doctor were to start a huge chain of clinics, he would no longer be able to spend the majority of his time being compassionate toward others. Instead, he would be bogged down with all the issues that go along with running clinics.

Think of the duck on dry land. The duck is perfectly happy waddling around on dry land, but it is much happier when it is in the water. You see, deep down, there is something that innately excites each of us. You need to follow your instincts and to do the things that excite you the most–those things that come most naturally to you.

There was recently a very interesting article called “Companies Headhunters Avoid,” in Business Week, about companies that have managers with specific skills that do not transfer well to other companies. I found the following portion of the article very interesting:

Recruiters also singled out companies that are widely viewed as successful. Consider Coca-Cola. The conclusion among headhunters is that the very attributes that make Coke a great company—an iconic brand and an unmatched global distribution system—also make it too easy for young managers to rise without having to develop the entrepreneurial skills necessary to compete in other arenas. “Coke is a great company with great brands,” says Joe D. Goodwin, an executive recruiter based in Atlanta. But Goodwin says he can’t recall any Coke alumnus who successfully ran a major company elsewhere. “People tend to get caught up in the Coke bureaucracy and get dead-ended in their careers,” he says. “My advice is that unless someone intends to make a career of Coke, don’t stay too long.” Granted, working at Coke can make you comfortable—the stock has yielded a 24.8% total return over the past five years, vs. a 2.4% return for the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index—but recruiters say it may not make you management material anywhere else. A spokesman says alumni have gone on to successful stints at places like Home Depot (HD) and Clorox (CLX), though the goal is to keep them at Coke.

For all of the vaunted “academy companies” such as General Electric (GE), IBM, (IBM) and Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), revered for honing executive talent that thrives elsewhere, a significant number of companies are seen as weak in that realm. They may do well financially, but they can’t seem to cultivate leaders others want to poach. Whether it’s their quirkiness, poor leadership development, or political culture, these players have become the corporate equivalents of the Hotel California: You can check in and enjoy your stay, but the risk is that you can’t leave. Three of the companies named as problematic by recruiters—General Mills (GIS), AT&T (T), and Intel (INTC)—made this year’s ranking of best places to start a career. http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/09_37/b4146042031508.htm

In discussing Coke and various companies, the article made it clear that certain companies have people with specific skills that do not work well elsewhere. Some companies may attract and cultivate very good bureaucrats, but not necessarily leaders. This is fine. People inside of bureaucratic organizations can make exceptional livings, and a good proportion of top executives in most companies are more bureaucratic than leadership or entrepreneurial minded. A person from a vicious dog-eat-dog company would be uncomfortable working for a company like Coke and vice versa. Taking people out of a bureaucratic environment where they are comfortable, and putting them in a more entrepreneurial environment, is not smart.

Several years ago, I hired a woman who had formerly been a public school teacher in a heavily unionized school district. In her former job, she had had prescribed break times, a limit on how many hours she could work in a day, and all sorts of other similar rules and procedures to follow. When she began working for our company, we had none of these things, and the woman practically had a nervous breakdown. She ended up quitting, citing the lack of procedures as her main motivation to leave. Incredibly, she filed a complaint with the unemployment office, and in her unemployment claim she cited that a lack of detailed procedures was the reason for her quitting; it had allegedly made her workplace unbearable and intolerable. The woman’s unemployment claim was denied, of course, but it really showed me how important procedures and so forth are to some people. As an aside, if I worked in the heavily unionized school system with all of its procedures and policies, I would probably go crazy! Certain environments and types of work come naturally to each of us.

If you are doing a job, or are in an environment that does not come naturally to you, it is always going to be a struggle for you, and you are never going to be happy. Regardless of how much you work at it, you are never going to like what you are doing. Some jobs are so boring and incompatible with certain people that the people may develop medical problems. Other jobs might drive us to visit psychologists for counseling, or psychiatrists to prescribe us antidepressants–to keep our spirits up. If you are in this situation (and many people are), then you should seriously reconsider your current job and career path. You need to be doing what you enjoy, and you need to make sure it is something that comes naturally to you.

Do not be like a duck on dry land.

THE LESSON Do something that comes [Read more]

How to Use Social Networking, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter in Your Job Search

In Los Angeles—like most major cities–if you go to a major auto dealer you will notice a group of ten or more salespeople, usually men, who are standing together (smoking, drinking coffee, gossiping, and so forth) waiting for you. In some dealerships it is actually quite intimidating. Less than three minutes after your getting out of the car, a salesman will put his cigarette out and start to approach you. The salespeople stand there all day and wait. They also joke among themselves:

• “That one’s hot; why do you always get the hot ones?”
• “That guy’s got a printout and knows our costs. You’re screwed.”

The banter among these guys goes [Read more]

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