The Importance of Productivity, Focus, and Measurement

When I was in school, I would study at least a couple of hours each day in the library. While there, I noticed that the best students were always very focused. They were not distracted like poorer students were. A poor student looks around and looks up frequently. The poor students try to start conversations, make jokes, and laugh at things going on in the library. When I was studying with the best students, I could feel their energy and focus. They blocked out external stimuli and their study time was extremely productive. In fact, just about [Read more]

You Always Need a Backup Plan

Being in the asphalt business in Detroit taught me very early on that things frequently go wrong. In fact, things go wrong so frequently, it is difficult to believe:

• Pumps break.
• Tanks break.
• Trucks break.
• People get injured.
• Employees do not show up to work.
• It rains.
• The police give you a hard time for the condition of your equipment.
• People do not pay you for the work you have done for them.
• Suppliers go out of business.
• Customers get incredibly angry with you.
• Accidents occur, and materials get spilled on roadways.
• People rob you.
• People steal your equipment.
• You need to “pay off” certain people in order to operate in certain geographic areas.

The list of things that go wrong in the asphalt business is virtually endless. I will mention this again: So many things went wrong when I was in the asphalt business, it was difficult to believe. I [Read more]

Harmonize With the People in Your Environment

One of the most unusual candidates I ever worked with back when I was a job recruiter, was someone who had basically worked for five different law firms in a five-year period. He had absolutely stellar credentials, having attended the best schools, and having worked at the best law firms. The only problem was that it seemed he could not last more than a year at any place where he worked. When I started sending him out to various law firms, all the prospective employers came back and in no uncertain terms told me they were not interested in the guy. It was the strangest thing and I could not understand it at the time. On paper, the candidate looked like someone who would easily secure at least a handful of interviews. He was also very personable. One day I was driving down Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles near the federal building and I saw a man with a giant sign: “KICK THE JEWS OUT OF ISRAEL AND GIVE IT BACK TO PALESTINE!” He was screaming at cars while waving the sign in the air to get everyone’s attention. Incredibly, it was that candidate. When I recognized who it was, it suddenly made sense why nobody was interested in hiring the man. He was apparently a complete rebel who did not care to fit in with those around him. Since there is probably no law firm in Los Angeles without a substantial number of Jews in it who would be deeply offended by this guy’s views, I realized this guy was going to have a really hard time fitting in anywhere. Marching against the people who are likely to also be your employers and clients is probably not ever a good idea. Over the years I have seen many attorneys like this who, for whatever reason, make a decision to really stick out. They lose jobs and quickly develop a “do not touch this person with a ten foot pole” reputation that follows them wherever they go. Law firms want people who are going to fit in and simply get the work done. They do not want to offend clients. It is the same with any job–you need to fit in with the people you are working for and they need to see you as fitting in at all times. If you do not fit in and harmonize with others in your work environment, it can create serious problems for you. Several years ago I hired an employee who came across as a very quiet library type. He did excellent work and was quickly given raises and increased responsibility. He was a nice guy who kept a very low profile at work and seemed to be respected by his peers. Apparently he had gotten romantically involved with a coworker. One day a few weeks after I heard the two had ended their relationship, the female coworker and I were talking about something unrelated, and suddenly she started saying negative things about the guy in a roundabout way, making subtle digs. I was not interested in listening and attempted to change the conversation. Then she brought up something that really shocked me: “He has tattoos across his entire chest of skulls and stuff.” “Excuse me?” I said. “He is covered in tattoos. You have just never seen them because he has kept them covered up all these years at work.” She knew this would shock me. She then proceeded to tell me that the guy liked to hang out at industrial Goth-type clubs in Hollywood. The reason she was telling me all of this was because at the time our company was somewhat formal and comprised lots of attorneys. I am not the sort of guy who is generally into tattoos and the woman could look around and see that I did not have any other tattooed employees, as most of the staff was pretty conservative. This woman was trying to get me to form a negative opinion of the guy and I could tell she was also trying, as best as she could, to get him fired. In essence, what she was implying was “here among you is a traitor!!” She was trying to send me a signal loud and clear that this guy did not fit in, and that he was not who he represented himself to be. The girl did not stay with our company very long and a short time later the guy she had tattled on got a significant raise–and a year or so later, another raise. I was incredibly impressed with him and what he had been able to achieve. Not once did this guy come across as the sort of person who would have a bunch of tattoos and be interested in strange night life, vampires, and whatever it was that interested him. He was an impressive, intelligent person who, when at work, did his job very well and served as a role model to his fellow employees, especially the younger ones. The fact that his ex-girlfriend had seen him with his shirt off and could testify that he was covered in tattoos did not make the slightest difference to me. In fact, it made me think even more highly of him. He had managed to completely fit in at work and play the work role that was expected of him. When I was in college,  the entire time I dated a girl who was Jewish. One time she came home with me over Christmas break and we went to a family Christmas party. My girlfriend, mom, sister, and I had driven from Detroit down to Ohio to visit the family of my mother’s second husband. We were in Toledo, Ohio, celebrating Christmas with this large Irish family in a very small house and at some point I wanted to get out of the house and get some fresh air. Down the street there was a giant church and I thought it would be fun to go look at it. My girlfriend and I decided we would go look at it and I informed a couple of my relatives that we were going to make the visit. It was about 3:30 in the afternoon and several of them were pretty buzzed on Miller High Life at that point. One walked up to us and said: “Why would she be interested in a church? She’s Jewish!” “Huh?” she said. “That’s right. We all know your secret. What’s it like seeing Christmas celebrated? Are you even allowed to go inside of a church?” Right then and there I realized we had been at this house the entire day and although not once did anyone say anything about her religion, it was clearly on their minds. Try as they might have, once the beers got rolling, they felt like they needed to make an issue out of it. My girlfriend ended up laughing it off; however, the conversation, short as it was, made us both feel incredibly uncomfortable. It had been nothing less than a tacit statement that my girlfriend did not fit in and was not one of the tribe. She thought the entire thing was pretty humorous but for me it actually felt a little menacing. People around us are always looking closely to see if we fit in. They are judging us and making assumptions even when we are not aware of it. In many cases, especially in the working world, it is important that we do our best to fit in at all costs. It can become a matter of survival. A couple of months later my girlfriend got back at me, albeit unintentionally. She took me to a Passover Seder in Chicago. My girlfriend had been raised a very conservative Jew. She spoke and read Hebrew and was incredibly well versed in her religion and all its traditions. The Hillel Center at the University of Chicago had a program where students could go have Passover with local families around Chicago. That night was really unusual to me; I had no idea what was going on. In the reading of the Haggadah I was unable to read in Hebrew and the people at the table looked very surprised. I managed to mess up virtually every ritual involved in the Seder.  At the end of the evening, the man who had hosted the event approached me and started asking me all sorts of questions such as which synagogue I went to in Detroit and so forth. It was his subtle way of letting me know he knew I did not belong at the dinner, and it was very unwelcoming. I felt so uncomfortable. Some incredibly awkward moments followed. Clearly this man was insulted that he had opened this sacred event to include a non-Jew. I am not sure why he felt this way and in my experience with Judaism this is certainly not par for the course; nevertheless this particular person was very angry. In fact he became downright hostile. The following day someone from the Hillel Center called my girlfriend and told her that she should not have brought me to the Seder. The next year they also posted an “addendum” on the sign up form for the Seder, which explained that it was “bad judgment” to bring non-Jews to the Seder. Throughout my relationship with this girl, she broke up with me numerous times at her parents’ and family’s request because I was not the same religion as her. Many groups go a long way to protect this ideal, because  maintaining the sense of solidarity within their group is so incredibly important to them. What these two events taught me–my family at Christmas and my girlfriend’s family at Passover was that people are incredibly sensitive about people fitting in with them. And every group seems to have both implied and expressed rules about who may or may not be allowed to fit in, based on how a person acts, looks, speaks, or believes. I ended up marrying another girl who was Jewish, several years ago. I had a Jewish wedding and during this wedding I could see that a lot of my relatives were confused as to what was going on. For most of my relatives, this was the first Jewish wedding they had ever attended, and for most it felt like a completely alien culture and set of traditions. I could relate to this because it was how I had felt too, before I had learned about and experienced it all first hand. A month or so ago I was having dinner in the Harvard Club of New York to celebrate my cousin’s birthday. At one point in the evening, my great uncle came up to speak with me and I noticed he had some information written on a piece of paper. He had gone to Harvard and Phillips, Andover, and was from a very old American family, out of which had come the first American Senator from Kansas (and the President pro tempore of the Senate)–among other things. My great uncle is a really nice guy who is always curious about various ideas. Recently, he decided to have some genetic testing done by some group affiliated with National Geographic. For the past several weeks he had been pondering the results: It turned out that his mother’s side was Jewish, which meant that my father would have been Jewish due to blood lines. My great uncle was very intrigued by this, and he told me how this side of his family had come over from Holland hundreds of years ago and must have been Jewish. He was actually in a state of disbelief–not sure what to make about any of this information. A couple of years ago I also took a genetic test and got interesting results: It came back that my mother was Jewish. My mother, of course, had no idea and for days sat puzzled in front of the computer. She had been raised in a small town in the Midwest and did not understand how her mother could possibly have been Jewish. When my wife and I went to visit her last Christmas she had put a Star of David on her window and appeared to be going with it in terms of what she had discovered. My point is not to instruct you based on my religious learning and what I have discovered about my roots. Instead, my point is far more general and far-reaching. Historically, at least in terms of the places my family has lived (Michigan, Kansas), Jews were treated poorly and not given the same opportunities as the rest of the general population. What I am surmising is that in order to get ahead, what many Jews [Read more]

Never Overlook the Obvious

When I was in my third year of college in Chicago, I received a notice from the City of St. Claire Shores, Michigan, that I owed them $18,000 and needed to report to court, because I might actually be responsible for owing them even more money. St. Claire Shores is a working class suburb outside of Detroit. In addition, the City was deciding whether to bring more serious criminal charges against me in the preliminary hearing that had been scheduled during spring break. This was a lot of money and I knew exactly what the entire thing was about. I [Read more]

He Who Sees True Opportunities Shall Always Prosper

People lose their jobs. Often people are released, even from the best jobs they might have ever had. People may find themselves in a position where they cannot find a job that is as good as the one they lost. What is important, however, is what people do when they are in this position. I cannot tell you the number of people I have seen completely blow it when it came to reestablishing their careers, after losing their prior jobs. I do not want you to be one of these people. I grew [Read more]

Appreciate Those Around You

Back when I was around 21 years old, my best friend Joe Friendmann and I used to hang out in Downtown Detroit on Thursday nights. There were bars that were set up in old river boats, and a ton of other young college students who had grown up around Detroit would head down to these boats and meet up there. It was a lot of fun for the most part and it was always enjoyable to catch up with people I had grown up with. This was something I looked forward to each week. [Read more]

You Need to Be Self-Managing and Responsible

Several years ago our company was operating in downtown Los Angeles. At less than a year old, the company was very small at the time; however, the people I was working with were nothing short of extraordinary:

• I had one computer programmer who had gone to Columbia Law School and had come to work with me after deciding that he did not want to practice law.
• I had a girl who had graduated at the top of her class at Boston University Law School and decided that she did not want to practice law.
• I had another guy who had gotten a perfect score on his LSATs and a perfect grade point average. He was working for me a few years before deciding which law school to attend. They all ended up offering him scholarships.
• I had a guy who was extremely intelligent and hardworking, who had gone to law school with his wife, and ultimately decided against working in a law firm. He had followed his wife out to Los Angeles while she took a job practicing law.

One guy might come in at 5:00 am and work until 4:00 pm and then work from home later in the evening. Another guy might come [Read more]

A Message to Garcia and Your Career

One of the most inspiring true stories I have ever read is A Message to Garcia, by Elbert Hubbard. It is a short essay that discusses the initiative of a soldier who is assigned a difficult mission of delivering a message and comes through, completing this very difficult task. In the essay, the soldier does not ask any questions, object to the assignment, nor request help; he simply gets the job done. The essay was first published in the March 1899 issue of Philistine magazine and soon thereafter was reprinted as a pamphlet and a book. In both World War I and World War II the article was given to every enlisted person in the U.S. Marines and the U.S. Navy. The short essay was even made into a silent film by Thomas Edison, Inc. in 1916. The Reader’s Encyclopedia of American Literature calls the piece “one of the most extraordinary documents ever issued in the United States”.

In all this Cuban business, there is one man who stands out on the horizon of my memory like Mars at perihelion. When war broke out between Spain and the United States, it was very necessary to communicate quickly with the leader of the Insurgents. Garcia was somewhere in the mountain vastness of Cuba- no one knew where. No mail nor telegraph message could reach him. The President must secure his cooperation, and quickly. What to do! Someone said to the President, “There’s a fellow by the name of Rowan will find Garcia for you, if anybody can.” Rowan was sent for and given a letter to be delivered to Garcia. How “the fellow by the name of Rowan” took the letter, sealed it up in an oil-skin pouch, strapped it over his heart, in four days landed by night off the coast of Cuba from an open boat, disappeared into the jungle, and in three weeks came out on the other side of the Island, having traversed a hostile country on foot, and delivered his letter to Garcia, are things I have no special desire now to tell in detail. The point I wish to make is this: McKinley gave Rowan a letter to be delivered to Garcia; Rowan took the letter and did not ask, “Where is he at?” By the Eternal! There is a man whose form should be cast in deathless bronze and the statue placed in every college of the land. It is not book-learning young men need, nor instruction about this and that, but a stiffening of the vertebrae which will cause them to be loyal to a trust, to act promptly, concentrate their energies: do the thing — “Carry a message to Garcia!” General Garcia is dead now, but there are other Garcias. No man, who has endeavored to carry out an enterprise where many hands were needed, but has been well nigh appalled at times by the imbecility of the average man — the inability or unwillingness to concentrate on a thing and do it. Slip-shod assistance, foolish inattention, dowdy indifference, and half-hearted work seem the rule; and no man succeeds, unless by hook or crook, or threat, he forces or bribes other men to assist him; or mayhap, God in His goodness performs a miracle, and sends him an Angel of Light for an assistant. You, reader, put this matter to a test: You are sitting now in your office — six clerks are within call. Summon any one and make this request: “Please look in the encyclopedia and make a brief memorandum for me concerning the life of Correggio”. Will the clerk quietly say, “Yes, sir,” and go do the task? On your life, he will not. He will look at you out of a fishy eye and ask one or more of the following questions: Who was he? Which encyclopedia? Where is the encyclopedia? Was I hired for that? Don’t you mean Bismarck? What’s the matter with Charlie doing it? Is he dead? Is there any hurry? Shan’t I bring you the book and let you look it up yourself? What do you want to know for? And I will lay you ten to one that after you have answered the questions, and explained how to find the information, and why you want it, the clerk will go off and get one of the other clerks to help him try to find Garcia — and then come back and tell you there is no such man. Of course I may lose my bet, but according to the Law of Average, I will not. Now if you are wise you will not bother to explain to your “assistant” that Correggio is indexed under the C’s, not in the K’s, but you will smile sweetly and say, “Never mind,” and go look it up yourself. And this incapacity for independent action, this moral stupidity, this infirmity of the will, this unwillingness to cheerfully catch hold and lift, are the things that put pure Socialism so far into the future. If men will not act for themselves, what will they do when the benefit of their effort is for all? A first-mate with knotted club seems necessary; and the dread of getting “the bounce” Saturday night, holds many a worker to his place. Advertise for a stenographer, and nine out of ten who apply, can neither spell nor punctuate — and do not think it necessary to. Can such a one write a letter to Garcia? “You see that bookkeeper,” said the foreman to me in a large factory. “Yes, what about him?” “Well he’s a fine accountant, but if I’d send him up town on an errand, he might accomplish the errand all right, and on the other hand, might stop at four saloons on the way, and when he got to Main Street, would forget what he had been sent for.” Can such a man be entrusted to carry a message to Garcia? We have recently been hearing much maudlin sympathy expressed for the “downtrodden denizen of the sweat-shop” and the “homeless wanderer searching for honest employment,” and with it all often go many hard words for the men in power. Nothing is said about the employer who grows old before his time in a vain attempt to get frowsy ne’er-do-wells to do intelligent work; and his long patient striving with “help” that does nothing but loaf when his back is turned. In every store and factory there is a constant weeding-out process going on. The employer is constantly sending away “help” that have shown their incapacity to further the interests of the business, and others are being taken on. No matter how good times are, this sorting continues, only if times are hard and work is scarce, the sorting is done finer — but out and forever out, the incompetent and unworthy go. It is the survival of the fittest. Self-interest prompts every employer to keep the best — those who can carry a message to Garcia. I know one man of really brilliant parts who has not the ability to manage a business of his own, and yet who is absolutely worthless to any one else, because he carries with him constantly the insane suspicion that his employer is oppressing, or intending to oppress him. He cannot give orders; and he will not receive them. Should a message be given him to take to Garcia, his answer would probably be, “Take it yourself.” Tonight this man walks the streets looking for work, the wind whistling through his threadbare coat. No one who knows him dare employ him, for he is a regular fire-brand of discontent. He is impervious to reason, and the only thing that can impress him is the toe of a thick-soled No. 9 boot. Of course I know that one so morally deformed is no less to be pitied than a physical cripple; but in our pitying, let us drop a tear, too, for the men who are striving to carry on a great enterprise, whose working hours are not limited by the whistle, and whose hair is fast turning white through the struggle to hold in line dowdy indifference, slip-shod imbecility, and the heartless ingratitude, which, but for their enterprise, would be both hungry and homeless. Have I put the matter too strongly? Possibly I have; but when all the world has gone a-slumming I wish to speak a word of sympathy for the man who succeeds — the man who, against great odds has directed the efforts of others, and having succeeded, finds there’s nothing in it: nothing but bare board and clothes. I have carried a dinner pail and worked for day’s wages, and I have also been an employer of labor, and I know there is something to be said on both sides. There is no excellence, per se, in poverty; rags are no recommendation; and all employers are not rapacious and high-handed, any more than all poor men are virtuous. My heart goes out to the man who does his work when the “boss” is away, as well as when he is at home. And the man who, when given a letter for Garcia, quietly take the missive, without asking any idiotic questions, and with no lurking intention of chucking it into the nearest sewer, or of doing aught else but deliver it, never gets “laid off,” nor has to go on a strike for higher wages. Civilization is one long anxious search for just such individuals. Anything such a man asks shall be granted; his kind is so rare that no employer can afford to let him go. He is wanted in every city, town and village — in every office, shop, store, and factory. The world cries out for such: he is needed, and needed badly — the man who can carry a message to Garcia.

In all my studies of success, I do not think I have ever encountered a better message in terms of what it takes to be successful than A Message to Garcia. The reason that this is such a strong message is because it really delves into the essence of what it takes to be successful in any undertaking and in life itself. The essay has been translated into 37 languages and at the time it was first written, it sold over 40,000,000 copies.

The point I wish to make is this: McKinley gave Rowan a letter to be delivered to Garcia; Rowan took the letter and did not ask, “Where is he at?” By the Eternal! There is a man whose form should be cast in deathless bronze and the statue placed in every college of the land. It is not book-learning young men need, nor instruction about this and that, but a stiffening of the vertebrae which will cause them to be loyal to a trust, to act promptly, concentrate their energies: do the thing — “Carry a message to Garcia!”

I have been studying successful people most of my life. I read biographies and I seek out successful people and speak to them. When I was in college I used to write long papers about people who were very successful. [Read more]

Stay on Track

I have been interested in self improvement and the process of growing spiritually, emotionally, and intellectually for most of my life. For the most part I believe we are all interested, to some degree, in growing and getting better at everything we do. If you go to any bookstore, you will undoubtedly encounter thousands of books all claiming they can help you improve in all areas of your life. There are gurus and similar types of people throughout the world who will tell you how to change or improve one thing or another about yourself. For example, [Read more]

You Are Just Fine the Way You Are

I was sitting in a sales seminar several months ago and a well known sales trainer got up and started speaking to the audience. He is considered by many to be one of the best salespeople in America, and I was hanging on his every word. The man was describing how he went into meetings in corporations to sell things, and how he always was able to close. His entire strategy was based on what he called “finding the pain.” “You need to find the pain! You need to find the pain!” he kept shouting as he paced back and [Read more]

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