Vested Interests: Ask Yourself, “Does This Really Serve Me?”
February 2, 2012
One thing you often find is that there seem to be a great number of people out in the world whose chosen business is to make your life and circumstances, whatever they may be, seem much worse than they are. In fact, in your day-to-day life, you are probably already continually surrounded by various people whose personal interests lie in making you feel bad about yourself and the world in general. Your success and ability to get on will in large part be determined by your ability to sift through all of this negative information coming at you. [Read more]
The Dangers of Complacency
January 29, 2012
The most important thing you can do in your pursuit of success is avoid complacency. Never allow yourself to settle down and accept your results as finite. You need to surround yourself with people who will continue to challenge you to become better. Whom you choose to surround yourself with plays a major role in what you will achieve and what will happen to you in your life. Surround yourself with mediocre people and you will likely face mediocrity in your own life; surround yourself with people who accept nothing but the best from themselves and others, and you are [Read more]
Control Your Environment
January 24, 2012
Have you ever known someone whose life seems to go wrong at every turn? I have known several people like this. Here are some examples of things that have gone wrong for them:
- They sign up for a course in school, forget they are enrolled, and get an F in the class–crushing their chances of getting into a good graduate school.
- They constantly have strange health problems.
- People around them seem to constantly be dying or having accidents for no apparent reason.
- They are robbed and beaten up, even in good neighborhoods.
- The sewer pipes explode in their house and destroy their home a week after they forget to pay their home insurance.
- They get fired and dismissed from jobs after being accused of things they did not even do.
- They touch a microwave oven to heat up some food and the microwave breaks.
- Their cars keep breaking down–even new ones–and they are always late and missing out on this or that.
- They have strange auto accidents, like being directly behind a truck making bottled water deliveries, which suddenly discharges its load onto the freeway, causing them to drive into a ravine.
- They have a couple of drinks and go for a bike ride, then get arrested and thrown in prison for drunk driving.
- The companies they join go out of business.
- They lose an important sporting competition because they have a bizarre accident right before they are to compete.
- They constantly lose purses, keys, and other personal articles.
I could go on and on about various people like this whom I have seen bad things happen to over and over again. However, the most interesting thing about these people is that [Read more]
Froth, Downward Wages, and the Importance of Repeat Business
January 20, 2012
When I started in the asphalt business, the people I was competing against were charging exorbitant rates for their work. As an example, they might charge $600 to seal coat an average-size driveway. The job would require about two hours’ worth of work and $50 or so in materials. As a young asphalt seal coater, I too decided that I was entitled to make this much money from my work, and I initially went into business with this attitude. One of the first asphalt jobs I did was at a house next to my grandmother’s home. I [Read more]
Help and Promote Expansion
January 17, 2012
Whenever I speak to other business owners and ask them how they are doing, one thing I hear over and over is the following: “Things are going well and we are expanding.” In fact, I hear this statement so often, it is difficult to believe. It is as if the people believe that the only sign of a successful business is if it is expanding. The funny thing about this is that I get this response even when I know the opposite is really what is occurring. Companies state they are expanding even when they are laying people off. Today I read [Read more]
Order and Disorder and Your Career
January 14, 2012
Every single person, place, or thing that you encounter follows these laws, which present and repeat themselves time and time again. In fact, both order and disorder are good things because they can be used to lead to great improvement in our personal lives and in society. How you make order and disorder work for you will in large part determine your success and failure in life and in your career. A few years ago, a very intelligent friend of mine, an attorney, came over to my house and started telling me about what a good investment [Read more]
You Need to Be in Favor with the Right People
January 13, 2012
When I started my first company, back in 2000, I and the other people who were with me at the time sat down and had a three-day meeting during which we discussed what we wanted the company to be then and what we wanted it to become. It was an incredible meeting that I will remember forever. During those three days, we came up with this fundamental core value, which has since shaped the course of my life and my various companies: We Must Get People Jobs. This has driven all of our work since that time, and anytime we have seen limitations in any certain way of doing things, we have always come back to this core value and expanded upon it. Today, because of this core value, we have evolved into numerous businesses that are connected to this same ideology. Back in 2001, I started a company called Legal Authority to help law students and attorneys get jobs. I had been a law professor, and I noticed [Read more]
Your Success is a Product of the Procedures You Follow
January 5, 2012
Like many people at the time, I was pretty fascinated with the first trial of O.J. Simpson. The court days were long, droning on–and I never could watch for more than an hour or two at a time. One thing I remember quite well about the trial, however, was the emphasis that the defense placed on the procedures followed when the police arrived at the crime scene where Ron Goldman and Nicole Simpson were found brutally murdered. Numerous times during the trial, various videos were shown, highlighting the fact that the police officers on the scene had allegedly not followed [Read more]
Run Your Career Based on Facts and Statistics — Not Opinions
January 4, 2012
One of the worst things you can possibly do is run your career based on the opinions of others. Other people are always going to have differing ideas about where you should work, how much you should work, what salary you should make–and various other subjects relating to your employment. Rather than making decisions based on the opinions of others, it is usually much more productive for you to base your decisions on hard, concrete facts, and empirical data. You can often learn a lot more from facts and figures than you can from the opinions of others.
You Need to be in the Right Environment
January 2, 2012
For the past several years my wife and I have kept a saltwater aquarium. We did not get one of these intentionally, but when we moved into a new house several years ago, it had a saltwater tank built into the living room wall. Outside, there was a huge Koi pond with waterfalls. We could not watch television and enjoy the house if we had a bunch of dying fish, so we immediately found a fish service. In each house I have owned over the past decade, the previous owner had a series of hobbies that I [Read more]
