Harrison Barnes » practicing law

Do Not Get Involved in the Social Side of the Office

Harrison Barnes — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 05:30:32 +0000

Several years ago we had an employee at one of our companies who was extremely intelligent. This person was older and had worked at several jobs before coming to our company. Although he’d never excelled at any of these jobs, he’d done well enough. He was hired as a writer to assist with various tasks for our companies. His abilities were not bad, and had he simply kept his head down and done his job I am confident he would still be here. Instead, this person was our company’s worst nightmare and still is to this day. The characteristics this person exhibited hurts more companies and careers than I can count. There are people like this person in every company and you need to know what to look for and how to stay away from them in order to be successful in your career. Before this person ever took a job at our company, he was very angry at, and critical of the world. While he didn’t make his criticisms known directly to management of our company, they ended up finding their way back. Most of the criticisms were things that really undermined the company and the people in it. This person seriously disrupted his superiors, the company, and others. It was as if this person’s greatest skill was undermining the company and those around him. For that reason, I refer to this particular employee as “the Underminer.” There are under-miners in most companies. I am sure you know one where you are working now, or have known one in the past. The Underminer would tell other employees things such as:

They were not being paid enough
They should be working for a larger company
The company was poorly managed
People had been screwed over by the company

His list of criticisms could fill several pages. What was most alarming about this particular person was the pattern we started to notice. The Underminer would often attempt to become friendly with our best employees. If any of them became friendly with this person, in a very short time, formerly enthusiastic employees would change right before our eyes. They would no longer be as enthusiastic about their work, stop completing assignments on time, get a “depressed” look and feel about them, and stop consistently showing up on time for work. If these employees were not fired, they would often quickly quit and leave the company. Sometimes the Underminer would affect the employee so negatively the person would quit and leave the company without having secured another job. In less than one year I noticed this pattern negatively affect the careers of at least 10 people. People who otherwise could have had excellent careers with our company left or were negatively influenced by this individual. This individual eventually was let go from our company and, incredibly, to this day is still trying to undermine our company and the people in it by spreading negative information. Am I upset by this? Am I hurt? Of course I am. However, you need to understand in every organization you will find people who try to undermine the company. The most alarming thing about the Underminer is the people this person approached and influenced are still floundering years later in their careers. They have moved from job to job and many are unemployed. Before learning to think negatively about work and the company, these people had been incredibly enthusiastic and talented. It was as if the Underminer had planted so much negativity in their impressionable young minds they were permanently affected. Over the years I have noticed patterns like this one repeat themselves in our company. Looking back, I’ve even seen this pattern repeat itself in law firms and other companies in which I have worked. It is often not just one person negatively influencing others, but several. What I am about to share with you could be some of the more important career advice you ever receive. You need to stay away from negative people inside companies. There is something called “guilt by association” that is easy to pick up and that can negatively affect you. If you are spending your time with people who are known as troublemakers or who are hostile towards the company, the implication is you may share these sorts of opinions as well. Once a company picks up on this and associates you with this behavior, you will be marked as someone who is not a friend of the company and is, instead, an enemy. When I was practicing law I saw many careers stalled and/or ruined in law firms because of the associations people made inside the office. When you associate with the wrong people a firm will view you as someone who is unlikely to be looking out for the firm and, consequently, will avoid promoting you, advancing you, or protecting you. Choosing to associate with the wrong people in the office will create huge problems for you. You are at work to make a living. Your job at work is to go there, be professional, and leave. You are not expected to go there to make friends or be a participant in various forms of gossip. You can choose to get involved in the social side of the office and watch your career stall, or you can choose to be removed from it. Not all social activity in companies is bad. In fact, a lot of it is good. However, you want to be removed from the social side of the office because you cannot be viewed as a supervisor by people with whom you’re friends. The further away you are from people in the office socially, the closer you are to being their manager. In addition, the closer you are to colleagues in the office, the more you are going to be affected by their negative behavior. None of this is to say you can’t be friendly with your co-workers. You need to be friendly with everyone in your company. However, you cannot become too chummy and you do not want to participate in the social network of the office too much. When I was in high school, one of my best friends got into serious trouble. He was on his way to lacrosse practice and was eating a giant bag of candy while sitting in the passenger seat of a car. He asked a couple of kids walking by if they wanted some of his candy because he noticed they were looking at him. The kids screamed and ran. My friend thought the whole thing was very strange (although he realized they may have misinterpreted this as a kidnapping attempt) until a SWAT team began fanning out on the practice field where we were playing lacrosse and threw his face in the dirt and arrested him. The entire thing had been a giant misunderstanding; however, the misunderstanding was serious enough he was suspended from school for three months. He would have been kicked out if his father was not an extremely influential person in Detroit who donated a lot of money to the school. During my last year of high school I asked my math teacher to write a recommendation for me for colleges and he agreed to do so. This math teacher had been very close to the parents of the children who had mistakenly believed they were about to be kidnapped. There were two sides to my friend’s scandal. One side thought the arrest was ridiculous because the offer of candy was genuine and there had been no kidnapping attempt at all. There had been other passengers in the car and they all testified the candy offer was legitimate. The other side thought the mere words were evil and my friend should be expelled. A few months after my teacher wrote the recommendations for me I was interviewing at a college, and the interviewer said to me, “What’s the problem with this math teacher? Why did he write such a horrible recommendation for you? It is so bad and there is so little substance to it we were actually going to call your school about it.” I think the math teacher may have gotten in trouble for the recommendation. He sought me out and apologized and one of the deans of the school took me into a meeting and told me the reason he had written the recommendation the way he did was because I had been friends with the kid who was suspended. The teacher actually withdrew his previous recommendation and wrote another. It was a strange episode. In fact, I do not think I ever spoke to my parents or anyone about it. Now that I am thinking about this I am wondering if this had an impact on the colleges I did and did not get into. The more I think about this the more I believe that it probably did. You need to realize guilt by association can hurt you with companies and other organizations. You also need to realize it is incredibly important you keep your distance from people in the workplace if you want to be considered for supervisory and other such roles. The social side of the office can be a great deal of fun and can also be entertaining. More often than not, however, the social side of the office will cause you far more problems than it is worth.

How to Manage Crisis

Harrison Barnes — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 05:01:54 +0000

One of the scariest things for any of us is when we are in crisis. A crisis can be defined a lot of ways. It can be:

the loss of a job.
a divorce.
a traumatic injury.
a death.
the alienation of a loved one due to a fight or disagreement.
a severe illness.
or even your own impending death.

Crisis is absolutely one of the most challenging things that we face, and when many people are in crisis they simply cannot cope and therefore fall apart. The key to managing any crisis is to look towards the future while you’re inside the crisis. You always need to be thinking about the future and the fact that a better future lies ahead for you. Knowing that there is a positive future in the picture and that you can control the future is extremely important. Today I saw a man speak who recently had a horrible accident that left him paralyzed from the waist down. I have known other people who became paralyzed as well. Due to their paralysis, those people confined themselves to their homes and stopped living the lives they were capable of living. In the case of this man, he started diving, surfing and doing all sorts of things that he never did before he was paralyzed. Despite the fact that he cannot walk, he made his future bigger than his past. If you were faced with the prospect of paralysis, what would you do? Would you look forward to doing things you had never done, or would you decide you would make your future bigger than your past? In terms of your life, you are going to be faced with crisis at some point. You may be in crisis right now. If you have recently lost a job, or are about to lose a job, you may be in crisis. I want to give you a few words of advice about how to navigate the crisis of losing a job or any other crisis in your life. If you have lost a job, the first thing you need to do is start thinking about your future and where you want to be. If you are about to lose a job, you should do the exact same thing. You need to concentrate on the future and how you are going to make your future so much better than your past. Your future is going to be much, much better than your past because you have learned so much in your current or last position.

You know what employers in your industry generally like and do not like.
You presumably have dealt with more people and are now more proficient with people.
You know how to look for employers in your industry that are doing well.
You are more mature.
You know how to do your job better.
You know what aspects of your job you are good at.
You know what aspects of your job you are not good at.
You know what aspects of your job you enjoy.
You know what aspects of your job you do not enjoy.

Another incredibly positive thing is that you can start looking at other sorts of professions and jobs you may be good at. I have seen so many incredible transformations of peoples’ lives after they lost or left a job, that it is difficult for me to recount all of them. The number of success stories of people who have transformed their lives after losing jobs is inspiring. Many of these people I have even hired. So many positive things lie in your future if you lose your job. I know of a guy who hated practicing law and was fired from a law firm. He ended up going back to school and is planning on becoming a professor. He has never been happier. I know of another guy who was fired from a law firm and ended up becoming a recruiter. He has never been happier, is making more money, and is more well known than he ever was when practicing law. I know of a man who failed the bar exam in New York several times, lost his job with a big firm there, ended up moving to California and founded one of the most prestigious law firms in the nation. I know of so many people who were in crisis, who looked towards the future when they lost a job, and ended up changing the world as we know it. Lee Lacocca, for example, was fired from Ford Motor Company. He went over to Chrysler and literally saved the company. He became world famous in the process. He made the absolute best of a huge crisis. People who succeed when losing jobs are able to get a perspective in their life that the loss of a job would not normally force them to get. This incredible perspective they get is something that enables them to dramatically increase their options and long-term happiness. If you are in crisis then feel good about this. The crisis you are in is going to force you to reexamine your life, and see what opportunities are potentially awaiting you. You will now be able to get out of what may have been a rut. This is something that is incredibly positive and you should be happy about it. In a divorce, for example, people will learn a lot about themselves. They will learn the sort of mate they get along with and do not get along with. They will learn about aspects of themselves that one mate may not like and that they need to be with a mate who happens to like that particular aspect of themselves. They will learn how they want and do not want to be treated. If you are in a crisis in a relationship right now (and you believe it is not solvable), then look to the future and the fact that you will one day have a much better mate who appreciates you. If you are in a job right now that you do not like and are in “crisis,” then look towards the future and see that there is likely something out there that will be meaningful for you. Look towards the future when you are in crisis. I have been in crisis situations many times. I have been in these situations in my career and in my personal life. Whenever I find myself in a crisis I just do what I am telling you right now: I look towards the future. You can feel bad all you want about the present situation you are in. This is what most people do. In fact, a lot of people spend their entire lives feeling bad about their situation and the life they are in. For example, they find friends and other people who will listen to how bad their situation is, and they sit around talking about this incessantly. They wallow, and may eat or abuse food or something else, while feeling bad about their situation. They simply do not allow themselves to enjoy life because they focus on what is wrong with their life right now. This is a serious problems for many people. The thing about the future is that it is always getting better. Even if you are about to die, depending upon your religious beliefs, you may be about to go to heaven or some other incredible place. You can mourn your departure from this earth, but you can also look towards the future.

If you are sick, look towards the future.
If you did not get into the college you wanted to get into, look towards the future. Maybe you can get into a better graduate school than the college you went to.
If you did not get the job you wanted when you applied, do not give up. Look towards the future, because you may be able to work for that employer again.
The future is always improving.

Juan Enriquez, the founding director of Harvard Business School Life Sciences Project, has written extensively on the topic of the future. One of the most interesting topics he studies is that we are now in a position, using stem cells and other methods, where we can regrow teeth such as molars in a petri dish. We can regrow the ear of a soldier injured in battle. We can regrow a bladder. We are even in a position now, where we are working on artificial eyes. The future that Enriquez sees is one where we will actually be a different class of humans that he calls “Homo Evolutis.” This name signifies that our species is continually evolving. Instead of being content with being able to hear, like we do right now, through science we will be able to engineer ourselves to hear like bats if we choose. Instead of seeing things normally like we do now, we will also be able to see infrared if we want. We are very, very close to doing this because we are taking direct control of the evolution of our own species. These findings are profound and they signify to me that even if we are deaf, if we cannot see, if we are missing an ear, if we are losing a bladder, there is hope. There are incredible miracles out there for the taking and the most important thing we can do is look towards the future when we are in crisis. The future can always be better than the past, if we allow ourselves to focus on what is possible. You manage crisis by looking towards the future and what you can accomplish there, instead of dwelling on where you are right now. THE LESSON Crisis is among the most challenging things that anyone can face, and many people cannot cope and fail in the face of it. To survive in the midst of a crisis, look to the future; doing so will make you feel more confident about your current situation. Crises can force you to reexamine your life, and make you seek out potential opportunities. The future can always be better than the present or past, and focusing on the future can be incredibly positive and guide you out of what may have been a rut.

The Danger of Driving Sharp Bargains

Harrison Barnes — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 05:01:02 +0000

Every time I have ever seen someone drive a sharp bargain, it has ended up coming back at the person in some negative way. People who get paid more than they are worth, or who receive more benefit than they provide, always run into problems and have difficulty achieving success. The most successful people in the world are, for the most part, the ones who give more value than they receive. They contribute so much value that people want to do business with them, to buy their products and services over and over again. When I was practicing law, I once moved from a firm that was paying $80,000 a year to another that was paying about $155,000 a year. This was back in 1998, and at the time this firm was the highest-paying firm in the city. I had enjoyed working at the firm that paid $80,000 a year; however, the prospect of making twice that salary really appealed to me. It would appeal to anyone. Typically, though, if someone is paying a lot more money for something, there is a catch. For example, you can make a lot of money working on a fishing boat in Alaska, but you can also lose a lot of money, sometimes working for weeks without any cash flow. You can also die at sea. Or you can get seriously injured. When I got to the high-paying law firm, I was in for a real surprise. The firm knew that it was paying attorneys way more than the other firms around town, and it viewed the associates as somewhat disposable. The firm would quickly show the door to anyone who was not desirable in some way or another. An associate might be hired, be given one assignment, and if the results of the attorney’s efforts were not up to par, he or she might be fired immediately. There would always be someone new available to fill the position, tantalized by the high earning potential. I, of course, did not really ask many specific questions before I started working at the place. I just saw the money. What I witnessed at this law firm still amazes me: Essentially the firm was able to chew up and spit people out with a ferocity that was difficult to believe. Many people left the law firm so shell-shocked that they never practiced law again and ended up doing things like becoming waitresses. In contrast, most of the people I had known at the law firm that paid $80,000 are still practicing law today. The law firm that was paying its associates incredibly high salaries had expected some kind of superhuman performance from all the people working there, and if those expectations were not met, people were disposed of like vermin, quickly and without conscience. The important lesson here is that the people going to work in this high-paying law firm were paying a price. In my opinion, the higher salary in no way compensated for the possible damages these people faced. At any moment they might have lost the security of having a job; their self-esteem might have been bruised and battered, and as a result, they might have decided to leave the practice of law altogether. Anytime something looks like a bargain, it probably is not. There are a myriad of factors that ultimately constitute a price, and the amount of money that a job is worth. Anytime people are paying too much money for something, they will do everything within their power to make sure that the price they are paying is fair. This means they will push whomever they are paying with extreme demands and so forth, to make sure they are deriving value from whatever amounts they are paying out. The price they end up paying must seem in all respects fair, in order that the payers do not feel like they are being taken advantage of. I am in the real estate business, and for several years I have rented out a small house in Malibu. During the winter months it rents for around $350 to $550 a night. However, during the summer, when demand is very high, the house rents for $850 a night. The house is rented out almost every night of the year. During the off-peak months people never complain, because they are getting a great value at a very fair price. Everyone who visits the property and stays there leaves nice notes and posts positive comments about the site online. However, during the summer months, when the rate is $850 per night, people turn into different sorts of creatures. It seems as though every other guest ends up complaining about something. They may say the dishes were not as clean as they should have been; they may complain about having seen an ant, and then demand exterminators come out to the house; they may say the water tastes funny and demand we change water filters. They have even complained that the computer is too slow. When people are paying a lot of money for something, they are much more likely to demand refunds or discounts and create other sorts of problems. It is not surprising that when people are paying more money for something, they expect a higher level of service. Here, however, the house rents at what it does simply due to the law of supply and demand. In the summer, more people want to use the house and it is easier for us to rent, and in the winter, fewer people are interested in vacationing at the beach. When something is trading at a high price, whether it is labor or a rental house, the amount of scrutiny that occurs and the problems from the perspective of the buyer of the product will increase. The more scrutiny there is of the product, the more pressure there is on the seller to lower the price or provide a better service for the price. If you are holding out for a really high salary, then you may find yourself out of work for a long time. Just because you were able to get a high price for your work at some time in the past, it does not mean this will ever occur again. A few years ago, the economy was much healthier, and there were many more jobs. This is no longer the case today, and the salaries for most jobs have gone down. When I was working for a federal judge in Bay City, Michigan, there was a plastic surgeon in the town who had a staff of a couple of nurses and secretaries working for him. He paid them each $150,000 a year, according to what people in the town said, which was easily more than three times what would have been fair. Everyone talked about it. Do you think that these people could ever get jobs like this again? Just because someone has been paid a certain salary or rate in the past, it does not mean they will be paid the same in the future. This is what many people expect, though. They believe that just because they received a certain amount in the past, or because someone else received that amount, they should too. This is a major problem in the job market. Everyone wants the best deal, although most people do not realize that the best deals often lead to the most problems in the long run. Lately I have been seeing a lot of people trying to drive sharp bargains in numerous situations. With housing prices down, with many people out of work, and with all the other issues we are facing, there are people out there who are suddenly very enthusiastic about the opportunity to “get a deal” with this or that. The person getting the deal could be an employer or it could be a shopper of various products and services. The number of people seeking deals, discounts, and so forth probably has never been higher than it is right now. I have some commercial office space available for rent. Before people make an offer on the space, they usually look up what the mortgage on the space is and just offer this amount. I know of people who purchased a house or property a few years ago for $1 million, which today is probably worth around $800,000. They put it on the market for $800,000, and people start making offers on the property of $200,000, or $150,000. Someone hears about someone buying a property that is worth $800,000 for $200,000 and decides that they too should get a similar deal. The person goes out and does everything possible to get a similar deal. It is like this with job searches as well. We hear about someone who gets a really high paying job doing this or that at a salary that is twice what the market is paying, and we decide that this is what the job is worth. Therefore, when we go out and start looking for a job, we make up our minds that we will not take a salary that is less than this amount. We end up being unemployed as a result. Driving sharp bargains typically backfires and can create long-term problems for you. When I was working in Detroit as an asphalt contractor, I got to know many other contractors who did asphalt work and construction. I am about to share with you a perception that is somewhat predicated on racist beliefs, which nonetheless exists in our society, and amongst contractors, and other people in business. Contractors get a sense, when they are dealing with people, how a prospective project would go if they were to undertake it. For example, if a contractor is called out to give an estimate for painting someone’s house, he is going to be evaluating the homeowner to see if it is even worth his time working for the homeowner. He will very quickly assess whether or not the person is likely to pay, how much reworking of the job the person may require, whether or not the person will drive a sharp bargain, and more. Every contractor has had an experience wherein he shows up to do a job for someone, and then the homeowner starts demanding all sorts of extra work that was not a part of the original contract. The homeowner will then do things like withhold payment and create all sorts of issues for the contractor if the contractor does not comply with the demands. Many people do business like this with contractors, and these people make it very difficult for contractors to make any money. In fact, at the end of the day, contractors often lose money on jobs due to people like these. This behavior is not just confined to people in dealing with contractors; it is present in all businesses. There is a real danger for people in doing business with people who drive sharp bargains because the business owner never makes money. So here is the racism: I have some working-class relatives that are painters in Toledo, Ohio, who will charge people more money based on how much bargaining the people are likely to do after a price has been agreed to. They have adopted this strategy as a matter of course and for certain groups of people, such as Middle Easterners, they will charge between two and three times what they would normally charge others. Their explanation for this is that they have found that certain people from certain countries will typically make them work two to three times as much as they would normally work for the money. The only way they feel they can make any money on the project is if they charge this extra amount of money. The business world is like this. If you get a reputation for driving a sharp bargain, in the end you may end up paying much more than everybody else. This weekend we hosted a wedding in our backyard in Malibu. I have had a house on the beach for several years and recently discovered that brides apparently love to have wedding ceremonies and receptions in our yard. When we first moved into the house several years ago, the previous owners had already arranged to have a wedding at the property, and, as a condition in the sales contract with them, we had to leave the house in order for a wedding to take place after we had been living there a few weeks. Weddings are really big business. The previous owner had negotiated a great deal to lease the yard for a wedding for three days for $50,000. This was pretty impressive. In fact, it was hard to believe. I do not understand how anyone can rent out a yard for three days for $50,000, but the people had managed to do it. The problem was that this had been the only time the people had leased out the house in the several months they had owned it. See, if you charge a ton of money for something you might get lucky sometimes and get a few takers; however, most of the time you will not. The people who owned the house before always drove a sharp bargain, and the sharper the bargain you drive, the fewer people will take you up on your offer. One of the greatest mistakes you can make in your career and in your life is to drive a sharp bargain. When you drive a sharp bargain you will find that you spend a lot of time doing nothing. This is something that keeps a lot of people on the sidelines. When you stay on the sidelines, you are not working, and when you are not working, you are not earning any money. You may have a few good runs and get some takers here and there, but for the most part, you will not keep busy. In order to start promoting wedding rentals, I contacted a few wedding planners and within just a few weeks, several weddings were booked at the house. The wedding that occurred this weekend, however, was a real disaster–and a perfect example of someone driving a hard bargain. It is not the sort of thing I am eager to do again anytime soon. The first thing that happened was related to the number of guests at the wedding. Originally, the wedding was supposed to be for 60 to 70 people. This is a small wedding; it would not have been problematical to have a wedding this size at all. The wedding company first booked it for this many people and then they booked two more small weddings with us. A few weeks before this wedding, however, they called up and during a conversation about something unrelated, said the bride had changed her mind and the wedding was really going to be for around 250 people. At this point, though, we had already agreed on a price based on 60 to 70 people. Having a wedding with 250 people becomes a completely different story. Weddings of this size require special permits, Porta-Potties, and all sorts of extra concessions. Consequentially they are a much higher price. Changing the terms of an agreement at the last minute is something that many people attempt to get away with. I am quite sure the bride and the wedding company were aware that the wedding was going to be of 250 people early on, but they made us believe that it was only going to be 60 to 70 people in order to get the best deal possible. Ultimately, instead of 250 people, more than 500 people showed up. These people drove a hard bargain, but in the process, they completely violated my trust. The wedding company did get a great deal, but I have canceled all future weddings with them: They had booked one wedding for next weekend and another for the weekend after that, both of which will no longer be occurring at my property. I will not be doing business with them again, and unfortunately they are scrambling right now to make last-minute changes for those other weddings. All around you can see people who do whatever they can to drive a sharp bargain and to get the best terms possible. Getting the best terms possible can ultimately be very harmful to you. One of the biggest mistakes that businesses, job seekers, and others make is always trying to get the highest price for whatever goods or services they provide. This often ends up limiting people because they unknowingly price themselves out of the market. If you try to drive a sharp bargain with people, they will not give you the benefit of the doubt; they will end up not working with you and they will make things very, very difficult for you. In your career and your life, the better deal you get and the sharper bargain you drive, the more problems you will create for yourself in the future. As a general rule, people will always sell something for what it is worth and will be willing to pay what something is worth. Anytime you get an incredibly good deal for something, you should consider yourself lucky, but you should never push to get the best terms with everything because if you do, your behavior is likely to backfire on you. THE LESSON The most successful people in the world create do much value for others that everyone wants to do business with them, and return to them over and over. Driving sharp bargains, however, typically backfires and can cause you more problems than benefits. Whenever you get a good deal you should consider yourself lucky, but you should never push for the best deal possible because your behavior will likely alienate others.

Flow, Your Ego and Your Career

Harrison Barnes — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 05:01:36 +0000

Aristotle 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 “in the zone”, 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 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 or 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. THE LESSON It is importantly that you be totally and completely involved in your work. When you do this, you establish a flow where time and problems disappear, and you will find yourself completing tasks with very little effort. Upon entering a state of flow, you can do your work unconcerned with power, competition, or recognition, vastly improving your chances of success. Satisfaction and rewards come when you are one with your work.

Find Joy in Your Life’s Work–and Never Be Without Work

Harrison Barnes — Sat, 30 Apr 2011 05:57:07 +0000

In my work as an advocate for people to find jobs, I insist that the people who work for me enjoy their own jobs, and this includes the recruiting team. I expect the recruiters I work with to thoroughly enjoy, appreciate, and respect the people they are helping to find work. Everything we do is affected by our mindset. Your mindset needs to be in the right place with regard to your work. A good mindset is a foundation for success. A poor mindset makes for job dissatisfaction, frustration, and long days, and, ultimately, can bring about failure. This is why enjoying what you are doing, and enjoying it immensely, is key. Many people cannot seem to grasp this simple but powerful perspective, so I would like to elaborate on it a bit. I think it is one of the most important perspectives one can have. It will change the way you look for a job, and if you really get it, it can really help you achieve success in your life and career. After my first semester at the University of Chicago, I had a mandatory meeting with a counselor. I had gotten a 3.3 average for that semester despite taking a difficult calculus class and several advanced classes that had made me study harder than I ever had in my life. I was feeling pretty good about myself for getting these kinds of grades. In the meeting, the counselor asked me what profession I wanted to go into after graduation. I told her that I was interested in going to law school. She told me that if I wanted to have a “shot in hell” of going to a top law school, specifically the University of Chicago, that I would need a minimum of a 3.6 grade point average. That meant my B+ GPA wasn’t good enough. I would need to score at least an A- for the rest of my time in college. At the time this seemed like an impossibility. I spent several weeks that semester thinking about how I could achieve this goal, and I worked even harder than I had worked to get my 3.3 average. Then, it hit me: I would get As if I simply took classes that I loved and knew I would do well in. Over the next three and a half years, that’s exactly what I did. I took classes in anthropology that studied African cultures. I took a class where I studied my hometown of Detroit. I took classes where I got to study and write about the personalities of American presidents throughout history. I loved these classes and my plan worked. In fact, in my junior year of college, every single grade I received was an A, except for one A-. This was not because I was smarter than other people. It was because I did what I loved and I was enthusiastic about all the work I had to do. I absorbed more information, I read more in my free time, I wrote more, I talked more in class–in short, my passion came through. During this same time, I saw other students flunk out of school or come close to doing so. Many students had parents pushing them to be doctors or business majors. These students took one class after another that they hated and in which they did poorly. I watched all of this going on around me while I continued to read about tribes in Africa, and to take courses about fossils and other things that interested me. When all was said and done, I ended up with great grades and a real love for school. I ended up having more opportunities, job offers, law school admissions, and so forth than I would have had if I had followed the pack and done what I believed I was supposed to. I think the world would be a much better place if everyone followed his or her passion. People would enjoy work more and success would be much sweeter. I know that my career and life would be vastly different than they are right now if I hadn’t chosen to do what I loved. Several years later, as I was spending 12 hours a day in an office tower in downtown Los Angeles practicing law, I thought of this advice again. See, I did not love what I was doing at the time. In fact, I did not even really like what I was doing–not to the degree I knew I should. As I investigated options for other employment I spoke with legal recruiters, and, incredibly, that sort of job had major appeal to me. I liked the creative aspect of it. I liked the fact that I would be able to do research the way I wanted. I liked that I would be able to speak with lots of people. I liked that I would be able to write. I liked that I would have more control over how much I earned. I knew instinctively, deep down, that this job was something I could love and do forever. I quit the practice of law, walked away from job offers, and started being a legal recruiter. In the beginning I of course had no income whatsoever–but I was pursuing something I loved doing. Despite having had a good salary as an attorney, despite the prestige, despite all of the work I had put into becoming an attorney, I knew that I would ultimately be much happier as a legal recruiter than I would ever be practicing law. I also knew that loving my work would make me a better recruiter, far better than I ever would have been as an attorney. The hardest thing about this career change was that it was going against what everyone told me I should do. Leaving the practice of law disappointed my parents and made me look something like a fool to the other attorneys I was working with. My law school classmates could not understand my decision either. It was just not what people expected of me. It was, however, what I wanted for myself. Sometimes you need to take charge and understand that when you love what you are doing, it changes everything. We are naturally better at the activities we love, and doing what we love simply makes us much happier. There is a final point I would like to make: When you find what you love doing and you practice it with passion, you are able to touch more people with your work, and you create much more value in the world. You inspire more people around you, and more people want to work with you. You also fulfill a higher purpose and discover a life with deeper meaning. No matter who or where you are, you can bring greater worth to the world and to yourself when you find exactly what it is that gives you joy. Success will surely follow. For example, there was a woman who worked in the restaurant up the street from me, where I would often go to eat as a child. She was always so enthusiastic about her job, and just seemed so happy to be there. This woman was the best waitress I had ever seen, and it still stands to this day. I imagined that this woman, at one time, might have had to choose from a couple of career options. One choice might have been to take an office job as a file clerk. If she had worked in an office, she would have the prestige of that office, a steady paycheck, and coworkers to collaborate and be social with. Her other option might have been the waitress job. Working as a waitress would mean she would not have the prestige of working in an office, she would be on her feet all day dealing with the public–which can be difficult, and her income would be heavily dependent on tips. Obviously, if there was ever a choice to be made, we know which one she took; she chose to do what she loved. This waitress was so memorable because she would anticipate your every need, call you by name, smile, and make you feel very good for coming to the restaurant. In fact, the waitress was so good that many people probably came to the restaurant just to see her. As it would happen, I had a relative who was a waitress at the same restaurant. I found out years later that the waitress had made three-times as much money working the same hours as my relative. Clearly the waitress absolutely loved her job, and that is precisely what made her so successful. Not everyone respected the waitress, though. In fact, I remember some people actually made fun of her. I wondered if she would have been as good at an office job, only because she had such passion for her job as a waitress. Some may believe that working in an office would be a better career than serving dishes at a diner. But who cares what other people think? You need to do what you love and be happy in your career, no matter what it is. Find what it is that excited your interest and grab it by the horns. Don’t be influenced by other people’s opinions or by society’s stigmas. Be passionate about your job and your career. If you do this and nothing more, you will have more success than you can imagine. THE LESSON Success in every part of your career and life depends on your mindset; a positive mindset lays the ground for achievement, while a negative mindset makes for an unhappy work environment and ultimately failure. Find work that you love and practice it with passion, and you will attract people and create more value in the world. Find what it is that makes you passionate in life, and commit to it. Passion is the most fundamental part of success, and you must exercise it even if you do nothing else.

Finish What You Start

Harrison Barnes — Tue, 31 May 2011 05:33:01 +0000

If you drive less than an hour outside of any major city in America, you will very quickly begin to see a different world. Typically, in the best neighborhoods and areas, the lawns are well maintained and there is not much to see beyond trees, flowers, and shrubs. When you start getting into poorer neighborhoods outside of major cities, however, you begin to see things like automobiles on blocks rusting in front yards and the landscape looks a lot different. I’ve ridden through these neighborhoods with wealthy people from larger cities. At least once I heard someone say something like, “Why don’t they clean up that mess?” I know exactly why they do not clean up that mess because I have some family members who live in the country who also collect vehicles on their front lawns, and behind their homes. They do not clean the mess up because they are in the middle of trying to restore and fix those various vehicles. There is a story to every car and truck that is in a state of disrepair. One needs a new transmission and will be fixed soon. Another needs some complicated engine work. Most of the cars were purchased on a whim and for cheap when they were already broken. Everyone believes they will one day fix the car or truck and when they do, they are going to make some good money. It is almost as if the unfinished car or truck gives the person who owns it value. It makes them feel as if they are important because they have some untapped wealth or power of which they’ve not taken advantage. Isn’t this how many of us are in our own lives? We have untapped power of which we’ve not taken advantage, and we’ve started things we have not completed. One evening I was at a mall and I saw a poster advertising surgery for women to lose weight. I saw the most stunning before and after pictures. A woman was at least 350 pounds and so large you could hardly make out her face. After the surgery, she had lost about 200 pounds. Her transformation after losing the weight was amazing. She was very attractive, and she looked much happier. What was so striking to me was the difference in potential the two pictures represented. One woman looked like a supermodel and the other could not fit into clothing you would find in an average mall. Why would someone want to pass up the incredible potential they have in their life? This is only one example of potential. People start diets and never finish. Others tell themselves they will start exercising and never follow through. Others start school and never finish. Others plan to start a business and never follow through. Others tell themselves they will start saving and never follow through. Others start a novel and never follow through. Others start taking the path to a better life in one of a million ways and never follow through. In fact, I think following through and finishing what you start is one of the most important things you can do. Why don’t more people follow through? What is it about following through that scares so many people? Why don’t most of us finish what we start? I know so many people with so much potential who could be incredible artists, lawyers, programmers, businesspeople, and more who never complete what they start. I know people who are chronically unemployed because they never finish what they start. I can think of whole groups of people I know of who are brilliant and talented but have lives of complete mediocrity because they never finish what they start. Before you read any further, I want to make sure you are aware of one thing: the only thing separating the people with the most important and meaningful lives from those who have average lives or fail is that the latter fail to finish what they start. When I was practicing law, I remember being at a cocktail party with numerous partners and associates from the law firm where I worked. One of the associates was joking with the partner that the law firm had only made two partners in the entire 14 years it had been in Los Angeles. The partner looked at the associate and said, “That’s because you guys get too scared you will not make partner and always leave before we have a chance to nominate and vote on you.” I thought that was an interesting statement because, regardless of the truth of it, the partner was saying that no one who worked there ever followed through by staying on the job. They got too scared and left. Perhaps those associates went somewhere they were positive they would make partner. The thought of all of those careers that were stalled by not following through was an interesting one to me. Maybe those associates like to say to themselves, “I would have made partner if I stayed around, but I did not like it so I left.” I do not know. However, what I do know is this situation is not much different from those people whose personal worth is tied to the fact that if they fixed up the cars on their front lawns they would have a lot of money. If only. Once you go inside the homes with cars rusting in front of them on blocks you will see additional projects that are half finished. You will see a bathroom that is being remodeled, and that has been for a long time. For years the family may have been taking a shower in a bathroom where there is no tile on the floor. This epidemic is not just confined to rural areas, it also exists in cities. People do not collect cars on their front lawns in cities because the police and authorities in these areas do not allow it. Go inside many homes in cities and suburbs and you will also see a huge collection of unfinished projects. I want to be clear about something with these unfinished projects: it is not just about the money. You can tile the average bathroom with inexpensive tile for less than $30. You can rebuild a transmission quite inexpensively if you know what you are doing. It just takes time. My mother is someone who was always attracted to dreamers and she dated a lot of them while I was growing up. These were men who always told her tomorrow was going to be far different from today. They were on the verge of getting rich, they were going to build a house on the water, something was going to change and change soon. My mother had relatives all over Michigan who did things like drive trucks and work in factories in the country, but she had a small house in a nice suburb. The whole outlook of never finishing what you started came right into our house with these men who were dreamers. Most of them were contractors or were involved in contracting, and they would start one project after another and keep the projects going for years. One project might involve replacing the kitchen floor. A few hours would be dedicated to ripping up the floor on a Sunday and a few years would pass before a new floor was installed. For years we would get splinters and eat in a kitchen with no floor. In the interim, they’d start numerous other projects. None of these would be completed either. What was the meaning of all of these uncompleted projects? Why did so many things consistently not get done? What was happening? The answers to these questions are complicated. However, I believe a large part of it is a desire not to be held accountable for the result. If the kitchen remodel is completed, we will have to call the result our kitchen. If all of the cars are fixed, we will have to explain why we do not have any money. If we finish college, we will have to be accountable for getting a high-paying job. How many people have you met who have started a novel and never finished it? Almost everyone knows someone like this. Have they not finished the novel because they do not know how to write? Have they really had writers’ block for the past eight years? The legions of people with unfinished novels are legendary. I think so many of these novels go unfinished because if they did finish them, the person will have to come to terms with the fact they are not the next great novelist, or they are not as important as they would like to believe they are deep down. Many of us want to represent ourselves as something other than what we are. Finishing what we start forces us to confront who we really are. So we are afraid to finish what we start. This brings me to you and your job. Do you finish what you start? I have supervised and worked with hundreds of people over my career, and the number one characteristic I have seen in the very best people is they finish what they start. Finishing what you start is the most important thing you can do in any job. The people you are working for need to know whatever work you are given you will finish. Every week for the past several years I have had a series of teleconferences with various individual employees in my company. The purpose of these teleconferences is to solicit various ideas about our businesses, to go over projects that have been assigned, and to assign new projects. They are the most effective method I know for making our company strong, ensuring the continual promotion of the good people, and pressuring the average people in the company to “shape up or ship out.” These teleconferences are simple and there is really nothing to them but ensuring that people finish what they start. I believe that cycles of action and finishing what we start are the most important things that can happen in any company. Several years ago, before I conducted these weekly teleconferences, I found most of the projects I assigned never ended up getting completed by certain people. It was a constant source of anger for me when things did not get completed, and after a while, I would simply give up on many people. The typical teleconference goes like this: we start going over the assignments for the current week and explaining them. Then we go over the assignments for the previous weeks and the person with the assignments provides an update. The spreadsheet may look like this: Assignment Weeks Write a letter to all previous EC clients re: sale 7 Call Franchise Tax Board re: new tax ID number 7 Certain employees never have any task go more than one or two weeks, and others have their assignments open for months at a time. The people who complete tasks are the people who remain at the company and work there year after year. In the past I have hired people from other great companies, great schools, and people with a lot of “flash” who could never complete an assignment. I have also hired others who did not look as good on paper but who always finished an assignment. Our company has no venture capital or borrowed money and must support itself with real revenues. In our company, the only thing that really matters is whether or not projects are completed. If a project is not completed, our company does not make any money. I believe the downfall of many companies begins when there are more people not finishing tasks than finishing them. There are people who are in the habit of not finishing what they start. The same employees who do not finish what they start are often the people who have the most doctors’ appointments and waste the most time during the day. They spend their time in a nonproductive zone. I do not judge people who do this because I am also guilty to a certain extent of not always finishing what I start. The fact of the matter is, however, the way to do the absolute best in your job and life is to make sure you always finish what you start no matter what. When you do not finish what you start at work, you are sending the message the task and the company are not important enough to you. In the business world, if you do enough of this people will stop taking you seriously. People do not have confidence in people who do not finish what they start. Companies do not promote people who do not finish what they start. Everyone, regardless of who they are, must be accountable for finishing what they start. When Hillary Clinton was running for president, one of the images I could not stop thinking about was when she pledged to fix the healthcare program in the United States when her husband had been president years previously. After a great deal of effort, she failed completely. I saw her at a news conference and she said something to the effect that “I do not know why anyone even tries. You cannot get anything done with these people in Washington.” To me this was a striking statement. It was striking because she had essentially “thrown in the towel” and given up. I wanted to see her succeed. After this sort of attitude, I felt it was very unlikely she could have really thrived in Washington. For example, when Al Gore lost the run for president, he kept fighting for his belief in fixing the environment – even without public office. I wonder what Hillary Clinton would do with healthcare reform if she were not in office. My feeling is not a lot. Finishing what you start says a lot about your character and leaves a huge and lasting impression on everyone around you. It is extremely important you are always finishing what you start. The results you will have in the world and the impact you will make will be in direct proportion to your ability to finish. Everyone can finish what they start if they really put their minds to it. The rewards for completing what you start are huge. When you complete what you start, you learn about your capabilties. You learn lessons you can use to take the next step and grow. I believe most people will do a lot more to avoid pain than they will to experience pleasure. For many people, completing a task may represent the potential for being criticized or judged for something, which is painful. People want to avoid pain. Success, however, could be compared to creating constant failure and forcing yourself to grow in response. If you finish a task and do not believe what you have done is good enough, then you will learn lessons that will drive you forward to do as good as possible the next time. The important thing is that you finished. Growth only happens when you are completing tasks. THE LESSON People with meaningful lives finish what they start; this says a lot about their character, and leaves a lasting impression on those around them. Completing the tasks you are assigned will make you the kind of person that companies retain year after year, and will help you better assess your capabilities. You must be accountable for finishing what you start, and you can do so by putting your mind to it. When you always finish what you start, you will find yourself performing at your absolute best.

Do Not Be a Victim

Harrison Barnes — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 05:15:59 +0000

When I was growing up, my mother was an investigator with the Michigan Department of Civil Rights. Essentially, her job involved listening to various peoples’ complaints alleging they were discriminated against by an employer due to their race, sex, sexual orientation, and so forth. Then, she would investigate to see if any discrimination really occurred. Typically, she would interview the employer and the people in a given place of business, as well as the person alleging discrimination. Once she’d done this, she would send a report to civil rights lawyers. They would determine whether or not to pursue action against the employer based on the information she provided. She did this for a long time. She got the job through an African American state senator with whom we were friends. My mother worked for him for several years before working for the Department of Civil Rights. He was the Pro Tempor of the Michigan State Senate for at least a decade and he was incredibly gracious in sharing with me the incredible level of frustration African Americans had with the white establishment in Detroit throughout the 70s, 80s, and 90s. This insight was invaluable and drove a lot of my early interest in helping people who had not been given a fair break in the job market for various reasons. I could not believe so many talented people were trapped in their lives and circumstances due to their race, class, and other factors. The lessons I learned from the Senator and watching my mother fight for the rights of African Americans and other disadvantaged people has been a major motivating force in my life. I’ve governed my life using the lessons he taught me. There is a tremendous amount of discrimination that exists. Growing up, I witnessed a great deal of this. What this taught me is many people do not have the tools or the knowledge to help themselves and are really kept down by society. When I was growing up, society had a pattern of keeping people down through a lack of access to information. For example, people might learn about top jobs on the golf course rather than the paper. People would exchange information among their peers about jobs and this often kept certain people in one place and never gave them opportunity. I saw this when I started practicing law to some extent. I gradually came to believe the very best thing to do was to ensure people received information about various opportunities. I believed this lack of information was something holding many people back. People can only take advantage of opportunities if they are presented to them. Many people relish opportunity and do everything within their power to make the most of themselves. What makes me really angry, however, is there are so many people who do not take advantage of the opportunities they are given. Instead, they look upon the few opportunities they have as a way to game the system and take the most they can from an employer. This way of thinking is somewhat prevalent in the United States, and it’s always had disastrous consequences for those who involved in it. Seventy years ago, our country was very isolated politically and economically. After World War II, countries in Europe and Asia were busy rebuilding themselves and the United States became an extremely powerful economic force. We were sending our goods and services all over the world and an incredible amount of wealth and opportunity was flowing into our country, creating wealth and opportunities. This massive growth in the United States also resulted in unions and other organizations gaining tremendous power. Incredible inefficiencies were allowed to occur in numerous organizations. Many of these inefficiencies are still working themselves out today in companies such as General Motors. More importantly, the wealth created resulted in a massive level of entitlement whereby those working expected massive rewards from the company regardless of the effectiveness of their work. People started suing their current and former employers for trivial things and eventually word spread you could make a lot of money holding employers accountable even when the employer had often done nothing wrong. My mother used to come home with numerous cases she was investigating each day and leave them on the dining room table. I would read all about the people who lost their jobs. In fact, for several years I found this information far more interesting than anything that was going on in school. I would say up to 95% of the reports I read were people who had filed complaints in circumstances where there actually was no discrimination. The people would just make up reasons for the alleged discrimination. My mother is extremely liberal and had spent her entire career trying to help people she believed had been discriminated against, and she became exasperated by much of what she saw. Numerous people so much wanted to be “victims” and get something for nothing, they did everything in their power to bring down their employer. This was upsetting to my mother, and she did not understand it. It was as if most of the people she met were genuinely evil in some respects. The other 5% of the people had truly been discriminated against, and there were many horrible stories. When my mother did find actual discrimination, she would spend all night working on cases. She would loan money to people and bring them blankets and food if they had no money. She would fight like hell for the real cases of wrong in the world she saw. This was the only thing she liked about the job. This was something that really motivated her, and I am proud of the hard work she did. My mother was fascinating to watch at these times when something bad really had occurred and she felt like she could make a difference in someone’s life and bring them justice. From an intellectual standpoint, it was the 95% where no discrimination occurred that was the most interesting to me. I could not understand why people would lie and want to be victims when nothing had happened to them. The people who were alleging discrimination where none existed included women alleging sexual discrimination, people alleging age discrimination, people from Europe alleging discrimination due to their accents, people who were gay alleging discrimination, Jews alleging discrimination, Catholics alleging discrimination against them by Protestants and others, and blue collar workers alleging class discrimination against them by white collar workers. What all of these people had in common, however, was they’d been fired from their jobs. One of the things I noticed most about these cases, after years of reading them, was a lot of people simply do not do good work, nor do they even want to work. Most of these cases involved people who were basically doing all they could to not play by the rules and get work done. They spent most of their time not working and not contributing to their organization. Their way was to look for reasons not to get certain things done as opposed to getting things done. They were on the outside. To this day, my mother has an incredibly annoying habit of asking for chronological information such as, “and then what happened … and then what happened…” This is how her reports read as well. The report would typically delve into the typical day of the fired worker. This was incredibly interesting and informative. Most of the people had rituals and other things that made them consistently late for work. When they got to work, they generally did close to nothing. I generally noticed the following about these fired workers:

They were frequently late.
They frequently missed a lot of work.
They frequently had many problems outside of work that resulted in them bringing these problems to work with them.
They frequently did not contribute as much as they could to the organization.
The frequently had habits and other rituals that isolated them at work.

Incredibly, the people filing these discrimination claims were almost always let go because of certain negative patterns and other things they did to upset their employer. They were more motivated by a sense of entitlement and anger towards employers, in general, more so than simply getting the work done. To me, this was very surprising. and as a young person, I began to realize there was a massive attitude of entitlement that existed. These were also people who often refused to take responsibility for their lives. There are a lot of people who refuse to take responsibility for their lives. Several years ago, I was home from school on college break. My mother had made friends with the mother of a kid I’d known growing up. The kid was absolutely hilarious and had been smoking pot several times a day since he was 13. He came over and told me about how he was currently living in the Caribbean on a small island with a bunch of other guys who had also gotten big workers’ compensation settlements. Apparently, he and a group of guys had figured out a way to go to work for an employer and fake various on-the-job injuries and extract giant settlements from their companies. He had been smoking pot in the Caribbean for the past several years on a beach due to a workers’ compensation settlement and had several friends who were doing the same. As I listened to this, I was not envious, but realized there is really something seriously wrong with the world and many of the people in it. In fact, there are so many people who are not interested in being contributors, it’s difficult to believe. What I would encourage you to do is to not have a victim mentality. You need to believe no one owes you anything and move on. Make the most of your life and your time in it by trying your very hardest every single day. Do not expect a free ride. Prisons are full of people who expected free rides, and there is no such thing. Rise above feeling like you are a victim and become a crusader for what you are capable of achieving. Give life and your career your all. THE LESSON Rather than adopt a victim mentality, work to take advantage of the opportunities that you already have. Most people only seek to gain as much as they can from their employers, hoping to get something for nothing by feigning victimhood. These people have no interest in being contributors, and refuse to take responsibility for their lives. Do not expect a free ride, but instead strive to perform at your greatest possible potential.

Treating Your Career Like A Small Business

Harrison Barnes — Sat, 25 Jun 2011 05:14:19 +0000

No one seems to take the time to consider that their careers are businesses. Your career is no different than any small business. You have a product (you) that you are selling to your audience (your employer). You need to run your career exactly like a business person runs a business. There is no greater skill to have with your career than to run it like a business. As a business, your goal is survival and to sell your product for as much money as possible. So too it is with your career.

Be a good business person and your career may go far, ignore the business realities and you are likely to run into trouble. I have been a recruiter for several years and have seen countless attorneys “go out of business” because they did not run their careers well. In fact, this is something I see on a daily basis while reviewing resumes of out of work attorneys. Just as companies make bad decisions that result in them going out of business, people also make bad decisions with their careers that result in them going out of business and finding themselves unemployed.

They may choose to concentrate on a profession that becomes obsolete–They are trying to sell a product no longer in demand.
They may have resumes that do not serve them well–They are not presenting/”packaging” their products correctly.
They may choose to work in an area where there are no jobs–They are trying to sell a product in a geographic area where there is no demand.
They may have done something bad that makes people not want to hire them–They have a bad “brand”.
They may be too old to get a job–People are “tired” of their product.
They apply to only a few jobs and do not get a job–They are not marketing their brands to a large enough demographic.

Your career is a business and you are a product. You need to understand that using simple business principles to market yourself is something that can be of massive benefit to you.

Before I go further, there are a couple of other things I would like to cover. First, I believe that working for other people is an incredibly smart thing. When you think about your career and working for other people as a business, you will quickly realize that there are few businesses that offer higher pay for less risk, the ability to shut off work when you are not there, the ability to leverage others’ assets as your own, the ability to be part of a social network and the ability to concentrate your efforts on one thing. Working for other people has a tremendous number of rewards and these rewards are both psychological, financial, and otherwise. When you are working for someone else, you are in business for yourself but allowing your employer to take most of the risk. Another secret of working for other people is that you can take advantage of economies of scale and inefficiency. If you go to work for a large enough company, the company will hopefully be throwing off huge amounts of money with thousands of workers and you can claim your desired share of this as your compensation. For some strange reason, however, when I meet people at various public functions (and elsewhere) they all start telling me how they want to start their own businesses. Whether they are doctors, accountants or lawyers, everyone seemingly wants to start their own business. I do not understand this. When you meet people who have little education and start hugely successful businesses and become fabulously wealthy, they rarely want their children to follow in their footsteps. They want them to go to school and become professionals and work for other people. There are a lot of reasons for this–the respect, the stress, predictability, the ability to be involved with large groups of people, the ability to be part of society and more. The point I am trying to make to you is that working for other people is something that the most successful people in the world want for others. It is good to work for other people. Many Americans seem to have a belief that it is much better to work for themselves and stay fixated on this idea throughout their careers. The truth is when you are working for someone else, you are actually already in business. Working for others is a very smart and shrewd choice for many people and if you were a business person it would be advisable in most instances to work for others rather than yourself. Someone who makes a $100,000 a year working for a company is no different than someone with a $1,000,000 a year at a company who is clearing a 10% profit margin. This is an impressive profit margin and something that not many people could accomplish, but being able to step into a job where you are guaranteed this profit margin is extremely smart. When you work for others, there is often less risk; other people are risking capital and not you. And if you choose the company right, you may have a lot of security. A few years ago, I was meeting with a lawyer friend of mine who had a salary of $200,000 a year, who was (like many people I spend time with) telling me in detail how interested he was in starting a business. The more I thought about it, the more incredible I realized making a salary like this is. He was sitting there talking about how he wanted to start one business after another. One business he wanted to start was a winery. Another business was a dry cleaners. The list of businesses he was interested in went and on. “What sort of profit margins are you interested in making?” I asked him. “At least 10%” he said. “Well, in order to make $200,000 a year you are going to have to bring in at least $2,000,000 a year. If a bottle of wine sells for $5 wholesale that means you are going to have to make and bottle over 400,000 wine bottles to generate the $2,000,000 needed to make your profit margin.” He gave this idea some thought and is still practicing law today. There are many people who dream of starting businesses when they would be far better off not dealing with the idea of a business at all. Running businesses is hard. Most businesses fail. How hard is it running a business? A couple of years ago, I hired a now world famous executive consultant to come and look at my companies. At the time the companies I was running were generating several millions of dollars a month and had over 700 employees. The coach sat me down and for a full day (at $40,000) lectured me about everything that was wrong with the companies I was running. “You would be a good CEO,” I said. “If you know so much about this why don’t you try going to work for a company,” I said. There was a pause and then the guy said something I will never forget. “I could never run a real business. I have never been able to fire people. I just cannot do it.” It occurred to me that here I was paying someone thousands of dollars an hour and he did not even have the nuts to be able to fire people. Running a business involves all sorts of things like this. You must be willing to take the unpopular position for the benefit of the company and consistently do this regardless of the consequences to your psyche. And then there are budgets, payroll, and all sorts of other things that most people do not even think about. The stress of running a business is incredible. There are a million small things like this that come up when you run a business as a business owner. When you limit your business exposure to your career and what you are doing on a day-to-day basis, you are much better off. Just understand that when you are working for someone else you still need to run your career like a business. I would like you to consider the following business realities of your career. First, that your career, like any business, needs to have a marketable product. This means that you need to be in a profession that is marketable in the geographic area you are in. There are countless professions that are marketable in some geographic areas and not others. For example, it would not be profitable to be a cowboy in New York City, but this would work in rural Wyoming. It would not be profitable to be a financial analyst in rural Wyoming, but it would be profitable to do this in New York City. Furthermore, the profession you are in can be under attack from various forces (including the economy) at various points in time. If you were a computer programmer 15 years ago, you had a very bright future. In today’s economy, however, this is not necessarily the case. Many of these jobs have been outsourced to India, Romania, and other locations where they can be done more cheaply. At all points in time you need to be asking yourself whether or not you have a marketable product. Second, you need to understand the importance of your “brand” to marketing your product. Everything you do in your career will have an impact on your ultimate brand. The better your brand is, the more in demand your product will be. The best brands typically work in the most competitive markets. The worst brands typically work in the least competitive markets. For example, if you go to Harvard Business School you are going to have a better chance of getting a job with a top bank in New York City than you would if you went to University of Phoenix at night for an executive MBA. This is not to be insulting to this school, it is just to point out a reality that you need to consider when you market yourself. Third, you need to know how to market your product for the maximum possible success. When you market yourself, you need to put your brand before the largest possible market to make the most “sales”–i.e., to get the most interviews and job offers. You need to know how to position yourself and your resume. You need to understand what to say in order to impress the employer in the correct way. A. Your Career, Like Any Business, Needs a Marketable Product Every business needs to have a marketable product in order to succeed. While businesses can sell all sorts of things, your business is selling yourself and what you do. This is something that will need to be carefully managed throughout your career. It is important to realize that when we are in the workforce we are all like small business people. We are selling a product (which is ourselves) and need to follow certain rules in order to sell this product effectively. The first thing you need to consider is that your product needs to be marketable. A lot of my family is from Toledo, Ohio. They are house painters and do other sorts of blue collar jobs. From the time I was around 10 until I was around 17 or 18 they kept telling me I should be a machinist. The told me about how they knew various machinists and how well they did as machinists. One machinist had his own boat, another machinist just redid his home. Being a machinist was a very good profession 20+ years ago in the Midwest. You could work for auto companies and other companies that were doing work that required the skills of a machinist. Today, it is almost impossible to find jobs as machinist in the Midwest. If I had chosen that career path I would be “out of business.” What do most machinists do when they lose a job? They try and find another job as a machinist. If you are working in an area where auto companies are closing and there are no opportunities for machinists (like Toledo, Ohio) you might have to wait a very long time indeed before you get a job. The problem with finding a job is not you–it is that you do not have a marketable product. Lots of people do not have marketable products and yet continue to look for jobs when their product is not marketable. When people lose a job ,the path they follow is often ass backward. They do not think about themselves as a product in need of a market. You can only sell what people are buying. You need to have something that is in demand. You can never cling to something that once was. I have seen so many careers ruined by this very idea. I know someone who, 12 months ago, was in a field that was very much in demand. It no longer is. He was making upwards of $70,000 a year at this profession. Now the most he can make if he continues doing this for a living is $12 to $14 an hour. He goes into every interview and tells people he expects to make $70,000 a year. The market for what he is doing around his geographic area has gone away, and to the extent it has, he can no longer sell himself for that amount. This is just the way it is. If I was a machinist in the Midwest, I might try looking for a job in other areas around the country where the skills of machinists are in demand. I would get the hell out of Toledo, Ohio, if I realized there were no opportunities. If there were not opportunities for machinists around the United States, I might consider another career. Or, I might consider how to package myself differently. Since I am in the legal career industry, I have recently witnessed something quite remarkable that I think you can learn from. During the real estate boom in the United States, a ton of small real estate firms became overwhelmed with real estate work. Companies and others were purchasing an incredible amount of real estate and this generated a lot of work for these real estate firms. About 18 months ago this work started dramatically slowing down to the extent that most of these firms started aggressively letting go of real estate attorneys. Things got so bad I was under the impression that most of these real estate firms would start going out of business. The crisis they were facing was incredible and beyond anything that had happened in the past. I was not sure what was going to happen. Recently, something incredible has happened with many of these real estate law firms. They have started representing to their clients (real estate companies) that they have great skill in bankruptcy involving property. Now, many of these bankruptcy law firms are thriving again and doing well. They are actively hiring. This is a remarkable reversal of fortune and something I certainly did not expect to see. This is because these law firms have figured out how to have a marketable product. As a business person and operator of a small business you are going to be faced with countless decisions as to how you operate your own business. You need to remember that every decision you make will determine your marketability. Everyone has a myriad of choices about how they operate their businesses. They may brand themselves as a big company employee, small company employee, government employee, you name it. Whether you are working on your own or for a large firm, you are always in charge of your career. There are aspects of your product that will never change. Wherever you are in your career right now, you simply cannot change the things you have done in the past. This includes your education to date, performance in school, the first company you worked at (or second, or third), your current skills and any variety of things that you have done in your career. However, if you look around, there are literally thousands of small businesses operating. The pedigree of these businesses does not matter so much as whether they are in business and how well they are operating. You need to look at the field you are in like the business world as well. Whatever type of business you are running, it must have a marketable product. If you are a computer programmer who programs in PERL, you have a product. You will be able to sell your product in certain areas and with certain audiences better than others. For example, your programming skills will be more valuable in Silicon Valley, most likely, than rural Nebraska. The list goes on and on. Everything is about having a marketable product throughout your career in the area that you are working in. The point of any business is to survive, and for many businesses, to grow. You need to consider the market for your skills and run your business accordingly. One of the most important aspects of running your business involves the type of work you do. If you are a sales person of premium automobiles, you help companies sell expensive cars. If you are an accountant, you will help people deal with tax issues. Whatever you do, it is important to understand that your product likely has more appeal (to the market) in some areas and points in time than others. Your objective is to get business and the decisions you make in this regard are important. There are certain jobs that may be bad business to choose. For example, railroad law used to be a popular practice area for attorneys, but you would have a difficult time running a small business now that focused on such an antiquated type of law. Several years ago, corporate work was enormously in demand. Later, however, this market was doing horribly and corporate attorneys from top 10 law schools who performed well both in school and in high profile firms were, in some cases, looking for work for more than a year. Years later, corporate work was again available. For many small businesses/attorneys, corporate law would have been a bad choice for them to get into because there is no demand for that product. In this current economic climate, bankruptcy would be a more prudent venture for the business-minded attorney. The list goes on an on. The point is that you need a marketable product. Likewise, the geographic area you are in, the stability of your current employer and your opportunity for advancement at your current firm are all factors to keep in mind in operating your small business. These are all things that will have a bearing on whether or not your business will succeed. Far too many people fail because they fail to adapt their business to the current economic climate. This is why most businesses out there end up failing. They simply fail to adapt. B. The Importance of Your “Brand” to Marketing Your Product

When you are working in any profession, you need to have a good personal brand. The quality of your brand will determine a great deal about what happens to you. The quality of the work you do, your interpersonal relationships and a variety of other factors will determine the strength of your brand. The point is that all brands have certain attributes and over time you will develop a certain brand.

Companies spend an inordinate amount of money both protecting and developing their brands. There are certain things that come to mind when you think of any brand. For example, think of BMW or Chevy. Likewise, RC Cola creates a different thought than Coke. A brand is developed over time. The places you work, your practice area, and all of the aforementioned factors will have a bearing on the quality of your brand. Generally, better brands can charge more and have more interest directed towards them than poor brands. All of the rules of the business world apply to managing your own brand. You always need to be cognizant of how you want your brand to be viewed by the outside world and potential employers. Think through what type of brand you want carefully, and ensure that you manage that brand the best you can. You are shaping your brand in so many ways, both by the things that you do and do not do. Your brand is shaped by the type of companies you have worked for, how long you have worked at these companies, the promotions or the demotions you have received, the awards you have received, the articles you have written and the general enthusiasm you have demonstrated for your job. There are numerous things that shape your personal “brand,” which is the general perception employers have of you. You need to be conscious that everything you do is reflecting on this brand. Something I have seen a ton of in my career are employees who move around a lot–they move every one, two, or three years. Once you have done this enough times you and your brand will start getting a reputation as someone who cannot be trusted to work with the same employer for a long time. If you do the opposite, you will also get the reputation as someone who can be trusted and will remain with the same employer for a long length of time. If you start out working for small, non-prestigious companies and gradually over the course of several years rise into more and more prominent positions and companies, you will get the impression as someone who is improving. Similarly, you will get the same reputation if you are consistently rising to higher and better positions with your employer over several years. It is important to understand that everything you are doing has a major impact on your brand. You shape your brand by the choices you make. The reason your brand is so important is due to the fact that it will impact your ultimate marketability. C. How to Market Your Product and Brand for Maximum Possible Success

As an attorney, consider hypothetically that your salary is $100,000 per year. Also consider that you are being billed out at approximately $200 per hour and expected to bill 2,000 hours a year in the law firm you are working in. This means that your small business is generating $400,000 per year and out of that amount you are “netting” $100,000. This is not bad from a business standpoint.

As a legal recruiter, I am not surprised that most attorneys want to go to the law firms that pay the most money and have the most prestige associated with them. These are all business decisions. If you are an attorney, over time you presumably would like the amount of money you make to increase. You would also like the percentage of the money you collect from your billings to increase. For example, if you generate $400,000 from your work, you would rather make $200,000 than $100,000, as in the prior example. You want to become a partner and earn more. The business game continues. Everything that happens to your career is the result of selling your product on the marketplace. The amount of money you receive as your salary (i.e., the amount of money the market will pay) will be influenced by the type of brand you have. Hypothetically, you could have no education and start out as a clerk in a small firm. This is something thousands of people do each year. Then, several years later, you could be earning in excess of a million dollars per year leading the same company you started out in. To many people this may seem like an aberration. Nevertheless, this is not an aberration and it happens all the time. The reason this happens is because of how people ultimately (1) brand themselves and (2) market their brand. Marketing is the single most important thing you can do for yourself and your career. Marketing is about how you package yourself, the things you say and the value the market perceives that you offer. The point of this essay is not to act as a diatribe on marketing; however, a few comments on marketing should make a helpful point. When you market a product, you need to appeal to people on both an emotional and rational (cost) level. When marketing personal services-which your specific skills are-people tend to want to deal with people like themselves. It is for that reason that large companies typically prefer a certain type of employee, small law firms prefer a certain type of employee and certain types of clients (rich, poor and in between) prefer dealing with a certain type of employee. We have a tendency to want to deal with people like ourselves. Thus, your product is likely to be well accepted in some areas and not others. I remember one thing when I was clerking for a federal judge and I had the opportunity to see different trial lawyers come into court and conduct trials. I also spent a year trying to write a book about personal injury attorneys several years ago and once again I made a similar observation. The one thing I noticed about the most effective personal injury attorneys was that they were nothing like big firm attorneys and almost never had big firm experience or top law school credentials. What they did know how to do was market themselves and their clients’ grievances to like-minded jurors. They also tended to be quite flamboyant in their marketing efforts, but that is another story. In small towns all across America, there are very successful attorneys. In most cases, these attorneys grew up in the area and are similar to the people they do work for. What is most significant about the attorneys who are most successful in small towns, from those who are not, is their marketing ability. They fraternize in local clubs and bar associations. Stories circulate about their successes. All of this is marketing. The same thing occurs in large law firms in big cities. Here, the marketing is confined to the law firm and getting clients to hire you as you advance in seniority. What is most significant, though, is that the marketing component and what the individual’s brand represents are always at the forefront. The issue then is how you market yourself and advance your own career. While this may not be obvious, a large part of a recruiter’s job is helping people market themselves to employers. They know what the employers want to hear and how the attorney should say it. Virtually every week at our recruiting firms we get attorneys jobs at firms that I know they could not have gotten on their own. That is because we “packaged” the person to the employer in a certain way and told him/her what to say in order to portray the particular brand the firm is interested in. What is so interesting about the work exceptional recruiters do is that none of what we do is dishonest. In fact, it is just knowing the market, the particular brand of the firm and what makes a person marketable to them. People need to be themselves, but also be aware of what the particular employer wants. If you are looking for a position you need to keep the idea of marketing at the forefront of what you do and how you think about everything. You have a product to sell and in order to sell your product you must brand it and package it in the right way. In order to sell your product, and get the highest price for it, you also need to have the largest possible market. Everything I have done in my career is geared towards helping people market and package themselves. One service I recommend that anyone look at is Legal Authority (www.EmploymentAuthority.com), which can assist you in marketing yourself to the largest potential demographic of employers possible. It helps you professionally package yourself and get the highest price for your product. Two other companies I recommend are Hound.com and EmploymentCrossing.com, which can help you see the most openings. You need to know what the market is for your product. EmploymentCrossing is an exceptional way to learn about the market. Here, you can be aware of the market at all times and know exactly what is going on and who is hiring. EmploymentCrossing is your personal barometer of the market and shows you where you can market your product. The benefit of knowing this information at all times cannot be overemphasized. Think of your career like a product. You have invested a tremendous amount of time and expense creating your product. You may have spent upwards of $100,000 on your education to get to where you are today. (If you are not educated, you have likely spent years of your life learning a given skill.) If you had that much money in the stock market, my guess is that you would want to watch what is going on in the market at all times. Your career should not be any different. Do not lose your investment. Do not allow yourself to go out of business. Know where your product is marketable. D. Conclusions

You are a product. Your career is a small business. Run it like a small business and realize the importance of your brand. Most importantly, realize you always need to have a market for your product. If you remember this, you will be well served throughout your career.

THE LESSON Your career is a business, and you yourself are a product that you are selling to potential employers. Your goal is to survive and sell your product for as much money as possible. Use simple business principles to market yourself, such as identifying markets for your product and recognizing the importance of your brand. Good basic business skills can take you and your career far.

Never Stop Using Your Imagination

Harrison Barnes — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 05:10:10 +0000

It is amazing what people are able to do with the power of their imagination.

Steve Jobs has become incredibly famous by taking things that already existed and imagining and creating new uses for them. These changes he makes by using his imagination have made him one of the most famous men in the world.
Walt Disney imagined entirely new ways to entertain the world and his vision led to a global multi platform entertainment empire.
The imagination of inventors brought us television, the light bulb, satellites, the telephone, and other incredible devices. Imagination can truly change the world.

There is almost nothing more powerful than our imaginations. If you have a well-developed faculty of imagination, you can bring positive (or negative) change to every single person on the earth. You need to use your imagination every single day, and you need to think about who you want to become. Two people presented with the same circumstances and same information will become different people based on the power of their imagination. I recently listened to part of a book called The Four Hour Work Week by Tim Ferris. While I did not get a lot out of this book from a business standpoint, what I was amazed at was Ferris’s power of imagination. He was able to become a Chinese cage-fighting champion by using his imagination. In this sport, there are various weight classes, and the weigh-ins occur 24 hours before the fight. Ferris was able to fight in a much lighter weight class by learning how to lose, and then gain, 25 pounds in less than 24 hours. Using his imagination, he was also able to exploit a rule that would disqualify his opponent if he pushed them out of the ring. We can win virtually any match in life if we apply our imaginations to the circumstances around us to figure out what we need to do in order to win. You can either imagine the life and the career that you want or you can imagine the limits that hold you back from attaining you goals. That’s how powerful your imagination is. When you look around yourself, what you are seeing is the life that you have created. Everything around you–the computer you are looking at, the desk you are sitting at, the home you go home to at night–is a result of your mind and your imagination. Whatever you want in the world, whatever you can imagine, you can create.

Perhaps you would like to live in Paris and work there. If this is what you want, you can have it (I know people who have done this.)
If you are interested in living on the beach in Costa Rica and surfing every single morning, you can do that, too.
You may be interested in working in a giant skyscraper in New York and screwing around with financial derivatives. You can have that, too.
You may want to be a rich and powerful trial lawyer who sues giant companies and makes hundreds of millions of dollars. If you want that, you can do this, too.

In fact, whatever you are interested in doing and having is possible. All it takes is using your imagination and then forming plans to make that happen. Your imagination is the most powerful tool that you have. When you use your imagination, you are creating a possible future for yourself. Your ability to imagine what you want is one of the strongest skills there is. You need to use your imagination, and you need to make sure you never stop dreaming about what you can accomplish. If you are seeking a better career, then you need to use your imagination. You need to think about what you want to become. When I was at the kindergarten age, I attended a school in Detroit, called the Waldorf School, which had some unusual philosophies about how people learn best and develop. One of these philosophies involved using your imagination. Every Monday morning, after the weekend, the teachers would sit us down and tell us about how they went to the forest that weekend and had all sorts of adventures with gnomes, dragons, and other creatures. This was absolutely fascinating for me as a youngster because the teachers would be quite serious about these various fantasies about things that occurred in the forests and other areas. The creativity they showed was absolutely amazing. Because I attended this school for some time, I really came to appreciate the value of imagination and what imagination can do for our lives. Quite simply, if you can imagine something you can really change the world. Several years ago, I was in a career I did not enjoy. I was practicing law and was not having a good time doing this. I started using my imagination to think about other things I would enjoy doing. I started thinking about what sort of career would best meet all of my interests and, eventually, I was able to imagine a life for myself that met all of my goals. Just being able to think about what you want and hold a picture of this in your mind is almost the entire battle. Once you are able to imagine your preferred outcome, you can begin to achieve it. You cannot begin doing anything, however, until you begin to use your imagination. Imagination is the most powerful and wonderful tool you have at your disposal. If you can use your imagination effectively, you can make the most out of any situation that is in front of you. You can succeed in any undertaking and make the most of your life when you know exactly how to use your imagination. The power we have to use our imagination is something that very few people take advantage of. Ideas and imagination are forms of energy which we can choose to put to work or not. Our ability to imagine what can be is something that can accomplish a tremendous amount. The power you have to really reach your full potential, change the world, and do whatever you want with your career is already in front of you waiting for you to use it. Very few people out there are able to tap into this power, and it is because of this that very few people are ever to have the careers they are entitled to. What interests me most about the world, and your career, is that you probably have the same opportunities in front of you right now that someone who is going to become an incredible success also does. What separates people who are the most successful in their careers is their ability to process the material in front of them with their imaginations. Different people will use the information out there and get different results using the same information. When I was in college, I remember a particularly brilliant teacher of mine speaking to the students one day about the importance of looking beyond what they were learning about and actually doing something with the ideas they were learning. I had taken several anthropology classes with a brilliant anthropologist. His classes were simply fascinating and involved learning about “fringe” African rituals and all sorts of anthropological stuff that was absolutely fascinating. Sitting in his class made one feel like you were watching a cartoon while under the strength of some very effective hallucinogens. I would read about, and learn about African rituals involving piercings, animal sacrifice, shrunken heads, and other things that were absolutely fascinating. After taking a few classes with this teacher, however, I realized that a lot of what really motivated him was showing people that there were massive groups of people in the world who were marginalized and needed to be understood. I believe that he had a real desire to help these people be understood, and through this understanding to help, not only the people he was teaching about, but to help his students learn to appreciate those around them more. In sum, I saw his work as actually something that was geared towards giving people in the world a greater understanding of what was going on around them. This was a very interesting and inspiring concept to me and is something that I learned a lot from because there are an incredible number of people out there who are not understood. I loved these classes because they pushed my imagination in different ways as I learned about people and stuff in the world I did not even know was there. Just as there are people out there who are not understood, you may not be understanding the world around you as well as you can. The students who showed up for these classes were a special bunch, as well. They were not the same sort of students who would show up for classes in economics, for example. The students in anthropology classes typically did not wear button down shirts and were much more “granola” than the average students. They would immerse themselves in reading about and discussing various anthropological ideas, and most of them seemed pretty isolated from much of what was going on in the world outside of the ideas that they were reading about. More to the point, they would sit in these anthropology classes, and no one outside of the professor and a few people would ever learn about their ideas or read anything they wrote. Many of these same students might continue on in their lives constantly reading about various ideas and discussing them with a limited number of people. Not much would ever happen with what they learned. The world would not be impacted by the ideas. One day the teacher said something to the class I will never forget: “You know, it is nice to learn about these ideas, but I really hope that some people here do something with the ideas you are learning about. Most of you will never do anything with the ideas you are learning about. If you are really concerned about underprivileged people, you should go out into the world and make something happen.” This idea really struck a cord for me because I knew that what he was saying was absolutely correct. People can understand ideas, but it is a completely different thing to do something with these ideas. It is much easier to understand and appreciate an idea than it is to make something significant happen with that idea. Very few people ever do this. One of the most ridiculous things I have ever witnessed, and one that continually goes on in the world, is people who sit around discussing ideas and spinning one idea around after another without doing anything. This is something that has consistently infuriated me to some degree. I remember when I was in college seeing people sitting around discussing ideas without doing anything with them. In the dorm rooms, people would sit around discussing various ideas. Schools are filled with people who sit around discussing ideas and not doing anything with them. Out in the world, there are countless people who will sit around discussing ideas without ever doing anything. In order for you to have the career and life you are entitled to and deserve, you need to stop thinking, and start acting, on ideas. You also need to use your imagination to think of exactly the person you want to become. The power of ideas about yourself, once you apply your imagination, is something that can literally transform your life and career when you apply these ideas in the correct manner. Very few people, however, understand the power of ideas and applying creative energy to these ideas. Use your imagination to change your life. Imagine who you want to become, and then stay focused on this. Applying the power of your imagination to something is the most powerful and important thing you can do in your career. THE LESSON You can make the most out of any situation by using your mind creatively. Your imagination is your most important tool, and your strongest skill is your ability to imagine what you want. Imagine the person you wish to become and the career you wish to have, and stay focused on this vision. Use your imagination, and never stop dreaming about what you want to accomplish.

Allow People Around You to Feel and Believe Whatever They Want

Harrison Barnes — Wed, 24 Aug 2011 05:01:29 +0000

When I was about nine years old I was driving down the street with a relative of mine and we saw a huge, pale man who was walking down the side of the road flipping off cars and screaming at them. The man did not have a shirt on and seemed extremely angry. He was wearing dirty jeans and had long hair that was sweaty. The man was large, probably at least 6′ 4″ and quite heavy. It was a terrifying site because the man’s movements were exaggerated and he seemed to be in a lot of pain. My relative saw this man, slowed down, pulled over close to him and rolled down the window on my side of the car. “Hey, screw you A##hole!” my relative screamed at him. There was absolutely no reason whatsoever for this display, and the man sprinted towards the car screaming and looking as if he would kill my relative (and perhaps me as well). My relative pulled away and the man found a rock and tried throwing it at the car we were in. I was very frightened and felt as if we were going to be killed. For whatever reason, my relative seemed to really be enjoying himself. I remember how fast my heart was beating and how frightened I was. Instead of driving away, my relative turned around and drove past the man again, screaming and making various hand signs. It was a very disturbing episode and I really felt at that moment as if I might have been killed. It was also an extremely dangerous thing to have done. Had the car stalled or something along those lines, I am pretty sure the man would have gone into a full-fledged attack. The man was crazed and extremely angry about something. This was one of the more frightening episodes of my childhood. One of the biggest mistakes any of us can make is not allowing people to experience whatever they are experiencing:

If people want to be angry about something, then we should allow them to be angry.
If people want to be sad, then we should allow them to be sad.
If people want to feel intelligent, we should let them feel intelligent.
If people want to feel that someone has done something very nice for them, then we should let them feel that someone has done something nice for them.

Some time ago, my wife and I had dinner guests over to our home. One of the guests presented my wife with a bottle of wine, declaring that it was a $100 bottle of wine and we should all enjoy it with dinner. The guest had apparently received the bottle of wine as a gift from a friend, who told them it was a $100 bottle of wine. Sometime later, as my wife was opening the wine, she said: “Isn’t it nice that they brought such an expensive bottle of wine!” I looked at the bottle of wine and knew that it was not a $100 bottle of wine at all. In fact, it was a $7.00 to $10.00 bottle of wine (depending on where it was purchased) that looked expensive because it had a bunch of French writing all over it and not a single word of English. I had purchased multiple bottles of this wine for a party of 100 people a year or so before, and had remembered the wine quite well. “This is not a $100 bottle of wine,” I said. “It is a $10 bottle of wine.” Everyone sort of fell silent and I could tell my wife was very upset with me. She said something about how what I said was not very nice. The wine was not a $100 bottle of wine and it had really bothered me quite a bit that the guest kept declaring this. Instead of just letting this pass, I decided to let everyone know the truth. What did this accomplish? It certainly did not endear me to the guests. Instead, it embarrassed the guests. No one cared if I knew the true price of the wine or not. The alternative would have been to let the guest feel good about bringing a $100 bottle of wine and the fact that her friend had given her a $100 bottle of wine. Instead, I chose to make her feel bad. It made my wife feel bad as well. It was simply not the right thing for me to have done at all. When I was practicing law, I would often go into the offices of various attorneys who would give me one assignment or another. When I listened to them speak, occasionally some of them would quote various laws and legal precedents they knew nothing about. I would generally choose to “set them straight” and let them know the real truth. This also did me no good. Instead, it would upset my audience a little bit. Some attorneys enjoyed being disagreed with, but for the most part this didn’t do me much good. When you look out in the world and see various employers and people in general, most people are living under one delusion or another. They are running their lives under one belief or another that is not true, and believing certain facts that may not make sense or are not true. You can see it everywhere. There are an incredible variety of beliefs out there and people have different ways of running their lives and businesses. Most often (not always) the best thing you can possibly do is just allow people to think and believe whatever it is they want to think and believe. Several years ago, I was speaking with an old man I knew who ran a gas station in Grosse Pointe, Michigan which was on a small corner that was not very busy at all. He hardly made any money selling gas because there just was not any business and not enough cars drove by. His best business was buying and selling cars, and he made more money doing this than anything else. He would purchase a used car, polish it up, fix small mechanical things wrong with it, and then sell it for a nice profit. One day I was speaking with him and he was telling me that the business of selling cars was slow. He told me that he wished he had more customers. He had around 10-15 cars he was selling at the time, and I looked around his little lot and noticed that you could not tell any of the cars at all were for sale. They were all sitting there and it looked like they might even have been in the process of having work done. “You ought to put a sign up that you sell cars and then put the prices in big letters on the windows of the cars,” I told him. To me, it looked like a pretty obvious thing. In fact, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that for years he had been sitting on that corner with no pricing information or any other sort of indication that the cars were for sale. It did not make a lot of sense to me. It was something that he had not seen. The man got extremely angry and told me that I needed to mind my own business and should not concern myself with stuff I knew nothing about. I ended up leaving because he was so angry. A few weeks later, I drove by and saw he had put up a sign announcing that he sold cars and that each of the cars had prices and little descriptions like “RUNS LIKE A TOP!” written across the windows. He had taken my advice, but it had cost me a friend. In James Harvey Robinson’s book, The Mind in the Making, he writes:

We are incredibly heedless in the formation of our beliefs, but find ourselves filled with an illicit passion for them when anyone proposes to rob us of their companionship. It is obviously not the ideas themselves that are dear to us, but our self esteem, which is threatened. We are by nature stubbornly pledged to defend our own from attack, whether it be our person, our family, or our opinion. A United States Senator once remarked to a friend of mine that God Almighty could not make him change his mind on our Latin-America policy. We may surrender, but rarely confess ourselves vanquished. In the intellectual world at least peace is without victory. Few of us take the pains to study the origin of our cherished convictions; indeed, we have a natural repugnance for so doing. We like to continue to believe what we have been accustomed to believe as true, and the resentment aroused when doubt is cast upon any of our assumptions leads us to seek every manner of excuse for clinging to them. The result is that most of our so-called reasoning consists in finding arguments for going on believing as we already do. … The “real” reasons for our beliefs are concealed from ourselves as well as others. As we grow up we simply adopt the ideas presented to us in regard to such matters as religion, family relations, property, business, our country, and the state. We unconsciously absorb them from our environment. They are persistently whispered in our ear by the group in which we happen to live. Moreover, as Mr. Trotter had pointed out, these judgments, being the product of suggestion and not of reasoning, have the quality of perfect obviousness, so that to question them. “… is to the believer to carry skepticism to an insane degree, and will be met by contempt, disapproval, or condemnation, according to the nature of the belief in question.”

In our jobs, interviews and elsewhere, we are constantly given the opportunity to question those around us. The people we meet come from all different sorts of backgrounds. The odds are very slim that we are ever going to change anyone’s mind about anything they feel or want to believe. You will begin to experience far more success in your job and your job search when you let people around you believe what they want to believe and feel, and do not question them. People generally get fired from law firms and employers not for making serious errors, but for lying about them. When I was practicing law, I remember there was a girl who had failed to file a very important paper in a certain case called a “Response to Requests for Admission”. This was a devastating mistake due to the fact that if you fail to file this document, the information that is requested is deemed admitted. She had made a mistake in not filing this and, consequently, the client of the law firm (a large and important client) lost a very important case. Despite such a serious error, the girl did not lose her job and the rest of her career was perfectly fine. THE LESSON The people we meet come from all different backgrounds; they live their lives according to facts that may not make sense or appear to be true. People are unlikely to change each other’s minds about their respective core beliefs. One of the biggest mistakes is opposing people from believing whatever they want. You will experience far more success by stepping back and allowing people to follow their own beliefs without questioning them.