Love What You Do

If you wish to get and excel at a job, one of the most important things you can do for yourself and for your employer is to love what you are doing. When I say, “love what you are doing,” I truly mean it. You must be so passionate about what you are doing you can hardly believe you’re getting paid for it. I do not care if you are 20 years old or 65 years old, you need to find and do work you enjoy. People who enjoy their work are the ones [Read more]

The Importance of Sharing Ideas

When I was in law school, I went into the library one afternoon and took a seat at a desk across from a guy I knew quite well. We were not great friends but I had been over to his home a few times and he was a likeable guy in all respects. Both of us were in the same Property class and we had an exam coming up in about two weeks. In your first year of law school, Property is one of the more difficult classes and requires a lot of study and preparation because it is a different way of thinking. In law school, the way people typically study is through outlines. An outline is essentially a distillation of the reading in class and insights from the Professor. Because there is so much to learn, what typically happens is groups of students get together to create them over a 15 week semester. For example, 15 students will get together and one week one student may do the outline and the next week another student will do the outline. After about 15 minutes, I looked up and realized that the outline he was studying from was absolutely incredible. It was incredible because it was very well organized and was tracking both the Professor’s comments and everything that had happened in the class very closely. It appeared to be something that was made in a prior year and had distilled the same class the professor had taught over and over again in a really good way. I asked my friend if I could see the outline. When I asked him this he hesitated a little bit and I could tell it was not something he really wanted to show me. Before he showed it to me he looked around the library to see if anyone was watching us. When he realized we were alone, he handed me the outline but not before telling me that if anyone walked up to not let them see me looking at it. I thought this was unusual but agreed. As I looked through the outline more closely I realized this was something that would really make my study of Property go a lot better. The outline was exceptionally well done in all respects. I immediately realized I needed this outline. “Can I copy this outline?” I asked. “I promised the people I got it from I would not let anyone copy it,” he said. “Are you kidding?” “No, I’m sorry. I can’t.” This sounded absolutely ridiculous to me. For the next 10 minutes or so I sat there and eventually talked him into letting me copy the outline. In order to copy the outline he made me promise to drive to a city called Culpepper, that was around 30 minutes outside of  Charlottesville, Virgina where I was going to law school. He was absolutely paranoid that someone who had given him this outline would see me with it and then blame him for giving me the outline. “These people are vicious … ” he told me. A few hours later I had copied the outline and drove over to his home and dropped it off. I chatted with him for another 10 minutes or so about where he had gotten this outline and who else had the outline. Incredibly, he informed me that he had gotten the outline from the same group of people who were in my outline group for property. He did not name all of the people, but he did name around 10 of the 15 people who were in my outline group as all having it. They had been having a “study party” or something along those lines that he had showed up at, and they had all been using this outline. They allowed him to copy it but made him promise never to give it to anyone else. As far as he knew, only these 10 people had a copy of the outline. The reason these people did not want others to have the outline was because the outline was so good. They believed that this outline was something that gave them an advantage and would enable them to perform much better in the final exam in the Property class. Essentially, the idea was that if they had this and others did not then this “artificial advantage” would enable them to do better, get a better job and be more successful. The next day in Property class, I looked around when the class began and watched those 10 people very closely. The classroom was a podium and I always sat at the very back of the classroom, so I could see everyone in the class and also look down. About 10 minutes into the class, those 10 people all had this “secret outline” out and were taking notes on it and so forth. A couple of days later, before the class started, everyone was [Read more]