Use Personal Stories to Connect with an Employer and Get a Job
October 9, 2009
What You Will Learn
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Whenever I meet a merchant, the biggest question I often have is how much something costs. Lots of merchants refuse to tell you how much something costs until they have shown you what they are selling and all of its various features. Many merchants also often want to tell you a quick story about the product they are selling.
No one is more notorious for doing this than the merchants who sell rugs in the Middle East. I think Middle Eastern rug merchants are about the best salesmen there are. The way these merchants conduct their business is a huge story in itself, about using the power of storytelling to sell product. Storytelling connects the customer with the merchant and the product, creating a bond that often results in a sale, and the customer’s appreciation of the rug for years to come.
When you walk into a rug shop in the Middle East, the salesman will sit down and spend a lot of time with you, especially if he believes you are looking for something expensive. He will explain the story behind the rug(s) you are interested in. You will learn about how the rug was made and the geographic area it came from. Different lights will be turned on to show you how the rug looks at various shades. You will be shown the rug from numerous angles. Many rug merchants keep a small loom in their shops, which enables you to see up-close how the rug was made.
You might be offered tea and perhaps even liquor, if it is legal in the country you are in. After an hour or two of discussing the one rug, you might even be offered a snack. The merchant will then proceed to tell you about himself and his family. He will tell you how well and where he lives. He will tell you about the books he likes and dislikes. The merchant will also ask you numerous questions to get to know you.
After all this has occurred, you will eventually learn the price of the rug–if you did not ask earlier. I have witnessed this enough times in Turkey and other countries to know that storytelling is an important ritual in the sale of rugs. It is the sort of ritual that has been occurring probably for as long as rugs have been sold.
Storytelling can be extremely relevant to your job search and how you market yourself. In fact, if you understand its significance, you are likely to have a great deal of ease getting employed.
What the rug merchants are doing when they present you with so much information is telling you exactly what you are getting before they give you a price. What you are getting when you purchase a rug from them is not just a rug but also the tale of the rug, its history, the merchant who sold it to you, and how you came upon the rug shop in your travel. You become significantly connected to the rug you purchase.
Many families have owned rugs for generations. They feel connected to these rugs, and a great deal of that has to do with the stories that go along with them. There is an emotional energy that is invested in the rug.
I remember the first time I went into a rug shop in the Middle East: I was surprised by how much time the salespeople wanted to spend with me. The salespeople were really selling a connection more than simply a pile of colored wool. I was taken to a casino. I was taken to Turkish teashops to spend time with other customers of the rug sellers. I learned about merchants’ families. The stories that went along with the rugs (which I would tell again and again to friends) were really something special. They are why I cherish the rugs I bought there, to this day.
How many times have you heard someone tell a story about why they bought something? When people talk about a purchase, they always seem to have a story to go along with the product. Take the purchase of a car, for example. There is always a story about the car, the deal that was gotten, and sometimes even the remarkable timing of events that led to the purchase of the car.
So what does this mean for you? As a person seeking employment you are at first seen as a commodity, and when an employer is hiring you they are making a purchase of sorts. The more information the employer has about you, and the more (positive) stories that they can associate with you after your interview, the more likely you are to receive a job offer. A story about you can create a positive, memorable connection between you and your prospective employer. The more engaging the story is, the more likely people are to pass it around.
In marketing, there is also something known as an elevator pitch, which is relevant to your job search. An elevator pitch is a story that you can tell (and that can be told again) quickly, which is memorable and to the point. For example, everyone knows that Google was started by two students at Stanford. People know that Henry Ford, the man behind the Ford Motor Company, developed the assembly line. You have a story, too. That story can be useful to your employer if you develop it in your interview and application materials effectively. I will explain this further:
As a recruiter, one of the primary jobs I do for candidates is write a story describing their work and personal history. I then forward that to the prospective employer(s) along with the person’s application. I love writing these stories. I know that this document must thoroughly engross and draw in any employer who reads it.
Throughout the years, I have realized that the better this story that I write is, the more likely the candidate is to get hired. In fact, developing a story for my candidates is one of the most important things that I can do for them. With very rare exceptions, every one of my successful candidate placements was due to the development of an outstanding story.
There are some common characteristics of stories that get people hired, which I want to share with you so you can understand the entire process. The best stories typically revolve around the employee being very motivated to do a good job and continually wanting to improve in his or her employment. The person is generally portrayed as someone who works hard, has a positive attitude, is loyal, and, due to forces entirely outside his or her control, can no longer grow in his or her position or company. When the story is developed correctly, each job move is shown as part of this quest for continual self-improvement. A well-written story will also detail the candidate’s daily life. It will mention his or her family and friends, so that the prospective employer can come to identify with the candidate as a person.
A good story requires main character that has a positive attitude, who is trying to do well but, due to forces beyond his or her control, cannot. Think of the typical cops-and-robbers type movie or show. In these shows, the policeman is most often misunderstood while pursuing the bad guy. His boss thinks he is out of control and he receives frequent lectures about this. The cop is often so misunderstood that he is taken off the case.
This story is incredibly popular and is so beloved that you can see it on probably any television set at any given time on any given day. When you think about why this story is so popular, it is pretty simple. It is about people trying to do good, putting in their best effort and then being thwarted by various forces. In the process the people are often gravely misunderstood and may lose the respect of their peers. When we watch these types of shows, we almost want to scream at the television screen. We want to help the detective because we know he is in the right.
When you are looking for a job, you need to think of the cops-and-robbers story, and have a similar story that shows you are out there trying to do good. You want to present a story that is memorable and that sets the employer up to care about you to the degree that they feel like they are the good guy, intervening on your behalf to help you, and doing the right thing by offering you a job.
The employer will also be more interested in you if you provide some personal information. Just like the police story shows you the personal life of the policeman, you too should give the employer a glimpse of your personal life. As a recruiter, I always ensure that I put information about my candidate’s personal life in the story so the employer can connect with the candidate. You want the employer to closely identify with you–the more the employer knows about you, the more you stand out, and the harder it is to reject you.
I am not telling you to pour your heart out. Nor am I telling you to share everything about your personal life with the employer. But, if employers have a short story they can pass around about you, and if they can understand you personally, they will be more likely to hire you. In addition, if your candidacy is portrayed to the employer as something which furthers the cause of good, the employer will be much more likely to help you by offering you a job. People want to feel like they are doing something good when they are hiring someone. If you present your candidacy as a cause for good, the employer will remember that connection and will likely want to hire you.
You Need to be in Favor with the Right People
July 16, 2009
What You Will Learn
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When I started my first company, back in 2000, I and the other people that were with me at the time sat down and had a three day meeting during which we discussed what we wanted the company to be at the time, and what we wanted it to become in the future. It was an incredible meeting that I will remember forever. During those three days we came up with this fundamental core value, which has since shaped the course of my life and my various companies: We Must Get People Jobs. This is has driven all of our work since that time, and anytime we have seen limitations in any certain way of doing things, we have always come back to this core value and expanded upon it. Today, because of this core value we have evolved into numerous businesses that are connected to this same ideology.
Back in the year 2001 I started a company called Legal Authority to help law students and attorneys get jobs. I had been a law professor, and noticed that many people were having an extraordinarily difficult time getting jobs after graduating. The main reason they were having a difficult time was that they were “undermarketing” themselves. Most law schools at the time, the one I taught at included, only had a small list of law firms, public interest organizations, government offices, companies and so forth that they made available to their students to apply to.
My reasoning was that this did not make any sense because, for instance, in a city such as Los Angeles, there are over 10,000 employers that hire attorneys. Conversely, the average law school might keep a list of only 200 employers for their students to apply to. Because everyone was applying to the same employers it was more difficult to get jobs. Getting on the law school’s list often was a political game whereby the law schools would stear their very best students to certain employers and not others. I figured that by creating giant lists of employers that students could apply to I would make it much easier for them to find jobs.
As part of the service I would put together a comprehensive list of prospective employers, rewrite their résumés and cover letters, and print all the materials that would be mailed out to employers. In some cases people might mail out over 500 letters; they would always be marketing themselves to a much wider variety of employers than their law schools would be providing them with. More important, they would be marketing themselves to employers that other law students were not marketing themselves to (i.e., employers not on the law school’s preferred list of employers), and since they were often the only person seeking a job at a given employer from a given law school they would really stand out.
Just as I had anticipated, the process worked like magic. The law students we assisted ended up getting jobs–time and time again. I then opened the service to attorneys, and soon people who had been unemployed for weeks or months starting getting job offers. The service grew like crazy and within a few months I had a crew of at least 20 people researching employers, several people writing resumes, people printing résumés and cover letters. The operation became so big I needed to move offices. In a short time we had become overwhelmed with job seekers using our service. It was a very fun and exciting time in business.
Because the service did more than law school career services offices and was so much more effective, I started running full page advertisements in law student magazines that said things like: “LEGAL AUTHORITY CAN BE MORE EFFECTIVE THAN YOUR LAW SCHOOL CAREER SERVICES OFFICE!” I ran these advertisements not because I had a problem with law school career services offices, but because what I was saying was simply true. The company really did do more for law students than a career services office–in fact, in terms of marketing, it did a lot more.
The service also took off when we started dealing with attorneys, because the process worked just as well for them as it had for law students. In the job search realm, there are many legal recruiters out there who track down and place attorneys in law firms and other employers. However, legal recruiters typically only work with the largest and more prestigious law firms–like the top 2-3% from all firms. The reason for this is because recruiters usually charge a fee to the employer, which is 25% over and above the attorney’s annual salary. Only the best attorneys can work with recruiters, since law firms are only willing to pay these fees for the most extraordinary attorneys. The problem therefore is that attorneys are only able to get jobs through recruiters if they are amongst the elite of the elite; this leaves the rest of the attorneys to try and figure out how to get jobs on their own.
The attorneys who used Legal Authority found incredible fortune using our service. They were able to secure jobs after being unemployed and in most cases Legal Authority proved to be a far more effective way for them to get jobs than by using a recruiting firm. Recruiters would never openly admit this to an attorney because it would reveal their weakness–but it was true. In almost every incident, an attorney was better off using Legal Authority to get a job, rather than a recruiter. The reason being (1) the attorney would be able to cover the entire market and (2) there was no fee attached to their candidacy. Law firms are happy to pay fees to recruiters for the most exceptional attorneys (and indeed, almost expect them to be using recruiter), but 95%+ of the attorneys out there would actually be ignored or overlooked by a firm, even if they did come by way of a recruiter.
To publicize this fact, I started running advertisements in all sorts of magazines and other publications about Legal Authority, explaining how it was more effective for most attorneys than using a recruiter. With these advertisements the business continued to grow much larger. Within a year of starting the company, by 2002, the company had over 50 employees working for it. We have since started another company called EmploymentAuthority.com, which does the same thing for people who are in other professions outside of law.
Around the same time I was making a name for myself as a legal recruiter. I started getting invitations to speak to the student bodies of various law schools about the job market. I was not known by law schools or anyone for my involvement with Legal Authority but was known as a recruiter. When I would go into the law schools I would be introduced and would start talking about the legal job market and then segue into a talk about Legal Authority and how it is was an incredibly effective way for law students to get jobs. I remember after one speech the Career Services Dean of one law school walked up to me and said something I could not believe:
“If I had known you were behind Legal Authority I would not have invited you to speak.”
I was puzzled by this statement, and the woman seemed very angry. I lingered around at the cocktail reception afterwards and then asked someone else in the career services office why the Dean disliked Legal Authority so much. She told me that my magazine ads had offended all of the career services people because the advertisements had attacked the effectiveness of career services offices. The more I tried to reach out to career services offices the more hostile they became towards me.
Within a year or so of this particular incident, I started getting letters, phone calls and so forth from the National Association of Legal Search Consultants (NALSC). They threatened to revoke a separate recruiting company’s membership that I worked for, if I did not remove from the Legal Authority website information about how Legal Authority worked as compared to recruiters. At their demands and due to their threats, we removed articles and other materials from Legal Authority, all of which explained in one way or another that recruiters could only place the best attorneys and only could place them at the select few law firms that were willing to pay 25% in fees to the recruiting firm.
My relationship with this particular group became one of never ending troubles and aggravation, as they looked into our various companies and started objecting to one thing after another (even in businesses not involving recruiting whatsoever). Their objections to Legal Authority and our other job search businesses in the legal community grew so pronounced that we eventually told the organization we wanted nothing more to do with them. Our core value of getting attorneys jobs was in direct conflict with what appeared to be their chief core value of protecting the legal recruiting industry from businesses which might be viewed as competitive. Apparently several years ago one of the Founders of NALSC was kicked out of the organization for starting a job site for attorneys. Associations exist to protect the members’ interests; although in my opinion there is nothing wrong with two sides having opposing views. I have no animosity towards the organization anyway, nor any regrets about the success of Legal Authority.
As Legal Authority continued to grow, our core value of getting attorneys jobs expanded into other businesses. The second business we started was a job site, LawCrossing.com. The way most job sites work is that they charge employers a fee, typically $350 to $500 to put a job on their websites. While this is a good business model, this also unfortunately ends up keeping lots of jobs off of the site, because not all employers are willing to pay these fees. My idea was to gather employment listings from every job site, plus the legal jobs that were available on LawCrossing.com. Also, many employers list jobs directly on their own websites. I decided that it would also be a good idea to collect the job listings from these websites and put them on LawCrossing.com as well. We launched this business and it quickly became very popular. It was based on the core value of getting people jobs. We have always looked at how people get jobs, and if there are ever deficiencies in the system, the goal has been to correct these deficiencies.
As LawCrossing’s position in the market strengthened, I was enthusiastic and wanted to reach out to law schools and tell them about it. I figured that they would be incredibly happy that such a site existed, and I wanted to give the service to law students and others for free. Several years ago I decided that a good thing to do would be to send one of our employees on a cross country trip across the United States to visit every U.S. law school. I purchased a giant Dodge Sprinter van and had all sorts of graphics put on the side of it promoting the business, LawCrossing, which was making this massive cross country trip. We had text written on the back of the van that said “WE LOVE ATTORNEYS AND LAW STUDENTS.” I was incredibly excited about the business and loved our customers.
I hired an older Mormon man in his late 60s from rural Utah to travel across the country in the van. He was enthusiastic about making the trip in numerous respects, and seemed to be the perfect person for the job. However, within a few weeks of his hitting the road, when he started reaching states like Kentucky and others, we started to get crazy emails and messages from various law schools. They started sending us messages stating that it was “SICK” to have a man traveling across the United States in a van promoting sex with law students. I realize this is hard to believe; however, to my astonishment many of the law schools decided to interpret the message on the truck in a negative way, rather than a positive way. The furor among the law schools about the so-called “love truck” and so forth got so out of hand that I had to pull the entire tour. Everything the tour represented had been grossly misinterpreted by the law schools. I can assure you that no “funny business” was going in this van.
In thinking about these episodes with LegalAuthority and LawCrossing, with the career services offices and with the recruiting association, a consistent theme comes to mind for me: Influencers/Opinion Leaders were not consulted and assuaged in the process of launching these businesses. Instead, both of my businesses pronounced deficiencies in the system, and made those in charge of the deficiencies a marketing target. Law school career services offices were targeted because they only gave students access to a limited amount of employers. Recruiters were targeted because they could only give people access to a limited amount of employers. In both cases, the other parties were guilty of intentionally controlling access to information. However, for both of these groups, information was the source of their power. My targeting this power was a major threat.
In reflecting on this situation I can definitely say that I made some big mistakes with the recruiting association and the career services offices. Despite their deficiencies, targeting them was a fundamental mistake because the public’s reaction to a business, or person, is generally shaped by opinion leaders–people who influence the opinions of the public. Recruiters influence the opinions of attorneys because they are talking to attorneys every day. Career services deans in law schools influence the opinions of law students because they are talking to law students every day. Targeting these people of leadership and authority in my marketing campaign was a massive mistake. In every business and endeavor, one of the most important things you can do is get on the good side of the people who influence others’ opinions.
Politicians typically come to power because they have gained the influence of those who influence the opinions of others. For example, presidents and others typically are sponsored by important influencers in business. It is no secret that Hollywood stars, for example, use their power to influence elections of various politicians. Several years ago I was in the student loan business and one day someone in power in a major bank asked me to give a decent sum of money to a United States Congressman. I did it. I proceeded to have lunch with the Congressman a short time later, and from then on I regularly received calls from his office asking if I needed any help on Capitol Hill with various things. I was very surprised by this, but this is how politics works to some extent. Politicians seek the favor of people willing to support them and then find themselves committed to those special interests who do support them.
One reason that politicians lose power when they are in office is due to their inability to gain the favor of others leaders who have the power to influence others. Watching politics is fascinating because what you generally see are politicians making crazy decisions and pushing through insane legislation; it is more due to appeasing special interests and others in power, than the general populace they purport to represent. The best businessmen, the best politicians and the best people out there in any profession who gain and hold on to power know that they have to influence people who are in a position to control the opinions of others.
Something that really interested me was the recent resignation of Sarah Palin as the governor of Alaska. Here was a person who was extremely popular, at one point becoming a vice presidential candidate–and then several months later she resigns from her position, possibly dooming her political career forever. Most of the news stories I have watched and read have indicated that she probably ended up resigning because the criticism against her became too much for her to personally handle. As she got into the public spotlight she began to face enormous criticism for everything from how she dressed, to how her children behaved and more. The criticism she faced became almost unrelenting. The opinion leaders and people in power attacked Palin and were able to make their opinions predominant. Without the support of the public, it became impossible for her to continue to govern.
People who control others’ opinions are everywhere. For example, they exist in families. There are people inside families who have the ability to influence everyone else’s opinions. This person could be a small child who turns against a parent, planting the seeds that empower the mother to leave the father, and causing other relatives to turn on the family. People with strong and influential opinions exist within all companies and organizations, and they are not always the people with the most money, or the best title.
What does all of this mean for your life and career? Unfortunately, it means that it is important to cater to and get the approval of people who have the ability to influence the opinions of others one way or another. These people are everywhere. Politicians rely upon them. Astute business people rely upon them. Social climbers rely on them. These people have an ability to control what happens in your career.
In my case, I have made mistakes by not catering more closely to people with the power to influence others. When you go against people with the power to influence others they can turn against you and make your career and life much more difficult. Often the person who gets fired, fails to get a promotion and fails to ever get ahead is guilty of not impressing–or even offending the people who have the ability to influence others. Believe it or not, this can be even more detrimental than doing poor work.
All around you there are countless political games at play, as people attempt to influence others with power and control others’ opinions. In Hollywood, for example, I have heard some incredible stories that are demonstrative of this: I know of male movie stars who the public thinks are heterosexual, who slept their way to the top–by having sex with much older men, who are producers or others who are in power. There seems to be no limit to the lengths people have gone to in order to get to the top in their profession–but this is all around us and it is part of the game. You do not need to sleep with people to get to the top, but you do need to be aware of the game going on and you do need to play it, or at least play along with it to get ahead. My career advice is that you need to be in favor with the right people.
Harmonize With the People in Your Environment
June 18, 2009
What You Will Learn
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One of the most unusual candidates I ever worked with back when I was a job recruiter was someone who had basically worked for five different law firms in a five year period. He had absolutely stellar credentials, having attended the best schools and having worked at the best law firms. The only problem was that it seemed he could not last more than a year at any place where he worked. When I started sending him out to various law firms the prospective employers all came back and in no uncertain terms told me they were not interested in the guy. It was the strangest thing and I could not understand it at the time. On paper the candidate looked like someone who would easily secure at least a handful of interviews. He was also very personable.
One day I was driving down Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles near the federal building and I saw a man with a giant sign: “KICK THE JEWS OUT OF ISRAEL AND GIVE IT BACK TO PALESTINE!” He was screaming at cars while waving the sign in the air to get everyone’s attention. Incredibly, it was that candidate. When I recognized who it was, it suddenly made sense why nobody was interested in hiring the man. He was apparently a complete rebel who did not care to fit in with those around him. Since there is probably no law firm in Los Angeles without a substantial number of Jews it in who would be deeply offended by this guy’s views, I realized this guy was going to have a really hard time fitting in anywhere. Marching against the people who are likely to also be your employers and clients is probably not ever a good idea.
Over the years I have seen many attorneys like this who, for whatever reason, make a decision to really stick out. They lose jobs and quickly develop a “do not touch this person with a ten foot pole” reputation that follows them wherever they go. Law firms want people who are going to fit in and simply get the work done. They do not want to offend clients. It is the same with any job–you need to fit in with the people you are working for and they need to see you as fitting in at all times. If you do not fit in and harmonize with others in your work environment it can create serious problems for you.
Several years ago I hired an employee who came across as a very quiet library type. He did excellent work and was quickly given raises and increased responsibility. He was a nice guy who kept a very low profile at work and seemed to be respected by his peers. Apparently he had gotten romantically involved with a coworker. One day a few weeks after I heard the two had ended their relationship, the female coworker and I were talking about something unrelated, and suddenly she started saying negative things about the guy in a round about way, making subtle digs. I was not interested in listening and attempted to change the conversation. Then she brought up something that really shocked me:
“He has tattoos across his entire chest of skulls and stuff.”
“Excuse me?” I said.
“He is covered in tattoos. You have just never seen them because he has kept them covered up all these years at work.”
She knew this would shock me. She then proceeded to tell me that the guy liked to hang out at industrial goth-type clubs in Hollywood. The reason she was telling me all of this was because at the time our company was somewhat formal and comprised of lots of attorneys. I am not the sort of guy who is generally into tattoos and the woman could look around and see that I did not have any other tattooed employees, as most of the staff was pretty conservative. This woman was trying to get me to form a negative opinion of the guy and I could tell she was also trying, as best as she could, to get him fired. In essence, what she was implying was “here among you is a traitor!!” She was trying to send me a signal loud and clear that this guy did not fit in, and that he was not who he represented himself to be.
The girl did not stay with our company very long and a short time later the guy she had tattled on got a significant raise–and a year or so later, another raise. I was incredibly impressed with him and what he had been able to achieve. Not once did this guy come across as the sort of person who would have a bunch of tattoos and be interested in strange night life, vampires and whatever it was that interested him. He was an impressive, intelligent person who, when at work did his job very well and served as a role model to his fellow employees, especially the younger ones. The fact that his ex-girlfriend had seen him with his shirt off and could testify that he was covered in tattoos did not make the slightest difference to me. In fact, it made me think even more highly of him. He had managed to completely fit in at work and play the work role that was expected of him.
When I was in college I dated a girl the entire time who was Jewish. One time she came home with me over Christmas break and we went to a family Christmas party. My girlfriend, mom, sister and I had driven from Detroit down to Ohio and to visit the family of my mother’s second husband. We were in Toledo, Ohio celebrating Christmas with this large Irish family in a very small house and at some point I wanted to get out of the house and get some fresh air. Down the street there was a giant church and I thought it would be fun to go look at it. My girlfriend and I decided we would go look at it and I informed a couple of my relatives that we were going to make the visit. It was about 3:30 in the afternoon and several of them were pretty buzzed on Miller High Life at that point. One walked up to us and said:
“Why would she be interested in a church? She’s Jewish!”
“Huh?” she said.
“That’s right. We all know your secret. What’s it like seeing Christmas celebrated? Are you even allowed to go inside of a church?”
Right then and there I realized we had been at this house the entire day and, although not once did anyone say anything about her religion, it was clearly on their minds. Try as they might have, once the beers got rolling they felt like they needed to make an issue out of it. My girlfriend ended up laughing it off; however, the conversation, short as it was, made us both feel incredibly uncomfortable. It had been nothing less than a tacit statement that my girlfriend did not fit in and was not one of the tribe. She thought the entire thing was pretty humorous but for me it actually felt a little menacing.
People around us are always looking closely to see if we fit in. They are judging us and making assumptions even when we are not aware of it. In many cases, especially in the working world, it is important that we do our best to fit in at all costs. It can become a matter of survival.
A couple of months later my girlfriend got back at me, albeit unintentionally. She took me to a Passover Seder in Chicago. My girlfriend had been raised a very conservative Jew. She spoke and read Hebrew and was incredibly well versed in her religion and all its traditions. The Hillel Center at the University of Chicago had a program where students could go have Passover with local families around Chicago. That night was really unusual to me; I had no idea what was going on. In the reading of the Haggadah I was unable to read in Hebrew and the people at the table looked very surprised. Virtually every ritual involved in the Seder, I managed to mess up. At the end of the evening the man who had hosted the event approached me and started asking me all sorts of questions such as which synagogue I went to in Detroit and so forth. It was his subtle way of letting me know he knew I did not belong at the dinner, and it was very unwelcoming. I felt so uncomfortable.
Some incredibly awkward moments followed. Clearly this man was insulted that he had opened this sacred event to include a non-Jew. I am not sure why he felt this way and in my experience with Judaism this is certainly not par for the course; nevertheless this particular person was very angry. In fact he became downright hostile.
The following day someone from the Hillel Center called my girlfriend and told her that she should not have brought me to the Seder. The next year they also posted an “addendum” on the sign up form for the Seder, which explained that it was “bad judgment” to bring non-Jews to the Seder.
Throughout my relationship with this girl she broke up with me numerous times at her parents and family’s request because I was not the same religion as her. Many groups go a long way to protect this ideal, because and maintaining the sense of solidarity within their group is so incredibly important to them.
What these two events taught me–my family at Christmas and my girlfriend’s family at Passover, was that people are incredibly sensitive about people fitting in with them. And every group seems to have both implied and expressed rules about who may or may not be allowed to fit in, based on how a person acts, looks, speaks or believes.
I ended up marrying another girl who was Jewish several years ago. I had a Jewish wedding and during this wedding I could see that a lot of my relatives were confused as to what was going on. For most of my relatives, this was the first Jewish wedding they had ever attended, and for most it felt like a completely alien culture and set of traditions. I could relate to this because it was how I had felt too, before I had learned about and experienced it all first hand.
A month or so ago I was having dinner in the Harvard Club of New York to celebrate my cousin’s birthday. At one point in the evening, my great uncle came up to speak with me and I noticed he had some information written on a piece of paper. He had gone to Harvard and Phillips Andover and was from a very old American family, out of which had come the first American Senator from Kansas (and the President Protempor of the Senate)–among other things. My great uncle is a really nice guy who is always curious about various ideas. Recently, he decided to have some genetic testing done by some group affilliated with National Geographic. For the past several weeks he had been pondering the results: It turned out that his mother’s side was Jewish, which meant that my father would have been Jewish due to blood lines. My great uncle was very intrigued by this, and he told me how this side of his family had come over from Holland hundreds of years ago ago and must have been Jewish. He was actually in a state of disbelief–not sure what to make about any of this information.
A couple of years ago I also took a genetic test and got interesting results: It came back that my mother was Jewish. My mother, of course, had no idea and for days sat puzzled in front of the computer. She had been raised in a small town in the Midwest and did not understand how her mother could possibly have been Jewish. When my wife and I went to visit her last Christmas she had put a star of David on her window and appeared to be going with it in terms of what she had discovered.
My point is not to instruct you based on my religious learning and what I have discovered about my roots. Instead, my point is far more general and far-reaching. Historically, at least in terms of the places my family has lived (Michigan, Kansas), Jews were treated poorly and not given the same opportunities as the rest of the general population. What I am surmising is that in order to get ahead, what many Jews ended up doing is converting to Christianity and abandoning and even forgetting about their roots. Consequently, a generation or more later we find guys like me who, through the modern miracle of genetic testing, discover that they are actually Jewish.
When I was in law school I was once visiting a friend of mine with the last name Goldstein. He had always pronounced this name the exact way you would think it looks and is pronounced. One time during a break I was sleeping on a couch in his apartment and I heard him talking to a girl he was being fixed up with. I did not know the situation but when I heard him pronounce his last name to her I could not believe it. He said his last name very quickly:
“Gosin,” I heard him say.
“Yes, Gosin.”
I was not sure what was going on there but I got the feeling that he did not want the girl to know, for whatever reason, that he had an obviously Jewish last name. It made me uncomfortable hearing this because my friend was the last person I ever suspected would try and gloss over who he really was. But isn’t this something we all do in one form or another to fit in? Don’t we all at one time or another go out of our way to be someone we are not in order to be seen as someone other than who we are?
One of the most important things that society seems to demand of us is that we harmonize with our environment. In order to do this many people will abandon their religions, cover up their tattoos and do all sorts of things to look the part. While I am not condoning that people do this with their religions, this is something that people all over the world do in order to fit in.
Don’t ask, don’t tell is an example of a military policy that forces soldiers to fit in and harmonize with their environment. If you were a flamboyant homosexual, the odds are pretty good that you would not be comfortable working as a motorcycle mechanic in a Harley Davidson dealership. And if this were your chosen profession you would probably do what you needed to in order to fit in–and then you would be a completely different person outside of work.
One day when I was in college I remember the President of the student counsel of the entire University of Chicago, who also belonged to a fraternity, was seen cavorting with another man in a gay bar that some of his fraternity brothers went into as a joke when they were drunk one night. They were astonished to see one of their own frat brothers in the gay bar, brushing up to another man. For all intents and purposes, this guy had covered up who he was, and had never been his real self in public. It must have been very difficult for him to have looked up and seen his fraternity brothers, realizing at that moment that his secret was completely out in the open. In heterosexual fraternities, you cannot really fit in if you are gay.
In your employment environment and to get the jobs you want you need to harmonize with the people around you. You need to be what they are and you need to go along with whatever the environment supports. Your work and how you are judged by the people around you will have a giant impact on your fate in the workplace.
I wonder if my great grandfather, John James Ingalls, would have been an American Senator and President Protempor of the United States Senate if he had been known as a Jew in the 1800s. Today there is a statue of him in the Capital Rotunda in Washington, DC. It is one of two statues of famous Kansas residents. I wonder if any of this would have occurred if he had been known as a Jew at the time. When he was a senator he was a strong advocate of freeing the slaves. Perhaps a part of him wanted to help that part of himself that was also oppressed in the dominant society at the time. My great grandfather was probably ultimately able to do more good, and to accomplish more in his life by fitting in, than had he not fit in. His son later followed in his footsteps, and became the governor of Kansas. If you saw pictures of this family the last thing you would expect was that they were Jewish. And at some point they probably forgot or covered up the fact.
There is nothing more important to your career than blending in and harmonizing with the people in your environment. It is only by harmonizing with the people in your environment that you can achieve your career goals.
Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss it, you will land among the stars.