Understand Your Ultimate Goal
April 29, 2009
What You Will Learn
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Several years ago I was living in New York City and taking the subway to work every single day. Like many young people, I had been taught somewhere along the line that this was “the place” to work and where the most sophisticated work happened, where the highest salaries are paid and where the most important work occurs. I think this is true to a great extent. The city is extremely exciting and people work so hard there they cannot help but become incredibly good at their jobs. The concentration of businesses in New York also creates an abundance of extremely sophisticated work for people to do.
While I love living in New York, I asked myself frequently while living there “What’s the point?” People work so hard there and live in small apartments and put up with so much. The city is incredibly expensive and it is difficult to work in. People from all over the United States come to New York seeking to be at the pinnacle of their professions whether it is law, advertising or public relations. People are coming there really seeking something. What people are seeking is to feel differently about themselves.
New York can be a really stressful place to live. At the time I was living in a small apartment and despite making a good salary I quickly realized that there is not much to do inside small apartments. Like many people in New York I spent a good amount of time walking around on the streets, going into cafes, seeing movies and exploring museums. There is a lot of activity in New York City and it is a very exciting place to be. As a young man I started to ask myself what all of this means. The entire city seems to be dedicated to working extremely hard. If you are inquisitive like I was and you’re thinking about where you want to spend the rest of your life, one of the questions you ask yourself is: What does this all mean? What are these people in this city all trying to achieve?
When I think of images of New York what I see are men and women rushing down the street on the way to various jobs. They are all going to and from work and the streets are incredibly crowded with people rushing about on their way to and from work. On the streets themselves, there are people working as well selling sodas, coffee and other things from carts. When I think of New York City I think of people rushing around working. The image I have of New York is simply “work”.
Last night I saw a picture in a magazine and it was of the roof of Rockefeller Center where apparently there is a garden with a lawn. The article went on to describe how incredible it was that there was a garden in the midst of this concrete jungle. It was a happy article, but it left me thinking that “green grass” is something that is sort of unattainable in New York. New York City represents streets and a world where not much grows. There is too much concrete and progress for this.
When I look at all of the people on the street the image is traditionally of a man or woman rushing somewhere. There is typically a bit of stress in their face and they do not appear totally excited about where they are going or what they are doing. They have something to do. They do not say hello to people on the street. They need to rush off and be somewhere. Work is too important. Who cares about green grass?
I think a lot of what you see in the expressions of the people of New York on the street is a metaphor for much of our work lives–we are rushed, stressed and unhappy. I heard a statistic recently that something like 15% of all Americans are clinically depressed. A lot of those people rushing back and forth on the streets of places like New York will smoke cigarettes to alleviate the stress. They will drink to excess, use cocaine and do all sorts of other things to feel good. Many will also go shopping and spend incredible amounts of money on haircuts, suits, vacations and do other things to feel good. The jobs they have are something that they have pursued in order to capture something. Everyone is chasing goals.
When we are growing up many of us are taught that we need to be lawyers, architects, or doctors in order to be happy. This message is that something needs to happen outside of us in order for us to feel good about ourselves. When we become doctors or lawyers we are taught that we need to be partners, or reach a certain level, in order for us to be happy. Many of the people I know in New York are obsessed with the consumer culture and can tell you about the latest this or that. These people are incredibly knowledgeable about various things that are available for purchase. This is part of what many of us are as people, however. We believe that something outside of us needs to happen in order for us to be happy:
- We need to purchase something
- We need to get a particular type of job
- We need to receive a particular acknowledgement
- Someone needs to do something for us
- We need to get promoted
The idea with all of these things is that something outside of us needs to happen in order for us to be happy. The fallacy of this thinking is that nothing is ever good enough. There will always be a better job, something else which can be purchased and something else outside of us that can happen in order for us to experience happiness. I have no doubt that much of our thinking in this world is driven by the fact we are in a consumer society and as part of this society we are constantly bombarded with advertisements that link up the purchase of a particular good or service to being happy. That is why, for example, in the heart of consumerism in an area like New York City the idea that something outside of us can make us happy is even more pronounced.
The most amazing place to me in the world is Thailand. If you have never been there, you need to go. I spent some time attending high school there and the experience of living with the Thais changed my life. The people there are extremely happy and despite massive western influence have largely stayed removed from a psychology which requires external events to occur in order for them to be happy. The last time I was in Thailand my wife and I met a man who stated he goes there at least twice a year because it is the only place in the world where people are happy all the time. He feels good there because people do not think about happiness the same way. The thinking of the people of Thailand is that happiness comes from the inside and not the outside.
When you watch a baby you can see the baby be happy about an incredible number of things. They can laugh at a light bulb on the ceiling. They will smile for the most trivial reasons. When you watch a baby being happy what comes to mind is that we are born happy. Happiness is on the inside. Happiness is something we are born with.
Back on the street of New York people are rushing too and fro and the thought that occurs to me is that people are working so hard and living these lives because their ultimate goal is really to be happy. They believe that if something occurs they will be happy. This is such a Faustian bargain and it makes no sense. People are doing all of this and working so hard because they believe that if they do they will be happy. When you think of someone walking down the street singing a song because they are so happy, the image is typically not of someone in New York. The image is most likely of someone in the country where there is no one around to judge, evaluate and tell the person they should not be happy. You need to be happy regardless of what is going on outside of you. We are seduced by the outside world into definitions of happiness that require various external things to occur before we can be happy. Happiness is inside of you and never requires any sort of external intervention.
The reason I am focusing so much on your happiness is because the happier you are the better job you will get and the better you will do in your career. Your happiness will guide the course of your life. When you are happy you perform better at your job. When you are happy all the time people want to be around you. When you are happy good things happen to you and continue happening to you. Most of all, the best way for you to be happy is to stop focusing on externalities and realize that happiness is already inside of you right now.
You do not need any rules of what must and must not happen for you to be happy. You can just be happy. You need to realize that what is already inside of you will give you joy if you allow it. You need to set up rules which allow you to be happy for no reason at all–just because you are happy.
Another important way to insure you are constantly happy is to change your focus. I am amazed when I go into different companies and meet people. I can always get a very good sense of what the people are like and what the company is like by speaking with the people. In some companies the second you get there the people are talking about how exciting this or that is and what a great place the world is and how much opportunity there is. In other companies the people will be talking about how awful the world is, how tough the economy is and more. Most of this thinking occurs and is prevalent in these companies regardless of the state of the economy. When the economy is good the people focus on the bad and when the economy is bad the people focus on the bad as well. This sort of negative thinking is very destructive. People feel what they focus on and a negative focus is self reinforcing and continues to make things worse and worse.
Focus is one of the most important skills you can learn. Refusing to be negative is a skill that really can help you accomplish a great deal in your life and career. Right now you can start thinking about who has wronged you in the past and get angry. You can focus right now on jobs you have lost and get angry. You can focus on people in your life you were close to that died and feel incredibly sad. You can continue focusing on negative things forever if you like (which many people do) and will continue to feel absolutely dreadful about your life. You can share your negativity with everyone you meet and insure that you spread this negativity everywhere. This is what a lot of people enjoy doing. They focus on the negative.
Refuse to focus on the negative.
When you look at the world around you there are many choices you need to make. For example, if someone is rude to you one option you have is to be rude back. Another option is to empathize with them and see if there is anything you can do to brighten their day and make them feel better. You need to choose meaning which support you and make you continually feel good. Nothing in your world and life has any meaning except for the meaning you give it. One thing I have noticed about the unhappy people and the most unproductive organizations is that they are constantly judging and putting a negative spin on people and events around them. They decide to interpret things in a negative way and this ends up doing them a massive disservice.
When you think about all of the famous people in history who have died despite being incredibly gifted but have taken their lives with drugs it makes no sense. All of the overdoses and issues of rock stars and other entertainers are nonsensical. Some of the most talented people in the world have used drugs like this to excess, most likely because they felt stressed and upset by the world around them. They wanted to feel good. Managing how you feel about yourself and your life is probably the greatest skill you can have. You need to feel good about yourself and how you feel about yourself is most often determined by the meanings you give to circumstances and the world around you. The most important thing you can do with your life is to choose meanings that are empowering you.
One of the reasons I think that so many people get into so much trouble when they get famous is that they are suddenly surrounded by people who are even more famous and talented than they. They look at these people and they start comparing themselves with other people. Because they make happiness external, they start not feeling as good about themselves due to the fact that someone is better than they are in one way or another. One of the ways that we look at the world and interpret the world is through contrasting ourselves with others. For example, I run a group of career sites that I believe are the best at what they do in the world. I feel very good about the power of EmploymentCrossing and how good it is in terms of getting people jobs. However, if I decided that the measure of my success was whether or not this site had as many users as a free site like Monster, I probably would never feel that good about myself and my business. The reason I would not feel good is because I would be measuring my success and ability to feel good by something external.
I made this mistake growing up. I grew up in a very wealthy neighborhood with parents who were not well off. Since the people around me were making such a big deal about cars, homes, vacations, clothes and so forth (none of which I had at the same level), I decided that I should feel bad about myself. This is a crazy reaction. A choice I could have made was that I should feel happy that I am being exposed to this and glad my parents are able to afford for me to be in an environment where I can associate with these sorts of people. Instead, however, I chose the negative interpretation. I think this is how many of us run our lives. We so often use contrasts to make ourselves feel badly instead of to make ourselves feel good. You need to use contrasts to make yourself feel good and not bad. Contrast is one of the most important tools you can possibly use in your psyche and it will change your life.
One of the largest obstacles to our true happiness is not just the contrasts we make it is the rules we make for when we can be happy. I remember one time I was on my way to visit a relative with my mom and I had on a shirt that I thought was alright and a sport jacket. I was probably 25 at the time. My mom started getting all agitated in the car and was very unhappy and angry with me. She wanted me to stop at a store and purchase a new jacket, slacks and shirt. The whole thing seemed very strange to me.
“You need to look ‘crisp’ and if you do not these people will not respect you. Your clothes have too many wrinkles. You need to be ‘crisp’,” she said.
Somewhere along the line she had picked up a rule about the importance of being “crisp” that led her to believe that wrinkles were a massive sort of sin. Perhaps she was right, but if she did not have this rule she would have had a much better time that day and so would have I. Many of us have rules about the way things need to be that prevent us from being happy. We want things to be a certain way before we will allow ourselves to be happy. We decide that to be happy we must be rich, lose 10 pounds, have a certain mate, or drive a certain type of car. We allow ourselves to be paralyzed by rules that are difficult if not impossible for us to ever meet and this prevents us from ever being happy. So many people out there are paralyzed by rules like this. Relaxing these rules would change their lives forever.
I would challenge you to stop externalizing your happiness with rules, conditions and more that will continually make you unhappy. Instead, you need to adopt a belief for your life and career that defines success as simply being happy and failure as not being happy. While we all have our ups and downs in life, the most important thing that you can do is to be happy. When you are happy your career and life will change as you know it. More happy people will start coming into your life and you will attract the energy of good opportunities and other happy people. Your life is too important not to be happy. Change your mind and you will change you life.
You Need to Be Relevant to Your Employer
January 2, 2009
What You Will Learn
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In the mortgage industry many jobs have simply disappeared. This has put tens of thousands of people out of work. While there are many who manage to hang on in all downturns, for the most part, many people in the mortgage industry have lost their jobs.
People who lose their jobs in the mortgage industry generally have a couple of options. One of the most incredible options they have is to try and find another job in the same industry, because this is what they know, which is what many are doing. They do their best to network, and email their resume out to every opening they can find in the mortgage industry.
“The job market is really tight,” they will tell you.
They may get an occasional interview, but they do not get the job because the companies they are interviewing with eventually realize they do not have the business to hire the person. They may also realize there is someone out there who is more qualified. The criteria for these jobs has become much more stringent. Eventually, after weeks or months of looking for a job, the person may say something like:
“I need to wait for the market to pick up. I simply cannot find a job.”
To illustrate further the current state of the mortgage industry, the headquarters of Countrywide Mortgage is located in Hidden Hills, near Los Angeles. As you might imagine, there are acres of buildings for Countrywide and other mortgage companies around this area sitting practically empty. Not too long ago, these buildings were filled with thousands of people selling mortgages to mortgage brokers and others. Now, most of these people are out of jobs. All around this area, businesses are closing and people are pretty desperate. In the early evenings, if you drive by these Countrywide buildings, you can see inside. There should be hundreds of people, however, in most cases you see no one.
Recently, I was playing golf with a friend who lives in Hidden Hills. When he arrived to play, he was very upset.
The night before, my friend had been invited to a small party at his friend’s multimillion dollar house. The friend was an unemployed mortgage broker who’d purchased the house when he was employed and doing very well. He’d been told the party was a social occasion. Happy to go, he’d shown up wearing jeans. When he arrived he immediately realized something was wrong – his friend was wearing a suit, and everything seemed a little ”too professional.” A few minutes later, he was given a brochure about some Donald Trump condominium going up in Florida. His friend started showing a movie about the development and began telling everyone at the party if they “wanted in,” he could immediately assist them with financing a condominium.
Everyone was astonished. A group of people who’d been invited to a party were suddenly being encouraged to buy and finance condominiums thousands of miles away they’d never seen in their entire lives. My friend got up and left the party upset he’d been suckered into a sales presentation.
While I have nothing against aggressive sales practices, what this story represents to me is someone who is holding on to a paradigm that no longer exists. While people may have been speculating on condominiums sight unseen years ago, this is no longer the case. Here, the mortgage broker was doing everything he could to hold onto a profession and a life that no longer existed for him. This example is extremely important to understand because it has a lot to do with you, your career, and what will end up happening in your life.
From what I understand, the mortgage broker, in this example, was on his way to losing his house through foreclosure. His world was literally crumbling around him. Like the man in the store, he was making a fundamental error so many people make: He did not understand how to adapt to a new paradigm. Understanding your paradigm and what you do for a living is the most important thing you can possibly do with your career because paradigms are always changing. The sun does not shine on every specific type of job forever. We get comfortable with one specific type of job and believe we should always do this.
A couple of weeks ago, while shopping, I met a man who was working in the computer industry. He told me he had made over $250,000 a year just two years ago writing software for mortgage companies. Now, he was working in a store selling sweaters and shirts to men for probably no more than $12 an hour.
“There are no jobs for programmers in the mortgage industry,” he told me.
The man who was trying to sell mortgages and Trump Condominiums in Florida was in the business of sales. If he realized this, he would likely not be having the problems he is having now. He could apply to every sales job available and probably easily get one.
The man I met selling sweaters in the store was also in a business: The business of programming. Instead of applying to every programming job available, he was stuck in believing he was a specialist in programming computers for mortgages and, for this reason, he could not find a job.
In everything you do, you need to understand what your basic business is. Far too many companies and individuals fail to understand this. They end up “going out of business”. Some of the largest and most profitable companies in the United States used to be railroad companies. These were the “Internet moguls” and tycoons during their age. However, when trucks came along, none of these railroad companies entered the trucking industry. Instead, they clung to the belief they were in the railroad business. If they had realized they were actually in the transportation business, they could have started offering trucking and other transportation services to their clients. Because of their belief they were in the railroad and not the transportation business, many great railroad companies ended up going out of business.
In your career, it is essential you realize what business you are in. You should not be blinded by the specifics of what you do and, instead, should understand the generality of what your specific profession in fact is. This is the way to stay employed, and it is also the means to continual improvement.
W. Edward Deming gives an excellent example of a time when there were carburetors in all cars. The people who made carburetors continued to improve their product. Soon, however, fuel injection was developed, and everyone stopped using carburetors. With very few exceptions, many very large companies that formerly made carburetors went out of business. They should have realized they were in the business of finding better ways of putting the correct mixture of fuel and air in the combustion chamber of engines. This is what the mortgage broker was doing wrong as well: He failed to realize he was in the business of sales.
Something similar happened to the makers of Swiss watches in Switzerland. The Swiss invented the quartz movement; however, they failed to realize the gigantic impact this would ultimately have on their business. The Swiss continued to make mechanical watches and market these even after inventing the quartz movement. Eventually, the number of people making watches in Switzerland went from 65,000 to around 10,000 in a decade. The Swiss failed to realize they were in the business of making watches and they did not take into account the needs of their market.
What you need to do in your career is the same thing companies need to do: they need to understand their market. When you understand your market, you have the ability to provide your customers with products and services that meet their needs. You and your career are a product. You need to sell yourself to the correct audience and know where and how to market yourself in the best way possible. You need to know what your audience wants and requires.
In 2001, General Motors released the Pontiac Aztek. The car was voted the ugliest car in the world by the British newspaper, The Telegraph. The vehicle was criticized many times in Steve McConnell’s book about software design, Code Complete 2: The Pontiac Aztek and the Perils of Design by Committee. According to another commentator, Dan Norman:
In the mid-1990s, then-General Motors Corp. Chairman John G. Smale decided to bring the world’s biggest automaker a dose of the ‘give-the-people-what-they-want’ethic that’d animated Smale’s old company, Procter & Gamble Co. And what the people wanted was sexy, edgy and a bit off-key – in short, a head-turner. General Motors’ culture took over from there. Design would be by committee, the focus groups extensive. And production would have to stick to a tight budget, with all that sex appeal packed onto an existing minivan platform. The result rolled off the assembly line in 2000: the Pontiac Aztek, considered by many to be one of the ugliest cars produced in decades and a flop from Day One.
The Aztek represented all that is wrong with GM’s design process, that official said. The concept car actually did something few GM designs do: arrive before a trend — this time, the crossover SUV that combined the attributes of a truck and a passenger car. And GM had high hopes to sell 50,000 to 70,000 Azteks a year, putting Pontiac on the cutting edge.
Then came production, the executive said. The penny-pinchers demanded costs be kept low by putting the concept car on an existing minivan platform. That destroyed the original proportions and produced the vehicle’s bizarre, pushed-up back end. But the designers kept telling themselves it was good enough. “By the time it was done, it came out as this horrible, least-common-denominator vehicle where everyone said, ‘How could you put that on the road?’” the official said.
Sales never reached the 30,000 level needed to make money on the Aztek, so it abruptly went out of production. The tongue-in-cheek hosts of National Public Radio’s “Car Talk” named it the ugliest car of 2005. “It looks the way Montezuma’s revenge feels,” one listener quipped. http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000321.html
In an oval office interview in January of 2006, President George Bush said he believed General Motors and Ford needed to produce “a product that’s relevant.” The idea of producing a relevant product is one of the most important things any manufacturer can do. Being a relevant product is also something essential for your success, as well. In a bad economic climate, one of the strangest things people do is try and continue being a ‘product’ that is no longer needed. This is nonsensical.
You need to be relevant and understand what the skill is you are offering. The worst thing you can do is not be relevant to the market you are serving. It’s easy to be relevant when you understand what you are doing and what purpose you serve. Being relevant is about much more than just getting a job, however. Being relevant also relates to serving your employer with the skills they need. You need to understand your market and what your customers want.
One of the biggest failures in my career was due to not understanding my market. When I got out of law school, I worked for a federal judge who had recently been appointed to the bench. My interest in this job was being brilliant and showing how smart I was, what a good writer I was, and how much detail I could put into opinions and more. I did a very good job with the harder intellectual aspects of the work. The judge I worked for admired my intellectual abilities, but his biggest concern was for me to produce work that was completely error free. Because I was so interested in the intellectual aspects of the work, I did not always give him what he wanted in terms of error free work. This was upsetting to him. Because of my concern with the “meat” of what I was doing, and not the details, I ended up leaving this position after one year, when I’d been hired for two. Had I not left, I am pretty confident I would have lost my job. I was not giving my employer what he wanted and, instead, was making up my own rules.
The next legal job I held, I was sought out for my intellectual insight into legal issues. You need to know your audience.
When you think about your career, how often have you made up your own rules? You need to understand your audience. You need to know you are in the business of selling a product to people, and you need to give them what they want. You are a product, and your job is to give your audience exactly what it wants. This is the way to get, and keep a job.
Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss it, you will land among the stars.