Featured
View Count: 2158
Some time ago I went to meet a few people for lunch who I knew. These people were about 20 years or so older than I was, and we were meeting in a nice restaurant by the water in Long Beach, California. I do not remember what the meeting was about – in fact, I remember only one thing from the meeting:
A woman I did not know came into the meeting wearing a Chanel T-shirt, Chanel sunglasses, with a Chanel purse, a Rolex watch and just about every other “logoed” designer you can imagine all over her. The Chanel logo on her T-shirt was at least a foot long. She had all sorts of plastic surgery as well that was way too obvious. The woman was wearing more large logos on her than anyone I had ever seen in my life. There was nothing tasteful about it. The logos were large and meant to be seen. They were meant to get attention.
I do not remember much about this woman other than the logos. I remember that after she left, someone brought up some stuff about how she had low self-esteem. She did not talk about much of significance at the lunch. The woman’s white skin was pulled very thin by all the surgery she had had. As I looked at her, deep down I felt I understood exactly what was going on with her.
What was going on with this woman is an exaggerated version of what is going on with almost all of us. In fact, this woman suffers from the same thing you suffer from. This woman’s issue is something that we all suffer from in one form or another.
Wherever I travel throughout the United States, I notice churches and various religious buildings all over the place. They are in small towns and large cities. They are everywhere. Each week, people file into these structures and stand and sit there in place for an hour or more.
The best-selling magazines in the United States are magazines like People, The National Enquirer and Us Weekly. They are in drug stores and grocery stores, large and small. They are everywhere you go. These publications are filled with stories about various stars and others that society looks up to. People devour these sorts of magazines like crazy.
Recently, I have been hearing all of these stories about an Indian Guru named Amma. This woman has built a giant empire and university based largely on going around giving people hugs. She is worshiped as a god and people devote their lives to her. I read she is coming to Los Angeles. People wait in line for hours to get a hug from her. She sells items like her used toothbrush, clothes she has worn and dolls of herself at her events for lots of money.
Quite frequently, when I am at various parties and events and meet strangers, they tell me within moments of meeting them how they attended Amherst, Columbia, Yale, or whatever prestigious school they went to when it has almost zero to do with the conversation we are having.
Recently I was discussing the LA Lakers with someone and they managed to tell me that they attended some prestigious college that did not have a good basketball team. I’ve been out of college more than 20 years and many people tell me what college they went to five decades or more after attending there.
When someone works for a large, well-known company or employer, the same sort of need to tell others and so forth arises.
Not too long ago, I had someone over to my beach house in Malibu. I was talking about this beach house and how I enjoyed going there on the weekends now and then to relax. The person then said something along the lines of: “This is a good thing to impress others with. When you get older, you will use something else to impress others like art, or maybe you will start giving more to charity to impress others.”
What does all of this mean?
It means that most people out there are giving away power to people, places and things outside of themselves.
When you are not secure with who you are, you will seek to get value elsewhere. For most of us, our value does not come from within. It comes from an endless stream of titles, achievements, associations, material goods, bank account balances, romantic partners, conquests and more.
For some reason, I have been fascinated with the study of the emergence of religious groups, gurus, cults and so forth – for almost as long as I can remember. I have even studied motivational superstars as well. One of the characteristics of most religious figures, gurus and others is that they are able to convince their followers that this person in some way can make their followers be happier, more secure and better off. Many even profess to have magical powers that can make you happy.
The entire message of these leaders is that they–and they alone—can be the source of your happiness. We give our authority to others outside of ourselves and idolize and make them more important than ourselves.
Christians, Muslims, Scientologists, Mormons—and every religion for the most part—makes its followers subjects. The religions then tell you when you can be happy (following its rules), should feel guilty (not following its rules), and so forth. To most people in the world, their religion is more important than what is inside them. They will allow their religion to govern how they feel about themselves and make that more important than who they are.
The best way to control people is to elevate yourself to a role that is more important than the individual. There are all sorts of ways we have control exercised over us, and it is due to this control that the majority of people are not living up to their full potential, or are as happy as they could be. Organizations, businesses, leaders and others with integrity do not support being idolized and find a way to deflect it.
People also do this with brands. They get their self-worth from the brands they are wearing and feel that if they cover their body with various brands, they will be important. If we feel empty or insecure inside, we may believe that wrapping our iPhone in a Louis Vuitton case that costs $300 will somehow make us more significant and fill up the hollowness inside of us—but if this is what we are seeking from doing this, it will not help us. Marketers, salespeople and others are all too happy to give us the impression that whatever they are selling will fill the void we feel—but it never does.
I write articles like this that go out to a lot of people. Each day, I get emails from various people asking me advice about important life decisions:
I appreciate that people seek such counsel from me, but make no mistake about it: I’m not much different than the people seeking my counsel (my wife would certainly agree with that).
Anytime we put someone on a pedestal, we are telling that person that they are more important than us. We are handing them our body and soul on a silver platter to do with as they wish. In most cases, we will be sorely disappointed.
In the business context, if we believe someone is more important to us, that gives them the perfect opportunity to screw us over. I remember the first time I met one of my favorite marketing gurus. This person had just given a speech in front of several thousand people and was standing at a valet line with me, waiting for his car. I told this person how much I admired his work. He thanked me and then proceeded to try and sell me an expensive marketing consulting program. He took my compliment and apparent deference as an invitation to sell me something.
Several years ago I had a problem with a very expensive piece of real estate whose value had fallen dramatically, and I needed to refinance. I found someone I believed to be one of the best attorneys for this sort of thing in Los Angeles and went to seek their counsel. I went in and was very desperate and pleaded for help. They billed me $50,000 for doing everything other than what I needed done—and then asked for more money to do what needed to be done. I literally got nothing. I was taken advantage of because I was desperate for help and gave them all the power.
I have been on the receiving end of several bad crushes in my time and also on the giving end. The relationships that are most likely to work are not when you have a crush on someone or vice versa. When you have a crush on someone, that person realizes that you have given them all the power. They will either use you (or take advantage of you), or they will simply be turned off by you. People generally want some sort of challenge in their romantic relationships, and the second they spot weakness, they generally go elsewhere.
Because most people are so insecure, they generally will imitate many people around them. This form of imitation means that they are giving people around them the power.
I grew up in a town called Grosse Pointe in Michigan. For whatever reason, the style of dress there among men is downright strange—it still is and has always been. Many men do things like wear green shorts with pink shirts and penny loafers without socks.
A few years ago, I was at a bachelor party in Las Vegas that was particularly wild. When I got to the day party after a drive from Los Angeles, I went into the hotel suite where it was being held and there was blood all over the room. Several people were passed out in the middle of the afternoon, and the groom was rolling around on a couch with a woman he had met in the hotel bar. After a few hours of this, I decided I had to drive home—I’ve never used drugs, and this party was too far out of control and dangerous.
I walked downstairs and was waiting in another valet line. I heard a few men beside me talking:
“Look at those fags!” one of them said, and a few guys started laughing.
I looked up and along came a group of guys who looked like they were from Grosse Pointe. I had not been back in a decade. One had a pink shirt on and a few were wearing penny loafers (with shorts) and no socks. They were wearing various bright-colored shorts.
“Are you guys from Grosse Pointe?” I asked.
“Yeah, how did you know?!” one asked.
Over 1,000 miles away — and I could spot these guys. They looked positively ridiculous. Why were they all dressed this way? Because they were imitating those around them.
If you do not recognize your own self-worth, you will consistently imitate those around you. If everyone started wearing chicken costumes 24/ 7, you would too.
Is there anything wrong with imitating a ridiculous style of dress? I do not think so, for the most part. What is wrong, though, is when we give our authority to other people, groups and so forth and base our happiness on this.
The rarest sort of people are the ones who take back the power they have given others over themselves and pave their own way in the world. They base their happiness on how they want to feel—and not on how a power other than themselves says they should feel. Your happiness, sense of achievement and sense of balance needs to come from within and not outside of yourself. When you give power to others, you set yourself up for perpetual unhappiness and disappointment.
Your power must come from within.
About Harrison Barnes
Harrison Barnes is the Founder of BCG Attorney Search and a successful legal recruiter himself. Harrison is extremely committed to and passionate about the profession of legal placement. His firm BCG Attorney Search has placed thousands of attorneys. BCG Attorney Search works with attorneys to dramatically improve their careers by leaving no stone unturned in a search and bringing out the very best in them. Harrison has placed the leaders of the nation’s top law firms, and countless associates who have gone on to lead the nation’s top law firms. There are very few firms Harrison has not made placements with. Harrison’s writings about attorney careers and placements attract millions of reads each year. He coaches and consults with law firms about how to dramatically improve their recruiting and retention efforts. His company LawCrossing has been ranked on the Inc. 500 twice. For more information, please visit Harrison Barnes’ bio.
About BCG Attorney Search
BCG Attorney Search matches attorneys and law firms with unparalleled expertise and drive that gets results. Known globally for its success in locating and placing attorneys in law firms of all sizes, BCG Attorney Search has placed thousands of attorneys in law firms in thousands of different law firms around the country. Unlike other legal placement firms, BCG Attorney Search brings massive resources of over 150 employees to its placement efforts locating positions and opportunities that its competitors simply cannot. Every legal recruiter at BCG Attorney Search is a former successful attorney who attended a top law school, worked in top law firms and brought massive drive and commitment to their work. BCG Attorney Search legal recruiters take your legal career seriously and understand attorneys. For more information, please visit www.BCGSearch.com.
Filed Under : Featured, Life Lessons
Tagged:
Job Market
recent posts
Your résumé is an extremely important document. There are entire books written about how to craft them. I have written at least one myself. There are scores of résumé consultants, companies, and others that will work on your résumé for a fee. Hiring one of these services can be useful and can improve your résumé. Nevertheless, most résumés can improve dramatically by following the below advice.
In this article Harrison explains how you can do better in your career by selling. The most successful people are absolute masters at sales. Selling is among the most important career skills you can have. When you know how to sell something you can do exceptionally well wherever you go. Knowing how to sell something is a key to survival, advancement, fame, and fortune. Everything we do is about making a sale. Selling yourself is about showing others the value you can bring them. So package yourself to the best of your ability, always be at your best and sell yourself. Develop your sales skills and do not be afraid to sell anything. Whatever your goal in life, becoming an effective salesman will help you achieve it.
It is absolutely vital to be in control of your life and career. When you fail to control your life, someone else will step in to do so and fit your life into their plans. Understand that it is in others’ interests to establish control over your life and work, and instead exert control yourself over your life and the events around you.
Do not be a dabbler, or someone who turns away in the face of stress; the secret to long-term happiness is to instead confront and push through these stress factors. Do not be discouraged by difficulties, but find ways to persist and deal with the stress. Confronting problems head-on is the key to improvement, and will take you much further than the dabblers who fail to approach their careers with commitment.
In this article Harrison discusses how persistent pursuit of something you believe in, against all obstacles, is one of the most important keys to success. So many of us just decide at some point not to push through and not to keep going even when a little bit of extra effort would push us through. The secret to being incredibly good at everything is pushing through and getting better and better when others around you are quitting. Even while hiring, employers want experts and people who are the best at what they are doing–they do not want dabblers. They want to hire the person who is incredibly committed to a job and has persisted against odds in one direction when others have given up.
In this article Harrison suggests that you actually may be safer getting a job without the help of family or friends. It is exceedingly rare that a friend or family member will ever be able to get you a position. They may not even want to help you get a job for various reasons. Their involvement in your job search may actually hurt you. The organization may actually look upon you negatively if you try to use a friend or family member to get a job. So going through a close contact is often counterproductive to your job search. Even if you get a position through a friend or family member, you could harm your relationship with that person in the process. Your friend or family member’s act of kindness may ultimately unbalance your relationship. The risks involved in this kind of job far outweigh the potential rewards.
A powerful sense of self will make all the difference in your life. You must understand that your sense of yourself and your capabilities come from inside of you, not from the external forces that have brought you to your current place in life. What you feel internally might be completely different from what the world is telling you, and you must learn to focus on the former rather than the latter.
In this article, Harrison explains the importance of making an effort in your job which is way above what is expected of you. When you have been given certain responsibilities, it means that someone is dependent on you for certain things. When you fulfill these duties far more efficiently, put in a lot more time and effort, and even stay back on weekends and holidays to complete or do extra work, your employers get the message that you are sharing their burden of pressures with them and begin to place tremendous trust in you. This is what paves the path to your promotion and growth in the company. Harrison believes that you need to develop the correct attitude and possess an extraordinary work ethic to thrive in the job you do.
In this article Harrison discusses how resisting change and not taking necessary and relevant action can be the biggest obstacles to a better career and better life. Resistance is something that prevents most people from ever changing. Resisting change can be highly damaging to your growth in your career and life. Instead of allowing your life to be controlled by external circumstances, choose to take action and bring about a change. Conduct a brutal self analysis if needed, to clear the blocks you have in your mind and to bring about change that is necessary. Most people give up. They do not persist. You need strategies and beliefs that will allow you to persist and persevere, so that you can change. The best strategy is to be focused, and this focus will help you overcome the resistance you face whenever you make an effort to begin changing.
Adopting a positive attitude will always bring you closer to success, as nobody wants to be associated with a losing side. Everyone wants to associate with and hire winners, and avoids losers. Nothing is more important than maintaining a positive attitude, as many employers hire people based primarily on attitude; with the right attitude, everything else will fall into place. You must look like you are on the winning team, even if times are tough; nobody wants to hire a loser.
The past does not dictate the future, so you should not use inductive reasoning to make conclusions about your life or career. Recognize when you are making incorrect conclusions based on past events, and switch to deductive reasoning in which you are not limited by the past. You will find your conclusions to be much more accurate, and you will succeed as a result.
When I was an attorney, I stopped going out to lunch with other attorneys during the day. The reason was not that I was not hungry. Instead, I stopped going out to lunch because just about everyone I worked with would want to dedicate the lunch to a critique—whether it was critiquing our bosses, coworkers, or others. When these people were not being critiqued, the job itself was being critiqued. When the job was not being critiqued, the attorney’s home life was being critiqued.
In this article Harrison discusses the significance of conditioning yourself to develop behaviors that will elevate you in your life. One of the most difficult things for anyone to do is to get leverage over themselves and condition themselves to go in a new direction. Very few people are ever able to make very fundamental transformations in their lives and become someone completely new and completely improved—and stick with it. Major improvements in our lives come only when we condition ourselves over and over again in one direction. You need to get leverage over yourself and condition new habits and behaviors within yourself to make any sort of fundamental and lasting change. The conditioning needs to be part of your lifestyle. You need to condition yourself to adopt new patterns in your life.
Going after companies on an “explosive growth” trend is among the most interesting and beneficial things you can do in your job search, as many such companies will hire you even if they do not have openings. Similarly, you can get hired in booming industries and geographical areas even if there are no openings, simply by showing up. Apply to growing companies, even if they do not have open positions.
Two fundamental laws of the universe are that order leads to disorder, and disorder leads to order. Since disorder always leads to order, you must always view disorder as a positive rather than a negative; disorder in your life is an opportunity to reorganize your life and career into something better. Making both order and disorder work for you will enhance your chances of success in career and life.
Think about your ultimate purpose in life, and what you are currently doing to accomplish it. Everyone is gifted with unique talents, and a failure to identify and utilize yours would be tragic for your life and career. The greater purpose you identify in your life, the greater the obstacles you will face. If you persevere and push through these hurdles, you will find the rewards to also be correspondingly greater.
Your perceptions of the world determine your reactions, and your reactions in turn determine your destiny. External factors do not dictate your life and destiny so much as your response to them, which is usually dictates by your emotional state. You must challenge yourself to make the best use of disorder in your life, and use it as a basis to develop a superior kind of order.
Be the person you want to be; if you see yourself naturally going in a certain direction, then you must allow yourself to go that way. Be grateful for every little thing in your life, and you will position yourself to receive more good things. You must hold the correct mindset to achieve a successful life and career; “get your mind right”, look at the world differently, and get away from your established ways of doing things.
There are two kinds of people; value creators and value extractors. Your career success will largely depend on your skill at either of these two things. Value extractors prefer an environment where value is already being created, while value creators look for areas of maximum opportunity. While value extractors seek stable careers, value creators seek to build up organizations rather than work within them. You need to decide if you are a value creator or extractor, commit to one or the other, and never look back.
It is important to have high standards. For the most part, life will pay any price you ask of it. The people who achieve the most in the world have incredibly high standards. It is like this with businesses as well. A great piece of machinery, or a great service, is like this because of the standards that are followed.
Rely on facts and statistics rather than opinions; when you depend on mere opinions, you inevitably face disastrous consequences. You must understand the difference between facts and opinions, analyze both, and adopt the former while disregarding the latter to make productive decisions.
Your skills and abilities merit profound appreciation; you must therefore place yourself in an environment where you will be so appreciated, and not subject to the negative opinions of others. People tend to believe the negative information that they hear about themselves. A work situation where you are unappreciated will tax your two greatest assets, your self-worth and your sanity.
Salesmanship is one of the most important skills you can have in your job hunt. You can use personality as a means of standing out and selling yourself, making sure that it comes through in everything you are doing. By injecting personality into your job search, you will soon notice changes in your life and career. People with personality succeed in sales because they draw attention; employers want to hire people with personalities, and a good personality can be your best job hunting tool.
In this article Harrison explains why the ability to close a sale is the most important skill in selling. Many people may get consumers interested in their products and lead them to the edge of making the sale, but it is the final push where the customer makes the actual purchasing decision which is the most important. Similarly it is good to be able to secure an interview, but what actually counts is the ability to push the employer to make the final hiring decision. There are a million possible closing techniques ranging from using the power of money and the power of issuing a deadline to identifying with a particular cause that could be important to the employer. All you need to do is tap into your instinctual ability and push employers that extra bit to ensure you get the job.
It is very important that you always ask questions in an interview when given the opportunity. Here are some good questions to ask and why you should ask them.
People who fail to reach their career goals are too complacent, rely too much on the opinions of others, allow difficulties to progress into ruin, and associate success with negative things. You have to establish success as a firm “must” in your life, associate your success with positive things, develop a workable strategy for success, and follow through with your plans. Never be a dabbler or give up in the face of adversity.
In this article Harrison explains the need to accept yourself the way you are. Harrison believes that most of us are not confident that we are good enough, or capable enough. Because of this hole within ourselves, we allow others to help us when we do not need help, fail to consistently feel content with our lives and accomplishments, and neglect to feel satisfied with who we are. We always feel a sense of lack. The most important thing you can ever do for yourself is overcome this sense of lack. Believe in yourself and your worth: you can accomplish all those things about which others would have you believe differently.
Related Posts:
Harrison Barnes:
Getting Ahead:
The Role of Jobs in Today's World:
Career Advice:
© 2025 Harrisonbarnes All Rights Reserved
Speak Your Mind
Tell us what you're thinking...
and oh, if you want a pic to show with your comment, go get a gravatar!
You must be logged in to post a comment.