Featured
View Count: 2164
Many years ago, I decided that I was not that good at math. This happened with seemingly good reason. I got an F in algebra in the ninth grade. However, I did not get an F because I was not capable of doing the work. I got an F because I never once did homework for the class—and was too distracted by other stuff during class to follow what was going on. I was a misbehaving, distracted, and lazy kid. I could get good grades in just about every other class without doing homework, but in math this was impossible. So I decided I was bad at math.
As a consequence of deciding I was bad in math, I never did that well in math classes even when I forced myself to start doing homework in tenth grade after receiving dire warnings from my parents and the school about my future if I did not shape up. Despite an identity that I was bad at math, for some strange reason I always did much better on the math portion of standardized tests than other sections. To my astonishment when I took a standardized test for graduate school admissions I got a near perfect, 99th percentile on the math portion of the test. I had done something similar (but not as extraordinary) on the math portion of the SATs for college. I also took three semesters of calculus in college and during my last semester of the class, I started getting As on all my tests. It did not make any sense that I was good at something I had been telling myself I was bad at for most of my life.
Forgetting how much I hated math, I decided to apply to and then attend Stanford Business School to get a master’s degree in business. On the second day of orientation, I received a few textbooks dealing with various numbers and spreadsheets. I opened the books and they looked positively puzzling. The first lecture I went to was a three-hour lecture about spreadsheets and numbers. I had no idea whatsoever what the professor was talking about and sat there confused as other students took notes. Then the Dean of the business school got up and made a speech to all the new students about how Stanford Business School was all about “quantitative skills” and “numbers.”
There’s no freaking way I am going to fit in with this stuff, I thought to myself as he was speaking. What the heck have I gotten myself into?
I figured there was no way I was ever going to understand this business math stuff. Partially due to my profound belief that I did not speak either “spreadsheet” or “math,” I dropped out of the school a few days later to the astonishment of the administrators.
In reality, I am not bad at math. The reason I told myself I was bad at math for so long is actually a pretty simple one: I’ve always hated doing math-related homework. For me, it requires sitting down for long stretches of time with a pencil and paper and going over and over problems. I do not have the patience for doing this for hours on end. In fact, I despise doing math-related homework. When I was younger, an easy way to spend my evenings enjoying television shows and video games was to declare I am “bad at math,” so I did not have to do the homework. Being “bad at math” allowed me to be much more comfortable. When I went to business school, deciding I was “bad at math” made it so easy I did not have to go back to school and, instead, could enjoy myself working in my company.
I am much more comfortable with an identity of being “bad at math” than I would be telling myself I’m “good at math.” Instead of being disappointed in myself for not liking math—or doing math homework–long ago I developed the identity that I am bad at math.
What’s so stupid about this identity is that it is not true at all. I am actually not bad at math; however, rather than confront a part of myself that is lazy, does not enjoy the tedium of doing math homework, and adopted an identity of being bad at something long ago—I have, instead, accepted this identity that I am bad at something in order to be comfortable and not change my ways.
How many things are you good at that you tell yourself you are bad at in order to be comfortable?
My belief is that you probably tell yourself you are not good at many things because it is easier for you to tell yourself you are bad at something than it is for you to deal with the stress associated with what it takes to be very good at something. It is much easier to be average and mediocre at something than it is to be good at something.
If you truly want to be good at something, you are surely going to experience more stress and uncertainty than you would by being good at something. For many people, a negative identity is more comfortable than a positive identity. You may be more comfortable in the short run telling yourself you are bad at something. In the long run, though, you will never reach your full potential in anything by reassuring yourself that you are bad at something.
Most people assign one or more of the following sorts of personality traits to themselves:
Some of these personality characteristics could be accurate—others may not be. If you have assigned some negative characteristics to yourself, it is likely you are doing this because it is easier for you being the negative characteristic than the positive opposite.
Adopting negative characteristics for ourselves makes us more comfortable than the positive ones.
The problem with adopting negative characteristics for ourselves is that doing this stops us from growing in a certain direction we could otherwise grow in. A common characteristic people assign to themselves and others is being introverted. People are social animals and while people can be legitimately introverted, most people deep down would prefer to be close to others and associating with others. The problem with associating with others, though, is that when you do this, you are going to have moments that are painful. Conflicts with other people are always going to occur. These conflicts are part of life and are also part of what makes us grow. It is more comfortable for many people to avoid conflict and to do this, they simply avoid people.
When it comes right down to it, there are probably numerous things you could be exceptional at if you did not give yourself a negative identity associated with them. In business, for example, many people tell themselves things like they are “bad salespeople” or “poor networkers.” If you tell yourself you’re a bad salesperson, then you will not have to get out and sell people and face rejection. Similarly, if you tell yourself you are a poor networker, you will not have to risk rejection either.
Most people prefer comfort and certainty over uncertainty. If you are always seeking comfort, though, the odds are pretty good that you are going to be left far behind in your career and life. You need to set yourself up for constant and never-ending improvement–and the only way to do this is to throw off any negative identities you have for yourself that you may have adopted because they make you comfortable. A negative identity is almost always something you are using as a safety mechanism to keep yourself comfortable and to give you more certainty in your life.
People almost always adopt negative personality traits because they are seeking some sort of comfort and avoiding the pain that would be associated with adopting a more positive personality trait. When you have total and complete certainty, though, you lose your edge—and you stop growing. You also tend to get bored. When we are bored, we generally become unhappy.
To become happy, adopt positive personality traits and not negative ones.
THE LESSON
Do not convince yourself of your own negative traits. We often adopt negative characteristics rather than positive ones to excuse ourselves from things we find unpleasant. If you are always seeking comfort, though, you will most likely be left behind in your life and career. You must identify and abandon the negative traits you have adopted for the sake of comfort, and don’t shy away from the pain that may be associated with adopting a more positive personality trait.
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, How to Succeed
Tagged: apply for a job, attorney jobs, attorney search, career advice, job blog | a harrison barnes, job search, legal career, legal profession, negative traits, personality traits, positively puzzling, quantitative skills, stanford business school, television shows
Job Market
recent posts
In this article Harrison talks about releasing the lack that you feel, in order to reach your full potential. If a sense of lack dominates your thinking, it will affect your interaction with the world and how the world sees you. There are many areas of your life where you are coming from a position of lack. Your ability to release this lack and go forward with your life can create a tremendous sense of peace and more natural accomplishments in your world. The amount of lack that people see out there is profound and it has a massive impact on their lives. According to Harrison, the most successful people in the world see the world as a place of opportunity and not lack.
When faced with difficult times, you must develop the ability to transcend the trouble around you instead of giving up or assuming that nothing can be done about your situation. Keep your wits about you and take charge of the situation, and you will find yourself on track for constant improvement and career success.
It is extremely important that you enjoy your job. Most people find themselves in jobs that they resent, and eventually make this resentment known by appearing disinterested and distracted. Success comes from being engaged in and grateful for your work. You can define your job according to your own vision; you can either choose to engage with your work, or avoid and despise what you do. People recognize and appreciate those who are enthusiastic about their work.
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.
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.