Life Lessons

One of the stranger moments in my career came when I joined the now defunct law firm, Dewey Ballantine. I was in Los Angeles, and the firm flew us out to New York for orientation with all of the new associates in the firm. A good portion of the new associates...

How to Attract Success is a book I know you will enjoy greatly. Here, Sears introduces the concept of the Law of Harmonious Attraction. Under this law, things come to us in the world not because we want them to and make them do so; but because they want...

The most successful people in the world share the common characteristic of sharing, or concentrating on the value that they give back to others rather than on their own growth and profit. Focusing on yourself never leads to long-term success, but leads instead to unhappiness as well as emotional and financial challenges. Your greatest consideration, therefore, should be how you can contribute to others, and how your actions can impact their lives.

Your thought process is a powerful determinant of your success or failure. Find a connection or unifying bond among the millions of thoughts that cross your mind every day, and use them to the greatest possible effect. Rather than dwell on negative thoughts that could undermine you, strengthen your mindset by asking yourself empowering questions; you will find that the answers to these questions constitute excellent career advice.

You can easily make your vision of yourself more real when you start to do the things the person you want to be would do. Your life is defined by your beliefs and convictions about who you are. You can always change your behavior, but never your perception of who you are. The first step to making a meaningful change is to become aware of your unconscious beliefs about who you are and change them. You need to be able to believe and think positively about yourself and your capabilities and not be held back by negativity. Negative beliefs about yourself will harm you.

The most successful people in the world have found new ways of expressing themselves professionally. To be continually successful, it is vital for you to reinvent yourself and find new, fresh approaches to the world. Settling into a single way of doing things is dangerous as it makes you predicable, and therefore easier to replicate and ultimately replace.

My wife and I enjoy taking classes. We’ve taken classes in meditation, various exercise classes, acting classes, different types of yoga, Eastern religion, and even classes that simply deal with the nature and meaning of various things. Several years...

Many people fall prey to the false attractiveness of the ego, allowing it to dominate their lives and hinder their progress. To conquer your ego you must establish a sense of what is and is not correct, and introduce discipline to your business and personal lives. This means your work will result from true effort rather than cutting corners, and you will be respected for the ethics that govern your actions.

In this article Harrison talks about the external and internal world. We have some–but certainly nowhere near total control over what happens in the external world. However, we do have control over the internal world. The internal world is comprised of our own emotions, how we think and feel about those events that occur in the external world. It is important that we do everything within our power to control our internal worlds. We should guard our internal world and take care to use it for ourselves, and not against ourselves. Problems are always going to be there. You can’t always stop them. What you can control, however, is your response to the problems that come up. Your nature of response is a key indicator to your control over your internal world and ultimately to your happiness and well being.

Many people have intuitions about areas in which they would like to improve or things that they would like to avoid. Your intuition is usually correct, and trusting it can help you avoid bad things that might befall others who ignore their intuition. People are all aware, on some level, of the things holding them back, but few people are willing to acknowledge and address these things. Knowledge of your weaknesses and what you should do about them comes from your intuition.

Anyone can be up when things are going well, but the real challenge comes when things are not. Do not look at problems, which are inevitable for any person or business, in a negative light; think of them instead as challenges, lessons, or opportunities. There is a silver lining to be found in every problem, and finding that silver lining will enable you to grow.

Frederic Van Rensselaer Dey’s The Magic Story first appeared in 1990 and created an immediate sensation worldwide. The book is in two parts and the author has remarkably woven the fundamental principles of the ‘New Thought Movement’,...

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.

To be happy, you must create the life that you want on your own terms. Structure your life in a manner that is fulfilling to you, rather than a vision of what you want to be or a vision that outside influences have created for you. The inability to design your own life is one of the worst tragedies that can befall you. When you design your own life you are in complete charge of your life’s events, and you set the rules any way you choose.

Focus on what you are doing, not what others around you are doing. There are people to take action towards their goals, and then there people who sit on the sidelines and comment on the first group of people. People who are mostly interested in gossip and watching others usually lack the confidence and determination to take action themselves. The most successful people go account and accomplish things rather than sit back and watch others make things happen.

Someone who wants to succeed in finding a job must understand marketing. Regardless of what you do, your job search is a marketing operation. The more effectively you market yourself, the more jobs you will get, the better jobs you will get, and the more successful you will be. The people who market themselves most effectively are the ones who do the best in their careers.

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 his book, Character-Building Thought Power, Ralph Waldo Trine draws a clear distinction between good and bad habits. In the process he raises questions as to whether we have control over habit forming and character building, or is it just a matter...

In this article Harrison reveals some secrets of success. According to Harrison most people who become super successful commonly have utilized ‘motivating force’ and ‘routine’. They have a strong sense of love, lack, rejection or anger and they incorporate routine and discipline into their career and life strategy. People who are not successful generally do not have that same motivating force and/or discipline to achieve their goals. In order for people to become extremely successful, people generally need both. However, having an internal motivating force is so powerful that you too can succeed with it alone. In order to reach your full potential, it is important that you understand these success factors. How you use motivating emotions is something that is going to determine how well you do in your career and in your life. Nothing is more important than using these motivating emotions in a positive and empowering way.

If you are very good at something, you should improve on it (try to stay inspired) and continue doing it. The biggest mistake you can make is abandoning something that is working. Do what you are good at.

You can change your life forever by harnessing the power of persistence. Think about the people in your life, and whether they empower you or hinder you in achieving your goals. You must win at all costs, and persist until you succeed.

You can never become too comfortable if you wish to be successful. Your success will largely depend on your ability to become dissatisfied with your current position. Successful people are never satisfied with the status quo, and constantly push beyond their comfort zone. When do you this and succeed, you set a new standard for normality in your life. Be continually dissatisfied, and always pushing yourself beyond your comfort zone.

Throughout our commercial career we require to attend several meetings. Most of these are a complete waste of time as they are unfocused and more often result in no action taking place. In this publication authored by Sean McPheat, the Founder and Managing...

It is important to have a career that makes you happy, rather than pursuing a career simply because you or others think that you should. Life too short not to be doing the things that you really want to do with your life. If you do not yet know the kind of work that makes you genuinely happy, you need to go and find it.

I’ve tried to provide you with as much information as possible about mistakes to avoid when you are interviewing. Mastering these elements can ensure your success when interviewing and make you more likely to get the job.

Creating a sense of urgency is one of the most important things you can do in your job search. Understand that your career is itself a commodity and you need to sell yourself, and your salesmanship will determine your career success. Creating a sense of urgency will always help you close your sale.

There is vast potential beneath the surface of each individual person, and it is the same with the job market. Many people fail in there job search because they only pursue one tactic, find nothing, and conclude that there are no jobs available. When looking for a job, you need to go deep beneath the surface, and exhaust every job board, employer website, and other possible avenue in order to get ahead.

In this article Harrison discusses the importance of putting your efforts in the right direction. The most important decision you can make is deciding where you are going to put your effort. If you choose the right field for your efforts, you will frequently be richly rewarded (even if you do not have a lot of skill in the field). When you identify something that the market wants, and provide it, then you can frequently do quite well—even if you are not particularly skilled. It is just a question of being at the right place at the right time and taking action. In your career, very little is more important than where you choose to focus your effort. Nothing is more important than working somewhere with opportunity and where you are being carried away by the wind of a positive economic current.

My first job out of law school was working for a federal judge in Northern Michigan. The position did not pay very well, but that did not matter to me at all. I decided I was going to “live it up!”

In this book, Managing Your Career, Sean McPheat gives readers a practical plan on how to go about taking control of their careers, no matter what field they are in. Sean is the Founder and Managing Director of MTD Training. He has asked readers to identify...

There are many different types of suffering that it is important to balance in your life. Physical, psychological, and spiritual suffering are all interconnected, and you must balance them so that you do not experience any one in greater proportion to the others; balancing the suffering in your life will lead you to greater fulfillment.

Your reactions to the world around you determine your state of mind and your progress in life. While most people tend to blame others for what is happening to them, you must learn to react in a positive way. You must understand that you usually cannot change the people and things around you, but you can control your reactions to these things; when you choose not to react negatively, you open the door to growth and fulfillment.

In this article Harrison discusses why emotional connections are so important in the workplace. In virtually every company, there are people who are not needed at all but are kept in the jobs due to some emotional connection. In every industry when layoffs occur, generally the first to go are those who do not have an emotional connection to the organization. According to Harrison there is a huge value attached to having emotional connections in your job. The holiday party, invitations to spend time with your boss outside of work, and other similar occasions are extremely important because they are a chance to form an emotional connection with the people you are working with. The emotional connection will take you farther and will last longer than any other sort of connection.

Address your weaknesses, and offset them complementary strengths when they become an issue. You want to be trusted and your weaknesses to be overlooked. When interviewing, you must bring up and address your weaknesses to your employers before bringing up your strengths. Employers are more likely to pay attention to your strengths if they have already been made aware of your weaknesses, and you in turn will have more credibility. You must always be sure to follow up a discussion of your weaknesses with complementary strengths.