Life Lessons

Some of the happiest, most well-adjusted, and most effective people I know are also people who have a profound ability to disconnect from their work. They can disconnect rapidly and put themselves in another state of mind that does not involve work. Some...

True self-esteem comes from within, not from the acceptance of others. When your sense of worth comes from within, you free yourself from comparisons with others and will enjoy a greater sense of internal security. You will no longer be bogged down by the experiences of others and can become much more self-reliant.

Do not be distracted by your insecurities and doubts, or you will never achieve success because you will not allow it to happen. Focus only on the message about your skills and capabilities. Identify your goals and create a gameplan, and fill your mind with positive and hopeful messages that will drive you towards said goal.

You must seek to understand the different beliefs of the people around you. Everyone holds their own unique set of beliefs, and attempts to question or change them will only work to your peril. Therefore, you must seek out and work with people who share your beliefs. When people perceive you as having beliefs similar to their own, they will be much more likely to accept you and you will ultimately achieve more career success and happiness.

Education is a gigantic industry, and there are many employers for whom you can work. One of the most rewarding things about is teaching career is your ability to draw upon and profit from your experience. The ideal way to find a teaching position is to go directly to the source of where you hope to work.

In this article Harrison discusses the role of criticism in helping a person grow, evolve, and excel. People generally want to avoid criticism. Many people will do everything within their power to find the “right” people who will say positive things about them and give them approval. But this does not help. You need to make sure that when you ask people around you for constructive criticism, you are doing it so that you can make changes and improve your skills, methods, and understanding of your job. Most people fail to learn from criticism and therefore cannot adapt in response to it. You need to make sure you incorporate criticism into what you do to ensure that you become a better person.

If you want to rise to the top, you need to create as much value as possible. The message is also pretty simple: the more value you create, generally, the greater your fall will ultimately be when you stop creating value.

In this article Harrison offers an insight into the working of the subconscious mind in order to get success in one’s career and life. Visualizing the result beforehand is a powerful way to get what you want. According to Harrison, programming the mind through repetition almost tilts the results in your favor. Writing down goals and reading and visualizing them every day will make your dream a reality. Additionally, you can also charge up your mind through meditation and self-hypnosis. By positively influencing the mind, with the help of positive inputs, you can keep your subconscious state happy and harmonious too.

Pursue your own dreams and become the person that you want to be, rather than what others might want. Living life according to the wishes of others is meaningless, and will bring you neither happiness nor success. Others do not understand your capabilities, goals, and interests as well as you do, hence their opinions should be your least concern. Have faith in your own potential greatness, and you will develop the confidence to act upon it and be the person that you really want to be, achieving true fulfillment.

Working with a recruiter can open more doors, and help you can jobs more effectively than if you were tracking down openings on your own. A poor recruiter, however, can leave you even worse off than you were on your own. Be very careful about the recruiter with whom your work, and try to find one that specializes in your niche or field.

In this article Harrison discusses how your brain is the single greatest determinant of what will end up happening to you in your career and life. Many of the common problems that people suffer from, such as distraction, worry, anger and more, are often related to a brain malfunction. When your brain works right, then you work right. If your brain has trouble, then you are likely to have trouble. Focusing on what you love, being grateful and meditation can help your brain. There are psychological things that are likely influencing you, and there may even be organic things that are influencing what is happening with you. Getting to the bottom of your brain and what is going on inside of you may be among the most effective career moves you will ever make.

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.

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.

What you believe about yourself, your abilities, and what you’re capable of will predict how successfully you live your life.  If you believe you’re capable of great things, this will dictate your life course.  Conversely, if you don’t believe...

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.

One of the most inspiring people in American history is Benjamin Franklin.  Something that very few people realize is that Franklin also wrote what is arguably one of the best self-improvement books ever written, The Biography of Benjamin Franklin....

A few months ago I was temporarily staying in Pasadena, California, about an hour from home, where I’d been dropped off without a car.  I didn’t know how I’d manage.  My hotel was just a 20-minute walk from the office, but living in Southern...

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.