The Morris Plan

That Job is Not Just Boring -- It's Killing You!

Continuing with my theme of the importance of working for yourself, I now offer evidence that your boring job may well be killing you.

In an article to be published in the International Journal of Epidemiology, Annie Britton and Martin Shipley of University College London will report that job boredom can kill you.

They analyzed questionnaires completed by London civil service employees between 1985 and 1988, with an age range of 35 to 55. The employees were asked if they had felt bored at work during the previous month.  After approximately 25 years had passed, Shipley and Britton looked to see how many of the employees had died by April 2009.

The employees who had responded that they had been very bored were two and a half times more likely to die of a heart problem than those who hadn't reported being bored.

The researchers try to blunt the report a little by saying that the true risk factor might be the lack of exercise and good diet.  In other words, a depressed person might report being bored, and would likely be the sort of person that does not have the energy to exercise.  But to me that just sidesteps the reality.  If the person had a fulfilling job or, far better, their own business, they would likely not be depressed or bored and would be more likely to exercise.

Bottom line:  That boring, life-sucking job is killing you.  February is National Start a Business Month.  Make it happen.

When Conducting a Job Search, It’s Easy to Distinguish Yourself

It’s not often that I get to observe the hiring process first hand. I’ve had ZERO turnover in my employees since starting my firm, which says something about my screening process and their loyalty.

We recently found ourselves in need of a part time paralegal, which afforded me the opportunity observe and offer insights into the recruitment and hiring process. Here is how it started:

I placed an employment ad on a job site, explaining that we were looking for a part time paralegal. I stressed this point, imploring people not to apply if they were really interested in full time work.

I like prospective employees to apply a certain way, so the ad directed them to a prior article on this blog, entitled, "One Employer’s View of Job Hunting Screw-ups." I asked that they read the article before submitting their resume. The article made these strong suggestions:

1. Read the listing carefully to make sure you understand what the employer is seeking;

2. Always submit resumes as PDF files, not in Word format (unless requested to do so); and

3. Target the employer.

I received 57 emails over a five day period. Out of those 57 applicants:

– 27 submitted their resumes in Word format when PDF was specifically requested.

– 13 did not attach resumes at all, but instead just put the resume text in the email (some offering the explanation that they did not know how to create a PDF).

– 17 submitted resumes as PDF files as requested.

– 2 made reference to the wrong job in the email.

– 5 specifically wrote that they were looking for full time work.

– 6 mentioned why they were looking for part time work.

You’ve probably heard friends and acquaintances bemoaning the job market. They may have said something like, "I’ve sent out over 500 resumes and have not received a single call." May I humbly submit that the above numbers may say why?

A good paralegal needs to be very detail oriented, and while I am of course ultimately responsible for his or her work, I would hope that he or she would catch details that I might miss. If an applicant submits a resume in the wrong format, regarding a job that requires attention to hundreds of procedural rules, how can I reasonably consider that applicant? Thus, as an initial matter, the applicants that took a few extra seconds to read the job ad and submitted their resumes in the proper format improved their odds from one out of 57 to one out of 17. (I received one very angry email telling me how unreasonable I was being "to expect people to buy Adobe in this economy." You don’t need to buy anything to convert a Word file to PDF. See www.primopdf.com.)

The ad also expressed that while the job was part time, we were very flexible on the schedule. Five of the 17 distinguished themselves by explaining why part time work was perfect for their situations, thereby providing me with confidence they were not just settling for part time work until they could find a full time position.

And finally, only TWO took it to the next level and did a little detective work to determine to whom they were responding. I don’t know whether they did this because the article suggested it or it was already their practice, but these two people targeted their email directly at my firm’s areas of law, making it sound as though this was a fit made in heaven.

The article also suggests that an applicant should "follow up without being a pain" in order to keep their name in front of the employer. Out of the 57 applicants, just ONE sent follow up emails.

I might be tempted to think that some of these applicants gave this particular job a half-hearted effort because it was only a part time position, but these numbers were typical of what I have seen in the past. The numbers demonstrate how, with just a few extra minutes of effort, you can move yourself to the top of the stack and greatly improve your odds. 

Stop thinking quantity and go for quality.  Focus on the job, and customize your approach.  Even your resume should be tailored to that specific job.  And if you don't quite match the qualifications sought by the employer, sell yourself and explain why that will not be a problem.

Practice Makes Permanent

I was watching a humorous video of a race car driver, apparently competing in a cross-country race. The car was equipped with an inside camera to permit watching the driver and where he was going. The driver lost control, left the race course and ended up in a lake. As the car slowly sank beneath the waves, you see and hear him reach down and set the parking brake. Obviously it made no sense to set the parking break on a sinking car, but that was what he had always done when his car came to a stop, so practice had made that response permanent, regardless of the circumstances.

This reality is not always humorous. When I attended the police academy, we studied what had come to be known as the "Newhall Incident" wherein four police officers were killed by two criminals. Four trained officers in two cars pulled over a car containing two suspects, knowing it was a high risk stop. The suspects exited and opened fire, all four police officers returned fire, yet the suspects were able to rush the position of the officers and kill them. How was that possible?

For context, this was back when police carried revolvers, so after firing six rounds the officer had to dump out the shells and reload the weapon. Most officers carried "speed loaders" which were a little device holding six bullets in a circle so the gun could be reloaded with one click instead of one bullet at a time. In a full-on gun battle the reloading time is crucial; that’s why most officers now carry semi-automatics, so they can just slap in a new clip.

In the Newhall Incident, when the pockets of the slain police officers were checked, one or more of them were found to contain spent shell casings. In other words, in the heat of a gun battle, when the time spent reloading could mean the difference between life or death, time had been spent pocketing the spent shells before reloading.  Why would they have done that?

As it turned out, this particular police agency liked to keep its shooting range free of clutter and debris. When the officers were trained to shoot, and every time thereafter when they would return to the range to train or get their annual qualifications, the practice was to dump the rounds into their hands and put them in their pockets so they didn’t end up on the ground, messing up the shooting range. This practice had become so permanent and instinctual, that even in battle the officers could not deviate from this pattern.

You probably won’t be involved in a gun battle any time soon, but the example shows just how firmly ingrained your practices can become. The question for you is, how much of your life is being lived on auto-pilot, following practices that have become permanent, even when they are counterproductive or even self-destructive?

People that come to my office often can’t answer what should be the most basic of questions about their lives. Someone will tell me that they just got fired from a job that they have hated for the ten years they worked there. And they want to sue to get that job back! When I ask why they would work at a miserable job for ten years, I get that deer in the headlights look. When I ask why they didn’t try to find another job during those ten years, they either can’t answer or mumble something about family commitments. The real answer is that they were on auto-pilot the entire time and never had the initiative to switch it back to manual and direct their own lives.

Spend a few days aggressively questioning everything you do in order to uncover all the "auto-pilots" you have adopted in your life. Why am I working at this job, why am I forcing myself to live with this commute, why do I always have lunch with these people, why am I really not doing anything to make myself more employable or to start my own business?  If there are no good answers, change the practices. 

Use the Power of Delegation

I was reading in the paper another one of the hundreds of tales of woe, wherein someone was decrying his inability to find work in this tough economy.  In this particular case, a 41-year-old tool-and-die maker lost his job after working 20 years at the same plant.  His resume has just one work entry and his education consists only of a high school diploma.  His job search efforts have been fruitless, so he has decided to go to a technical college for a two-year mechanical drafting program.

So what does this poor soul have to do with delegation?  I’ll bet if we asked him, he would say that during those 20 years he was barely scraping by.  He certainly could not afford to hire others, he would argue, and had to do every errand around the house himself.  He had no time to go to school.

Wrong, wrong, wrong.  Whatever was keeping him busy after work, whether it was watching the kids or working on the house, if he had delegated those duties, at least part of the time, he could have freed up enough time to attend school at night, even if just once or twice a week.  Over 20 years, he could have earned about four PhDs if he was so inclined.  Instead of starting his education while unemployed, his toughest decision now would be whether he wants to teach calculus at Cornell or political science at Penn State.  I exaggerate to make the point, but he certainly would be in a position to aim higher than drafting school.

I speak from personal experience.  I earned my college degree while working full time as a police officer and running a business, and continued to work through law school.  One of the attorneys in my office began as a legal secretary, obtained her paralegal certificate, and then attended law school at night for four years, all while working full time and raising a son.  She used the power of delegation to free up her time enough to allow her to attend classes three nights a week.

It’s a major cliche, but one that fails to resonate in the minds of so many.  Our attorney was 37 when she started law school, and when some people felt compelled to point out to her that she would be 41 when she graduated, she would just respond, “How old will I be in four years if I don’t go to law school?”  If only the tool-and-die maker had lived that philosophy. 

As stated in my prior post, you have an hourly rate that should not be squandered.  That hourly rate can be immeasurable if by delegating house work, yard work and occasionally the child care to others, you free yourself to improve your situation.

Never Forget Your “Hourly Rate”

A few years back, a local hamburger chain advertised that it was going to sell a burger, fries and a Coke for the 1950s price of a dollar. People waited in line for hours to get this super deal.

Today, Denny’s was giving away free breakfasts. I took a different route to work in order to drive by a Denny’s and see if people were waiting in line. I was pleasantly surprised to see that there were only about ten people in line, but I later saw on the news that at some locations people were, again, waiting hours to get the meal.

This scenario is emblematic of a larger problem that holds back so many people. Never forget that your time has value. By whatever formula you decide to use – what you think your time should be worth or the actual value based on your current job – assign a value to your time. Then apply that number to your daily activities to determine what they are costing you.

Let’s say you are an employee earning $75,000 a year. With benefits, that’s probably closer to $100,000 a year in terms of your total compensation. Assuming around 2000 hours a year of working hours, your effective hourly rate is $50. If you decide you are worth more than that, all the better, but let’s use $50 per hour for our analysis.

When you sit down tonight to watch two hours of American Idol, know that entertainment experience is costing you $100 ($75 if you Tivo it and fast forward through the commercials). I’m not making a value judgment here; you may well decide that $100 is a fair price to pay for American Idol, but you need to make that informed decision.  Many of the people waiting in line at Denny's were paying a very high price for that "free" meal because they don't place any value on their time.

Now it is true that in my situation the hourly cost is quite literal. If I push myself away from the television and go sit at the computer, I can bill hours that I would otherwise delegate to others. But don’t permit yourself to rationalize that your situation is completely different. If your business is not yet in place, that time can be spent getting it there. If you are committed to being a drone employee, the time can be spent looking for a better job or on continuing education for advancement. 

I’ll make the point once more in anticipation of the naysayers. This is not to say that every hour must be productive. Down time has a value as well. But knowing what your activities are costing you allows you to make an informed decision.

Next time: The power of delegation.

Maximize your sales IQ

Everyone sells. Some professions are identified as sales positions, but in reality we all employ sales techniques in our lives and careers to some extent. I have studied sales techniques for decades and find that there are some fundamental mistakes being made by all of us "salespeople."

Don’t offer too much information.

My clients always want more and more information presented at trial, and despite my track record are nervous when I keep telling them that "less is more." Understandably, they think that presenting 100 reasons why they should win is better than presenting ten. In reality, every new fact and theory presents another reason for the jury to find against you.

For example, I recently obtained a million dollar verdict for a client after the defendant failed to repay a loan. The loan amount was around $200,000, but I was able to convince the jury that the utter failure to repay any of the amount owed demonstrated fraudulent intent, so the jury also awarded punitive damages.

We knew that the defendant had failed to repay loans made by others, and my client wanted me to make that fact a part of the trial. Her desire was understandable, because that evidence would have shown a pattern. But that evidence would have presented a new variable. What if defendant could have convinced the jury that the other loans were repaid, or there was some valid reason why they weren’t. The strength of our claim would suddenly be linked to the strength of the evidence as to the unrelated loans.

When you are selling – whether it is a timeshare, project idea, or yourself at an interview – don’t throw out every perceived beneficial fact. A prospective employee once told me about all the volunteer work she was doing, presumably to impress me with her giving nature. But that led me to ask about her time commitments to all this volunteer work, and it soon became clear that her work schedule would have to accommodate the demands of her volunteering. I appreciated the fatal honesty, but I’m sure that was not her intent.

Sound like you don’t care if you make the sale.

The single most important rule of negotiation is that you must be willing to walk away. Every time I buy a car, I am told that my price is too low and out of the question, until I thank the salesperson for his time and go to leave. Then my price suddenly becomes doable.

The same is true when making a sale. You’ll be amazed at how badly people want to buy from you when they are convinced that you and/or your product are so good that you don’t care if you make the sale. I don’t mean that you should come across as arrogant, just confident. I have potential clients call me with matters that don’t involve a lot of money, so after telling them the best way to proceed, I suggest that they find a less experienced attorney who will charge less. Even though I have just told them there are less expensive attorneys that can handle the job, in their mind I become the only attorney for the job and they happily pay my higher rate.

Show deference to the customer.

I am always amazed by the religious pamphleteers that try to get me to take their materials by saying, "it’ll change your life." I may not want to change my life, and it is presumptuous to assume I do.

A salesperson at the local electronics store was trying to sell me some very high-end speakers, and asked what I was currently using. When I told him, he basically responded that my speakers were crap. This approach is stupid on several levels. First, just on an interpersonal level, why would I want to buy from someone who just told me I made a bad buying decision? Further, and in line with the earlier comment that you don’t want to provide too much information, my speakers sounded great and received good reviews, so with that comment he just informed me that he doesn’t have a trained ear.

Don’t tell your prospect you can improve their life or business, because they will know more about their life or business than you. Tell them what you offer, tell them how it has helped others, and let them connect the dots to their own situation.

How to keep your Godforsaken, life-sucking job

The stress meter is definitely pegging among the working crowd. Being an employment lawyer, I normally gets dozens of calls per week from people who have been fired, but now I’m getting a lot of calls from people who expect to get fired and want to do something proactive. Most are not familiar with the concept of at-will employment, so they want to know how they can document their stellar work performance, thinking they can later use that as evidence that there was no just cause for termination.

As stated here many times, you can be fired for any reason or no reason, so long as the termination does not violate public policy (although some states like New York don't even have that limitation). In a down economy when terminations are commonplace, it becomes even more difficult to prove wrongful termination because the company can easily show you were fired for economic reasons.

So, instead of looking to litigation to save the day, here are some tips to keep the job you have (at least until you can go to work for yourself).

Get noticed as a valuable employee

Now is not the time to be a wallflower. With a go-go economy you can fly under the radar, but when the higher-ups are deciding who to terminate, you don’t want anyone saying, "how about that guy with the office next to the copy room – what does he even do?"

Provide an alternative to termination

Say you’re a 15 year employee with one of the higher salaries at the company due to your seniority. When it comes time to cut payroll, you are a big target, and the company will not be thinking of what is best for you, but rather will simply be looking at an organizational chart and the dollars and cents. Before the knock on your office door comes, be ready with an alternative to termination. For example, you might offer to take a lesser-paying position, or switch from a salary to commissions. The company might be thrilled to have someone with your experience go from regional manager down to store manager, but assumed that would be beneath you. Even if it is beneath you, it is far better to be working while you look for a better job than to be living on unemployment.

Diversify and have an exit strategy.

Smart people diversify their investments, yet they usually depend on a single source for their income. Your income should never be limited to one source. While in college, I got a part-time job as a radio announcer. I then got a job at a second radio station, and worked as a disk jockey at a night club on weekends. When one of the radio stations changed formats and fired all the announcers, it was no problem because I had two other jobs.

Yes, those were part-time college jobs, but trust me the same approach can be applied to your situation. If you are thinking right now, "I don’t even have time for my primary job, how can I add others?", then you are thinking too narrowly. Your backup job should be ready and waiting, but it does not need to be active. By day, you are a mild mannered CPA, but you buy a hot dog cart and three times a year you work the local fairs with your kids to instill the entrepreneurial spirit in them. When your accounting firm goes out of business, you hit the county fair circuit selling your hotdogs full time until you find another accounting gig. Even now, working as a full-time, muckety-muck attorney, I maintain "second jobs." If all my clients disappeared tomorrow, I could live off my writing income and Internet businesses. Having money in savings to weather a termination is a good idea, but it should not be your fallback plan. That plan just leaves you with no savings.

Discrimination is Good and Permissible (another reason to work for yourself)

I find myself giving this speech to callers about three times a week, so I thought I’d post it here and just direct them to a more detailed explanation.

Here’s the setup. Someone is working at a company and doing a good job. A new person is hired, and for whatever reason, the boss really hits it off with that new person. They go to lunch together every day and socialize after hours. Soon, it becomes apparent that the boss doesn’t hold her new found friend up to the same standards as everyone else.  She is allowed to commit Infractions that would get anyone else written up.  The final straw comes when a promotion becomes available, and the new person is given the position to the exclusion of better qualified employees with more seniority. One of the employees that was passed over for the promotion calls to say, "that’s discrimination!" 

Another common variation on the story arises from an interoffice squable that results in a termination.  Sometimes it will be an actual physical altercation, or it may be the case of two employees pointing their fingers at one another, each claiming the other is responsible for a short cash drawer or falsified documents.  Without investigating who was at fault, the company keeps the favored employee and fires the other.  The terminated employee will call claiming "discrimination" based only on the fact that he or she was treated differently than the other employee (i.e., they were fired while the other employee was not).  I even get calls from people who think nepotism is somehow illegal, as though it is against the law for someone who owns a company to prefer their own children over employees.

All of these examples constitute discrimination, but they are not forms of illegal discrimination.  There is no law or even any good reason that you must be treated like everyone else.  Discrimination can be a good thing.  We all discriminate on a daily basis.  If you are married, you discriminated against the entire world when you chose that one spouse to the exclusion of all others. You discriminate when deciding who will be in your circle of friends, favoring those with similar interests and shying away from the felons. If you are working for a company, then you discriminated against other places you could have worked, and your boss discriminated against all the other candidates when he or she hired you. Professional sports are rampant with discrimination, only hiring those who are the tallest or fastest or strongest.

Bad discrimination arises when the reason for the discrimination is based on an arbitrary and mindless criteria.  We have decided as a society, rightfully so, that it is unfair to deny someone employment on the basis of their race, nationality, religion, gender, etc. These are called "protected classes" because of the history of discrimination they have suffered.  It is unlawful to discriminate against a member of a protected class because they belong to that protected class. (Another point lost on many – you can discriminate against a member of a protected class if the discrimination has nothing to do with their race, nationality, gender, etc.)

So back to our first example. Can the caller sue for discrimination because the boss promoted her friend even though she was less qualified and had less seniority?  That depends on the motivation. If the boss promoted the friend only because she likes her more, that’s fine. But her preference cannot come from a dark, discriminatory place in her soul. If her preference for that person arises from her race, age, gender, etc., then that is wrong. This is how so-called reverse discrimination arises. Say a supervisor is Vietnamese, and hires someone else of that nationality. They may well have an instant bond given their backgrounds and language. When time comes for promotion, with no evil motive she may well give preference to her fellow countrywoman because she seems so personable, not realizing that perception is coming from the fact that they share a nationality. That preference for one nationality over another would constitute impermissible discrimination.

However, in most cases your employer if free to prefer some employees over others, and has no legal duty to give them equal treatment. Your hard work and dedication will not guarantee that you move up through the ranks.

Thank God I was only offboarded and not fired!

It has long been the case that law firms never admit to terminating lawyers for financial reasons. Many big companies, the lifeblood of large law firms, want to feel like they have a big, bad law firm working for them. If a firm doesn’t have enough business to keep its lawyers busy, that must mean companies have taken their work to other firms that are bigger and badder. At the first sign of contraction at a law firm, companies may take their business elsewhere.

To avoid this perception, law firms will go to great lengths to characterize terminations as anything other than a reduction in force. Most often they will kick an entire group of attorneys to the curb, claiming they were terminated for poor work performance. The efforts are sometimes so successful that even the remaining attorneys don’t know the truth. I once spoke to an attorney at a firm that had axed over 40 attorneys, and he was absolutely convinced that they were all terminated for work performance.

But this approach is not limited to law firms. With half a million terminations just last month, U.S. companies are becoming very creative with their euphemisms for terminations. For some time, "downsizing" has been replaced by "rightsizing." The latter gives the impression that the company isn’t contracting, only correcting. In a November press release, Nokia fired 9,000 employees, and referred to it as a "synergy-related headcount adjustment goal." I’m sure the fired employees feel much better about that.

In October, eBay didn’t fire 1,600; instead it took "actions to simplify our organization." Many companies use the terms "offboarding" and "reduction in force." The latter term has been reduced to an acronym, as in, "What’s the RIF going to be this month?"

My personal favorite for job cuts is "surplusing". The implication is that you are taking a paid employee, and holding him in reserve as an unpaid commodity. When things turn around, you can take him down off the shelf and put him back to work. Also good is "de-verticalization". I’m not sure what that means, but that’s the point.

Control your own destiny. Work for yourself lest you be offboarded.

Confirmation from the Real Deal

The crazy mindset that you must work for someone else is certainly not limited to the blue collar world.  My last few posts have been very specific to the practice of law, but they tell a much broader story.  In every industry there are pre-conceived notions about the way things are done.  Law students think they must must work at a big firm, engineers think they need to work at big company like Boeing, accountants think they must work at one of the big eight, wait, big six, wait, big four.

To work for yourself, you need to think creatively.  Hell, you can now be an astronaut in the private sector if you so choose, so don't assume your chosen career makes working for yourself impossible.

I sometimes haunt the law student boards where all the attorneys in training post messages about which firm is paying what and which firms are the best places to work.  A casual observer would think that working at a big firm is the end all be all of the legal profession.  When I do my "fun with numbers" routine (see my last post) it amounts to challenging their religious beliefs.  One or two students will inevitably flame me with the brilliant insight: "That can't be true.  If you could make six figures working as a contract attorney, everyone would do it."

First, I never say that "everyone" can do it.  Like any service provider, you need to have something to offer if you want repeat business.  I've encountered a number of contract attorneys that can't draft a decent motion.  But to check my numbers, I sent the Fun With Numbers post to Sue (appropriately enough), one of the contract attorneys I use.  Or more precisely, a contract attorney that I used to use. She now has an in-house arrangement whereby she is paid over $100 per hour for all the time she spends on cases, and is too busy to work on my cases. Here is her response to my post:

"Good stuff...

As to contract attorneys, you are right on. It not
only provides flexibility, less stress, and complete
control of your schedule, but the pay is great.

I agree with you, the work is out there. If I wanted
to work 40 hours a week, I could easily do it.

I guess the only negative about your typical contract
attorney is that sometimes you don't feel like you
have complete control of the case.

My situation is a bit different because my arrangement
with [name of attorney] is that I have complete control of the
case and meet with clients. However, a typical
contract attorney only works on a complaint, motion,
discovery, etc. - sometimes you don't know the outcome
of your motion, or if they objected to your discovery,
and so it takes away from the excitement of being an
attorney.

But I guess it is better than stressing over billable
hours - and you probably don't have much client
contact as an associate in a big firm anyway, right?"

Are you paying attention?  She could "easily" work 40 hours a week if she wanted, so she could "easily" make over $200,000 a year.  And she can earn that $200,000 per year working 50 hour weeks, as compared to the 70 the first years will work at the big firms.  While earning that $200,000, she can develop her own practice and open the way to earning far more.  She already has trial experience, while the the big firm associates will be excited to argue a motion for summary judgment during their first five years.  I bet you big firm devotees are feeling a little silly right about now.  And let me twist the knife a little.  Sue is just two years out of law school, and that law school was a non-ABA approved correspondence school.  I bet you ivy league school devotees with your significant student loans are feeling a little silly right about now.

So there.

The point is that all these future attorneys are crippling their own careers and dooming themselves to pretty miserable lives (recognizing that some people love being drones), all because of preconceived notions of what the practice of law should be.  Don't make the same mistake with your chosen profession.  Is it really the case that your situation is so unique that you must work for someone else, or are you just falling prey to your own preconceived notions?