Mark Ford

April 15, 2019 No Comments

After my speech, I found myself surrounded by a cluster of people wanting to say hello or ask a question. This surprised me because these were employees, not readers. Like matriculated students attending classes, employees attend company-sponsored lectures under some degree of compulsion. They weren’t there because they were fans.

One of them, a young man who works as a telemarketer, surprised me doubly by asking a question so simple it seemed at once naïve and profound: “What do I have to do to be successful in my job?”

The thing is, this kid was serious. He believed I knew the answer. And I had the feeling that he was ready to put into practice whatever advice I was going to give him.

Other people were listening. The question begged for a long and complicated answer, but the moment demanded a brief and simple reply.

What to say?

As it happened, I’d been thinking and writing about a parallel question: What does it take for a social or cultural group to achieve economic independence? My answer to that question was about values and commitment.

To lift themselves out of poverty and acquire wealth, a social group (even a family) must place a high moral value on three ideas: hard work, saving, and learning. No amount of external financial aid will do the job if the group does not believe in and practice these values, for they are the moral and behavioral cornerstones of wealth creation.

So that’s what I went with: Hard work, saving, and learning. READ MORE

Notes From My Journal

Success in the Spotlight: It’s More Rock Than Roll

December 16, 2018 No Comments

Sunday, December 16, 2018

Delray Beach, FL.- I was late arriving at Steve and Lori’s annual holiday party last weekend. I’d been working on the outline of a new book, and I wanted to finish it while I still had a sense of it in my mind.

Steve’s parties are always inspiring. Inspiring is an odd way of describing a “party,” but in this case, it’s warranted. There is something about the elegance of the architecture of their house, how serenely it sits on a wide stretch of the Intercoastal Waterway, and also and mostly the diversity and quality of the guests. It breathes some sort of ambition into me. Makes me feel a little like Nick Carraway visiting his neighbor Jay’s West Egg mansion.

Steve accepted my apology with a smile: “The price of success is hard work,” he said.

“Vince Lombardi,” I replied, happy to recognize the quote.

The occasion was Delray Beach’s annual boat parade, our South Florida attempt to create a semblance of the good cheer generated by the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Elaborately lit and decorated boats float up the Intercoastal for 3 hours.

Steve introduced me to Max Weinberg – Max Weinberg of the E Street Band and a decade-long stint as Conan O’Brien’s bandleader. If you didn’t know who he was, you might think – from his physical appearance and the way he conducts himself – that he was a college teacher or a lawyer (the profession he was pursuing before hooking up with Springsteen).

In fact, if Steve hadn’t clued me in before he introduced us, I never would have guessed that he was a rich and famous guy. (And what better praise can you give a successful person?)

Steve had told me that Max is an avid reader and a huge consumer of books about politics. So we talked about that for a while. Then, somehow, the subject of family came up and we talked about how proud we are of our kids. It was a completely normal, unremarkable, but unusually gratifying conversation.

I was interested in his professional life, and felt comfortable asking about it. I was not (to his pleasure, I think) the least bit interested in him as a “rock star.” I wanted to understand the labor and stress of what he did. The day-to-day grind of it. The kind and amount of work that was involved in achieving the success he had.

I was interested because, for a long time, I’ve been thinking (and writing) about what, to my mind, are the virtues of success. My theory is that there is a nearly direct relationship between how much you get paid and how much effort you put into your job. That financial success – if not all success – is 99% hard work.

In describing his career, past and present, Max said nothing to derail that theory. For him, an 8-hour day is a short day, and a 5-day workweek a rare treat.

He told me that he views his skill as a drummer as being secondary to his success. Much more important: He was always on call for new opportunities, always willing to say yes more often than no, and always did whatever it took to not only keep his promises but exceed expectations.

I felt like I was talking not to a rock star but to a senior executive of a Fortune 500 company.

The subject of Springsteen’s one-man show on Broadway came up. I told Max that I’d seen it and was impressed. “Five shows a week – it must have been incredibly hard on him,” I said.

“It’s a commitment, for sure,” Max said. “And a lot of work, too. The physical work is nothing compared to touring with the band. But the responsibility of leaving the house each afternoon, after a day of working on other things, and doing the show… If you could see the look in his eyes before he sets off for the city. He has to drum up the energy to rise to the challenge one more time.”

“He’s the hardest working person I’ve ever known,” Max said.

“Like Vince Lombardi used to say…” I replied.

“Right,” Max said. “It’s the price you must be willing to pay.”

From My Work-in-Progress Basket

Success in Life? It’s All About Micro-Culture

October 18, 2018 No Comments

There’s a longstanding nature-versus-nurture debate among social psychologists. Wrestling with it doesn’t get you very far, because it’s not a real question. Nature matters. Nurture matters. But what matters most is micro-culture.

(Micro-culture is a term that doesn’t yet exist. I’m making it up to denote the close circle of people that surround and influence you during your formative years.)

What you accomplish in life – in terms of every aspect of success, from mental health to longevity to self-satisfaction to your career – is due much more to micro-culture than to any other single factor. So why haven’t researchers figured that out?

To wit: A recent University of Minnesota study has academics scratching their heads.

Led by epidemiologist Theresa Osypuk, the study followed the lives of youngsters born into poverty in the 1990s. Some of them were given vouchers that allowed them to move out of public housing and into better neighborhoods. And what happened to the kids who made the move? The researchers found that the girls were far less likely to drink heavily than the girls left in the housing projects. But the boys binged more.

As the WSJ put it, “The findings challenged the assumption that behavioral risks increase with economic hardships and that poverty affects women and men the same way.”

How could that be?

From My Work-in-Progress Basket, Notes From My Journal

September 6, 2018 No Comments

Notes From My Journal

A New Word, an Old Peeve

New York City– Sitting on the stoop in front of this brownstone, reading a magazine, I come across a word that’s new to me: glanceable.

This doesn’t happen often. And when it does, it’s usually a neologism built from something foreign or political. (Have you noticed? Recently, most political neologisms seem to be invented to cope with the ever-expanding micro-culture of identity politics.)

Glanceable felt different. Modest. Unpretentious. Easy to interpret. But was it unnecessary? Could it have been just a synonym for scannable?

I looked it up and was happy to discover that, no, it is not a synonym for scannable. There is a subtle but important difference.

Scannable is an adjective that qualifies the readability of text. It means “that which can be scanned,” either with a fast read or electronically with a scanner. (Example: a scannable ID)

Glanceable also refers to the readability of text. But its focus and its requirements are very strict. Glanceable denotes information – usually on a screen – that can be read and understood at a glance.

In other words, it refers to very short lengths of text (headlines, subheads, captions, etc.) or graphic elements (charts, graphs, Illustrations) that can be comprehended in a matter of seconds.

That’s different than readable or scannable. And I like it for that reason. It has a use, a particular use that is much needed in the publishing world.

A pet peeve of mine is the publication of graphics meant to demonstrate concepts that are difficult to grasp. They may convey the information intended. But if it takes the reader minutes to figure them out, what’s the point? It would be better to use words.

If you can elucidate (see “Today’s Word”) complex ideas through graphics, you should do so. Just make sure that they are glanceable – i.e., so crystal clear that the reader can grok them at a glance.

The logic of this rule is so simple that it’s hard for me to understand why so many writers and editors choose to ignore it and continue to put out charts and graphs and illustrations that confound.

From My Works In Progress Basket

A Simple and Realistic Way to Attract Success in Your Life (for People Smart Enough to Smirk at the Law of Attraction)

There’s a way to bring good fortune into your life. It might look, from one angle, like luck (or perhaps some precious “law” of the universe). But it is, in fact, something much more mundane. Something like a recipe for baking bread.

I’m talking about a “recipe” for attracting (yes, attracting) success. For solving problems and opening doors and bringing amazing people into your life.

I discovered the recipe 30 years ago by observing TP, a man that had built one of the largest direct-marketing companies in our industry.

From My Work-in-Progress Basket

An Unavoidable Hazard of Success

June 20, 2018 No Comments

Wednesday, June 20, 2018

Delray Beach, FL – If you’re smart, hardworking and persistent, you’ve got what it takes to be successful at any career you choose. But as you climb the ladder, you’re likely to face a problem they don’t talk about in business schools: too many attractive opportunities.

For 90+% of the population, this is a problem that will never arise. But you – you are in the top 10%. And the farther you travel down the road of success, the more opportunities will come your way.

I’ve heard this complaint from good people I’ve mentored for years. Just recently, GR, an up-and-coming copywriter, put it this way:

As one becomes successful, it seems more and more opportunities present themselves. It’s tempting to want to go after every single one of them.

So how do you spot the opportunities that are right for you?

Or, how do you decide which ones to say “no” to and which ones to place your bets on?

Here’s a quick answer, the answer I gave to him…

I don’t think there is a failsafe strategy for selecting and rejecting career opportunities.

If you are a thinking person, you will recognize in every opportunity a complex assortment of costs, risks, and benefits. The most obvious of these will be financial. But there are emotional, intellectual, political, and social costs, risks, and benefits too.

If you did a matrix that included all of these variables, it would quickly become very difficult to read. And that’s one reason smart people like GR have trouble deciding which opportunities to take and which to reject.

Here’s the thing. Opportunities are inherently complicated. You can’t un-complicate them.

Notes From My Journal

Literary Criticism

September 23, 2013 No Comments

For every good book, play, or poem, there are probably a half dozen works of criticism written about it.

Literary critics tend to fall into groups, characterized by what they think their jobs are. The best criticism is that which seeks to understand and explain a work by analyzing it in its cultural context.

But many critics are not happy doing that. So they do other things, such as evaluating literature based on how well it lives up to some moral or political standard. These efforts usually aren’t helpful at all – unless you are a zealot – but they are common. Other critics,wishing to show how smart they are, take a “formalist” approach, analyzing works according to their “linguistic texture.” Then there are critics who analyze works psychologically. This can be fun if you like it, but… well. There are also critics who like to find comparisons between a work and the author’s life. Most of them work for arcane literary journals. And then there are those who think their duty is to explain nothing more than their own personal impressions.

Interesting Fact: The word “criticism” is from the Greek kritikos, meaning “judge.”

Miscellaneous Essays

IF YOU’RE TRYING TO IMPRESS ME, DON’T DO THIS

August 28, 2013 No Comments

He had been strongly recommended for the job. And so, when I got on the phone with him, I was expecting a sharp, take-charge guy. Instead, I got this:

“I’ve been involved in strategically important roles with communications companies for 25 years. Throughout, I’ve focused on my core competencies, building brand recognition and interfaces with key personnel.”

To which I responded: “Huh?”

He went on…

“It’s been a personal paradigm of mine that quality control and dynamic leadership are essentials in today’s globalized business environment, and that’s what I feel I can bring to any company I work for.”

I had already made an initial assessment: This guy was a fraud. But to give him a chance to redeem himself, I tried to keep the conversation going.

“So,” I said, “what, exactly, have you been doing all these years?”

I could almost hear him thinking, “What kind of dummy am I dealing with?” But this is what he said:

“Bringing in a bottom line and achieving optimal results have always been goals that resonated with me.”

“That’s enough,” I thought. “I can’t take any more.”

“I’m sorry to do this,” I said. “But I have to jump off the phone now to handle an emergency. I enjoyed talking to you. I’ll be sure to look at your resume and get back to you if something comes up that meets your qualifications.”

And with that, I bid farewell to this young man and any chance he had of ever working for me.

In their book Why Business People Speak Like Idiots, authors Fugere, Hardaway, and Warshawsky say there are three reasons executives – and people applying for management positions – sometimes speak like this.

Their focus is on themselves, rather than on the person they’re speaking to. “When obscurity pollutes someone’s communications it’s often because the… goal is to impress and not to inform.”
They fear using concrete language, because saying exactly what they mean can make it hard to wiggle out of commitments. “Liability scares [some people], so they add endless phrases to qualify [their] views, acknowledging everything from prevailing weather conditions to the 12 reasons we can’t make a decision now.”
They want to elevate and even romanticize their thoughts and deeds, because they are afraid they aren’t impressive. They do so by using lofty language that disguises the mundane truth.

They are afraid to appear ordinary. Their solution is to attempt to bamboozle everyone they speak with – and particularly those with power.

This is a very bad strategy.

In a job interview, it makes the interviewee look pompous and vacuous – two traits any sensible employer wants to avoid.

When applying for a job, only two things really matter: what you know (your skill set) and who you are (your integrity). Pretending to know things you don’t is a waste of your time, because you will soon be found out. Getting tossed into the street after only a few weeks on the job is both embarrassing and an ugly blemish on your work history.

You can demonstrate your good character by being honest from the outset. Be candid about what you know and what you have done. But make it clear that you are confident you can quickly learn to do anything that is required of you.

In granting you an interview, your future employer is trying to find out if you can help him solve his problems and grow his business.

He isn’t looking to be impressed. He’s looking for someone who can make his life easier by doing a great job. Your job during the interview is to sell yourself as being that person.

And the first rule of successfully selling yourself is to make sure you’ve got the basics down pat:

You must be good at something – really good.
That something must be useful to the success of the business you are attempting to work for. If you’ve been reading my blog – even for a short time – you already know what I mean by that: It must be some financially valued skill. Generally speaking, that’s one of four things: marketing, selling, creating profitable products, or managing profits.
You must prove that you are good.

And then you must deliver.

Miscellaneous Essays

The Unpleasant Truth About Asking for Favors

May 9, 2013 No Comments

I recently intercepted a memo from a partner of mine. It appeared to be a nothing-much memo regarding a not-all-that-important request for a favor from a business associate – but I intervened because I thought it could ultimately be damaging.

Mutual back scratching, as I’ve often said, is a big part of good business. All the successful business relationships I know of – at least the ones that last – involve a lot of back and forth. I do such and such for John, and sometime in the future he will reciprocate. If he doesn’t, I cross him off my list. Unless I’ve done him a foolishly big favor in the first place, losing my good will costs him more than he gained from my initial service.

It’s all about give and take.

Smart businesspeople (those who think long-term) don’t demand an immediate quid pro quo. They are happy to let the credits add up by helping out where they can. But unless they are saint-like, they do keep a running tab in their heads. And when the time comes to ask for service in return, they expect it.

That’s the way it should be. And when businesspeople act that way, they prosper. Just as important, the products and services they offer tend to improve because of the exchange of information and technology. And this benefits their customers.
But not every businessperson is that smart. Many fall short when it comes to cooperation in general and favors in particular. If you randomly selected a dozen business owners and lined them up against a wall, you’d find a considerable range of enlightenment as far as cooperation is concerned.

And that’s why you have to be careful when you ask for favors. Because the person from whom you are requesting a service may not think of it the same way as you do. Such was the case with the favor my partner was about to ask in the memo I intercepted.
The favor was for the other company to do some printing and mailing for her – things she would have been happy to do for them. But what I think she failed to understand was the reaction her request was likely to cause. I happen to know the people who run that business. I’ve worked with them for years. And though they are good people, they have a tendency (in my view) to overvalue their work and undervalue that of others.

There was another factor, too, that she failed to take into consideration. My partner’s view of the favor she was asking was somewhat distorted. Because she runs a smaller business, it would have been fairly easy for her to personally manage the printing of a job for them. But since their operation is larger, a similar task would have involved several people … and required checks and double-checks… with no organized way to account for the work done.

Between my partner’s honest misunderstanding of what she was asking and the tendency of those she asked to overvalue their contribution, trouble was brewing. They would have done what she asked, but my partner would have incurred a big “You owe me.” A debt she wouldn’t recognize – which would have made matters worse.

My advice to her?

Miscellaneous Briefs

Groundhogs’ Day

May 11, 2012 No Comments

On Wednesday, I wrote about how I transformed from being an underachiever to a motivated successful person.

Most people reading this will think, “I don’t need another motivational speech. What I need is a change of luck.”

I’m here to say that luck had nothing to do with the change in my life. And it needn’t have anything to do with whatever changes you would like to make in yours. Had I waited for luck to come to me, I might be waiting still. My life changed when I got fed up and started planning my success.

You, too, can change your life if you are (a) dissatisfied with the lack of success you’ve had so far; (b) willing to make a big change – and not just a minor adjustment; (c) prepared to start working differently and thinking about yourself as a different kind of person; and (d) willing to start now by preparing yourself to succeed.

MarkFord.net

A Brief Answer to a Surprise Question: The 3 Cornerstones of Career Success