Use Your Head to Get Your Foot in the Door by Harvey Mackay

as Maggie Fitzgerald in Million Dollar Baby. For this film, she had the discipline to train in a gym almost five hours a day and to bolster her clout with nearly twenty pounds of muscle!
    Beverly Hills, 90210 was not the first time she tasted a setback. Swank grew up poor—spending part of her childhood in a trailer park. She and her mother even lived for a time in her mother’s car.
    She also savors the power and self-discipline of competitive sports. Growing up, Swank was a gymnast and a Junior Olympic swimmer.
    It’s hardly a surprise that Hilary Swank was chosen for the title role in the recent film Amelia about the legendary Amelia Earhart. This breakthrough aviator had a kindred cockiness about her and once said, “Never interrupt someone doing what you said couldn’t be done.”
    Let Swank’s 90210 experience be an inspiration to you—I don’t care if you’re eighteen or eighty. Use an intelligent, disciplined, and medically sound plan to get yourself back into shape after a setback, especially in your career. The rewards could put your name in lights.

Chapter 22
    Getting a Job Is a Job
    1. Get a routine and stick to it. Getting a job is not a nine-to-five job. It’s a sixteen-hour-a-day proposition, from the moment you get up until the moment you go to sleep. With that kind of workload, you need a daily schedule to manage that routine and organize your time. No employer is around to police your time management, and that means the control burden falls squarely on your own shoulders. This doesn’t mean you’re being sentenced to endless rounds of self-punishment and drudgery. If you’re going to be at your best, you’ve got to have some fun, too, so make room for a little downtime.
    Start the week unofficially on Sunday night. You’ll want to scribble out a short list of things to get done the next week and check it against the list you had the previous week.
    Set goals. To put them to work for you they must be:
    M easurable
    I dentifiable
    D ocumented
    A ttainable
    S pecific
    And they need to be examined regularly.
    Note the first letter of each word spells Midas, and I call this approach giving goals The Midas Touch because it turns goals into gold.
    How many new contacts did I make last week? Did I stretch out geographically into new areas? Explore new job descriptions? Improve my presentation or appearance? Grade yourself, and don’t be too narrowly focused. A week without getting a job is not a week of failure. You may have accomplished other goals last week, things you’ve never had the time for or put in the effort to achieve in the past.
    Think of what you are doing as a new do-it-yourself skill, like crafting a fine piece of woodworking or raising and grooming a bonsai plant. Why? Because you are going to need to use the same job-finding skill set twelve to fifteen times in your working life. You can and will become expert at it. So good and efficient, in fact, that you will be able to methodically get a new job in your off-hours while you actually have one during the working day.
    2. Get back in shape. Companies have always hired according to subtle, hidden values. We like to believe that discrimination in the marketplace has been largely eliminated. Not so. Even though we have legislation that forbids hiring on the basis of race, religion, age, and gender, there are still millions of Americans who have no legal protection against job discrimination. Prejudice against overweight people seems to be the only form of discrimination that hasn’t been made illegal, and it’s practiced with a vengeance. All things being equal, studies have shown that the overweight have a much poorer chance of getting a job than people who are not overweight.
    Under any circumstances, take huge pains with your grooming, hairstyling, and wardrobe. And not just at interviews, either. Looking good is the rule every time you poke your nose outside the door. If you’re serious about getting a job, you’re going to be