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

visible in a number of ways where your appearance will be observed and can work for you or against you. This is yet another reason for keeping visuals of the mugging, cavorting you off social Web sites like Facebook.
    We’re not all perfect tens, but there’s a lot we can do to catapult ourselves up the scale. Appearance has always been 30 percent nature and 70 percent cunning artifice, so we can all be at least sevens if we try.
    3. Read. Until newspapers and magazines go out of business or they install pay walls on the Internet—and that may never come to pass—your problem is not going to be a scarcity of information. I used to recommend reading the local paper and the Wall Street Journal for starters, but that may have been fitting advice for an era when Jeeves was buttering your muffins and pouring your coffee. The Wall Street Journal and Financial Times charge for their services, but a subscription to the Journal in particular is well worth the investment, since it is so influential across the board in business. A good argument can be made that if your recruiter or your prospective employer takes a daily read on the Wall Street Journal , so should you. You can also use Web sites like Bloomberg.com and the New York Times to get a ton of business news.
    As to job listings, today, according to Wikipedia, “Monster is the largest job search engine in the world, with over a million job postings at any time and over 150 million résumés in the database (2008) and over 63 million job seekers per month.” Then there are the Craigslist entries. Again I turn to mighty Wik: “The [Craigslist] site receives over one million new job listings each month, making it one of the top job boards in the world.” The local classifieds? What are the chances that your next job will be a local find? If not moving is key for you, there are regional Web sites springing up every day that can help you focus your search.
    The Internet has redefined our information diet. In this creepy, crawling cyberspace world, you better be snacking on three levels of the food chain: breaking news—especially in your business and professional specialty; career opportunity postings; and high-nutrition management journals and mind-stretching essays and lectures.
    It’s not uncommon for an interviewer to ask the “friendly” and “casual” question: “What have you been reading lately?” Have a good answer. Current business books and e-zines, trade and technical journals in your field, thoughtful books of any kind, fiction or nonfiction, qualify if you can discuss them creatively and analytically. Be able to recite your bookmarks on Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox. By the way, I hope your search engine is at least as good as either of those.
    One still-employed job seeker took his efforts at changing careers so seriously that each evening he was frozen in front of his screen for hours to bone up for the next day’s interviews. His little daughter couldn’t understand, and one day asked, “Mommy, why does Daddy stare at those dumb articles all night? I want him to teach me how to play Guitar Hero!” Her mother explained to the tot, “Well, darling, you see, Daddy has so much work to do, he has to log on and finish it at home.” “Well,” responded the daughter, “why don’t they put him in a slower group?”
    4. Make those contacts. Keeping your network alive means casting a wide net. Dive into your files and give yourself a quota of, say, five contacts a day. Sort your contacts between e-mails and phone contacts.
    I know people who send mass barrages of the same e-mail to twenty or thirty people at once. That may make sense in a personal emergency or when you are communicating within your family or a close-knit group of friends. Others are likely to see it as an affront, that they are just one in a supporting cast of countless others.
    Make your phone calls brief, especially in the “AE age”—that’s the next era after AD and it means