Again, employers want to hire people who make contingency plans, not ones who consider “hope for the best” a strategy.

Again, it is rational behavior, since the former is in your control and the latter is not. Scientists estimate that 70 percent of people feel what’s called Impostor Syndrome, where we worry that others will find out we’re not really as talented as they think we are.2

you can’t control outcomes; you can only control process.

Open a blank spreadsheet in Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets. In the top row, label your first four columns “List,” “Advocacy,” “Motivation,” and “Posting.” (You may also download a blank preformatted LAMP list from www.2hourjobsearch.com.) That’s really it. Note that in this chapter, we will only be filling in the first column, List (which I will

Getting internal referrals is simply the only predictable way to get interviews; getting them efficiently is the core challenge of the modern job search.

Assessing passions can be more difficult, however. If you don’t have time to read books on self-assessment, pick up the latest issue of the New York Times and mark the articles you’re most interested in reading. Don’t actually read them—simply flag them and keep looking. After you’ve found a few that have caught your eye, determine what those

To access the People Also Viewed box, enter one of your “dream employers” in LinkedIn’s main search box and click on their Company page. Scroll down, and to the right you’ll see a People Also Viewed section listing five related employers that other LinkedIn users looked up. These tend to be direct competitors of your dream employer, or at worst

For further reading on this topic, I strongly recommend StrengthsFinder 2.0 by Tom Rath. It will help you identify your top five strengths (among a possible thirty-four) and understand how they uniquely interact to make you “you” in an ownable rather than clichéd way.

Satisfice is a hybrid word formed from satisfy and suffice. Coined by Nobel Prize–winning social scientist Herbert Simon in 1956, the term describes a person’s tendency to select the first available solution that meets a given need rather than an optimal solution.