Choosing the right people is the most challenging task for any type of project. If you end up with the wrong team or with somebody that keeps sabotaging you or your idea, you won’t go too far. Since I have arrived in the United States I have personally found out that I need to test at least 4 or 5 different people for a given work before I find a good reliable professional that can deliver what I need in a consistent and professional fashion.

Rzeszow's castle in Poland.

I am not talking about selecting somebody for a job, I mean actually hiring him, getting him through the job and then deciding whether you want to keep him based on the actual result. An initial selection is necessary to ascertain competence and cost, but when you think you have found the perfect resource and that you don’t need to look anymore, you still need to wait for the actual completion of the first project before coming to a real conclusion.

For example I have changed 4 different immigration lawyers: each one of them gave me something valuable along the way, but only the last one actually managed to give what I really needed and get me through the application process successfully. I have changed at least 5 contractors for my rehab works and each one of them was outstanding in some aspects, but none was reliable enough to build a long term relationship. Only one has survived so far along the whole process and is still working with me.

The biggest thing I learned after being in the US is that you need to get rid of negative people fast. It doesn’t matter whether they are friends, family or trade. Anyone who is taking away from you positive attitude, from your potential of success, needs to be kept at a distance and you should keep close to yourself only the people that can contribute to your growth, that you can learn from.

Sometime it is difficult to say who needs to stay and who needs to go an you might have some close friend or family member or business partner who doesn’t like a particular person that could instead turn out to be valuable or appropriate for the situation. So I have found out that eventually I must be the final judge when it comes to something I am directly responsible for.

Even people we trust completely can give us wrong estimations simply because they don’t have all the data or have some bias. Finding the right people is the most difficult and time consuming task: therefore trust yourself and if you make a mistake, don’t worry, i’t part of the process: simply move on.

Roberto Mazzoni