This is the first of sixteen parts of a “book club” reading and discussion of Keith Ferrazzi and Tahl Raz’s Never Eat Alone, where this book on building a lifelong community of colleagues, contacts, friends, and mentors is teased apart and looked at in detail. This entry covers the first two chapters, “Becoming a Member of the Club” and “Don’t Keep Score,” which appear on pages 3 through 22.

After the success of the recent Total Money Makeover book club (with lots of good discussion and a flood of great feedback), I wanted to give it another try – a nice, long discussion about a book that made me think about my money and my life.

This time, though, I decided to take it in a bit of a different direction with a more unorthodox book selection (at least given the “personal finance” nature of The Simple Dollar).

Never Eat Alone by Keith Ferrazzi and Tahl Raz is about building relationships, both professional and personal. The subtitle of the book sums it up: How to Build a Lifelong Community of Colleagues, Contacts, Friends, and Mentors.

Why discuss a book like this in such detail? It’s simple: I believe that a healthy net of relationships is the most valuable thing that we can build. With a wide circle of colleagues, contacts, friends, and mentors around us, we can rely on them for help when we need it and also receive unexpected help on a regular basis. All of these things “grease the skids” for great things in life (and help when the chips are down) in ways that we can’t possibly execute alone. Such a network can provide everything from material help, helping hands when we’re working on a task, advice, opportunities, information, companionship, and much more.

I’ve read many books on this topic and I keep turning back to Never Eat Alone. It packs together the ideas in an incredibly effective package.

Let’s dig in.

It’s Not About Quid Pro Quo
Ferrazzi offers this insight on page 7:

What many of my fellow [business school] students lacked, I discovered, were the skills and strategies that are associated with fostering and building relationships. In America, and especially in business, we’re brought up to cherish John Wayne individualism. People who consciously court others to become involved in their lives are seen as schmoozers, brown-nosers, smarmy sycophants.

Over the years, I learned that the outrageous number of misperceptions clouding those who are active relationship-builders is equaled only by the misperceptions of how relationship-building is done properly. What I saw on the golf course – friends helping friends and families helping families they cared about – had nothing to do with manipulation or quid pro quo. Rarely was there any running tally of who did what for whom, or strategies concocted in which you give just so you could get.

I read this bit and immediately thought about my father. During my entire life, it’s seemed to me like he’s constantly doing things for other people. He shares vegetables he grew with them, he shares fish he caught with them, he shares the wine he made with them, he goes to their homes and helps them out when they need help. He fills his spare time doing these things, engaging in hobbies where the product can be shared easily with friends or actually working with friends on projects.

What’s the end result? Every single day, a small army of people just stop at my parents’ house, mostly to visit my father. He spends a good chunk of the day holding court, talking to people in his garage or out in the garden. They constantly bring him food, information, and advice, and if he needs a hand with anything, there’s always help right there.

In just the last year, people have given my parents a kids’ bed (for the guest bedroom, which we use when we stay there), a new kitchen table, a small mountain of food, free repair of a lawnmower and of a vehicle, and countless other things I’ve not even heard about.

When Dad does something to help someone else, he doesn’t expect anything in return. Random people he’s never met before can wind up at our house, just to place a phone call or something similar, and within a half an hour they’ll be loaded down with garden vegetables and enjoying a glass of wine with him. He might never see that person again – but he doesn’t care. If that person leaves with a smile on his or her face, Dad’s happy.

After doing this for years and years, though, it’s returned to him in spades. He has more good relationships with people than anyone I know, and those relationships are constantly handing him advice, material items, and help when he needs it.

It’s not about a quid pro quo at all. It’s just about giving of yourself and not really worrying about the return.

Mutual Need
On page 16, Ferrazzi touches on the idea of mutual need:

A network functions precisely because there’s recognition of mutual need. There’s an implicit understanding that investing time and energy in building personal relationships with the right people will pay dividends. The majority of “one percenters,” as I call the ultra-rich and successful whom many of my mentees aspire toward, are one percenters because they understand the dynamic – because, in fact, they themselves use the power of their network of contacts and friends to arrive at their present station.

It’s naive to think that people enter into a relationship without expecting to get something out of it, even if it’s something as simple as companionship. The more time and energy we invest in relationships, the more valuable we expect those relationships to become.

What’s different here is to realize that you need each other. No relationship is one-way – you give to them because they need it, and they give to you because you need it. It doesn’t have to be perfectly in balance at all, but relationships that are completely out of balance collapse eventually.

The time to cement a relationship is when you don’t need it – and they do need it. If you continually step up when others need you, you’ll find that people step up for you when you need it. It might not be perfectly symmetrical, but it’s certainly present.

Stop Keeping Score
What about the tendency to “keep score”? What if you help someone and they don’t help you back? If you’re focused on that, you’ll never actually benefit from such a network. From page 16:

[F]irst you have to stop keeping score. You can’t amass a network of connections without introducing such connections to others with equal fervor. The more people you help, the more help you’ll have and the more help you’ll have helping others. It’s like the Internet. The more people who have access, and use it, the more valuable the Internet becomes.

A network is not about a series of one-to-one relationships. In any such relationship, it’s likely that one person will give more than the other – sometimes you’ll give more and sometimes the other person will.

What’s important is the aggregate. Overall, on the whole, you should be giving at least as much as you’re getting. The more you give, the more value you’re perceived to have overall. The more you take, the less value you’re perceived to have.

I can’t help but think of one of my old “friends” who was one of those “takers.” If you did anything to help him out, instead of helping in return, he would ask for more help.

What happened to him? To tell the truth, I have no idea. Virtually no one knows what actually did happen to him. He dropped out of my network after a while and, eventually, out of the network of everyone else I know. Last I knew, he had completely abandoned what had once been a promising career and had gone back to school, with virtually no connections at all in his old career.

He took more than he gave – and now he’s left with nothing except an older body and an older mind.

Where’s Your Loyalty?
On page 17, Ferrazzi makes a crucial point about the fundamental shift in trust and loyalty that’s happened in the modern workplace:

Where employees once found generosity and loyalty in the companies we worked for, today we must find them in a web of our own relationships. It isn’t the blind loyalty and generosity we once gave to a corporation. It’s a more personal kind of loyalty and generosity, one given to your colleagues, your team, your friends, your customers.

This is a theme that’s run through a lot of recent books on the modern workplace, from Escape from Cubicle Nation to Career Renegade. To put it simply, your loyalty should be to your coworkers, not to your company.

Quite often, that means producing in a way that’s beneficial to your company, but your loyalty should not be to the company. In fact, most of the time, it’s very difficult to distinguish between the two of them.

The difference comes about when people leave the company and move on to new things. That person may no longer be a part of your company, but they’re still part of your social network. You still have loyalty to them. You continue that relationship, sharing what you know (of course, without undermining the rest of your network) and helping when you can.

In effect, a network that includes a lot of people at other businesses is far stronger than one just including the people in your office. Let’s say you’re downsized – people in your own office aren’t going to be able to help. It’s going to require some help from people outside of your business.

Job Security
On page 21, Ferrazzi makes a great point about the true nature of job security today:

Job security? Experience will not save you in hard times, nor will hard work or talent. If you need a job, money, advice, help, hope, or a means to make a sale, there’s only one surefire, fail-safe place to find them – within your extended circle of friends and associates.

This is undeniably true. There is no significant job I’ve had in my life that wasn’t at least partly set up by a personal connection I made.

My first job in college was found by my academic advisor. We had several long discussions about the growing role of computer use in the life sciences and he decided to hire me to work in a public computing lab where software was used for simple biological data analysis. Later on, he also helped to place me in a research lab, a job I enjoyed but didn’t quite click with.

While working in that computer lab, I built a great relationship with one of the full-time system support people working in the same circles. He got me a job as an undergraduate researcher developing software for a scientist.

When I was about to graduate, that scientist was happy enough with my work that he essentially found me a full time position working for him – in truth, he seemed to craft it out of thin air. This was during the worst part of the job market in late 2001 and early 2002, where none of my fellow graduates seemed to be finding work.

Later (when the funding situation changed), he did everything but hand out bribes to get my foot in the door with a more permanent job with another entity doing similar work.

Every single job I’ve mentioned here was made possible thanks to relationships I’d built. How did I build them? I just worked selflessly, sharing what I knew with the people around me and stepping up to the plate when there was a real need.

My experience didn’t really help, nor did my knowledge or my degrees. What helped more than anything was the relationships.

Contribute.
On page 22, Ferrazzi drops the real key to building a valuable network:

Contribute. It’s like Miracle-Gro for networks. Give your time, money, and expertise to your growing community of friends.

In other words, the first step is always in your court. Do you have something to give right now? Is there someone you can help?

Don’t worry about getting back. Just give. Contribute what you know and you have.

Why not start today? Do you have a friend who could use some help? Why not give that help without anything in return? Do it a few more times, with other friends or work associates. Enjoy it. Then, see what happens when you make it a regular habit.

You’ll feel better about yourself. You’ll have friends and connections that feel better about you. And, in the end, you’ll have more value floating around you than you know how to deal with.

Do you believe in such reciprocity of relationships? Do you believe that by giving when others need it without expecting anything in return that others will be there for you when you need it? I wholly believe in it, because I’ve seen it again and again in my life.

On Saturday, we’ll tackle the third and fourth chapters – What’s Your Mission? and Build It Before You Need It.

Recently, I dug out a copy of Mad Men: Season 1 on DVD that I’d received for a gift a long time ago and never watched. And now I’m thoroughly hooked.

For once, the hype was right on. The only problem now is that season 3 is airing on television and I’ve yet to see season 2. I’ve watched a couple season 3 episodes, but there are clearly some pieces of the puzzle missing.

Guess I know what I’ll be spending my “mad money” on next month!

Work to Live or Live to Work? What are you working so hard to achieve? Are you sure you don’t already have it? For me, I worked very hard to build a great career so that my children could be secure, but I found that my children were actually LESS secure because of all the time I was investing in that career. So I walked away. (@ bargaineering)

Get Less Done: Stop Being Productive and Enjoy Yourself This article points to the same place that many such articles on doing less point: IGNORE the urgent but not important tasks in your life. I’ve been doing this by strongly applying email filters so that I don’t have to even look at a lot of emails. Doing this means you have time for the “important but not urgent” things in your life, like true leisure. (@ zen habits)

A Cheapskate’s Guide to Eating Out There are several good tips here for reducing the cost of a meal out, but a few of them wind up in something of an ethical gray area. I agreed highly with seven of them, but felt the other three ideas really merited some further thought and discussion (but that’s what comments are for, right?). (@ wisebread)

Rethinking the ideology of carrots and sticks Rarely do traditional motivators work over the long run. Instead, the best motivator is freedom. If you want someone to excel, give them the freedom to do so. I think this works for a lot of people, but some people simply function better in an organized hierarchy with clearly defined tasks. (@ presentation zen)

Cooking from Scratch: Where’s the Work? The “work” for me cooking at home is the chopping. I’m just not very good at it and as a result I usually dread recipes like ratatouille, where there’s a lot of chopping (even though I love the finished dish). My solution is usually to look for “cheats” for chopping (like overusing the food processor) or to try to offload it to someone else, like my wife who’s better at it and doesn’t mind it as much. (@ wisebread)

You have an income crisis, not a spending problem Some people truly have cut all they can, but they’re in a living situation where their baseline cost of living approaches their income. That’s an income crisis, not a spending problem. In that case, you need to focus on earning more – get a second job, try to jump-start a side business, or even do odd jobs. (@ gather little by little)

When You Try To Be Frugal And Hit The Wall If you “hit the wall,” you might not be doing frugality correctly. Similarly, if you “hit the wall” with a diet, you’re probably not dieting right. Frugality shouldn’t be like a crash diet, but should be a steady process of maximizing the value in your life. (@ queercents)

The Seven Enemies of Financial Success Lack of discipline, materialism, debt, taxes, inflation, investment mistakes, and emergencies are the seven enemies. I think some are much bigger than others – lack of discipline and materialism top the charts, in my opinion. (@ get rich slowly)

How to Respond to Criticism – Learning from Dr. King This is a great essay on how to deal with criticism, inspired by Martin Luther King’s “Letters from a Birmingham Jail.” One passage still gives me chills: “when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people.” (@ four hour work week)

Why you should outsource your chores I think, in some cases, it does make sense to outsource your chores. The real key to all of this is to get a firm grip on what your time is worth in AFTER TAX money and also how valuable you believe time spent doing things like Twitter etc. to build your business really is. (@ msn moneycentral)

The fourteenth episode looks at the personal finance media. Who can you trust? Total length: 7:25.

Listen In!

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Though I hope you do subscribe using one of the above methods, don’t worry – each episode will be featured in its own post, much like this one, on Tuesday afternoons. The podcast itself may appear earlier than that, however, if you subscribe using one of the above forms, but the notes won’t appear until I post about it here on The Simple Dollar.

Episode Notes
Here are some additional notes that go alongside the comments in the podcast. Approximate times for the corresponding links and notes are listed.

0:00 – The theme song is a snippet of a Camper van Beethoven concert on October 25, 1986, shared via their very open taping policy. Listen to the concert in its entirety.
0:45 – The news story I refer to ran on local news in Des Moines and is apparently no longer in their online video archives, unfortunately.
1:45 – I trust Dave Ramsey, for example, when he sticks to finances, particularly debt elimination. He knows what he’s talking about, you can run the numbers yourself, and lots of people have found success using his methods.
2:40 – On the other hand, I don’t trust Robert Kiyosaki at all. Yes, his works are inspirational for entrepreneurial types, but I have a hard time trusting anyone who refers to a person who chooses to work a traditional job as a “hamster” as he does in Rich Dad, Poor Dad.
3:42 – Financial bloggers I trust include J.D. Roth and Jim Wang. Bloggers I don’t trust include Casey Serin, whose blog is now defunct (for good reason).
4:40 – The format matters, too. I tend to trust Jim Cramer in book form (because he gives very sensible long-form advice), but in short doses, I don’t trust him at all because he tends to go off the cuff with advice not based in fact.
5:55 – I’m not wholly condemning things like the Wall Street Journal and Money Magazine, just saying that my trust tends to focus more on the individual writers, not that it appears in those publications. I trust Sam Walker, not the WSJ. I trust Jason Zweig, not Money Magazine. That’s the right place to put it, I think.
7:20 – A preview of next week’s topic.

One thing I’d like to do in a future episode is have an audio reader’s mailbag. If you have a microphone on your computer and can record an MP3 of a simple, short question you might have on personal finance, careers, pop culture, or anything else you’d like me to answer, record it as an MP3 and send it to me. Keep the total recording under 15 seconds, please. Also, if you use Skype, feel free to ask your question that way – my username is trenttsd.

Comments and suggestions welcome.

Early this year, I posted a popular article, Some Thoughts on Building a Successful Marriage. In it, I gave my thoughts on what it takes to make a marriage work – and since your spouse is your most important partner in your finances and your life, it’s important to have a successful relationship there.

Recently, “Gary” sent an email asking a similar question:

I read your this post about sucessful marriage every month. I was wondering if you can create such step-by-step guide for friendships.

I have lots of acquaintances but I am not good at making very close friends. It could be that I am not very open with my emotions and also influences from my parents but I can’t seem to make close friends.

Gary’s question is borne out of a number of recent posts on The Simple Dollar about the power of friendships and relationships – a topic that we’ll be expanding upon over the next month and a half with the book club reading of Never Eat Alone.

But what do you do after you’ve met someone and you want to actually build a lasting friendship? Lasting friendships are often the backbone of our social lives and help us in countless ways throughout our professional and personal lives. They come through for us when we need help, plus they provide the constant support and companionship that a friendship can provide.

Building strong friendships comes easily to some – and not so easily to others. Here’s what I’ve learned about building long-term friendships.

First, friendships wither without regular attention. If you don’t keep in touch in some fashion with a friend, they quickly become an “old friend” – someone that you might be able to rekindle a friendship with, but someone who’s not really an active part of your life. Sometimes, that happens due to a change in interest or in lifestyle (having children can often cause this), but quite often it happens unintentionally, particularly among people with very busy schedules.

On the other hand, regular attention to a friendship is the essence of building up a lasting friendship. This doesn’t mean you have to have a friend at your house every day to keep a friendship strong. Instead, it means that without regular contact, a friendship will fade.

What’s “regular contact”? There’s no exact recipe for it, but I usually define it this way: if I don’t have some idea of what my friend is doing in two weeks, I’ll get in touch with them.

Intrigued? Here are my fifteen rules for building lasting friendships with people.

Keep multiple lines of easy communication open. The more tools you have for keeping track of someone, the better. If you have their cell number, save it – you can easily text them or call them. If you have their address, pop it into your address. If they’re on Facebook, friend them. If they’re on Twitter, follow them. This allows you to keep track of what’s going on in their life – and makes it much easier for you to contact them very quickly. The more lines of easy communication you have, the simpler it becomes to simply get in touch with them at your convenience, which lowers the barrier to continued communication.

Make sure it’s easy to contact you, too. This is why I’m on Twitter and Facebook (and other social sites as well) – it makes it very easy for people to contact me. I keep an eye on both services (to see what my friends are doing), but equally important, I drop my own updates on these sites (so that my friends can see what I’m doing).

If you use such services and you’re silent on them, you’re engaging in a one-way conversation – and how interesting is that? Your contribution is absolutely vital – people who are following you or have friended you want to hear what you have to say.

Another tip – mention that you’re on such services in the footers of your email. Add a link to your Twitter feed or your Facebook page.

Make contact regularly, but be worthwhile. Part of the reason I follow lots of people on Twitter and friend lots of people on Facebook is so that I can keep track on what’s actually important in their lives. Few things bug me more than people who contact me without having anything to say. “Hi, how are you, I am fine, what are you doing?” contacts simply aren’t very interesting and they don’t sustain conversation.

Keep an eye on what your friends are up to and if you have something interesting to contribute to what they’re doing or saying, contribute it. Send them a message or an email, or give them a ring. If what you have is actually useful, you’ve taken another step towards cementing a real relationship.

Quite often, the thing you have to share isn’t a material item, nor does it cost anything other than a bit of time. Usually, it’s information. Most human relationships revolve around the exchange of information with one another, and if you provide lots of good information, then you’re a lot closer to being a good friend.

Exchange contact at least once every two weeks. I don’t keep track of this intensely – it’s merely a good rule of thumb with a good principle behind it. If I haven’t sent a message to someone recently, I’ll pay extra close attention to what they’ve been saying and look for some avenue for following up. If they’re not involved in online social networks, I will often spend some time attempting to recall what their most recent concerns were, then follow up with those concerns and see how they’re doing.

Direct contact is key to sustaining a friendship. While it can be useful to pay attention to what they’re saying publicly – and they’re likely following you, too – direct contact is still necessary and useful. You might be up to date with what someone’s doing, but contacting them directly by phone or other means is still the key piece of maintaining (and slowly building) a friendship.

Fill up your social calendar. You should strive to fill up your social calendar as much as you can with plans with friends (and others). A meal eaten alone is an opportunity lost – a chance to catch up with a friend, build another friendship, or get together with a larger group.

Pencil in your lunch breaks. Have friends over for dinner and a movie or a game. Once a week or so, host a dinner party and invite a mix of people. If you get invited to things, make an effort to go.

In short, start keeping a calendar and strive to fill it up with as many social activities as you can, particularly ones where you’re setting up events directly with specific friends (or attending larger events with friends). The more full your social calendar is, the more friends you’re building relationships with.

I confess that I have some difficulty doing this. My biggest challenge is that many of my closest friends are spread across the world, far away from where I live, and I sometimes find it challenging to open the door to new friendships. However, I do know from experience that it works – the more full your calendar is, the more strong friendships you’ll build.

Be helpful When a friend asks for help, this is the time to really cement a friendship. Be there for that friend. Help them in whatever way you can. Often, the best thing you can do is just listen without interjecting your own thoughts. Sometimes, though, you may be able to help by completing a task or sharing some information.

As long as it’s reasonable, always step up to the plate when a friend calls you. Such actions are the building blocks of lasting friendships.

Don’t hesitate to ask for help – but do it with tact. First of all, don’t expect help. Sometimes the difficulties of the lives of others means that they can’t help you with your situation, even if you’ve helped them in the past and even if they’d like to.

Second, ask in a personal way. It’s fine to broadcast your need on a service where people have chosen to follow you (like Twitter or Facebook), but don’t just send out a blanket email to all of your friends. Instead, contact the people you really need help from individually, by email or by phone (or even by stopping by). Make it clear that you want their help, not just that you’re seeking help from anyone for a problem you have.

Often, such requests go a long way towards building a relationship as well. Direct requests like this show that you do value a friend’s help and input and will make them quite happy to contribute, especially if the help you’re asking for is simple for them.

Celebrate their important moments in a special way. Don’t hesitate to host a party for someone on a major birthday or milestone. Don’t be afraid to take a friend out to dinner (or put a lot of work into preparing one of their favorite meals) to celebrate their new job or their engagement. Stepping up to the plate and making an extra effort to celebrate a friend’s big moments is often just as important as being there for them when there are problems.

Listen. If you’re saying more than 60% of the words in a conversation with a friend, you’re talking too much. Draw them out and get them to participate by asking questions of them. Listen to what they have to say and don’t interrupt them, even if that’s how you naturally converse. Then follow up based on what they have to say.

People want to be heard and to see that their ideas and thoughts have value to others. When you run roughshod by talking all the time or not actually listening, you’re running roughshod over that and damaging the friendship. If you think doing this is boring – then perhaps you don’t want this person as a friend, but as someone who merely follows you.

If a friend stops replying to your contacts, don’t be insulted – it’s often hard to understand what’s going on in their life. If that relationship is important to you, keep the window of communication open. Send emails on occasion, even if they don’t reply. Give them a call just to see what’s going on. Express some concern, but don’t intrude unless you know the person intimately. Look for a sign that they need help before you intervene.

Sometimes friendships die out. Friendships are based on mutual interests and commonalities. Over a long period of time, your own shared experiences may become those commonalities and you’ll have a lifelong friend, but quite often friendships die out or go dormant. Don’t be dramatic or overwrought about it.

One sure sign that you should perhaps let a friendship rest (and devote time to building other friendships) is if you’re doing virtually all the work in terms of making contact. It may be that the friend’s interests have changed and they have moved on to another part of their life’s journey. Back off and see what happens, but in the meantime, fill your time with other friends.

Never force a friendship to continue. It’s unhealthy for both people. Instead, let it drift away and grow dormant – perhaps in the future, opportunity will cause it to bloom again.

Good luck, Gary.