This is the eleventh 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 twenty-first and twenty-second chapters – “Find Anchor Tenants and Feed Them” and “Be Interesting” – which appear on pages 190 through 223.

I have a really good relationship with my pastor. She’s one of the most interesting people I know and I regularly have long conversations with her about any number of topics, from the struggle of organized Christian churches to define where they stand on social issues and the reliability of scripture as an accurate document to such things the prevalence of moose in northern Minnesota. She’s genuinely an interesting person and I’m truly glad to have had the opportunity to get to know her over the past several years.

That being said, she inhabits a completely different social circle than I do – and I inhabit a different social circle than she does. Through her, though, I’ve been able to at least make acquaintances with quite a few different people. Her encouragement to participate in different activities has made that possible.

In Ferrazzi’s terms, my pastor is an “anchor tenant.” She’s a person that gives me a foothold in a completely different world – that of pastors of Lutheran churches in Iowa and into many, many other Lutherans in our local community.

Defining Anchor Tenants
On page 192, Ferrazzi spells out the meaning of the “anchor tenant” concept:

Every individual within a particular peer set has a bridge to someone outside his or her own group of friends. We all have, to some degree or another, developed relationships with older, wiser, more experience people; they may be our mentors, our parents’ friends, our teachers, our rabbis and reverends, our bosses.

I call them anchor tenants; their value comes from the simple fact that they are, in relation to one’s core group of friends, different. They know different people, have experienced different things, and thus, have much to teach.

From this perspective, it’s easy to see that our lives are full of anchor tenants. They’re the people that we know reasonably well that simply don’t run in our usual social group.

These people are good to know, though, because they give you a foothold into a completely different world. They bring different experiences and thoughts to the table than your usual friends. They can help connect you to people that you would otherwise never know. They often have access to resources and information that you would have never conceived of.

Who are your anchor tenants? How can you connect with them a little bit better?

Inviting Anchor Tenants Over
One powerful way to build a relationship with an anchor tenant is to invite them over for a dinner party. This works very well for some anchor tenants – but which ones? Ferrazzi spells it out on page 193:

Frankly, anyone who can add a little electricity to your dinner party is an anchor tenant. Journalists, I’ve found, are terrific anchor guests. They aren’t particularly well paid (which makes them suckers for free meals), their profession has a good deal of intrigue, they are always on the lookout for good material and see such dinners as a potential avenue for new ideas, they’re generally good conversationalists, and many folks enjoy an opportunity to get their ideas heard by someone who might publicize them to a larger audiences. Artists and actors, famous or not, fall into that same category.

Ferrazzi basically outlines several traits of good anchor tenants here. Let’s walk through all of the traits.

They’re not rich. People who are well off generally attend dinner parties just purely for the socialization and conversation. People who make less income also appreciate the value of the meal itself. This means that less-well-off folks are more likely to attend dinner parties and the like, meaning they’re easier to include in your social gatherings.

Their work has a good deal of intrigue to a general audience. Journalists, artists, actors, writers, and the like usually do unusual and interesting things with their time. This means that they’ve usually got lots of interesting stories to tell and things to say – which makes them very nice to have around in a group situation.

They have an added interest in getting to know new people. People who particularly benefit from meeting new people – like journalists and politicians – tend to be good anchor tenants, since they’re always striving for new relationships and new connections.

They’re good conversationalists. People that sit there quietly generally don’t add much to dinner parties. On the other hand, people who are extroverts and willing to strike up a conversation are always good additions.

They’re doing something valuable and want to share it. Individuals who are working for something that they want others to know about usually make for good guests as well. People who work for charities or causes fall into this category.

If you start filtering people with this criteria – especially anchor tenants in your life – you’ll pretty quickly come up with a killer list for an enjoyable (and potentially very worthwhile) dinner party at your home.

Notes on Hosting a Dinner Party
Ferrazzi spends several pages on techniques for hosting a successful dinner party, which he views as being key to building a good social network. On page 198, he suggests how to handle the food, an aspect that many people balk at when thinking of trying on such an event:

There’s no sense in a party being all work. If you can’t hire a caterer, either cook all the food ahead of time or just use takeout. If the food is good and the presentation snazzy, your guests will be impressed.

These days, I usually opt for a caterer. But you can have a similarly elegant party for much less if you’re willing to get creative and spend some time preparing. The key to low-budget dinner parties is to keep it simple. Make one large dish, like a stew or chili that can be prepared a day or two ahead of time. Serve it with great bread and salad. That’s all you need.

That’s usually the plan I follow if we’re having a large number of guests. I’ll make a big pot of chili or something similar the day before. Early that morning, I’ll bake several baguettes – which are really, really easy to make – from scratch. In the afternoon, an hour or so before the meal or people begin to arrive, I’ll begin warming up the soup and slicing the baguettes, as well as preparing a tossed salad. When it’s time, I just serve everything buffet-style. This allows me to serve a very good meal without a ton of effort.

One point of advice, though: find out about dietary choices in advance. If someone’s coming that’s vegetarian or has a food allergy, be prepared for that with something else. It’s not that hard to have something additional on hand for such guests – and they usually really appreciate your thought and extra effort.

Be Interesting
Up to this point, the primary focus of the book has been on how to connect with people. However, it’s not very useful advice if you’re not interesting yourself. On page 204:

Be interesting! All that you’ve read thus far doesn’t relieve you of the responsibility of being someone worth talking to, and even better, worth talking about. Virtually everyone you meet in a situation is asking themselves a variation on one question: “Would I want to spend an hour eating lunch with this person?”

Ferrazzi’s question at the end is pretty key. Look at yourself and ask yourself honestly if you’d like to spend an hour eating lunch with that person. If the answer is no, then there’s a problem.

How can you be interesting, though? The best way to do it is usually to just express what’s on your mind. The more you hold back because you’re worried about what others might think of you, the less they think of you at all. That doesn’t mean you should be offensive or crude, but it does mean that you should share your ideas and thoughts in conversation with others as often as you can.

For many of us, this is scary. I know that, for a long time, it was scary for me to do this. I was helped greatly in getting over that fear by Dale Carnegie’s excellent How to Win Friends and Influence People. That book taught me little things that I could work on to feel more comfortable in social situations and some general guidelines on what exactly to say next when I didn’t naturally know what to say.

The Value of Being Interesting
How exactly can you be interesting to others? On page 206, Ferrazzi addresses that point:

Being interesting isn’t just abut learning how to become a good conversationalist. Don’t get me wrong, that is important, but you need a well-thought-out point of view. I honestly hop from now on you’ll be a newspaper-reading maniac ready to engage the topics of the day with anyone you meet. But being interesting and having content are very different. The former involves talking intelligently about politics, sports, travel, science, or whatever you’ll need as a ticket of admission to any conversation. Content involves a much more specialized form of knowledge. It’s knowing what you have that most others do not. It’s your differentiation. It’s your expertise.

When I read this passage, I immediately thought of academic conferences.

At a typical academic conference, most of the people there already have the content. They’re stuffed full of ideas and information related to the topic at hand. Yet many of them don’t talk to one another – they remain quiet, taking notes and sticking to their presentations.

Why is this? They have content, but they’re not interesting.

Instead, there’s usually a handful of people at these conferences that everyone knows. These people spend the whole conference carrying on conversations with others. At the end, they’ve met pretty much everyone of interest there and often have lots of people to follow up on.

Those are the interesting people. Yes, they have the content – but so does everyone else there. What sets them apart is that they also have a wide basis of general cultural knowledge, and that general knowledge helps them to connect to pretty much everyone they meet. They’ll understand the obscure joke on someone’s shirt and complement them on it. They’ll know enough about current events to strike up a chat with a guy who just sat down his newspaper. They’re culturally aware – and that makes all the difference.

A Unique Point of View
Every single person has a unique point of view. It’s only those that utilize that uniqueness that succeed in being interesting. Fron page 213:

A unique point of view is one of the only ways to ensure that today, tomorrow, and a year form now you’ll have a job.

What about you sets you apart from the rest of the world? Your family? Your personal story? Your experiences? Your particularly strange set of accomplishments? What can you break down about your story that makes you unique – or nearly so?

Mine’s simple. I grew up in an impoverished family in the Midwest and managed to make it out of that situation. Unfortunately, I had no idea how to manage that money and I fell into the debt trap that ensnares so many. As I struggled to free myself, I chose to tell the world all about my struggles. I’m also a parent.

Each element of that story is pretty common. Lots of people grow up poor. Some of them make it out. Many people grow up and live in the Midwest, which offers some distinct character traits. Lots of people wind up in severe debt trouble. Many people share their stories with the world. A few people are willing to talk openly about their money. Many, many people are parents.

But when you mix those elements together into a stew, you wind up with something that’s unique – or nearly so. That’s why The Simple Dollar works – readers know who I am and what my perspective is. They don’t have to guess at it and they can identify with some of it, but some elements are different enough that they keep reading.

On Saturday, we’ll tackle the twenty-third and twenty-fourth chapters – “Build Your Brand” and “Broadcast Your Brand.”

Three little items of interest.

1. I will be attending the SXSW Interactive conference in Austin, TX on March 12-16 (or some subset of those days). I hope to have copies of my upcoming book there to give to a few people. If you’re going to be there as well and want to meet up, let me know!

2. Starting next Friday (or possibly the Friday after that), I am going to be writing a series of weekly food posts on frugal meals and food preparation, ones that are kind of similar to the “How Low Can You Go” series from this summer. These will be heavy on the photography, but I do not want the typical over-the-top food photography – I want it to look like a realistic kitchen where real people prepare food and serve it to their families. Please, take extra effort in commenting on these posts, as these are “warm-ups” for an eventual blog that I hope to write dedicated to food and cooking.

3. Over the years, many readers have been kind enough to send me gifts of all kinds, and I really appreciate it. But after receiving some (very) awkward gifts in the mail, I’ve changed that policy. If you wish to send me a gift, please choose an item from my wishlist at Funagain Games. We play a lot of board games here as a family and with friends, and Funagain is a great game retailer with great prices and a very easy ordering system (you can even pay via PayPal). Alternately, please make a donation to Jump for Joel (my favorite charity) on my behalf. This change in attitude about such generosity was a difficult decision to come to and I puzzled over how to handle it (and write about it) for a long while.

Here are some interesting personal finance writings I found in the past week.

Little Known Secret to Buying Cookbooks at Insanely Cheap Prices Library book sales are a great way to find “timeless reference” books – like cookbooks. After all, recipes from the 1950s still work, don’t they? The cookbook section is the first place I hit during library sales, actually. (@ pay less for food)

5 Ways Self Storage Units Are More Sad Museums Than Savvy Solutions Before our financial meltdown, we had a self-storage unit to hold the stuff that wouldn’t fit in our apartment. It was an incredibly stupid mistake. Instead of throwing more money away storing stuff that we’re not using, we should have gotten rid of a lot of stuff. (@ wise bread)

Goals Are the Gateway to Financial Success This is the second in J.D.’s list of thirteen guiding principles. I’m a huge believer in personal goals for success, not only in finances, but in any area of life. (@ get rich slowly)

A Secret to Happiness? Don’t Get Organized. This seems counterintuitive at first, but it actually makes a lot of sense. If you have so much stuff that it’s difficult to keep it organized, you have too much stuff and should consider getting rid of some of it. A lack of organization is a sign of being overwhelmed – and that means it’s time to step back a little. (@ happiness project)

The Death of Multitasking and Rebirth of Unitasking If you do any sort of work that requires deep focus, multitasking won’t help you get it done. I find time and time again that I work better if I close off as many distractions as possible. (@ dumb little man)

The Neutral Fallacy: There is No Sideways in Life A thought-provoking article. I tend to agree, for the most part – everything you do in life is either a step forward or a step back. I don’t really think “sideways steps” exist – they’re usually steps back. (@ jonathan fields)

This past weekend was a typical one at our house – lots of time spent together as a family and surprisingly little money spent. There were activities that cost very little, bartering, home improvement projects, and time spent together as a family.

During the weekend, I kept a notebook, jotting down the things that we did that show how easily frugal tactics can be integrated into a normal, joy-filled life. Here are some of the highlights. I highlighted some of the things we did to save money, along with a count of them (perhaps convenient for comments!).

Friday
We started off the weekend with a nice family dinner together, consisting mostly of leftovers (1). Later in the evening, I left to meet up with a local board gaming group for a free evening (2) of games – my one “guy’s night out” activity. While there, I bartered (3) away a big pile of our games to get several new ones for us to play. My wife stayed home with the kids, put them to bed, and read a book sent to us for free via PaperBackSwap (4).

Saturday
After everyone woke up, we had from-scratch waffles for breakfast (5) requiring only a few staple ingredients and using a gifted waffle iron. We spent the morning doing household chores (6), as the day was rainy, and playing with Joseph’s wooden train set (7). Afterwards, had a simple soup for lunch (8) that just required a few handfuls of leftover ingredients, a few spices, and some water.

In the afternoon, John paid us a visit and we spent several hours socially playing board games (9) – the very ones I’d acquired for free the night before. For dinner, we had a pot roast. The roast came from our freezer (10), as it was purchased during a meat sale a while back, and many of the vegetables came from our garden (11).

Sunday
Sunday featured beautiful weather, so we spent much of the day playing outside in the grass (12). For breakfast, we had scrambled eggs and toast (13), then we went to church. After church, my son went to a kid’s event and I sat outside, biding my time by reading a book I checked out from the library (14). For lunch we had leftovers from lunch the day before – soup (15). While the kids napped, I bought a few groceries for the week at Fareway (16) and also picked up some supplies for a home improvement project. I bought a high quality brush (17) to use for the project.

In the afternoon, we worked on refinishing our deck (18) while the children played in the yard some more. For dinner, we had a large pan of homemade lasagna (19). Later, we prepared for the week ahead by transforming the leftover pot roast into a shepherd’s pie (20) with just a few added ingredients.

That pretty much sums up our weekend. Living frugal is simply a way of life for us now. At each of the numbered points above, we would have either done it a more expensive way – buying new, not reusing leftovers, hiring someone to do it, buying an el cheapo brush, going out and about, buying new books – or just done something completely different. Instead, we find ourselves spending less at every turn – and it makes a tremendous difference in our pocketbooks.

How Did This Save Money?
Here are some additional notes on each point above.

(1), (15) If there’s food left over from a meal, it’s always incredibly cost effective to eat the leftovers later until they’re gone.

(2) Social events with no cost to get in or to participate are always great. I brought along a travel mug and filled it up with tap water a few times, so there really was no cost at all aside from the gas to get there.

(3) Swapping items is always a great way to save money, as you’re directly transforming something you don’t want into something you do want. In this case, I transformed some old, tired games we’d played to death and/or grown bored with for games we’d never played.

(4) Almost all of our books come from PaperBackSwap, which allows us to read almost any book we want for the cost of mailing another paperback via Media Mail – about $2. The books are delivered to our home – we don’t have to go shopping for them. Incidentally, it was this book

(5) We did this instead of buying a waffle mix, using Alton Brown’s recipe. Given that the powdered ingredients add up to a cost of about fifty cents and replace the cost of a kit, I’d say this was a bargain. Plus, the waffles turned out tremendously well – perfectly crispy.

(6) I worked on my home maintenance checklist, which extends the life of things in our home, saving us some serious coinage by significantly delaying appliance and repair costs.

(7) He has the Thomas Wooden Railway. For his third birthday and fourth Christmas, he asked that his grandparents and aunts and uncles get him parts for his wooden railway instead of highly disposable plastic gifts. Now his wooden railway can take over the entire kitchen table, he has tons of wooden cars to drive on them, and the vehicles easily take a bruising and beating without skipping a beat. A three year old and a one year old have beaten on them for a year and you can barely tell it. This is a toy that will be used with these two kids for a while longer, with any future kids we have, and likely with any grandchildren. It’s a gift with strong staying power. Sturdy toys always trump plastic, semi-disposable ones.

(8) All you need is real chicken stock, maybe half a pound of cooked chicken, and a few vegetables – a carrot, a couple celery sticks, an onion – and the soup will blow your mind.

(9) A free social afternoon spent entertaining ourselves with new items acquired for free.

(10) We buy meat in bulk when there’s a sale and store it in our freezer. This cuts down on the initial cost of the meat itself, plus reduces incidental costs – it’s a lot easier to throw together a meal if you always have a freezer stocked with meats and other items. This means less eating out, less last-minute runs to the store, and less prepackaged meals, too. Vive le crock pot!

(11) Our vegetable garden provided many hours of outdoor enjoyment during the summer and is now providing lots of fresh vegetables (we’re getting to the end of them, finally), all for not much cost. We compost our vegetable and yard scraps and use that for fertilizer and do the work ourselves by hand for the fun of it, so the free vegetables are just an incredibly delicious bonus. Here are some details (and pictures) of our spring planting.

(12) Instead of going somewhere to entertain our kids, why not just enjoy a day running around in the yard? No cost – and with an imaginative three year old and a dad who loves a good game of Calvinball, there’s no need for much else.

(13) The total cost to feed all four of us was less than a dollar.

(14) I am a fanatical user of our library – that’s where I get the newer releases that I read. The book I was reading at that time was This Is Where I Leave You by Jonathan Tropper.

(16) We used a price book to determine that, for the staples we buy, Fareway is the cheapest local store for us. Thus, we shop there for our staples – and since we cook as from-scratch as possible, most of our shopping happens there. We save money each trip there compared to other stores – the places we used to shop for groceries.

(17) We have several refinishing projects that need to be done over the next year, so buying one high-quality brush that we can reuse several times is better than buying a cheap, disposable one that loses bristles often and will have to be discarded after a couple of uses. This brush can go on our tool shelves in the garage and be used over and over again as we refinish deck furniture, etc.

(18) By putting a water-resistant finish on our deck, we’ll greatly extend the life of the deck. This means putting off the cost of replacing it by years and years, perhaps allowing us to never have to replace it before we move (or if we do, being able to sell the house with a beautiful new deck attached).

(19) A “large pan” means ingredients could be purchased in bulk, especially if you make multiple pans at once. This means it’s cheaper per serving. A “large pan” also means leftovers, which means that pan covers lunch for both Sarah and myself for the next few days.

(20) Reconstituting leftovers as ingredients for subsequent meals always saves some money.

Recently, my wife was in rural area of Iowa where the gas prices were significantly higher than they are near where we live. While there, the amount of gas in her tank got low, so she stopped to fill up. After looking at the price and doing a quick bit of mental math, she chose to only put two gallons of gas in the tank.

Upon returning home, she stopped at a nearby gas station that consistently has very low prices and put another nine gallons in her tank, filling it up, and saving about seven cents a gallon added – sixty three cents, total.

When she got home and told me this story, I was fairly surprised. Making an extra stop for gas just to save sixty three cents somewhat threw me.

“Why didn’t you just fill up before you left that town?” I asked her.

She shrugged her shoulders. “The gas is cheap enough here that I thought it would be worth the stop.”

Being the analytical people we both are, we decided to turn to the numbers. First, I needed some accurate data on how long it would take to fill up a tank of gas. I stopped myself to fill up my truck – with a twenty gallon tank – and the entire stop took me just shy of six minutes. If you filled up a ten gallon tank, four minutes would be a reasonable estimation for a stop.

So, calculating based on that, stopping to save seven cents a gallon on gas actually saved us money at a rate of $9.45 an hour after taxes. That’s reasonably good – better than it might seem at first glance.

But it’s actually more than that. Let’s say she normally puts ten gallons in her tank during a four minute stop. Half of that time is spent parking, getting out, setting up the pump, and then turning it off and driving away afterwards. So, she pumps in the ten gallons in two minutes – a rate of a gallon every twelve seconds or so.

Her two gallon stop thus took her a total of two minutes and twenty four seconds. Her nine gallon stop took her three minutes and forty eight seconds. Add them together and you get six minutes and twelve seconds – not eight minutes.

So, she actually only invested two and a quarter minutes in pumping twice.

If you figure based on that number, she actually saved money at a rate of $16.80 by pumping twice – plus she has an extra gallon in the tank, which means she won’t have to stop again as soon.

What’s the conclusion here? Even if it seems a bit counterintuitive on the surface, it’s often worthwhile to make an extra stop if you are completely certain you can save money with that extra stop.

I use a simple rule of thumb for this – if I’m not doing anything particularly productive with my time, I’ll often jump on board with anything that’ll earn me at least $15 an hour in savings. In her situation, that’s exactly what she did by pumping twice compared to filling up just once.

This type of analysis reasserts itself with grocery shopping. There are several grocery stores in Ankeny, Iowa. The grocery store with the best selection of the items we buy is Hy-Vee. However, the best prices on staples can usually be found at Fareway.

If we had several specialty items on our list (like a particular kind of cheese or something along those lines), we would just do all of our grocery shopping at Hy-Vee, even though we’d pay a bit more per item for our other items. The only time we would split it up into two store stops is if we had an enormous grocery list.

In truth, if you’re buying more than just a few items, the amount you save for the extra time invested is probably worth the second grocery store stop. How so? If you figure that you’re familiar with the layout of both stores, it doesn’t take too long to find a particular item – let’s say thirty seconds per item to be fair.

Let’s say I can save an average of a quarter per item buying a staple item at Fareway, but we have to stop at Hy-Vee for some specialty items.

If we stop at just Hy-Vee, we invest ten minutes in getting out of the car, finding the cart, getting into the store, checking out, getting out to the car, and putting the items in it. If we stop at Fareway, we have to do that twice – twenty minutes. A ten minute addition for stopping at Fareway. However, the time actually finding items in the store is equal and, if anything, slightly favors Fareway because the store is smaller.

Let’s say I need an hourly rate of $15 in savings to make the stop worthwhile. The extra Fareway stop eats ten minutes, so I’d actually only need to save $2.50 there to make that $15 an hour rate. If I’m saving an average of a quarter per item, if I’m buying only ten staple items, it’s worth making two separate stops for groceries.

What’s going on here? To put it simply, if you know exactly what you’re shopping for and have at least a solid idea of where you’ll find the best price on a particular item, stopping at multiple places to buy groceries or doing things like only partially gassing up actually really pay off – much more than you might think on the surface.

Most people look at a quarter and just see a quarter – no big deal. A better way to look at it is to ask yourself what it really takes to get that quarter. At some point, the effort is worth it – and if you find that level, why not just keep doing it again and again? After all, quarters really add up.

If you want to get rich, watch the pennies and the dollars will take care of themselves.

Three years ago, one of my mentors was debating internally about how to handle a personnel situation. There were enough funds to employ one person. The performance of one worker was better overall, but the other worker often showed flashes of brilliance and was trusted more by his coworker.

In the end, the decision was made to keep the one with flashes of brilliance. After all, in my mentor’s words, “followers are easily replaceable, leaders are not.”

Ever since that day, I’ve thought a lot about what makes a leader. The person with flashes of brilliance clearly wasn’t a leader in the traditional sense – he was at the bottom of the pecking order. Yet he clearly was a leader in the more important sense. Other people trusted him and often turned to him when they needed help. He also was able to step up his game when it was needed the most.

Thus, he became much more vital to the organization than the steady, quiet employee who kept to himself.

What does it mean to really be a leader? It doesn’t mean having a title – that’s often just the result of already being a leader. It means being the person people rely on in a tough situation. It means being the person that steps up when it’s needed. It means being the person that gets people going on the things they need to do. It means getting the things done that you need to get done as well.

A leader with strong skills to back it up is indispensable to any organization. Here are fifteen ways you can start to become a leader in your own organization and make yourself more valuable there – even if you’re a quiet person who’d prefer to just get his or her work done.

Speak up at meetings.
If you have a genuine concern or a good idea in a meeting, speak up and voice it. Why? Quite often, your very concern or idea is in the mind of a lot of others around the room, only they’re afraid to speak up. By speaking up, you’re essentially giving their thoughts a voice without that risk. You’re being a leader for that group of people with that idea.

I’ve found that time and time again, when I do this, people will come up to me afterwards and say, “Thanks for saying that!” Right there, our relationship is stronger and they now look to me a little more than they did before. In at least one case I can think of, it led to a surprisingly strong working relationship.

Cut out the negative talk.
Talking negatively about others behind their backs does very little to help you. You might get the quick rush of feeling good from the ability to make yourself feel superior to the other person, but over the long run, you’ll have a very negative reputation outside of your tightest associates. If you don’t have anything good to say, don’t say it – it will damage the amount that people trust you. Plus, do you think people are saying similar things about you behind your back? How do you think that affects your reputation? A good tactic is a simple one – don’t run away from negative talk and don’t repeat it at all, but don’t contribute to it. Just ignore it and see it for what it is – usually jealousy on some level.

Offer up some positive talk, instead.
My tactic is to usually be quiet when people are being disparaged, but speak up quite a bit when the conversation is more positive. Making positive statements about others (and doing it consistently) does nothing but improve your reputation. Keep it to the realistic things, though – don’t just blindly compliment people.

Volunteer for the tasks everyone’s afraid to volunteer for.
Whenever a major task comes up that bears some serious responsibility and others are afraid to step up, step up. As with speaking up, by doing so, you effectively become the leader of the people who are interested but are too timid to volunteer themselves. You can take these people and channel them into being a part of the project.

Look for people who are struggling – and ask them what’s wrong.
In a workplace where people meet regularly and collaborate on projects, it’s often quickly clear if certain people are struggling or having problems. Quite often, these people are left to flounder by others who are too “busy” to deal with it, but by spending some time to find out what the real problem is, you’re often throwing this person a life raft which, if they climb aboard, can make them eternally respectful and supportive of you. When people are in trouble, that’s the time to approach them, find out what’s wrong, and find out if you can help without greatly upsetting your own boat.

Directly compliment impressive work.
If someone does good work, tell them right to their face that it’s good work, preferably in front of others. Everyone loves recognition and compliments and usually retain positive feelings towards the people who give recognition and deserved compliments. That positive feeling can often be utilized later on when you’re in charge of a team they’re on.

Tell supervisors when their subordinates are doing well.
This is a more indirect – but often more effective – method of the idea above. If someone does outstanding work, contact their supervisor and tell them. Face to face is often good, but even an email works for this purpose. Tell their supervisor exactly what the person did to go above and beyond the usual standard. This often results in an improvement in the workplace status for that person and, quite often, they end up realizing who offered up such compliments and recommendations.

Be willing and enthusiastic about team-based work.
I used to be a workplace loner and avoid team-based work. Eventually, though, I learned that team-based work is the absolute best opportunity you ever have in the workplace to build strong relationships with the people around you. The more you participate in teams – and come through with your part of the puzzle while helping in little ways with the parts of others – the more others begin to see you as reliable and trustworthy.

When you’re part of a team, take charge of it – but don’t be dictatorial.
My approach is pretty simple. If I’m a part of a newly-formed team, I’ll step up immediately and brainstorm a plan, then send it to the others for consideration. Unless someone rips it to shreds, it usually more or less becomes the plan and I’m the de facto leader of the group. It’s for the same reason as above – you’re usually speaking for people who are too timid to speak up or offer a plan and they’re happy for you doing that if you’re not pushy about it. I would usually do something like send out a rough plan and say, “Here’s my idea for how we should tackle this. What do you all think?”

Make a point to remember – and celebrate – your coworker’s life milestones and accomplishments.
One person I used to work with had a calendar he kept with everyone’s birthday in it along with their favorite two items from the vending machine. On their birthday, he’d go up to the vending machine, pop in $2, get their favorite soda and favorite snack, affix a bow (that he’d brought along with him) to the can, then stop by their desk and put them there, saying “Happy birthday!” with a big grin. It was small, but it came across as incredibly thoughtful – unsurprisingly, he was very well liked within the group and was often listened to and respected whenever he had any ideas or plans to share. Also unsurprisingly, he’s doing very well in life now.

Take two minutes to recognize the milestones and highlights in other’s lives. Keep track of them if you can. Find little ways to make everyone smile. Do these things and you’ll always win.

If there’s a problem you can easily solve, solve it.
Don’t worry about the political connotations or anything like that. If someone comes to you with a problem that you can completely solve or help solve without too much effort, just solve it. The more problems you solve, the more people look to you as a problem solver and the more they listen to your advice and what you have to say.

Ask for help when you need it.
Sometimes, you’ll need help. Some people are afraid to show weakness and avoid asking for help unless it’s absolutely vital. That’s nonsensical and inefficient. If there are particular elements that others can do much easier than you can, ask them for help (unless, of course, it’s a lot of additional work for them). This is the flip side of the coin from helping others whenever you can – if you’ve consistently helped others, they’re likely to help you.

Suggest events that involve your coworkers.
Be the person that rounds up a group to eat lunch together. Be involved in the planning of office parties – and even be the ringleader. Plan parties for people who are leaving. That doesn’t mean you have to do all the footwork, but develop the plan yourself. People will see you as a person who takes charge – and such events are simple to pull together if you just take a few minutes to do it.

Offer useful, detailed feedback.
In a busy world, it’s easy to just go “Looks good!” when someone wants feedback on something. Instead, take ten minutes and try to come up with three things that could be improved with the document. Preface it with a compliment on how good the project already is, put the three suggestions down as clearly and positively as possible, and finish up by saying something along the lines of wanting to turn something very good into something truly great. If the feedback is really worthwhile, they’ll again see you as someone to turn to when the chips are down.

When asked for your opinion, be honest but don’t be cutting.
Your honest feedback is much more valuable than being positive – but even if things are bad, you don’t have to be hurtful. I usually make an effort to compliment where I can, but if there are serious problems with what I’ve seen, I say so. Not saying so hurts them (since they present a poor product) and then, by association, hurts you (since you told them this poor product was good when it wound up dumping egg on their face).

These small things, done every day, make you simultaneously indispensable in your workplace as well as a person people look to as a leader. Who do you think will have their name come up the next time promotions are discussed?

Each Monday, The Simple Dollar opens up the reader mailbags and answers ten to twenty simple questions offered up by the readers on personal finance topics and many other things. Got a question? Ask it in the comments. You might also enjoy the archive of earlier reader mailbags.

I recently graduated college and have 2 student loans to pay off:
Loan 1: about $4,000 left on it with a 6.8% rate
Loan 2, Part 1: about $3,000 left with a 6.8% rate
Loan 2, Part 2: about $7,000 with a 4% rate
Loan 2, Part 3: about $6,000 with a 5.3% rate
The kicker on loan 2: I was ‘automatically selected’ to pay off both part 2 and 3 before I can even start paying off part 1 (with the crazy high rate).

Any and all advice will be welcomed. Please and thank you in advance!!
- AReynolds42

The first thing you need to do is figure out the true interest rate on that second loan. Effectively, you need to treat loan #2 as one loan – ignore the separate “parts.”

It’s easy – multiply $3,000 by 6.8%, $7,000 by 4%, and $6,000 by 5.3%, then divide all of it by $16,000. You get 5.0125%. Then, compare that interest rate to the other loans and start paying off either the one with the smallest total (the first loan) or the one with the lowest interest rate (again, the first loan), depending on whether you’re using the Dave Ramsey plan or the mathematically superior plan.

The answer’s easy for you – pay off the first loan first and just wait on the second one.

What is your process of reviewing books? Do you read the whole book and then do the review? Do you have any advice for writing good book reviews?
- Jules

I usually read the book chapter-by-chapter or section-by-section and jot down my impressions afterwards. Sometimes, I focus in on the big point of the section – at other times, I end up jotting down the individual point that sticks with me the best.

Once the book is done, I write down a few final notes on it and ask myself whether it was a worthwhile read.

From those scribblings, a book review comes together pretty easily. The real time investment is in the reading. I tend to put two hours a day aside for just that purpose – reading for the purpose of learning more about personal finance, careers, and so forth and writing reviews of those books.

Uh…you think emergency funds should have no limits? So, if I was a college kid with a $50,000 emergency fund in a savings account, you wouldn’t suggest I do something with that money?

One should never stop replenishing an emergency fund, yes, but that’s because emergencies keep using it up.
- Michael

Michael, it might be useful to put away your “jumping to conclusions” mat that you like to pull out all the time.

Yes, I think an emergency fund should have no limit. No, it doesn’t necessarily need to all sit in a savings account. Put some of it into CDs or bonds or short term treasuries.

An emergency fund shouldn’t just be used for negative emergencies. Life often throws us opportunities (or positive emergencies), and our emergency fund should be there to easily help us with those, too. That means the typical “six month emergency fund” – intended to just help with negative emergencies – isn’t enough. You need more. And given the number of opportunities we have in life, the more the better. If you keep your ears and eyes open, life is full of great opportunities.

In the past five years, three of my grandparents have passed away, having had the usual run of health issues, and having been helped tremendously (at near-sainthood levels) by their respective children – my parents, aunt and uncle. My sister is on the verge of getting married, and we’ve been debating the merits of having children. I love children, and hope to have several of my own. My sister doesn’t much like children, and doesn’t consider herself good “mom” material. But we both agree there are lots of times in life when having family support is necessary, and old age/failing health is the biggest. We always expected that the grown children would take care of the parents. But what if there are no children? Seeing the number of families where the kids grow up and are completely estranged, unwilling to help take care of aging parents, there’s no guarantee they’ll take up the task either.

My sister says raising kids and paying for college is expensive, and that amount of money invested wisely could pay for a great deal of home health care when the time comes. Does that work? We have a family friend in her 90’s, never married, who has had a home health care aide (let’s call her Jane) for years, who does all the cooking, cleaning, personal care and PT. How do you estimate how much to save for that? I suppose it’s like planning for retirement, but sadder.
- TheOtherKathi

If you have children and raise them in a loving and supportive environment, they’re often there for you in your dotage. I’ve seen it time and time again in my own family and in my wife’s family as well.

If you don’t have children at all, you simply don’t have that support. You don’t have children popping in to check on you or calling you every day. All you have is you (and perhaps your spouse).

That’s not a reason to have a child. If you’re not capable of being a good parent, your children won’t be capable of being good children. Don’t have children unless you want to have children.

Another caveat: it’s a bad idea to plan on your children helping you. Instead, you should focus on not being a burden to them in your final years – they’ll often still help you, but it’s impossible to predict how much they’ll help you.

Do you dream in color or black and white? Do you remember your dreams?
- Ashley

I dream in frighteningly vivid color. Sometimes, I have dreams that remind me of Yellow Submarine, actually – I don’t know how else to describe them. Many of my dreams are more reality-based, though.

I tend to remember one dream a night or so and I usually write them down in as much detail as possible in my journal. For example, last night I had a dream that my wife and two kids passed away and I wound up remarrying a very short woman – I never did see the woman’s face. She had also lost her husband in an accident and we found each other in a support group. She had a teenage son (that I do remember) who practically demanded that we get married.

I usually write these dreams down because they become the basis for short stories later on. I read through these recollected dreams and every once in a while, one will become the source of a piece of fiction.

Me and my partner are planning to go to live in Southeast Asia for up to a year (or longer – it’s very open-ended). We both have roots there, and think it would be one of those life-enriching experiences that we’d never forget and would thank ourselves for later on in our lives. We’re planning to use about 20k in savings to pay for basic things, and then try to start a little business (English tutoring, guest house, or online service). However, we’re both concerned that when (if?) we get back to the US, we’ll have to resort to office/other drudgery again. Also, our parents are getting to that age where they need more of our financial and emotional support. Being in a traditional family, they’d like to see us buy a home to which they’d most likely move to as well. Do you think it makes sense to travel now or to hold it off until we save more?
- Ty

Travel now.

Here’s why. The older you get, the more likely you’re going to be entangled in many different demands in your life. Your parents will be in worse health. You may wind up with children whether you intend to or not. You’ll become a part of a community and more attached to the people around you.

And travel will seem less realistic than it does now. It’ll be harder to take such a leap.

The best time to do such a thing is when your entanglements are few, and they’ll never be fewer than they are now.

If you’re dreading returning to “drudgery” when you return, you should consider a different career. What do you consider to not be “drudgery”? Think about that and try to find work in that direction.

Do you ever write fiction?
- John

I try to write a short story a week. I’d love to be able to write more than that, but fiction writing is harder to find success with today than nonfiction and memoir writing (which is what The Simple Dollar is, for example).

I’d love to be able to primarily write fiction at my own pace, but that’s a future that seems a long way off. My plate is happily full at the moment, so I mostly work on fiction to keep myself from getting completely rusty.

I haven’t written anything that I feel is publishable yet, but I may be too hard on myself.

May I know what you consider as the best personal finance book for people in their 30s that you have read so far?
- Joy

It depends on what you’re looking for.

If you want a book that focuses on the nuts and bolts of investing and money management, I’d probably vote for Get a Financial Life by Beth Kobliner.

If you’re re-evaluating your whole relationship with money, nothing beats Your Money or Your Life.

If you’re at a career crossroads, look at something like Career Renegade by Jonathan Fields.

Those all speak well to thirtysomethings, I think.

How much money does a person have to have before you consider them rich?
- Kelly

There’s no set dollar amount.

For me, a person is rich if they can wake up each morning and do whatever they want to do. It might be some kind of work or it might not, but the person has the freedom to choose between work and play and define entirely for themselves what work is and what play is.

That, to me, is what it means to be rich. It doesn’t mean a huge number of investments or a fleet of expensive cars. It just means freedom.

Did you enjoy Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box? You tweeted about it a few times.
- Kathy

It’s just as good as the first Professor Layton game, if not better.

For those unaware, Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box is the second in a series of games for the Nintendo DS. The games are simple adventure games (with amazing graphics and voice work) that involve solving a huge number of puzzles – 150 directly in the game and a few very engrossing puzzle-based side quests.

Both games are well worth playing. They only have between five and ten hours of gameplay in each one, but it’s some of the most enjoyable gameplay around. It’s great to pick up for fifteen minutes, solve a few puzzles, dig a bit deeper into the story, and then put it down.

Got any questions? Ask them in the comments and I’ll use them in future mailbags.

Every other Sunday, The Simple Dollar reviews a personal development, personal productivity, entrepreneurship, or career book.

For the first time ever, I’m reviewing a book as a result of an impassioned plea from one specific reader.

Susan, however, is one special reader. She started reading The Simple Dollar in early November 2006, right as the site launched. Since then, I’ve heard from her almost monthly and have used her story for inspiration for several posts over the years. She’s always been encouraging, has offered lots of suggestions, and been incredibly generous a few times (including giving me quite a few credits on PaperBackSwap when I first started).

When she first started writing, Susan was chasing her MBA. When she received her degree, she struggled for quite a while finding a job, then finally found a good place to call home – or at least to start out.

Recently, Susan wrote to me, glowing about how her career was going so far. In that email, she said that reading Basic Black was one of the best things she ever did. An older worker had loaned her the copy and encouraged her to read it and absorb it, so over one long weekend, that’s what Susan did.

She practically begged me to review this book, saying it had a huge impact on her life and her career starting out as a young woman in the business world, and after all the support Susan has given me over the years, I couldn’t help but give Basic Black a read.

Basic BlackCosmopolitan, Esquire, Good Housekeeping, Harper’s Bazaar, and O. She was also involved in the incredibly successful launch of USA Today back in the 1980s. In short, she’s a great example of how a woman can succeed in business – and, at least in the case of Susan, Cathie’s a real role model and someone to look up to.

Does Basic Black offer any strong career advice or does it just faintly mimic other books already on the market? Let’s dig in.

Drive
If you want something, you have to be willing to go after it – or else someone else will pluck that ripe tomato right out of your hand.

Going after something is simple. It means taking care of every significant problem or conflict along the way. It means building lots of relationships with lots of people – get on the phone regularly! It means doing what it takes to come up with a tremendous end result for whatever projects are assigned to you.

It means being tireless and filling every moment you can with achieving your goal (without being unethical, of course). The best way to get ahead is to do the best you and build the most relationships for yourself, not by sabotaging or interfering with others (as that’s detrimental to the whole organization – and thus detrimental to you).

Risk
Many people are very risk-averse with their career. A small group of people are extremely risky with it, often taking enormous chances with themselves, their business, and their industry (hi, Lehman Brothers and Enron!).

The best solution is to be somewhere between the two. Be willing to take risks, but also spend some time carefully considering the downside to these risks. Don’t take risks that would severely damage the company unless you can control that outcome. Be willing to take risks that might set your career back a little, but not ones that can sink everything.

Calculated, moderate risk mixed with drive is a powerful medicine for career success.

People
The advice in this section neatly overlaps with the recent discussions on here about the book Never Eat Alone. To put it simply, you’re far better off giving what you know freely and accumulating connections that find you valuable than you are playing social games.

Instead, your goal should be to build valuable, long-standing relationships with people inside your organization as well as people outside your organization (both in the industry and in the community).

The more people you have a strong relationship with, the more strings you can pull when you actually need them to accomplish a project. You build those relationships by helping those people out when they need it – giving information, offering help, and so on.

Fear
Fear comes from intimidation – a person you don’t think you can handle or a situation you’re uncomfortable with. Quite often, the thing we fear just represents some other fear we have – our own mortality or our own failure.

In other words, most things in the outside world that we fear are instead just issues of self-confidence.

Whenever you’re put into a situation where you feel fear, think about what’s going on for a second. What are you really afraid of here? What’s the worst possible outcome? When you start thinking in those terms, fear begins to melt away. The worst thing that can happen is that the client walks out the door – and that’ll probably happen anyway – so why be afraid?

Power
Everyone has some degree of power just because of their presence. Others have earned more power over time because of their success or relationships.

However, one thing’s for certain: the more you use your power, the less powerful you are.

Power is not an infinite thing. Instead, it shouldn’t be used unless there’s a very good reason for it – and just getting your way is not a good reason. When you reserve your power for key moments, you become substantially more powerful. People pay attention and follow you because they know that you don’t exert your power unless it’s important.

Passion
Some people confuse passion and drive, but they’re different things. Drive makes sure you cover all your bases, while passion ensures that you enjoy the whole process.

Channeling your passions can be a real trick. It requires you to seek those things that you truly enjoy and find ways to channel that enjoyment into your work, creating things that no one else can create.

Drive fills your days. Passion fills your nights.

Attitude
Believing in a positive outcome of any situation is key to creating a positive outcome in any situation. If you go in the door under the belief that you’re going to fail, you probably are going to fail.

Make up your mind what result you want for the upcoming situation, then consider what you need to do to make that happen. Keep it front and center in your mind – the desired outcome of the event – and do everything you can to raise the overall tide of the room so that you can accomplish it.

After all, a rising tide lifts all boats, and if you bring a great positive perspective to a situation, it raises everyone’s boats.

Leadership
Leadership simply means being reliable. Whenever there’s a problem or a big decision, the leader is the person that everyone feels comfortable with making that decision or solving that problem. It’s not a title on a placard or anything else – it’s simply taking care of things.

Don’t worry about big long lists of traits that leaders provide. You make yourself a leader by solving problems and coming up with solutions to the big issues of the day. You are a leader when you help bring someone around and engage them in their work. You’re a leader when you volunteer for the tough tasks – and collect the input of others for that task.

You can be a leader every day, whether you have that title or not. The title will come if you’re a leader for long enough.

Is Basic Black Worth Reading?
For someone who is entering into a business career, particularly a young woman, Basic Black is loaded with strong advice and information, written from the perspective of someone who had to fight her way up to the top. In my writeup, I glossed over the specifics – over and over again throughout this book, Black does a great job of offering up very specific advice in the general areas covered, mixing anecdotes and straightforward suggestions in a very heady mix.

Unfortunately, the target audience for this book is pretty narrow. It really applies mostly to people starting out in the business world. Although many pieces of the advice apply elsewhere, readers outside of this situation are better served reading other books on personal growth and career development.

When I was in seventh grade, a bunch of twelfth graders grabbed me one day. They tossed me in a trash can, popped a lid on it, then rolled the can (with me and some trash inside) out into the middle of the school’s parking lot. They then administered some kicks to the can and left me there.

I crawled out as they were laughing and high-fiving each other, grinned, shrugged it off, and went on about my business. It was the right attitude to take. A few other seventh graders provided an enormous reaction to the situation – telling the principal, throwing fits, challenging the much older kids to fights. Those reactionary kids were subjected to ever-escalating forms of bullying and hazing, while the ones who just shrugged it off were at worst ignored and at best given an occasional positive recognition from the much older kids.

Now that we’re all adults, we might think that such bullying has been left behind. This is playground fodder, after all – the nonsense and torments of high school is in the past for most of us, right?

The truth is that even as adults, we’re subjected to bullying in various, more subtle ways – and our reactions to that bullying often determines our futures.

Don’t believe me? Take these ideas into account.

Advertising is a form of bullying. The purpose of an ad is to make you somehow feel less adequate if you don’t have the product they’re pitching. In essence, it’s psychological bullying – the point is to make you feel inadequate while the people who have the product are superior to you.

“Keeping up with the Joneses” is a form of bullying. Again, when your peers have certain status objects, these objects can subtly make you feel jealous and make you feel less adequate than you once did. They have a nice new car and you do not – why not? Again, when you buy into the “keeping up with the Joneses” mindset, you’re agreeing to feel superior when you have things they do not and inferior when they have things you do not – mutual bullying.

A boss like Bill Lumbergh, forcing you to work on Saturday and Sunday, is a bully. He’s a bully because he has power over your freedom and he knows it. Such a boss knows that you’re financially reliant on the job you have and that your situation in life, if you were to be fired, would be disastrous. So he uses that power like a club to beat you into submission and to make you give more and more of your time and life energy to the organization.

Fortunately, we have weapons that we can use to fight against financial bullying.

The biggest tool is an appropriate sense of “enough.” You don’t need more things. You don’t need better things. If you’re reading this, in all likelihood, you already have abundance in life. Sure, it’s fine to have some desires, but those things are just that – desires. They don’t define who you are and they aren’t a requirement for living. You already have enough.

Another tool is self-confidence. You don’t need products to make yourself worthwhile – you already are worthwhile. You’re surrounded by people who care about you. You have countless opportunities to do many, many things every day to make the world a better place.

Yet another tool is financial independence. If you’ve been careful with your spending and put yourself in a position so that if you did lose a job it would not be the end of your world, then you’ve got a great deal of financial independence. You can’t be beaten down due to your “need” of a salary any longer, which gives you the freedom to take risks at work and explore new potential areas of employment without panicking or being afraid.

In the end, the solution to bullying is up to you. Do you choose to let the world tell you what to do? Or do you choose to walk your own path with your head held high?