This is the sixteenth 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 thirty-first chapter – “Welcome to the Connected Age” – which appears starting on page 291, as well as some concluding thoughts and links back to earlier entries in this series.

Much of the material up to this point in Never Eat Alone occurs offline, in face to face meetings.

But, as you sit there reading this article, the obvious is true. Many of our interactions today take place online. We’re hyperconnected.

Just fifteen years ago, when I was in high school, I would have to stay home waiting by the phone as people played phone tag to make plans. Conversations were infrequent and the vast majority of socialization happened face to face. Today, most teenagers are in constant contact with each other via texting. The vast majority of their socialization takes place through social networking and instant messaging protocols.

That’s a tremendous change, and it’s rippling throughout our world. Quite a lot of my communication with others happens via email and Skype. Thanks to sites like Facebook and Twitter, people can get to know others quite well without ever meeting face to face.

Ferrazzi digs into this a bit in the closing chapter of the book.

Community and Alliances
As communication becomes easier and easier, alliances and relationships will become ever more important. On page 291:

Rugged individualism may have ruled for much of the nineteenth and twentieth century. But community and alliances will rule in the twenty-first century. In the digital era, when the Internet has broken down geographical boundaries and connected hundreds of millions of people and computers around the world, there’s no reason to live and work in isolation. We’ve come to realize, again, that success is not contingent on cool technology or venture capital; it’s dependent on whom you know and how you work with them. We’ve rediscovered that the real key to profit is working well with other people.

The vast majority of my work is conversation.

My day is usually filled with reading tons of emails and comments. I’ll then take from those emails and comments some ideas on what people are thinking about, and those provide the seed for future articles.

I’ll spend the day working on articles that are seeded by readers. In essence, these are responses – continuations of the conversation. I’ll post them, and they themselves will receive comment.

The conversation continues.

At my previous job, I did a lot of individual work, but there was still a huge amount of collaboration and conversation involved. I would email other workers for assistance. I would communicate with our clients for feedback. I would communicate with my boss when formulating future directions.

Communication is the key to everything. Working well with others is the one skill, above all, that’s valuable today. Master your interpersonal skills and communication skills and you’ve become much, much more valuable, no matter what you’re doing.

The Rebirth of Unions
Ferrazzi forecasts an interesting development on page 293:

Old style labor unions and guilds are showing signs of revitalization. As the outsourcing of jobs outside the United States continues, and more and more of us become free agents, Americans are finding strength in membership to something larger than themselves. We’re giving our loyalty and trust not to our companies but to our peers.

I don’t believe that the idea of what a union was in the twentieth century will continue to hold. Those unions are dinosaurs, large, dying behemoths locked in a struggle of mutual assured destruction with other dying behemoth corporations.

Instead, the future of unions is in actually caring about your peers and helping them to succeed directly. It won’t be some collective bargainer that you pay to negotiate a slightly better wage or better conditions for you. It’ll be a good relationship with the guy in the other department who will help you out when you need it.

I’m about as “free agent” as one can get. Yet, I’m part of an organization much like this – LifeRemix. The handful of people in this small group are peers. We all write (in various media) materials that strive to help others succeed in life. Because of that, we often have similar experiences and utilize similar resources.

By sharing those experiences and resources with each other, all of us in that group benefit. I’ve established great interpersonal relationships with many of them virtually and I look forward to meeting many of those people in the future.

What Is Our Legacy?
After all of this, what are we leaving behind in this world? Ferrazzi digs into this a bit on page 293:

Certainly, some of us will tally success in terms of income and promotions. Others will cite their newfound celebrity or the exciting expertise that they’ve amassed. For others still, it will be the fabulous dinner parties they throw or the aspirational contacts they’ve befriended.

But will such success feel empty? Instead of being surrounded by a loving family and a trusted circle of friends, will you only have colleagues and clients?

Sooner or later, in one way or another, we all will ask ourselves these questions. Moreover, we’ll look back on our life and wonder, What is my legacy? What have I done that is meaningful?

I don’t like to think of my own mortality. Such thoughts make me uncomfortable.

However, I do wonder (quite often, really) what my mark on this world will be.

I’m lucky in that The Simple Dollar has reached a lot of people in a positive way. I’ve read tons of emails from people who have begun turning their financial life around. I also have a book in print and another on the way.

I also have the legacy of my children. I strive to raise them well and I think (or is it hope?) that they’re starting off in the right fashion.

But what beyond that? What can I do with my life that will help as many other lives as possible?

It’s something I puzzle over all the time, and it’s starting to guide me more and more.

Some Final Thoughts
Quite a few people were surprised when I chose to dig so deeply into Never Eat Alone here on The Simple Dollar. After all, this is a personal finance blog. Shouldn’t I be talking about investments or saving money on ketchup?

Here’s the truth. I believe that successful money management comes about as a result of success in a lot of different aspects of life – and one major part of that is the relationships you build with others. Do you have a lot of people you can call a friend, both in personal and professional circles? These people provide companionship, advice, encouragement, and opportunities, almost at every turn.

In short, they’re integral to your career. They’re integral to opening personal and professional doors for you. They’re integral in helping you through the hard times in life.

People without such relationships are often in a tough spot. They have no one to call if they lose their job. They can’t organize a party when they need help re-shingling their roof. They never have the opportunity to meet the leaders in their field because they’re never invited in the door.

That’s the whole point of Never Eat Alone. Successful relationships with other people often make or break the success you experience in your own life, not just professionally, but personally, too.

For those of us who aren’t naturally socially adept, Never Eat Alone is a powerful handbook for doing just that. Even if you don’t agree with all of the ideas and tactics presented, the book is always thought provoking and it’s always pushing in the direction of building more and better relationships with the people all around you.

That, my friends, is a recipe for success in life.

Other Entries
Here are the fifteen earlier entries in the Never Eat Alone book club series. Enjoy!

Don’t Keep Score (chapters 1 and 2)
Build It Before You Need It (chapters 3 and 4)
The Genius of Audacity (chapters 5 and 6)
Do Your Homework (chapters 7 and 8)
Managing the Gatekeeper (chapters 9 and 10)
Share Your Passions (chapters 11 and 12)
Follow Up or Fail (chapters 13 and 14)
Expanding Your Circle (chapters 15 and 16)
The Art of Small Talk (chapters 17 and 18)
Social Arbitrage (chapters 19 and 20)
Anchor Tenants (chapters 21 and 22)
Build and Broadcast (chapters 23 and 24)
The Write Stuff (chapters 25 and 26)
Build It and They Will Come (chapters 27 and 28)
Find Mentors, Find Mentees, Repeat (chapters 29 and 30)

This is the fifteenth 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-ninth and thirtieth chapters – “Find Mentors, Find Mentees, Repeat” and “Balance is B.S.” – which appear on pages 273 through 290.

Just over a year ago, I wrote an article entitled “How to Find and Utilize a Mentor, No Matter What You’re Doing.” In it, I discussed strategies for identifying a mentor in one’s community and adopting that person as your mentor.

What I didn’t discuss in detail was the value of a mentor. Why would you want to have one?

The most valuable reason to have a mentor, I’ve found, is that a great mentor is a boundless source of advice that actually works. If you manage to get a successful elder statesman as your mentor, they likely have forgotten more about your area of interest than you’ll ever know. That wisdom can be incredibly helpful to you as you start out and grow into your area of interest.

Beyond that, a mentor can be a great source for connections and other resources to help you grow. They can put the word out for your fledgling career or entrepreneurial endeavor.

I believe a mentor is one of the most valuable things a person can find in their career or entrepreneurial journey.

The Historical Nature of Mentoring
On page 274, Ferrazzi puts mentors in a historical context:

No process in history has done more to facilitate the exchange of information, skills, wisdom, and contacts than mentoring. Young men and women learned their trade by studying as apprentices under their respective craftsmen. Young artists developed their individual style only after years working under elder masters. New priests apprenticed for a decade or more with older priests to become wise religious men themselves. When finally these men and women embarked on their own, they had the knowledge and the connections to succeed in their chosen field.

My belief is that the world would be better off if we returned to this sort of apprenticeship in most career fields. There are very few career fields today that do not require a pretty large skillset and isn’t benefitted by quite a lot of additional knowledge. Incorporating some form of apprenticeship into a field means that new entrants learn all of these things under the careful eye of a person who has learned them.

Yes, in many cases, apprenticeship already exists informally. I had several strong mentors during my early years that taught me many, many things. Yet, even then, it was limited. They were mentors to me out of the goodness of their heart, taking time out of their busy schedules to teach me things. On the other hand, as a proper apprentice, one would actually be very strongly tied to one’s master, doing much of their grunt work but also fine-tuning one’s skills and knowledge base over a long period of time.

Mentoring alone is incredibly helpful and it has spawned many a successful professional. Apprenticeship offers even more, yet we seem to have abandoned it culturally due to our impatience and our drive for profits. Is that a good thing? For quarterly returns, yes it is. For long term growth of skill-based fields, it’s not at all.

Everyone Has Something to Offer
In some ways, almost everyone you meet in life can be a mentor. On page 276, Ferrazzi spells this idea out:

The fact is, from my father’s perspective, everyone had something to offer. When he’d go out for his weekly sit-down at a local diner with his friends, he took me along. He wanted me to be comfortable with older, more experienced people and to never fear seeking their help or asking them questions. When my dad would show up with me in tow on a Friday night, his buddies would say, “Here’s Pete [my father's nickname] and Re-Pete [my nickname to his buddies].”

This passage really struck me because it points to something really important about mentorship: you can learn valuable lessons from almost anyone.

Here’s an example. For several years, I lived in an apartment about three miles from my workplace. It was in a large town that had solid mass transit available, so I would go out of my apartment building each day, walk a little ways, and there would be a bus stop. I’d wait for the bus there and ride it to work.

Most mornings, the same small group of people would be there at the same time and, over time, I got to know them. Many of them were professionals in other departments at the same place of employment. From those people, I learned a lot. They taught me how to speak up. They taught me how to diminish my intimidation factor (I’m a very tall, broad shouldered guy and can inadvertently intimidate people on occasion) and how to seem more friendly. They taught me about the nuances of office politics and gave me lots of advice on how to deal with difficult situations I was facing.

And they were just people at the bus stop. Yet, still, they were useful mentors who taught me a lot.

When you keep your ears and eyes closed, you miss out on a lot of valuable lessons.

Getting a Mentor
How exactly do you build up a relationship with someone who might be a primary mentor of yours. On pages 281 and 282, Ferrazzi offers up some strong ideas:

The best way to approach utility is to give help first, and not ask for it. If there is someone whose knowledge you need, find a way to be of use to that person. Consider their needs and how you can assist them. If you can’t help them specifically, perhaps you can contribute to their charity, company, or community. You have to be prepared to give back to your mentors and have them know that from the outset. [...]

If, however, there are no immediate opportunities for help, you must be prudent and conscious of the imposition you’re placing on that person. Almost every day, some ambitions young man or woman sends me an email that states all too directly, “I want a job.” Or, “I think you can help me. Take me on as your mentee.” I shudder at how deeply these young folks misunderstand the process. If they’re going to get my help, and they haven’t even offered their help in return, then at minimum they should attempt to endear themselves to me. Tell me why you’re special. Tell me what we have in common. Express gratitude, excitement, and passion.

I get emails all the time from bloggers who have just started a blog. They have maybe two or three posts up and they write to me essentially demanding that I take the time to visit their site and give them thorough feedback on what they’ve done.

In essence, these people are asking me to be their mentor. They’re asking me to give my experience and careful advice to them. Often, it’s in exchange for nothing, and just as often, they’ve given me nothing in return for it, not even the basic start of a conversation.

Now, if they happen to be presenting a blog that might be interesting to me, I’ll check it out, but most of the time, I just delete these emails. The people making such requests do not want to establish any sort of relationship. They just want to be handed a recipe to get themselves a few more page views.

On the other hand, several much wiser bloggers have started out by emailing me questions and observations about The Simple Dollar. They’ve written long posts, linking back to my site and debating what I have written. After an extensive conversation, then they might ask for some specific help, and at that point, I’m very happy to oblige.

The role of the mentee isn’t just to take. Every relationship is an exchange, and if you’re not offering to exchange anything, the other person likely won’t offer anything, either.

The Myth of a Work-Life Balance
On page 287, Ferrazzi attacks the idea of a balance between professional and personal life:

When it became clear to me that the key to my life was the relationships in it, I found there was no longer a need to compartmentalize work from, say, family or friends. I could spend my birthday at a business conference and be surrounded with warm and wonderful friends, as I recently did, or I could be at home [...] with equally close friends to celebrate.

To put it simply, once you figure out what your true central values are in life, the boundary between “work” and “personal” becomes a non-issue. In every aspect of your life, you just seek those true central values and do whatever is most in line with them.

For me, my central values are my children and my personal and intellectual growth. Almost every activity I choose to do, whether it’s work related or personal, seeks to push me in one of those two directions. I try hard to grow intellectually due to my work, and I push through the drudgery to earn income so I can support my children. I’ll spend long afternoons playing with my children and taking them to intellectually-stretching events or playing mentally challenging games with them or engaging them in social situations. My favorite pastime with friends is to play a game with them that requires me to think. I’ll happily invite anyone over that’s interesting to me and makes me grow somehow as a person, whether I know them through my professional work or they’re a close personal friend.

In the end, what’s the boundary? My only boundary of any sort is that I’ll turn off my cell phone if I want to engage in a focused activity with my children. Aside from that, pretty much anything goes.

I know what’s important to me and everything balances on that. The details? I’ll figure them out as I go along if my central values are in the right place.

There Is No Equation
What if you have multiple central values and you try to balance them? Ferrazzi, on page 287, argues that there is no equation that can be balanced:

The kind of false idea of balance as some sort of an equation, that you could take this many hours from one side of your life and give it to this other side, flew out the window. And with it went all the stress of trying to achieve that perfect state of equilibrium we read and hear so much about.

In essence, what Ferrazzi discovered is that the best way to spend your time is the way that mixes your various core values and interests the best.

One of the key highlights in my life is inviting friends over. I love to socialize. I love preparing meals for guests. I also love conversation with intelligent people and engaging in thought-provoking activities with them. This balances several key values in my life all at once.

What I learned, though, is that I get even more value out of this if I simply disregard the professional-personal barrier in terms of who I invite. For instance, the thought of inviting J.D. and his wife to a dinner party with several of my own personal friends sounds like it’d be incredibly enjoyable for everyone. There is no line between personal and professional there at all – it’s just people I like that I find interesting. The only difference is in how I connected to them.

I spend my time looking for activities with synergy throughout the various core values and passions in my life. I love taking my children to the grocery store, for example. It provides countless teaching opportunities, a fair amount of playfulness, the ability to riff on my passion for cooking, plus countless opportunities to jot down ideas for posts for The Simple Dollar. Where’s the line between personal and professional there? To put it simply, there isn’t one.

There’s just me.

Who Are You Spending Time With?
Ferrazzi ties these points together in an interesting way on page 288:

If you buy into the myth of balance (the one that sees life as an equation), as I once did, the answers to such questions as “If I’m so ‘accomplished,’ why aren’t I having more fun?” or “If I’m so ‘organized,’ why do I feel so out of control?” is to “simplify,” “compartmentalize,” or “reduce” your life into its most essential components.

So we try to save time by eating our lunches at our desk. We have less serendipitous conversations with colleagues, strangers, and other “nonessentials” at the water cooler. We consolidate our schedules to include only the most important actions.

People tell us, “If you just get more organized, if you strike a balance between work and home, and limit yourself to the important people in your life, you’ll feel better.” That’s just totally misguided. What they should be saying is “I gotta get a life filled with people I love.” The problem, as I see it, isn’t what you’re working on, it’s whom you’re working with.

Think about it this way. How many of your coworkers would you choose to spend time with if you didn’t work with them? If that number is very low, then it’s likely you have a strong desire to separate work and personal life. If it’s high, it’s likely that you do fill your social calendar with these people and thus you have a naturally balanced life, balanced in the way you want.

Ferrazzi’s argument isn’t that you should devote your life to work – I know that’s what at least a few readers thought when they read this. Instead, he’s saying devote all of your time to what you enjoy doing and the people you enjoy doing it with. Boundaries aren’t all that important.

The more time you find yourself spending doing things you don’t like doing with people you don’t like spending time with, the lower your quality of life is. There’s no paycheck worth chasing that’s worth sacrificing so much of the happiness in your life.

On Saturday, we’ll tackle the final chapter – “Welcome to the Connected Age” – and I’ll share some final thoughts.

This is the fourteenth 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-seventh and twenty-eighth chapters – “Build It and They Will Come” and “Never Give in to Hubris” – which appear on pages 259 through 272.

One major challenge for many people is how exactly to find people to connect to. Many of the typical social methods people use to meet each other are shots in the dark, hoping that you find someone compatible.

Ferrazzi is a big proponent of clubs and community organizations. If you dig around, there are hundreds, perhaps even thousands of these in your local area, but many people never put in the footwork to find such organizations.

Over the years, I’ve been a member of many, many such groups, and I have to agree – they’re often useful in building relationships and providing a great way to spend time. In my experience, the best organizations are the ones that combine the camaraderie of a club with a natural passion that you already have.

Join a Club
Ferrazzi lays out the reasoning behind joining a club or organization on page 261:

All clubs are based on common interests. Members are united by a similar job, philosophy, hobby, neighborhood, or simply because they are the same race, religion, or generation. They are founded by a common proposition that is unique to them. They have, in other words, a reason to hang out together.

Take a look in the mirrow. Who are you? Where do you live? Where did you go to school? What do you believe in? The answers to these questions give you things that you have in common with other people, and this can often be the basis of participation in organizations.

Perhaps your school has an alumni association. Perhaps you’re a believer of a certain religion. Perhaps you engage in a particular hobby that others might share. Maybe you suffer from a certain medical condition, or have survived a certain social situation.

Whatever it is, there’s either an organization out there that will help you find people that you have something in common with or you can start such a group yourself. The people you meet will not only be easy to meet, but many will have social worlds that don’t overlap your own, giving you many opportunities to get to know people in different areas and stages and walks of life.

Bring Something Extra
On page 261, Ferrazzi talks about your unique selling proposition:

At a time like this, you have to figure out what is your U.S.P. – your “unique selling proposition,” for all you non-MBA types out there. What secret sauce can you bring to the table? Your proposition can be an expertise, a hobby, or even an interest or passion for a particular cause that will serve as the foundation from which an entire organization or club can be established.

When you join a club – or, especially, when you start your own – you need to bring something unique and interesting to the table or else you’ll just stand out. Perhaps it’s nothing more than a willingness to participate and take on the difficult tasks. Perhaps it’s a set of resources that you have that you can contribute to the group. Maybe it’s personal talent.

An example: when in college, I joined a computer group, where people would trade software and computer parts, build computers for people, and give each other advice. The group was somewhat anarchical, though, and the job of president – the person who had to interact with the college and arrange rooms for meetings and the like – was thankless, though people did appreciate that someone was willing to do it. For one (long) year, that was me. Because of that year, I built up several long-lasting friendships, resulting in two separate guests at my wedding a few years later.

Whatever it is, having that extra “something” will help you become an integral part of any group and make it possible for you to meet lots of people. Stand up, offer what you can, and good things will happen.

Clubs Aren’t for Rich White People
On page 263, Ferrazzi eschews the “rich white guys” notion of what a club is:

The days when clubs were only for wealthy white men to consort with people just like themselves are over. It doesn’t matter if it’s a group of carpet salespeople meeting weekly to discuss the trials and tribulations of their jobs; a roundtable of female Republicans who are dissatisfied with the stance of their state party; or a group who share a passion for great wines and who come together monthly to do tastings, hear vintners who are traveling through the area, and who plan an annual trip to Napa. Whatever it is and whoever you are doesn’t matter.

The idea that a “club” is just an exclusionary group of like-minded people who don’t want anyone else interfering in their ways died along with the pet rock. Sure, there are still a few such archaic groups around, but most groups simply aren’t like that, and if you use the fear of exclusion to keep you from dabbling your toes in the water, you’re making a big mistake.

The entire purpose of a group is to meet people that overlap in some demographic fashion, whether it be a hobby or a belief or a location or a political affiliation or something else. That overlap is the one thing that matters.

Yes, maybe some groups that seem like they would fit simply don’t fit, but it’s not because of exclusion. It’s usually because of personality clash.

The Value of a Club
The compelling reason for club membership is spelled out on page 264:

As long as it’s an association of people with shared interests meeting in a specified place (even if that place is cyberspace), you’ll benefit from belonging to something larger than yourself. You and your fellow members will be strengthened by a collective identity. And whereas with business, where boundaries of most relationships are clearly defined by a specific project or deal and end when that project or deal is done, membership in a club (preferably a club you’ve started) will lead to friendships that will last for years.

Being in a club means that you’re building a bond with other people that goes beyond the minutiae of the day. People come together in clubs because of common interests and beliefs and passions, not because they’re made to out of business or because it’s convenient.

That’s why clubs are often the best opportunity for building new friendships and connections in your area. The people in that room share something that transcends the ordinary. Often, they work together to build something even more interesting and exciting. That environment is the type of place where relationships and friendships thrive.

Take some time and find out what groups, clubs, and organizations are available in your area and give them a shot, whether it’s a book club at the library or a hunting club at the local range. Whatever it is, if it matches you, you’ll likely match it.

Momentum
Whenever people start building a lot of new relationships, these relationships often snowball. Friends will constantly introduce you to new friends, and so forth. Ferrazzi looks at this more deeply on page 268:

The pursuit of a powerful network of friends is not in and of itself a bad thing. But the closer you get to powerful people, the more powerful you tend to feel. There is a point where your reaching out to others will pick up momentum; one powerful contact will lead to another and then to the next. It can be a very fun and motivating and important ride.

At one point in my earlier career, I noticed that this very phenomenon happened to me. At one point, I completed a pretty substantial project and was able to share the results of that with a large number of people. Later, at a large conference (the first of its kind I had attended), I would meet up with these people and they were constantly introducing me to others. By the end of it, I knew many of the key people there, pushing one of my friends to comment that it sure didn’t seem like I was a first-timer.

If you provide something of value to others and make a sincere effort to befriend them, help them, and maintain a connection, they’ll remember you. When the time comes, they’ll introduce you to people they know and you’ll get to know new people. Eventually this will reach critical mass – people will talk positively about you when you’re not around, realizing that they have you in common, and this will often bolster your reputation strongly without any effort from you. You’ll get calls and messages out of the blue from people wanting to know you.

It’s awesome. It works. It really happens. But it requires being a sincere and helpful friend to a lot of people over a long period of time.

Vanity
Unfortunately, that kind of success can lead to vanity. On page 268:

Don’t let a little vanity seep into your actions or excite more expectations or create a deeper sense of entitlement. Don’t get your Ph. D. in master connecting, and then, for some reason, forget all the classes and values that were your foundation.

Everyone fails in life. What will you do when the phone calls that were once returned immediately no don’t even get a response?

It’s easy to think that you really are awesome and that a gravy train of success will keep on running. Inevitably, though, something happens. We all fail. We all do something we shouldn’t.

The end result of that is sometimes connections close right in your face, and often even a domino effect can occur as the story of your mistake spreads.

What happens then? You rely on your old friends, the ones who have been around for a long time. The only problem there is that if you’ve stopped being true to who you are, you’ve also stopped being true to them – and it’s likely they won’t be there for you.

If you begin to think you’re better than people you once thought of as a valuable equal, it will eventually backfire on your face. Remain humble, and remember who your truest friends are and the values that helped you to start opening the doors in the first place. If you stick to those values and beliefs, you’ll do all right.

On Wednesday, we’ll tackle the twenty-ninth and thirtieth chapters – “Find Mentors, Find Mentees, Repeat” and “Balance is B.S.”

This is the thirteenth 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-fifth and twenty-sixth chapters – “The Write Stuff” and “Getting Close to Power” – which appear on pages 246 through 258.

When I was in high school, I had dreams of being a writer. I read prodigiously, wrote mediocre short stories, and imagined myself publishing a long line of novels when I was older.

My English teacher was surprisingly supportive of this, even though I never directly told him of my dreams. He constantly reinforced to me that I had some writing ability, but that I really needed to work at it to polish it. He would grade my papers with an extra sharp pen, taking off points for things that other students would have gotten away with.

My dream of being a writer went away for almost a decade, but I never stopped writing. I wrote something almost every day, not because I thought I was good, but because I thought it was fun. Little did I know that I was developing a personal trait that would serve me well throughout my professional life. I found myself writing reports and many other documents (things that I probably shouldn’t have been writing – they should have been the domain of my supervisor) while at my previous job, then my writing opened the door to The Simple Dollar as well.

I have little talent as a writer. Any ability I have comes from a lot of practice. However, that practice has built up a skill that’s marketable enough that I can use it to earn a living.

How to Use Writing to Build Relationships
Ferrazzi carries this idea forward on page 246:

If you have any writing skills at all – and yes, the good news is we all have some level of skill – you can get close to almost anywhere by doing a piece on them, or with them, even if it’s for your local newspaper.

Or even for your blog, provided you’re not trying to interview a mega-superstar.

Here’s how this works. Let’s say you’re trying to get to know someone. Get ahold of your local newspaper (or other media source) and suggest that you’d like to write a freelance article about this person. Explain why they’re interesting. Get permission, then call up the interesting person in question. The fact that you’re calling for a story about them will flatter them – unless, of course, they’re a major star of some sort, in which case more media requests might be annoying.

This gives you a great opportunity for a conversation with them. You can then relate to them the things you’re really working on – and you can even reveal to them that you’re only moonlighting as a journalist and your primary interests are elsewhere (if that’s the case).

Then, just translate what you know and what you learned in that conversation into a short piece and submit it. You’ll likely not get paid for it – or if you do, it’s a pittance – but that’s not the point. The reason to do it is to meet a person in the community you’ve always wanted to meet.

But I Can’t Write!
Many people believe that they can’t write. However, most people can – and they can even write well enough to be quite passable in a small newspaper. All it really takes is practice. On page 247, Ferrazzi offers some great advice on this:

First, get over all the romantic pretensions around writing. In business school, when I was dreaming about publishing an article in the Harvard Business Review, I had a wonderful encounter with a visiting professor who had written a number of high-profile articles and books. I asked her how I, too, could become a writer.

“Write,” she told me.

Brows furrowed, I nodded. When no more advice came from her esteemed mouth, I asked: “Anything else.”

“Write, then write some more. When you’re done – and here’s the kicker – keep writing.

“Look,” she said, “there is no secret. Writing is tough. But people of all talents, at all levels, do it. The onlything necessary to become a writer is a pen, some paper, and the will to express yourself.”

I have no writing talent at all. What skill I do have is built from a lot of practice. I can’t turn out much truly great prose, but I can turn out a lot of good prose fairly quickly. That’s how I can post two lengthy, meaty articles a day at The Simple Dollar.

Here’s the thing, though. Anyone can do this if they practice – perhaps not at the same volume, but anyone can write a good short article if they practice at it regularly. And the ability to write a good, short piece is endlessly useful in life, not only in the “getting to know you” method described here, but in any environment that relies on communication.

The better communicator you are – and written communication is a big part of this – the better your skill set is, no matter what you do. It doesn’t require talent. It just requires practice.

Field Mice and Antelope
Ferrazzi offers a good anecdote on page 249:

Newt Gingrich, the famous Republican politician and all-about-Washington gadfly, is known to tell a story about a lion and a field mouse. A lion, he says, can use his prodigious hunting skills to capture a field mouse with relative ease anytime he wants, but at the end of the day, no matter how many mice he’s ensnared, he’ll still be starving.

The moral of the story: Sometimes, despite the risk and work involved, it’s worth our time to go for the antelope.

It’s easy to make friends and connections with your peers and particularly with people at a level below you, but the real rewards come in building relationships with people who are above you in status at work and in society in general.

Yes, it’s difficult. Yes, it takes us out of our comfort zone. But connections to the people who have found success in their life often buoy us into success as well, both directly and indirectly.

They can help with success directly by giving advice that actually works. You bear witness to their success – you identify that success with them.

They also help indirectly through association. People recognize who you’re associating with and their opinion of you goes up and down depending on who that associate is.

Isn’t That Disingenuous?
Isn’t striving to meet well-known people just for the sake of connecting with well-known people disingenuous? On page 251, Ferrazzi addresses that very point:

There are no easy answers. But if you pursue these people in a sincere manner, with good intentions, you’re not being manipulative. And if you are emboldened by a mission and you’ve put in the time and hard work to establish a web of people that count on you, then the time will come when your growing influence will put you in a place where you’ll be face-to-face with someone who can convey a lot of sparkle.

In other words, if you take the initiative to become a leader among your peers, eventually you’ll be recognized as such and the more influential people around you will be perfectly happy to meet you.

As he says, it’s not easy. It takes a lot of consistent, hard work. You need to do your work well, produce great results, and build trust with the people around you.

Over time, doing that will slowly open doors for you. And then you’ll find yourself in the same room as a legend, and it’s up to you to go over there and introduce yourself. If you don’t, you’re choosing to slam the door in your own face.

Trust
There’s one big element here that presides over everything else. From page 252:

I’ve found that trust is the essential element of mixing with powerful and famous people – trust that you’ll be discreet; trust that you have no ulterior motives behind your approach; trust that you’ll deal with them as people and not as stars; and basically trust that you feel like a peer who deserves to be engaged as such. The first few moments of an encounter is the litmus test for such a person to size up whether or not he or she can trust you in these ways or not.

To put it simply, when you approach someone purely as a fan, they don’t recognize you as a peer. Going up to someone and gushing about how incredible they are won’t make them impressed with you. It’ll make them see you as someone far down the ladder, someone to appease and then move on.

If you actually wish to know someone as a potential peer, the worst thing you can do is accost them as a fan. Instead, act as if they’re an equal, even if you’re thoroughly impressed. Offer them whatever advice and suggestions you can to improve what they do. Bounce ideas off of them.

A compliment for good work is fine. Raw adulation is rarely a good move.

What Do You Do Instead?
How do you converse instead if you’re starstruck? Ferrazzi offers up some ideas on page 253:

To assure them that you’re interested in them for themselves, rather than what the public perceives them to be, stay away from their fame and focus, instead, on their interests. You can certainly let them know that you respect their work, but don’t dwell. Take them away from what they are normally barraged with.

Once upon a time, I was lucky enough to have a very casual breakfast with a Nobel Prize winner. I could have been completely starstruck by spending time with this individual, but instead we spent most of our conversation talking about chicken farming.

Seriously.

Why did we talk about chicken farming? He was raised on a farm and was very particular about his eggs. He didn’t particularly like the eggs that had been served – they were prepared fine, but he thought the eggs themselves were really awful. I spoke up for the first time and simply said that when I grew up, we fed the chicken table scraps and pieces of grit and they produced wonderful eggs. This got him going down a very nostalgic path about chicken farming in his childhood.

At the end of the meal, he slapped me on the back and suggested I tag along with him, something I would have loved to have done had I not had other responsibilities that day.

That one event got me over my fear of meeting famous people. People in that situation have already heard a lifetime’s worth of adulation and simply wish to have a normal conversation with people interested in the same things they are. If you do that, you can make friends at any strata of life.

On Saturday, we’ll tackle the twenty-seventh and twenty-eighth chapters – “Build It and They Will Come” and “Never Give in to Hubris.”

This is the twelfth 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-third and twenty-fourth chapters – “Build Your Brand” and “Broadcast Your Brand” – which appear on pages 224 through 245.

What do others think of when they think of you? Do they have any sort of a consistent image? Is the image they come up with a positive one, one that you’re happy to be associated with? Is the image an interesting one?

In marketing-speak, this is your “brand.” In terms of your future – social relationships, career opportunities, and so forth – the better and more interesting your brand is, the better off you are.

It can seem like a strange way to look at things, but it really works. We constantly make snap decisions about who to invite to events, who to call, and so on, and those snap decisions are based on a very simple image of people that we have in our mind – their brand. Quite often, that “brand” is based on simple things, things that the person could easily alter if they so chose.

The question of course becomes what can we do to improve our own brand?

Figure Out What You Want
On page 229, Ferrazzi addresses the big question underneath all of this.

What do you want people to think when they hear or read your name? What product or service can you best provide? Take your skills, combine them with your passions, and find out where in the market, or within your own company, they can best be applied.

The beginning of this whole matter lies in what you want. What do you want other people to think of you? When they hear your name, what would you like to be the first thing or two that pops into their heads?

If you spend a bit of time defining this, the conclusions that you come to will often direct you immediately towards what you should be doing with your time. If you want to be known as good at something, then you better well be good at that thing – and you need to be willing to share what you’re good at. If you want to be known as having a particular character trait, then you’d better have that character trait – and you need to exhibit it clearly to others.

Similarly, if you recognize negative traits in yourself and you don’t want people to identify you for those traits, work on them. If you think people identify you as quiet – and you don’t like it – work on it!

Looking at yourself through the eyes of someone else is a great way to figure out how you really want to present yourself to the world – and brutal honesty when doing it exposes the areas of your life that need work (and there are areas of everyone’s life that need work).

Growing Yourself
Ferrazzi reinforces that ‘grow yourself’ message on page 228:

You can’t do meaningful work that makes a difference unless you’re devoted to learning, growing, and stretching your skills. If you want others to redefine what you do and who you are within organizational boundaries, then you have to be able to redefine yourself. That means going above and beyond what’s called for. That means seeing your resume as a dynamic, changing document every year.

In other words, if you want people to see you differently, you need to start taking real action right now to make that happen. Just wishing for it won’t make it so.

If there’s some aspect of yourself that you’d like others to really notice and identify with you, you need to work on it. You need to polish it. You need to focus on it. You can’t just wish that others would notice your raw talent.

One of my closest friends is a really gifted writer, but she rarely shares what she writes. She keeps it to herself. Thus, when others think of her – both personally and professionally – they don’t think of her as a writer at all. She doesn’t have that reputation.

What can she do to change that? Write. Practice writing. Take every opportunity to get published. Share her successes as a writer by sending links out to her friends showing off her work. Make her personal website all about her writing, and include a link to it in the signature of her email. But it all comes down to one thing – she’s got to practice that writing, improve at it, and start sharing it with the world. Without that, everything else is just a pipe dream.

Be Unique
People remember uniqueness. That’s how you’ll stick in people’s minds. On page 230, Ferrazzi gives an example:

When I was younger, I used to wear bow ties. I felt that it was a signature that people would not quickly forget, and it worked. “You were the guy who spoke at the conference last year wearing the bow tie,” I’d hear over and over again. Over time, I was able to give up that signature, as my message and delivery became my brand.

My unique feature is that I’m very tall and broad shouldered, almost in a “football linebacker” kind of way. People remember me for my size.

For others, it can be trickier. However, there’s usually some way to stand out a bit in a crowd. One of my friends who’s involved in businesses wears a fedora almost everywhere he goes in relation to his work. It makes him appear a bit taller and really stands out visually. Another friend of mine – a personal trainer – has his business card done on what appears to be a piece of an Ace bandage. People remember things like that – you stick in their mind.

When you stick in their mind, you become the person that they recall later on. When they need a personal trainer, they’ll remember the guy who had the business card made out of an Ace bandage. When they think back to the conference, they’ll remember the guy with the enormous hands who gave the talk about money. They’ll remember the guy with the fedora who was astonishingly quick at remembering a large set of names (a little parlor trick he’s mastered). They won’t remember the person that didn’t bother to stand out at all.

Talk to Journalists
One of the easiest ways to get your unique story known is to talk to journalists about it. It’s easier than you think, actually. On page 233:

Journalists do less sleuthing for their stories than you’d imagine. They get a majority of their stories from people that have sought them out, and not the other way around.

This is surprisingly true. I’ve been called out of the blue by reporters who merely went to Google, typed in search terms, and found The Simple Dollar because it matched a story they were interested in.

The reverse is also true. When my first book, 365 Ways to Live Cheap, was about to be released, I attempted to drum up some traditional media about the book. I just simply contacted lots of different publications directly, telling them about the book. I did NOT do a press release – those don’t seem to work when there are people out there issuing them by the hundreds of thousands. Instead, I contacted people directly myself.

It worked. I ended up with a small flood of stories about The Simple Dollar and my book last December. Yes, just because I’m some guy writing a blog about his inability to manage money and his struggle to find a career path.

Once you’ve figured out what you want your professional brand to be (probably a mix of your passions and your personality), look at journalists as one way to spread the message. Maybe you’re a stay at home mom trying to make money selling handmade Norwegian food on the internet (and if you live in central Iowa, let me know what your lefse prices are!). Maybe you’re a government employee who spends his spare time making exquisitely-finished wood flag cases for the parents of deceased soldiers. Maybe you’re wheelchair bound and you’re writing fiction by using transcription software. Whatever it is, you probably have a story that someone would want to share. So send it out there.

Go Small
But where? Many people swing too hard and strike out quickly. On page 242, Ferrazzi offers a clue:

Are you Bill Gates? No. Maybe you’ve developed the antidote for the common cold? No again. Well, the New York Times probably isn’t knocking on your door quite yet. Go local first. Start a database of newspapers and magazines in your area that might be interested in your content. Try college newspapers, the neighborhood newspaper, or the free industry digital newsletter you find in your inbox. You’ll get the fire started and learn how to deal with reporters in the process.

In my area, I’d start with the smaller papers and the free papers. I’d also talk to people running websites that cover issues in central Iowa. If I were running a local side business like the ones I mentioned above, I’d shoot for the independents, not for the Des Moines Register – at least not at first.

Once I was comfortable talking to reporters about what I was doing – and if you’re going to go through stages of nervousness and screw up, you’re way better doing that in front of a reporter from a tiny paper than a big one – then I would move up and try to contact bigger sources. View it as a mix of practice and of ultra-local marketing of your story.

Yes, you’re marketing yourself. For some people, that’s uncomfortable. But if you’re doing something that requires others to be interested, you have to start somewhere. Start telling your story if you want people to start finding you.

Don’t Be Annoying
On page 243, Ferrazzi makes another key point about all of this:

There’s a fine line between marketing yourself properly and becoming annoying. If a pitch of mine gets rejected, I’ll ask what else it needs to make it publishable. Sometimes it will never be right in the editor’s eyes, but other times, you can answer a few more questions or dig deeper.

Sometimes people won’t be interested in what you have to say. That’s fine – just let it drop, or else find a way to re-work it. If you just keep trying again and again to catch a fish with the same old rotten bait, you’re not only wasting your time but you’re learning a bad technique through repetition.

A rejection isn’t a bad thing. It just means that what you’re saying needs some additional work to make it compelling. Many people think that if they tell their story to someone and the person is not interesting, that person is rejecting them. Rarely is that the case – usually, it’s the story that’s being rejected.

Step back and ask yourself what’s interesting about what you’re trying to do. Why would other people care about this? If you were reading about what you’re doing, what would make you want to keep reading and find out more? The better you are at answering that question, the better you’ll be able to explain that very thing to a journalist and the more likely they’ll want to write about your story – and then you both win.

On Wednesday, we’ll tackle the twenty-fifth and twenty-sixth chapters – “The Write Stuff” and “Getting Close to Power.”

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.”

This is the tenth 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 nineteenth and twentieth chapters, “Social Arbitrage” and “Pinging – All the Time,” which appear on pages 171 through 189.

In the past, I’ve worked with three kinds of people: information broadcasters, information sharers, and information hoarders.

The broadcasters were annoying. They would simply share gossip to the exclusion of everything else and, often, the material they broadcasted was useless. It was hard for people to build good relationships with them because anything that was said was immediately blabbed anywhere and everywhere.

Other people were information hoarders. You could at least be secure in that when you told them something, it would not be shared. Yet, these people never shared anything in return. They held onto their knowledge, content to build an empire with what they knew.

The people that were always the best to work with were the information sharers. They worked hard to acquire new knowledge and new friendships and would be discretionary in what they shared, sticking to the genuinely useful things that didn’t hurt other people. If you had questions, you could go to these people and receive information without worrying that your requests would be used against you. You wanted to work with them because they were genuinely helpful.

In this part of the book, Ferrazzi argues that those information sharers hold the real power in the world.

Become Indispensable
On page 174, Ferrazzi makes the case for why you should strive to be indispensable to others:

Real power comes from being indispensable. Indispensability comes from being a switchboard, parceling out as much information, contacts, and goodwill to as many people – in as many different worlds – as possible.

Ferrazzi basically makes the argument here that real power resides in the hands of people who have a lot of friends and acquaintances who view them as invaluable, not in the hands of the people nominally in charge (necessarily).

In almost every experience I can think of in my life, this is true. People that have a lot of strong connections and give information, ideas, and other things as freely as they can quickly become indispensable – they’re the heart of whatever organization (whether a true organization or just a group of people) they’re involved with. The person who is friends with everybody usually winds up being the leader of the group, whether or not that’s their title on the door or not.

I’ve seen companies that are basically ran by the guy on the floor who has good relationships with everyone, while the nominal president spends his time in the office with the door shut. The president could leave and it wouldn’t affect a thing – the floor leader leaves and everything falls apart.

Which position would you rather be in? The disposable one that’s out of touch and friendless, or the person who has lots of friends and is completely indispensable? Who would you rather be friends with?

A System of Bureaucracies
On page 175, a quote from Ron Burt pops up that’s really thought provoking:

“People who have contacts in separate groups have a competitive advantage because we live in a system of bureaucracies, and bureaucracies create walls,” says Burt. “Individual managers with entrepreneurial networks move information faster, are highly mobile relative to bureaucracy, and create solutions better adapted to the needs of the organization.”

When you think of our world as a system of bureaucracies, it actually makes a lot of sense. Our families are bureaucracies. Our circles of friends are each bureaucracies. Our workplace is a bureaucracy. Virtually every group we’re a part of is a bureaucracy.

The more bureaucracies you have access to, the more you can accomplish and the more valuable you become to every single bureaucracy you’re involved with.

Let me use an example to show you what I’m talking about. A close personal friend of yours is fired. Let’s say you have good friends in several businesses in the area in which your friend works – he’s likely to call you, right? And you’re likely to be able to help him, right? Your access to many different bureaucracies enables you to better help a friend and thus you’re more valuable to him. Plus, if you direct a good worker to a new company, the bureaucracy at that company will value the person you’re connected to there even more than before, again, adding value to you.

On the other hand, if you don’t know anyone, you won’t be able to help. You won’t have value to that friend and he probably won’t turn to you in his time of need.

A network of good relationships is very strong and it often leads to even stronger connections.

Be Interested in Others
Ferrazzi uses a Dale Carnegie quote on page 177 to make a point:

To paraphrase Dale Carnegie: You can be more successful in two months by becoming really interested in other people’s success than you can in two years trying to get other people interested in your own success.

It all comes back to listening and then thinking about how you can genuinely help someone. The more times you’re able to do that, the more valuable you become and the more power you’ll subtly accumulate.

On the other hand, if you just try to promote yourself and grab every opportunity blindly, you won’t be building those valuable relationships. You might get off to a slightly brighter start, but over the long run, the person with the relationships is king.

The way to build them is to listen, to stay in touch, and to help whenever you can without worrying about what you might get in return. It’ll just gradually flow your way.

What Is “Pinging”?
On page 181, Ferrazzi introduces the idea of pinging:

I call it “pinging.” It’s a quick, casual greeting, and it can be done in any number of creative ways. Once you develop your own style, you’ll find it easier to stay in touch with more people than you ever dreamed of in less time than you ever imagined.

Yes, there’s grunt work involved. Pinging takes effort. That’s the tough part. You have to keep pinging and pinging and pinging and never stop. You have to feed the fire of your network or it will wither and die.

To put it simply, pinging simply means staying in regular touch with the people in your network and not letting them drift away. This might take the form of quick emails, messages on Facebook, text messages, cell phone calls, and so forth.

The reason for doing this is to simply keep up to date with how people are doing and also remind them that you’re listening and that you care. Some people broadcast what they’re up to on social services like Twitter and Facebook, but it’s still a good idea to ping them sometimes, just so they know you’re actually involved and paying attention to their statements.

Contact Lists
On page 184, Ferrazzi makes a great case for putting effort into organizing all of the people you’re connected to:

The third step, as I mentioned in the chapter on taking names, is segmenting your network into call lists. In time, your master list will become to unwieldy to work with directly. Your call lists will save you time and keep your efforts focused. They can be organized by your number ratings, by geography, by industry, and so on. It’s totally flexible. If I’m flying to New York, for example, I’ll print out a “New York list” and make a few calls [...]

This is one area of my life that I didn’t have much organization on until recently. There are a lot of people that I keep touch with on a regular basis, but it was on such an ad hoc basis that people kept falling through the cracks – I wouldn’t intend for them to fall through, but the sheer number would make it happen sometimes.

My solution was easy. I just started putting everything in Google Address Book. I made up quite a few groupings of people within that to help me keep everyone organized. One thing I did to help myself is assign them all to numbered groups, groups 1 through 25, pretty much randomly. Each day, I’d contact everyone within that group electronically. So, one day I might shoot an email to the twenty people in group “1.” The next day, I’d do the same with the people in group ‘2.”

This takes time, but it helps me maintain relationships with a LOT of people and contact them all at least once a month.

Making Pinging Normal
This needs to become part of your normal behavior or else it’ll be hard to maintain. On page 185, Ferrazzi explains it well:

The important thing is that you build the concept of pinging into your workflow. Some organizations go so far as to make pinging integral to their organizational processes.

In other words, for pinging to work, it needs to be a normal part of your day.

I’ve started taking a portion of my day – early in the day, usually – to simply ping people and respond to the replies I get (if needed). Yes, this sucks down some serious time – it usually adds up to 75 messages or so a day – but all of these messages are useful. They help me to maintain real relationships with a wide variety of people.

Then, when something of real importance comes up, I can contact any of these people. I’m fresh in their minds and when my request for help comes through, they’re usually glad to help me out. Similarly, they know I’m a person they can reach out to for help.

We make each other better, and this is maintained through pinging.

On Wednesday, we’ll tackle the twenty-first and twenty-second chapters – “Find Anchor Tenants and Feed Them” and “Be Interesting.”

This is the ninth 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 seventeenth and eighteenth chapters, “The Art of Small Talk” and “Health, Wealth, and Children,” which appear on pages 143 through 170.

I’m terrible at small talk.

Those little slivers of time right after you meet someone but before a real conversation starts is almost painful to me. I never know what to say and I usually just hope that it doesn’t last too long.

What I’ve come to do is to rely on a handful of standard icebreakers that tend to fill the gap quite well and often lead into some real conversation (which I actually enjoy). They’re just silly things – references to the top news story of the day, a comment on the weather, a compliment of the other person’s clothes or reading material, and so on. However, they get me over the “hump” of small talk nervousness and allow me to begin to get to know the other person.

Ferrazzi addresses the “small talk problem” in this section of the book. Let’s dig in.

Vulnerability
On page 146, Ferrazzi outlines the principle of vulnerability:

Being up front with people confers respect: it pays them the compliment of candor. The issues we all care about most are the issues we all want to talk about most. Of course, this isn’t a call to be confrontational or disrespectful. It’s a call to be honest, open, and vulnerable enough to genuinely allow other people into your life so that they can be vulnerable in return.

How many negotiations would have ended better if both parties involved were simply honest and forthright about their needs? Even when there is disagreement, I’ve found people will respect you more for putting your cards on the table.

In other words, if you’re nervous before a meeting, commenting on that nervousness is a win-win. It not only provides a great conversational icebreaker, but it opens yourself up a bit to others. It’s likely a feeling that they’re having as well and hearing that you’re feeling the same way builds a bond between the two of you.

I often do this. If a situation makes me feel slightly uncomfortable, I’ll say so. If I’m nervous about making small talk, I’ll say that I’m nervous about making small talk. Quite often, the other person feels the same way and is relieved to find that you do, too. It immediately gives you something in common and, at the same time, lowers the threshold for what you have to say next, since the need to impress isn’t as strong as it once was. You already have a rapport.

There may be some situations – such as a negotiation that is going to result with a clear “winner” and a clear “loser” – where vulnerability might not help, but in virtually every other situation, vulnerability is a great way to build rapport with people.

Focus on One Person
Ferrazzi addresses the tendency some people have to constantly “scan the room,” a practice I find pretty weaselly. On page 151, Ferrazzi hammers it hard:

Whether you spend five seconds or five hours with a new contact or acquaintance, make the time count. In Los Angeles, where I live, eye darters are a party staple. They’re constantly looking to and fro in an attempt to ferret out the most important person in the room. Frankly, it’s a disgusting habit, and one that’s sure to put off those around you.

The surest way to become special in others’ eyes is to make them feel special. The correlate, of course, is equally true: Make people feel insignificant and your significance to them shall certainly diminish.

The only person worth paying attention to is the person in front of you. Everyone else can wait – they don’t matter yet.

The counter-argument many people offer against this method is that you might miss something important if you just focus on one person. To those people, I make the point that in your need to find out what’s “going on” around the room, you’re actively alienating the person in front of you.

If I begin a conversation with someone, I make an effort to focus on nothing but that conversation until there’s a lull in that conversation. If the lull happens and I’m not interested in continuing it, then I’ll excuse myself (sometimes after making plans to meet the person later). Otherwise, as far as I’m concerned, the other person (or small group of people) are the only one(s) in the room.

How to Listen
Ferrazzi also argues on behalf of the art of listening. On page 155:

As William James pointed out, “The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated.”

You should be governed by the idea that one should seek first to understand, then to be understood. We’re often so worried about what we’re going to say next that we don’t hear what’s being said to us now.

[...] Take the initiative and be the first person to say hello. This demonstrates confidence and immediately shows your interest in the other person. When the conversation starts, don’t interrupt. Show empathy and understanding by nodding your head and involving your whole body in engaging the person you’re talking with. Ask questions that demonstrate (sincerely) you believe the other person’s opinion is particularly worth seeking out. Focus on their triumphs. Laugh at their jokes. And always, always remember the other person’s name.

This should come naturally if you’re focused solely on one person. If you’re focusing your attention on the person – and that person alone – then following their words and asking appropriate questions is the natural response to a conversation. Not doing so is a sign that you’re not paying attention.

I don’t really worry about doing such specific things as nodding and so forth. Instead, I just concentrate on the words they’re saying and my honest reaction to them. My physical reactions and follow-up questions simply fall into place behind them.

Having said that, I’m pretty poor at reading people. Quite often, my only indication that others are interested in hearing what I have to say is whether or not they have follow up questions or conversation.

If All Else Fails, Five Words that Never Do
If you’re stuck as to what to say next when making small talk, Ferrazzi has a simple suggestion on page 155:

“You’re wonderful. Tell me more.”

In other words, encourage the other person to talk more about themselves. Why? In the end, everyone enjoys talking about themselves to people who they believe are interested in them.

Thus, encourage people to follow up when they talk about themselves. Dig in for more details (without prying). Tell them you’re interested and listen to their story. Even if you’re not fully interested, attempt to grab onto the threads where you are interested.

This has a double advantage for me – it allows me to get comfortable with the other person without talking too much. I often get self-conscious when speaking.

What’s Your Motivation?
On page 161, Ferrazzi looks broadly at the motivations of others:

In my initial conversation with someone I’m just getting to know, whether it’s a new mentee or simply a new business contact, I try to find out what motivations drive that person. It often comes down to one of three things: making money, finding love, or changing the world. You laugh – most people do when confronted with the reality of their deepest desires.

Get comfortable with that reality.

If you think about your deepest motivations, they really do fall into those three categories that Keith outlines here.

Take me, for example. My biggest motivation is my family – a mix of finding love with a bit of changing the world (by raising my kids to do great things). If I walk through every person I know very well, their motivations usually fall along these lines. My friend who’s in a Christian band hopes to change the world. My career-obsessed friend is all about making the money. Some people have motivations that mix these areas.

It goes even further. What if you simply aren’t motivated by one of these areas? If that’s the case, it’s likely that you’re not in a situation where actually conversing with others and making new friends holds much value for you. Why? If you’re actually interested in building relationships, then your motivation is finding love – not in the romantic sense, necessarily, but in the sense of camaraderie and friendship.

How to Motivate
So, how do you utilize that understanding of people? On page 163:

The only way to get people to do anything is to recognize their importance and thereby make them feel important. Every person’s deepest lifelong desire is to be significant and to be recognized.

In other words, recognize that people are motivated by something very important to them, even if it’s not something you share with them, and realize that the person wants to be seen as being important and significant.

My desires to be a great parent and to be a great writer are central to me. They’re very important to me. Knowing that, it’s easy to connect with me – ask me about my family and chase it with some follow-up questions, or ask me how my novel is going. Follow up. Before you know it, I’m talking up a storm – and you’ll find many avenues to build the conversation from there.

The trick is figuring out what’s central to people, but once you find it, it’s the key to connecting to them.

On Saturday, we’ll tackle the nineteenth and twentieth chapters – “Social Arbitrage” and “Pinging – All the Time.”