Never Eat Alone, Expanded and Updated: And Other Secrets to Success, One Relationship at a Time

by Keith Ferrazzi

Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead, which Fast Company magazine called one of the top ten business books of 2012.

there are always fail-safe conversation starters suitable for every business function: How did you get started in your business? What do you enjoy most about your profession? Tell me about some of the challenges of your job? But safety—whether in conversation, business, or life—generally produces “safe” (read: boring) results.

In order to establish a lasting connection, small talk needs to end on an invitation to continue the relationship. Be complimentary and establish a verbal agreement to meet again, even if it’s not business. “You really seem to know your wines. I’ve enjoyed tapping your wisdom; we should get together sometime to talk about wine. We can both bring one of our more interesting bottles.”

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.

I was reminded of what Ralph Waldo Emerson once said: “Every man I meet is my superior in some way. In that, I learn of him.” Everyone had something to teach him.

The highest human need, said Maslow, is for self-actualization—the desire to become the best you can be. Dale Carnegie astutely recognized this. But Maslow argues we can’t attend to our highest needs until we attend to those at the bottom of the pyramid, like the necessities of subsistence, security, and sex. It is within this lower group—where health, wealth, and children reside—that Mike was saying loyalty is created. In addressing those three fundamental issues, you accomplish two things: (1) You help someone fulfill those needs they most need met, and (2) You allow them the opportunity to move up the pyramid of needs to tackle some of their higher desires.

Helping others, Grant’s studies show, motivates us to feel good about ourselves and work harder. The hours spent helping others actually make us more productive over time, not less.

But here’s Grant’s most important insight: The most successful people aren’t just givers, but a particular subset. They are those who give freely but also maintain a high degree of self-interest. They are strategic with their giving, and in the long run, it protects them from becoming doormats and washing out.

today the system is more akin to social arbitrage: a constant and open exchange of favors and intelligence, as Greg had so wisely advised. How does this work? Think of it as a game. When someone mentions a problem, try to think of solutions. The solutions come from my experience and knowledge, and my tool kit of friends and associates.

Soon after, Hank started networking locally with other executives. Hank’s products are superb; what he needed was the network. A decade later, Hank sold his “tiny company” to Samsonite for $110 million. It’s not just he and I who have prospered. My former colleague, Peter, the outdoorsy marketer from Starwood, ultimately used the experience to build the confidence he needed to go out on his own. He now has a thriving consulting firm in New York. The CMO at Reebok? He was grateful for an introduction that might help him boost his bag business. What started with one man and a problem, ended with several people and many solutions. My point? Real power comes from being indispensable.

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.

To overcome this herd mentality and pull people into my dinner parties who would otherwise not come, I developed a helpful little concept I call the “anchor tenant.” 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 experienced 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.

On those occasions when you can’t land as big a fish as you might have liked, you can try to pull in a person with proximity to power: a political consultant to an interesting politician, the COO of an interesting company under an interesting CEO, and so on. In these cases, it’s about brand association.

For me, the invitation list needs to be a mix of professional folks I want to do business with today, contacts I aspire to do business with down the road, and those I call “light attractors”—guests who are energetic, interesting, and willing to speak their mind. Of course, a local celebrity or two never hurts. And it goes without saying that you should have your friends and family present, as well.

Six to ten guests, I’ve found, is the optimal number to invite to a dinner. I usually invite fourteen now, but that’s after a lot of practice. I also invite an extra six or so people to pop in before or come after for drinks and dessert. This group should be closer friends who won’t get offended about not being at the main event but will appreciate being part of the group nonetheless. Generally, when you invite someone to dinner, you get a 20 to 30 percent acceptance rate because of scheduling difficulties. When invitees say they cannot come because of another dinner or engagement, I often suggest they come before the dinner for drinks and appetizers, or even after, for dessert and drinks.

With that, I convinced Mark to give it a try. I told him I’d be his anchor guest and suggested that he invite four others for dinner. I told him to get some simple wine, but plenty of it. For appetizers, set out chips and salsa, or dip with vegetables. Buy a foldable round tabletop that one can easily find and place it on the coffee table. Voilà!—you’ve got yourself a grand dining table. For food, I told him, forget about cooking. Get some salads and a roasted chicken from the deli. For dessert, buy some cookies and ice cream, and keep the wine flowing.

4. Create atmosphere. Make sure to spend an hour or two gussying up your place. Nothing expensive or out of the ordinary, mind you. Candles, flowers, dim lighting, and music set a good mood. Add a nice centerpiece to the dinner table.

5. Forget being formal. Most dinner parties don’t call for anything fancy. Follow the KISS principle (Keep It Simple, Silly). Good food. Good people. Lots of wine. Good conversation. That’s a successful dinner party. I always underdress just so no one else feels they did. Jeans and a jacket are my standard fare, but you judge for yourself.

a “sensor,” meaning that he has the ideal network to ensure that he’ll be the first to catch wind of the next great start-up or cool new tech innovation. We live our lives in networks. Being conscious about shaping that network determines the value of the information that will come your way. So turn your network into a petri dish, with you smack in the middle of it.

My own guide is my Relationship Action Plan. Make it yours, too. I always have my goals front and center, on my desk and in my phone, directing the evolution of my network and how I’m using social media. The trick is making the shift back and forth between the 50 or 150 folks who are front and center in your RAP, with whom you want to build real, intimate relationships, and that broader, scaled network that brings you new ideas and information.

GENEROSITY + VULNERABILITY + ACCOUNTABILITY + CANDOR = TRUST

Some of Altucher’s most popular posts: “I Want My Kids to Be Drug Addicts” (about having passion), “Three Stories About Billionaires” (about money and happiness), “I’m Completely Humiliated by Yoga” (about attending a yoga retreat with his yogini wife), and “How to Be an Effective Loser” (about being thrown out of grad school).

When Gary Vaynerchuck, the now-famous social media guru behind WineLibrary.TV,

What’s got your attention? There’s a subtle utility in that shift, and once you make it, you’ll start seeing your content get shared and commented on. So you’re not posting, “At the movies,” you’re posting, “I saw the new Will Ferrell movie—it was hilarious. Must see!”

quote “The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ but ‘That’s funny.’ ” Asimov’s point is that the best insights are generated from surprising, unexpected connections that became something more—happy accidents. Life-changing moments we couldn’t plan for and never expected. Information we couldn’t Google because we didn’t even know what to ask.

The money, today, is looking for where the smartest people are. To stay relevant amid constant technological disruption, every venture of any size is looking for creativity. Because wherever you find creativity—and, by extension, wherever you find talent—innovation and profits soon follow. These days the challenge of companies isn’t to scale efficiency, but to scale learning, our ability to master and remaster new rules of business as they explode around us.

Your goal as you move through the world should be to create a force field inside of which people feel safe to play by different rules. Model the traits that support serendipity—curiosity, generosity, passion, and humility. Create social opportunities, like the dinners I described earlier, that allow others to build trust.

Anyone who wants to achieve something extraordinary needs a plan. Most of you reading this book are planners. It’s okay, I’m a planner, too. But in the words of Joichi Ito, director of MIT’s media lab, “If you plan your whole life, by definition you can’t get lucky. So you have to leave that little slot open.”

You’ll have to leave time on your schedule for things that in the moment may seem so far removed from your immediate goals that they seem silly—a trip to the park, coffee with an old classmate, going left when you would normally go right. Say yes to new experiences when you would normally say no.

In the book Heart, Smarts, Guts, and Luck, my old friend Tony Tjan and his coauthors studied people they called “Luck Dominant,” and found that 86 percent of them credited their success to “being open to new things and people.”

Learn from Gina: Create opportunities for supportive, in-person encounters by attending workshops and conferences where you’ll be surrounded by people who share not just your values but your interests. Surround yourself with genius. Focus less on “to-dos” and more on “to-meets.” And finally, whenever you can, attract and reward mentors not just with gratitude but by demonstrating success.

The CMO of today and tomorrow must be a strategist, a technologist, creative, and always focused on sales and the financial return on his marketing investments.

Remember those wise words of Mark McCormack in his book What They Don’t Teach You at Harvard Business School: “Creativity in business is often nothing more than making connections that everyone else has almost thought of. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel, just attach it to a new wagon.”

We started to imagine how games might be applied to more than just leisure and entertainment. We started to question assumptions such as what business we were in (entertainment, marketing, or services?), what product we should offer (games, advertising, training, consulting, enabling technology?), and who our real customers could be (geeky adolescents, adults, Fortune 500 companies?). We started to visualize how we might connect the gaming medium—which had a large and growing demographic of users—and the Internet medium—which had a large and growing group of companies trying to figure out how best to use it to interact with their customers.

I’ve never met a journalist with a gatekeeper. Moreover, I’ve never had my calls go unreturned after leaving a message that said, “I’ve got the inside scoop on how the gaming industry is going to revolutionize marketing. I’ve appreciated your work for a long time now; I believe you are the right person to break this story.”

As I look back on my career, the recipe seems straightforward: I’d latch onto the latest, most cutting-edge idea in the business world. I’d immerse myself in it, getting to know all the thought leaders pushing the idea and all the literature available. I’d then distill that into a message about the idea’s broader impact to others and how it could be applied in the industry I worked in. That was the content. Becoming an expert was the easy part. I simply did what experts do: I taught, wrote, and spoke about my expertise.

That doesn’t mean your business, your résumé, or whatever content you’re trying to pitch actually has to be oversimplified or overly universal. But you should figure out how to spin your yarn in a fashion that (a) is simple to understand, and (b) everybody can relate to. Another way to think about this is to ask yourself, “How does my content help others answer who they are, where they are from, and where they are going?”

So forget bullet points and slide shows. When you’ve figured out what your content is, tell an inspiring story that will propel your friends and associates into action with spirit and fearlessness, motivated and mobilized by your simple but profound storytelling.

Image and identity have become increasingly important in our new economic order. With the digital sea swelling in sameness and overwhelmed in information, a powerful brand—built not on a product but on a personal message, defined through content—has become a competitive advantage.

Good personal brands do three highly significant things for your network of contacts: They provide a credible, distinctive, and trustworthy identity. They project a compelling message. They attract more and more people to you and your cause, as you’ll stand out in an increasingly cluttered world. As a result, you will find it easier than ever to win new friends and have more of a say in what you do and where you work.

You’ve got to become your own PR firm, as I’ll talk about in the next chapter. Take on the projects no one wants at work. Never ask for more pay until after you’ve been doing the job successfully and become invaluable. Get on convention panels. Write articles for online publications and company newsletters. Send e-mails filled with creative ideas to your CEO. Design your own Me Inc. brochure.

You need to impart a sense of urgency and make the message timely. Reporters continually ask, “But why is it important now?” If you can’t answer that sufficiently, your article will wait.

Once you put yourself in position to connect with the famous and powerful, the key is not to feel as if you’re undeserving or an impostor. You’re a star in your own right, with your own accomplishments, and you have a whole lot to give to the world.

It was the library campaign—the first of Franklin’s several public projects for Philadelphia—that gave Franklin a deep insight into one of the crown virtues of networking. The resistance he encountered, he tells us, made me soon feel the Impropriety of presenting one’s self as the Proposer of any useful Project that might be suppos’d to raise one’s Reputation in the smallest degree above that of one’s Neighbors, when one has need of their Assistance to accomplish that Project. I therefore put my self as much as I could out of sight, and stated it as a Scheme of a Number of Friends, who had requested me to go about and propose it to such as they thought Lovers of Reading. In this way my Affair went on more smoothly, and I ever after practis’d it on such Occasions.

There were two crucial components that made my mentorship with Pat—and that make any mentorship, for that matter—successful. He offered his guidance because, for one, I promised something in return. I worked nonstop in an effort to use the knowledge he was imparting to make him, and his firm, more successful. And two, we created a situation that went beyond utility. Pat liked me and became emotionally invested in my advancement. He cared about me. That’s the key to a successful mentorship.

The truth of this is powerfully illustrated in a 1986 study commissioned by Harvard’s then-president, Derek Bok. Bok wanted to know if there was a way to predict whether a kid would succeed or fail in college. What was different about those who kicked ass as undergrads? A large-scale study was conducted over the course of several years. One finding in particular surprised everyone: The single best predictor of college success had nothing to do with any metric we associate with collegiate achievement, now or then. It wasn’t GPA, SAT scores, or a number of any kind for that matter. It was, instead, the ability of a student to create or to join a study group.

As noted author and speaker Rabbi Harold Kushner once wisely wrote, “Our souls are not hungry for fame, comfort, wealth, or power. Those rewards create almost as many problems as they solve. Our souls are hungry for meaning, for the sense that we have figured out how to live so that our lives matter, so the world will at least be a little bit different for our having passed through it.”

As the anthropologist Margaret Mead once said, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” It is my hope that you have the tools to make that a reality. But you can’t do it alone. We are all in this together.