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

by Keith Ferrazzi

1. Go on a Learning Safari: Everyone has something to teach. Everyone has something to learn. Take an intellectual, spiritual, and creative journey. 2. Build Friendships: Summit Series isn’t about networking; it’s about building lifelong friends. The people around you are amazing. Get to know them. 3. Embrace Synchronicity: The unexpected moments are often the most meaningful. Embrace them. 4. Show Love: Summit Series is about character, not résumés. Show love to the start-ups, and don’t fanboy the big-timers. 5. Have Fun: If it’s not fun, it doesn’t count.

1. Create a fulfilling, authentic, effective networking strategy that lasts a lifetime 2. Build and align social capital to achieve ever more ambitious goals 3. Combine strategy and serendipity to keep in constant contact with a wide network of people 4. Filter and prioritize your relationships for quality interchange that supports your goals and values 5. Cultivate a magnetic personal brand that has people clamoring to share information, access, and resources 6. Translate that brand to social media to build a devoted online tribe 7. Increase your value to your network, and specifically to your company or clients 8. Create innovative content to build a reputation as an expert and increase your online influence 9. Get “discovered” and tapped for the best opportunities 10. Create a life that you love and the network to cheer you

Poverty, I realized, wasn’t only a lack of financial resources; it was isolation from the kind of people who could help you make more of yourself.

I learned that real networking was about finding ways to make other people more successful. It was about working hard to give more than you get.

Until you become as willing to ask for help as you are to give it, however, you are only working half the equation.

A network functions precisely because there’s recognition of mutual need. There’s an implicit understanding that investing time and energy in building personal relationships with the right people will pay dividends. The majority of “one percenters” are in that top stratum because they understand this dynamic—because, in fact, they themselves used the power of their network of contacts and friends to arrive at their present station.

the currency of real networking is not greed but generosity.

Bottom line: It’s better to give before you receive. And never keep score. If your interactions are ruled by generosity, your rewards will follow suit.

Each of us is now a brand. Gone are the days where your value as an employee was limited to your loyalty and seniority. Companies use branding to develop strong, enduring relationships with customers. In today’s fluid economy, you must do the same with your network.

Even then, I recognized how something as simple as a clearly defined goal distinguished me from all those who simply floated through school waiting for things to happen.

Have you ever sat down and thought seriously about what you truly love? What you’re good at? What you want to accomplish in life? What are the obstacles that are stopping you? Most people don’t. They accept what they “should” be doing, rather than take the time to figure out what they want to be doing.

James Champy, celebrated consultant and coauthor of Reengineering the Corporation, claims that success is first and foremost a matter of our dreams. In his book The Arc of Ambition, Champy found that the abilities of successful leaders like Ted Turner, Michael Dell, and Jack Welch are less important than the fact that each shares a clearly defined mission that drives him in all that he does.

Step Three: Create a Personal “Board of Advisors”

Corporations, like any bureaucracy, tend to resist change, especially when the change doesn’t have the support of top management.

Mustering the audacity to talk with people who don’t know me often simply comes down to balancing the fear I have of embarrassment against the fear of failure and its repercussions.

You’ll feel most comfortable when you’re doing something you enjoy with others who share your enthusiasm. Any hobby is an opportunity to get involved: stamp collecting, singing, sports, literature. Clubs develop around all of these interests. Join up. Become an active member. When you feel up to it, become one of the leaders of the group. This last step is crucial. Being a leader in life takes practice—so practice! The possibilities for making new contacts and reaching out to others will grow and grow.

Set a goal for yourself of initiating a meeting with one new person a week.

Fear debilitates. Once you realize there’s no benefit to holding back, every situation and every person—no matter how seemingly beyond your reach—becomes an opportunity to succeed.

Google. Going to a meeting without Googling someone is unacceptable. Besides leading you to relevant info, a quick search gives you something more subtle—a sense of how active the person is online and how much information they share.

LinkedIn. Take a look to see how you’re connected and what groups they’ve joined. Read their work history and summary info carefully. The summary will often reveal what they’re most proud of professionally, and perhaps what goals they’re working toward. Also check out their last activity on the site.

“The problem isn’t information overload, it’s filter failure.”

Next, I enter the gathered names into a database. To note, LinkedIn now lets you aggregate contacts whether they’re LinkedIn members or not, and then see your communications with them across all major platforms. Very useful.

And second, cold calls are for suckers. I don’t call cold—ever. I’ve created strategies that ensure that every call I make is a warm one.

Setting up such meetings takes time. It is up to you to take the initiative. Sometimes, you have to be aggressive. After a few weeks of no reply, I called Sony information and eventually got Serge’s direct line.

I don’t know who you are. I don’t know your company. I don’t know what your company stands for. I don’t know your company’s customers. I don’t know your company’s products. I don’t know your company’s reputation. Now—what was it you wanted to sell me? You can see the total lack of credibility one has when making a cold call. Credibility is the first thing you want to establish in any interaction, and, ultimately, no one will buy from you unless you establish trust. Having a mutual friend or even acquaintance will immediately make you stand out from the other anonymous individuals vying for a piece of someone’s time.

Always respect the gatekeeper’s power. Treat them with the dignity they deserve.

My point is, behind any successful person stands a long string of failures. But toughness and tenacity like Lincoln’s can overcome these setbacks. Lincoln knew the only way to gain ground, to move forward, to turn his goals into reality, was to learn from his setbacks, to stay engaged, and to press on!

1. Fifteen minutes and a cup of coffee. It’s quick, it’s out of the office, and it’s a great way to meet someone new. This proved one of my most popular recommendations from the first edition of this book. I know, because I started getting dozens of requests a week for these meetings. So remember my earlier advice: Make sure you lay out very clearly why those fifteen minutes will be valuable to them. 2. Conferences. If I’m attending a conference in, say, Seattle, I’ll pull out a list of people in the area I know or would like to know better and see if they might like to drop in for a particularly interesting keynote speech or dinner. 3. Invite someone to share a workout or a hobby (golf, chess, stamp collecting, a book club, etc.). 4. A quick early breakfast, lunch, drinks after work, or dinner together. There’s nothing like food to break the ice. 5. Invite someone to a special event. For me, a special event such as an evening at the theater, a book-signing party, or a concert is made even more special if I bring along a few people who I think might particularly enjoy the occasion. 6. Entertaining at home. I view dinner parties at home as sacred. I like to make these events as intimate as possible. To ensure they stay that way, I generally will invite only one or two people I don’t know that well. By dinner’s end, I want those people leaving my home feeling as if they’ve made a whole new set of friends, and that’s hard to do if it’s a dinner filled with strangers. 7. Volun...

In the old model of selling, 80 percent of a salesperson’s time went into setting up meetings, giving a presentation, and trying to close a deal. The other 20 percent was spent developing a relationship with the customer. Today, we focus mostly on relationship selling. Smart salespeople—in fact, smart employees and business owners of all stripes—spend 80 percent of their time building strong relationships with the people they do business with. The slickest PowerPoint presentation can’t compete with the development of real affection and trust in capturing the hearts and minds of other people.

Mom was wrong—it does pay to talk to strangers. As Malcolm Gladwell wrote, “Acquaintances, in short, represent a source of social power, and the more acquaintances you have, the more powerful you are.”

Only, for some, it’s not. These people are super-connectors. People like me, who maintain contact with thousands of people. The key, however, is not only that we know thousands of people but that we know thousands of people in many different worlds, and we know them well enough to give them a call. Once you become friendly with a super-connector, you’re only two degrees away from the thousands of different people we know.

Of course, 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.

Charm is simply a matter of being yourself. Your uniqueness is your power. We are all born with innate winning traits to be a masterful small talker.

Ralph Waldo Emerson once said: “Every man I meet is my superior in some way. In that, I learn of him.”

And at Deloitte, as in all organizations, it isn’t easy getting things done when your peers dislike you.

If 80 percent of success is, as Woody Allen once said, just showing up, then 80 percent of building and maintaining relationships is just staying in touch.

These days we’re overwhelmed with so much information that our minds can prioritize only the most recent data. What does it take to break through the white noise of information overload? Becoming front and center in someone’s mental Rolodex is contingent on one invaluable little concept: repetition. • People you’re contacting to create a new relationship need to see or hear your name in at least three modes of communication—by, say, an e-mail, a phone call, and a face-to-face encounter—before there is substantive recognition. • Once you have gained some early recognition, you need to nurture a developing relationship with a phone call or e-mail at least once a month. • If you want to transform a contact into a friend, you need a minimum of two face-to-face meetings out of the office. • Maintaining a secondary relationship requires two to three pings a year. • Social media pings (status updates, retweets, comments, etc.) are terrific for ongoing relationship maintenance, especially for the fringe of your network, but they don’t replace the need for one-to-one pinging with the people in your highest-priority network, those people connected to your current goals.

Eventually everything connects—people, ideas, objects … the quality of the connections is the key. —Charles Eames

Chris Hadfield is a Canadian astronaut who finished up his stint on the International Space Station in 2013, when it was being crowded out of headlines by commercial space efforts like Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic. No one was paying attention—until Hadfield started tweeting about his personal experience of the day-to-day of space station life. One popular video showed what it’s like to cry in space. He broke even bigger (and got people crying on Earth) when he tweeted links to a zero-gravity music video of him performing David Bowie’s “Ziggy Stardust.” Even Bowie gave him the virtual high five, a Twitter retweet. Meanwhile, five other astronauts were up there with him. I couldn’t tell you one of their names. What we’re talking about is content, the one true vehicle for building trust online. Content is how people come to know who you are, what you’re about, what you want, what you can provide, whether you’re cool, etc. Articles, blog posts, profiles, status updates—every bit and byte that’s produced and associated with you and your name adds up to something.

Creating content that gets read and builds trust requires you to adopt and communicate the same core values that help you build relationships in the physical world. Here’s my formula: GENEROSITY + VULNERABILITY + ACCOUNTABILITY + CANDOR = TRUST

The messages you send out into the world need to be in language that matters. Tell people how you’re solving a problem they already know they have. Putting yourself in your reader’s shoes and responding to their needs is generous—and it will also get you read.

“Keith, I want to blog, but I don’t know what I’d write about.” If you think that the creative process begins with you, a blank screen, and a deep cup of coffee, you’re making things very hard on yourself. The best ideas come from looking around you and constantly asking, “How can I be helpful to people?” and then engaging them early

People are desperate for authenticity. Everywhere you look today there’s someone lying about something, some organization glossing over the truth, some person not telling it like it is. There’s a scarcity of the authentic in our culture. “So many people are liars: they lie to themselves, they lie to their friends, they lie to their lovers, clients, customers, colleagues, that if you become the one in a thousand that is truly honest, then you will stand out,” writes Altucher. “And when you stand out you will find success. You will find money. You will find happiness. You will find health.”

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.

You may not be able to rearrange your office floor plan, but you can similarly design your own life to maximize serendipity, with a little awareness. 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. The key is in adopting the attitude that this effort isn’t a distraction or even a diversion, but is, in fact, contingent on your success. 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.”

Content is a cause, an idea, a trend, or a skill—the unique subject matter on which you are the authority. What will set you apart from everybody else is the relentlessness you bring to learning and presenting and selling your content.

1. Get out in front and analyze the trends and opportunities on the cutting edge.

4. Always learn. You have to learn more to earn more.

5. Stay healthy. Research has discovered that at midafternoon, due to sleep deprivation, the average corporate executive today has the alertness level of a seventy-year-old. You think that executive is being creative or connecting the dots? Not a chance. Sounds hokey, but you have to take care of yourself—your body, mind, and spirit—to be at your best.

9. Develop a niche. Successful small businesses that gain renown establish themselves within a carefully selected market niche that they can realistically hope to dominate. Individuals can do the same thing. Think of several areas where your company underperforms and choose to focus on the one area that is least attended to. A