One Person Out of a Hundred

One Person Out of a Hundred

Jana talked to about a hundred people at a networking event this week. She remembers one of them.

And she's good with names. That's not it.

The problem is all hundred said the same thing. Here's my business, here's who I help, here's what I do, here's who I'm looking for, here's my product, here's my event coming up.

Lots of events coming up. Let me get my calendar.

She walked out of there with flyers and sticky notes and business cards and some kind of branded stress ball, carrying it all in both arms like groceries. It was speed dating for networking. A hundred and something people in one room. I don't think either of us is going back, though I say that after most of them.

The one she remembers is a guy named Luis.

Luis asked how he could help her. What she was looking for, who he could introduce her to.

And here's the part I keep thinking about. She didn't answer him. She said tell me what you do, Luis, because I could probably help you.

He asked four words and got the only real conversation in the room.

Why it works

Everybody in there wanted the same thing and hardly anybody was going to get it, and the wanting was the reason.

Jana explains it with college, which is better than any business version I could come up with. You need a date for the mixer. So you tell people you need a date for the mixer. And you keep telling people, and the more you say it out loud the worse it gets. Eventually you're asking the guy you sit next to in chemistry on Wednesdays and Fridays. He says he has to study. Somebody else says he's cleaning his toenails, which, fine.

Then you give up, or you tell everybody you're seeing somebody, and now there are three of them.

That's not woo. Desperation is a signal and it's loud. People catch it in the first few seconds, before you've said one word about what you do, and the normal human response to pressure is to back up a step.

Walk into a room hunting for opportunity and you're doing the mixer thing in a blazer.

The question is question three

We ask four questions every day. The third one is how do I want to contribute.

For a long time I thought of that one as the nice question. The one that keeps the other three from being purely about me.

I had it backwards. It's got the most leverage in it, and you can see that in a hotel ballroom faster than anywhere else. A hundred people running what can I get, one guy running how can I help, and the one guy is the only person anybody remembers.

I still couldn't tell you what Luis does for a living. That's not a knock on him. It's the point. He was the only person in that room who let somebody's guard down instead of raising it, and he left with a real conversation and a woman who wanted to help him.

What I had wrong for about a decade

Okay, here's the part I've been avoiding.

For years I was the guy who was always helping. Always. And I told myself I didn't need anything back, which was a lie, because I was absolutely running a tally. I just wasn't calling it that.

And it wasn't coming back. That's what I thought, anyway.

So I decided I was done. I was going to be selfish for a while, and I remember feeling sort of good about that, like I'd finally wised up.

I lasted about a week.

I don't know how to describe how bad it felt. Not guilty exactly. More like wearing somebody else's coat. I'd do something a little cold and then walk around all day feeling off. Took me a while to figure out that the thing I thought I was protecting was the exact thing I was giving away.

Anyway. I went back to being me. And somewhere in there something moved.

I was only looking at it from one angle. I had it in my head that if I helped somebody, the return was supposed to come back from that somebody, and when it didn't I filed it under unpaid. Step back far enough and you see all of it at once, and there's a lot arriving from directions I never sent anything.

It comes back. Almost never from where it went.

Which is easy to say now and was impossible to believe on a Tuesday in 2014 when I'd just done something generous for a person who didn't notice.

The baseball thing

Here's how I picture it now.

Say helping is throwing a baseball. You throw it to somebody. And then you stand there, watching that person, waiting for them to throw it back. The throw back is the thank you, or the favor returned, or whatever you decided you were owed.

So you're standing there. Locked in on one guy. Waiting.

And the whole time there are balls coming at you from everywhere else. All directions, all day, from people you never threw anything to. Some of them from people you've never met. The world is already playing this game constantly and it doesn't run point to point.

You just can't see any of it, because you're staring at the one guy who didn't throw yours back.

That's what took me a decade. Not learning to give. Learning to look up.

Some of what comes back is tangible. A referral, an introduction, a call at the exact moment you needed one. Some of it is the peace I get from helping somebody, which shows up immediately and doesn't depend on anybody else's behavior at all.

And that peace isn't a runner-up prize. There's no separate real return that it's standing in for. It is the thing.

Jana's grandmother had a rule about this that Jana never understood as a kid. Give anonymously. No thank you, no accolades, nobody brings you anything at Christmas.

Her grandmother said you get the knowing.

And I'm not being delusional about it

I want to say this because I know how the last section sounds if you're having a hard year.

I'm not walking around pretending everything is fine. I watch the news. I've seen the flooding in Nepal. I know about hunger.

And I know that roughly eighty million people need a wheelchair and don't have one. That means being carried, or staying on the floor, or not going anywhere at all. I'm married to somebody who'd be in that group if she'd been born somewhere else.

I didn't know how big that was until our first distribution trip. You read a number like eighty million and it's a number. Then you're in a room handing chairs to people who have been on the floor for years and it stops being a number pretty fast.

Jana and I are on the board of an organization called Chair the Love. We've been on three distribution trips and we've personally put a little over 550 people in wheelchairs. The organization has done thousands. We're trying to do our part.

Now, I'm aware I just spent a whole section on giving anonymously and then told you about the wheelchairs.

Here's how I square it. Anonymous is right when the only thing at stake is whether I get credit. It's the wrong call when the thing itself needs to be seen. Chair the Love needs people to know it exists, and me keeping quiet about it to protect my own humility would be a pretty expensive kind of vanity.

So: they're at ChairTheLove.org. We're emceeing their Love Moves the World Gala in Orlando on October 4th, and the details are at chairthelove.org/events.

None of what's in the news is fine and none of it is luck.

What I'm saying is smaller and it's about noticing. The quality of my life tracks pretty closely with my capacity to see what's actually getting handed to me on an ordinary day. I wake up feeling like the luckiest guy alive and I go to bed the same way, and it's not because I've arranged things so nothing hard happens.

It's because I got better at looking up.

Walking in with "what can I get"	Walking in with "how can I help"
You lead with what you do.	They ask what you do, usually within a minute.
You sound like the other ninety-nine people.	You sound like the only one.
They take your flyer to be polite.	They remember your name a week later.
You leave with a stack of cards.	You leave with two people who want to introduce you to somebody.

Find the helpers

Mister Rogers said his mother told him that when something scary was on the news, look for the helpers.

She meant it for kids. It's also a pretty good instruction for a grown man in a hotel ballroom.

Be the helper and people can find you. Everybody in that room is quietly scanning for the one person who isn't going to sell them something. There's usually one or two. Everybody remembers who they were.

Try it Thursday

The whole thing fits in one sentence.

How can I help you?

Ask it first. Before you say what you do. And ask it without an angle behind it, because people can feel an angle, and then it's just a pitch with better manners.

Then listen. And if you can actually help, help.

You'll be the one they remember. That's not why you do it. It happens anyway.

The Living Lucky® Practice

Exercise: at your next event or meeting, lead with how can I help you. Don't follow it with what you do. Let them ask.

Reflection question: where am I keeping score without admitting I'm keeping score?

Journal prompt: what came back to me this year from a direction I never sent anything?

Action: do one useful thing for somebody this week and don't tell anybody.

Frequently asked questions

Why does looking for opportunity at a networking event backfire?

Because wanting something from a room shows before you open your mouth, and people move away from pressure. It also makes you sound like everybody else in there, since almost everyone walked in running the same math.

What should I say instead of my elevator pitch?

Ask how you can help them, and mean it. Most people will ask what you do within a minute anyway, and by then you're in a conversation instead of taking your turn.

Does the law of reciprocity actually work?

It has for me, with one adjustment that took me years. It rarely comes back from the person you gave to. If you're tracking one-to-one you'll decide it doesn't work, because that's not where it comes from.

What if I give and nothing comes back?

Then it's worth asking whether being a person who helps is worth it on its own. If it is, you already got paid. If it isn't, the giving was a trade with a delay built in, and that's worth being honest with yourself about.

Isn't "how can I help you" just a manipulation tactic?

It is, if you're using it to get something. People pick that up fast and it works worse than a straight pitch would. The question only does anything when you're prepared for the answer to cost you an hour and return nothing.

How does contribution connect to creating luck?

Asking how you can contribute changes what you notice, and what you notice is the whole game. A room full of people looking for something to take and one person looking for something to give are not standing in the same room.

We went deeper on this on the Living Lucky® Podcast, Season 11, Episode 30.

We Create Our Luck®.