Tag: Adding Value

How to make yourself more important.

How do you make yourself more important? It’s a simple but valuable question to ask. While there may be a million ways to become more important, there is one proven approach that anyone can use, regardless of your current skills and resources. It even works if you are not really, really good-looking, like Zoolander.

Here it is in two simple steps.

  1. In every situation you are in determine who is the most important person.
  2. Make yourself useful to that person.

Some examples:

In school, become useful to your teacher, professor, principal or Dean. Volunteer. Ask questions or provide answers. Make them look good during their annual evaluations. (Definitely do that last one.)

On a team, make yourself useful to your coach. This could be through actions or attitude. Set a great example. Help set up for practice or clean up after. You could also show up every day really tall, fast, strong, or coordinated. Coaches love that.

As an employee, make yourself useful to your boss, Hugo. Get your work done on time, every time. Help improve processes, efficiencies and effectiveness. Help improve revenue or profitability. If your boss is a bumbling idiot, help them hide it. (I always appreciate it when my team does that for me.)

At a party, make yourself useful to the host. Be a quick set of helping hands. Smile and have a good time. Introduce people. Play the games the host wants played. Unless the host is P-Diddy.

At home, there are always opportunities to be useful to your spouse or your parents. And making yourself more useful at home is one of the most important things you can do.

Try It Yourself

Start by evaluating who is the most important person in every room or situation you are in. Most of the time, this is easier than it sounds.

Then look for opportunities to provide value.

It’s a great habit to develop. And you’ll get better at it the more you practice. Soon you’ll recognize how valuable this approach is when you are the most important person in the room and others are going out of their way to be useful to you.

Key Takeaway

People are deemed important because they add value in some way. It may be through their intelligence, leadership, experience, responsibility, or a range of other skills and attributes. When you make yourself valuable to those people, you are adding to the value they bring. Which in turn increases your usefulness. As a result, you stand out from the crowd in the eyes of the person who already stands out from the crowd. Remember, your value is directly related to your contribution. Contribute to the most important person in the room’s success and you will contribute to everyone in the room’s success. That is how you make yourself important.

*If you know someone who could benefit from this message, please share it with them.

+For more of the best life lessons I have learned check out my book, What Does Your Fortune Cookie Say? from Ripples Media.

Why it’s smart to reach out when you don’t need anything.

I recently experienced a suspicious outreach. That happens when someone you don’t know very well or haven’t spoken to in a long time reaches out, suddenly eager to talk. Typically this means they are newly unemployed, have something they want to sell you, or a judge has asked them to let you know there is a sex offender in your neighborhood.

This person who contacted me and I have never met in person. He initially reached out to me a few years ago, but after his original introduction, there was never any maintenance to the relationship. In fact, he acknowledged his deadbeatness in his outreach. But suddenly he was eager to talk. Like a close-lipped criminal after being granted legal immunity. I could tell from the note that whatever he was selling at his Tupperware Party would be far more valuable to him than to me.

I don’t mind hearing about what you have going on or what you are trying to sell. But I am much more interested in talking about it if we have spent time talking about other things first.

A Rule of Thumb

Don’t meet and sell on the same day. Don’t do it on the second interaction either. Instead, create a base for your relationship before you develop your base for sales. As a good rule of thumb, meet, email, or call 3 times before you start asking for a transaction. Better yet, provide value to the other person first. Find an article or book they should read. Connect them with another person they should meet. Let them know if they have spinach in their teeth. You know, be helpful.

People don’t like to be sold, but they love to buy. Give others a chance to approach you about your offering first. If you develop a real relationship, and they are a good candidate for your offering, there is a good chance they will bring it up first if you just give them a chance.

Key Takeaway

Develop relationships first. Add value first. Once a good relationship is established the sale, donation or vote may come without an ask.

*If you know someone who could benefit from this message, please share it with them.

+For more of the best life lessons I have learned check out my book, What Does Your Fortune Cookie Say? from Ripples Media.

Don’t spend your whole life busy and not make progress.

Being busy is not the same as being productive. In fact, busyness is like Fool’s Gold. It looks like business to the uniformed. But it is easy to be busy without getting ahead. In fact, you can spend your whole career extremely busy but not make any progress. The same thing can happen in your personal life too.

The 80-20 rule says that 80 percent of the results come from just 20 percent of the work. (And that 80-year olds seen with 20-year olds have money coming out of the wazoo.) In other words, if you are spending your time on the wrong things you could get little to no results. 

Earlier in my career, when I was with a very large advertising agency, the majority of my time was sucked up with meetings. And meetings about meetings. And to the uninformed, it looked like we were all super busy beavers. But very little wood was actually chewed. And we weren’t building any damn dams.

Today, as an entrepreneur, I see a direct link between how I spend my time and the value that time creates. The goal of any business is to make money. And if you are spending time on anything that ultimately is not helping your organization make more money, you are wasting your time.

Your wasted time and wasted motions at work hurt your career. Because they rob you of time that could be used for self-improvement, networking or creating value for your organization. Those are the 3 keys to making your company more successful, rising within your organization, and earning more for yourself.

If you find yourself in meetings that are not adding value, do one of the following:

  1. Change the meeting. Take the initiative to alter the meeting to make it more valuable to your organization and the people in it.
  2. Shorten the meeting. Help fast forward to the information that needs to be shared or decision that needs to be made, and be done. Often we take a lot of time to do what could be done in just a few minutes. 
  3. Pull the cord. Just like riding the bus, you can pull the cord and ask to get out of the meeting at any time. Be polite, but clear that you don’t feel it is a valuable use of your time. If you feel that way, it is likely that others do too.
  4. Text someone outside the meeting to pull the fire alarm. That works every time.

Key Takeaway

Time is your most precious commodity. Evaluate the way you are spending your time. Look for inefficient and ineffective uses, then eliminate them. Don’t let others waste your time. The opportunity cost is too high with this non-renewable resource.

*If you know someone who could benefit from this message, please share it with them.

The surefire way to increase your wealth.

I own a lot of books with the word ‘rich’ in the title. Among them you’ll find Think And Grow Rich, Rich Dad Poor Dad, The Science of Getting Rich, The Richest Man In Town, and  Rich Like Them. In fact, I have bought so many books with the word ‘rich’ in the title that the Amazon recommendation engine now suggest books like The Adventures of Richie Rich, Rich Desserts, and The Many Impressions Of Rich Little.

The Real Lessons

I like these books because they are about success. They help you think and act in ways that help you accomplish great things. And those great things often attract money like magnets. Or magnates.

I consider the tips, tricks and examples in these books to be important reminders rather than great aha’s. Although there are certainly plenty of both in my library of riches.

The One Thing To Remember

But if you want to know the most important point of all about getting rich it is summarized in the following line:

‘It is the value you bring to a company, an organization, indeed the universe, that ultimately determines your level of wealth.’ -From The Richest Man In Town by W. Randall Jones

Key Takeaway

If you want to earn more money, add more value. If you want more social capital, add more value. If you want more political capital, add more value. Your success is directly related to your contribution. So if you want more, contribute more.

If you know someone who could benefit from this message, please share it with them.