Category Archives: Business

Recently I met with some young, green entrepreneurs to discuss their business idea. I gave them a bunch of feedback at the end of the meeting. They nodded hungrily and said they appreciated it.

One problem. Neither took a single note during the meeting. As I read off a list of 6 or 7 specific things I had written down in my notebook, they nodded but did nothing else.

I’m a notebook-and-pen kind of guy. I try to carry a notebook around with me everywhere because I never know when a good idea will strike me, or when someone will tell me something I want to remember. In meetings, I not only take notes to remember things — I’ll trust paper notes over someone’s memory any day of the week — but also to signal respect to the person talking. I want to show that I value their ideas.

I apply this value the other way, too. That is, if I give someone specific, responsive feedback over several points, I appreciate it when he writes it down because it shows he’s taking my time / ideas seriously.

Here’s the catch: sometimes there’s rationale not to scribble notes in a meeting. If you’re trying to build a personal relationship with someone, or are out with a friend, sometimes taking notes can make the interaction seem too transactional. Also, if you are taking notes but your partner is not, a subtle power dynamic can emerge (ie, the person taking notes is less than the person not taking notes).

In the end, it’s a personal choice. I take notes all the time, regardless of situation. There’s no worse feeling than trying to remember that golden nugget of wisdom that you didn’t write down. I also try to signal that I value my partner’s time. But I can appreciate the perspective that in certain non-professional interactions taking notes can be weird and maybe counterproductive in the long-run.

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One logistical note: sometimes a “notebook and pen” can be digital — ie, your PDA. I use my T-Mobile Dash to write down blog posts, quotes, etc. that come to mind during the day, and then transfer to my computer at the end of the day.

Here’s Tim Ferriss on “how to take notes like an alpha geek.” To me, this is over-optimizing the organization part of it (which is a central problem I have with many productivity hacks — over-optimization), but it’s worth a read to see different people’s systems.

There’s no shortage of people hailing the benefits of mentors. There’s also ample advice on how to find mentors. Few talk about what to do once you’ve made contact with someone who wants to help you. You sit down to lunch with a potential mentor. What do you say? How do you act? How frequently do you follow up, especially if the person is busy and important?

I know many professionals who would like to be mentors but are not, mainly because once they start interacting with a potential mentee they find it’s not nearly as fulfilling as they imagined. I place the blame in many cases on the mentee and how s/he approaches those early interactions. Smart mentees realize that successful mentoring relationships don’t necessarily happen automatically; rather, they’re the result of genuine engagement and sustained effort.

Drawing upon my own experience and that of others, here are six habits of highly effective mentees.

1. It’s all about the questions you ask.

Here’s an example of a bad question: "What career should I go into?" Expect a worthless blue sky answer, or something that corresponds closely to what he does.

Here’s a better question: “I’m deciding between these two jobs, which each offer these benefits and these drawbacks. What do you think? Which factors should I consider most highly – salary, geography, etc?”

In other words, present options and then get help on how to think about the options.

Here’s a common question mentees ask that I think is problematic: “What would you do if you were me / you were in my shoes?” This is ambiguous. This either means, “What would you do in this situation?” which is asking what the mentor herself would do after considering her own situation, which is not what you really want. Or, it means, “If you were me, you had all the same strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats as me, what would you do?” It’s unlikely the mentor (or anyone) knows you well enough to have a 360 degree perspective. So the question fails with either interpretation.

2. Have strong beliefs, weakly held.

This is maybe the hardest habit: How do you at once demonstrate greenness, a blank slate, and open-mindedness (ie, a genuine interest in hearing an advisor’s ideas and potentially incorporating them into your own life) while also showing potential through your existing ideas and convictions? In other words, mentors want to mentor someone they can influence, but they only want to influence people they think can be successful, and people bound for success tend to have beliefs about the world. Asking a million questions but putting forth no ideas of your own, or simply nodding hungrily at anything and everything the mentor says, puts you too far in the "green" direction. By the same token, acting like you’ve figured out the world is just as much a turn-off — who wants to help someone who thinks he doesn’t need help?

So how do you walk the line between these two extremes? Try articulating your existing stance to your mentor in an expository fashion: here is what I feel, here is why, here is my level of certainty.

3. Have a long term perspective.

Mentoring relationships are like any friendship or romance — it takes time. Lots of time. Years of time. If things are going well, don’t try to cover every topic on your mind in one meeting. Meander. Dive deep. Have a memorable conversation about just a couple things. Don’t bring a "pump-and-dump" attitude to the relationship.

4. Be open to topics not on your short-term agenda.

Say you’re trying to start a business and you meet with a start-up expert. You want to pick her brain about successful start-ups. One problem: everyone wants to ask this gal about start-ups. She’s bored of doling out the same advice. So spend some time probing her on off-the-beaten path topics. Religion? Politics? Wander on the path less trekked upon.

For example, if you’re young, everyone is going to want to give you advice about colleges and higher ed. Be open to hearing it.

In the long term, you’ll have plenty of time to cover the topic that made you interested in her in the first place.

5. Follow up by showing interest in them (at least four times a year).

To form a long term relationship you need to stay in touch. But what does "stay in touch mean"? A meeting a year? An email every month? Phone calls? It all depends on the situation.

Nothing beats an in-person interaction. So aim for those, but it can be hard to see busy people. At the least, email him four times a year.

Remember, in your communications, show interest in his life, and he’ll reciprocate and show interest in your life. Send a relevant article, or comment on a move his company recently made. Set a Google News Alert on his name.

If the mentor reads blogs, maintaining a blog is one of the best ways to stay in touch. Because it is "opt-in" — people choose to read blogs — you can get away with more frequent communications. If you email someone, he feels an obligation to read and respond. If you write a blog post, you’ve created no such obligation, and he still will probably read it in his RSS reader.

Try to be creative in your communications both in format (try postcards!) and timing (never send an update during the holiday season).

6. Don’t make the mentor do the work.

It’s not up to the mentor to figure out how to mentor you. It’s up to you to figure out what you need help on.

Need an introduction to someone? Need to figure out which of three options is best? Have a life/personal question that would be great over a cup of coffee? Take the initiative.

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What should be added to this list?

For more on this check out my book My Start-Up Life. Thanks to Chris Yeh, Ramit Sethi, and Cal Newport for giving feedback on this post.

Effective leaders don’t have to passionate. They don’t have to charming. They don’t have to be brilliant. They don’t have to be great speakers. What they must be is clear. Above all else, they must never forget the truth that of all the human universals–our need for security, for community, for clarity, for authority, and for respect–our need for clarity, when met, is the most likely to engender in us confidence, persistence, resilience, and creativity. Show us clearly whom we should seek to serve, show us where our core strength lies, show us which score we should focus on and which actions must be taken today, and we will reward you by working our hearts out to make our better future come true.

That’s Marcus Buckingham, via Chris’s summary. There are so many good nuggets. Here are just a few more:

• To combat arrogance and carelessness, don’t tear down the person. Instead, build up the size of the challenge. Emphasize their scope, their complexity, their "no one has ever pulled this off before" quality. The state of mind you should try to create is a fully realistic assessment of the difficulty of the challenge and an unrealistically optimistic belief in his ability to overcome it.
• The one thing all great manager know about great managing is this: "Discover what is unique about each person and capitalize on it."
• The most effective way to turn fear into confidence is to be clear; to define the future in such vivid terms, through your actions, words, images, pictures, heroes, and scores that we can all see where you, and thus we, are headed. Adjustments along the way must be communicated with great vividness; clarity is the antidote to anxiety and therefore clarity is the preoccupation of the effective leader.
• "It is always showtime." However trivial or boring a transaction might be, you are still making an impression.
• The best way to succeed is through a disciplined process of stress and recovery. Impose on your life a series of routines that allow you to stress yourself, then recover, stress, then recover, and you will find that, over time, your capacity, your resilience, and your energy will all expand.

He also excerpts Buckingham’s five universal human fears and needs that are relevant to leadership:

1) Fear of death (our own and our family’s) / The need for security
2) Fear of the outsider / The need for community.  We are herd animals, and we organize ourselves to keep the herd strong.
3) Fear of the future / The need for clarity. In every society, we give prestige to those who claim to be able to predict the future.
4) Fear of chaos / The need for authority. Every society has devised its own creation myth in which the world was created out of chaos. The need to classify things is universal. The reason creating democracy from autocracy is hard is that we dislike chaos and thus like strong leaders.
5) Fear of insignificance / The need for respect.

Thoroughly acknowledged the difficulties of their situation, acknowledged that they are very busy, etc. In other words, you need to actually listen to them and proactively appreciate them before you play the role of advice-giver.

A friend told me this today and it rang true.

Suppose you tell a busy person: "You should check out this museum — they have a great Asian Art exhibit." A busy person’s first quiet thought might be, "I’m a busy person, I can’t just go to museums whenever I want." He will discount your advice because you haven’t acknowledged a basic fact about his life.

Now suppose you preface your suggestion: "I know you’re really busy. But you should check out this museum — they have a great Asian Art exhibit." I would expect a higher follow-through rate.

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Most people think they are busy. Many people annoyingly make a big deal out of how busy they are. Whether it’s self-delusion or reality, it’s important to acknowledge the busy-ness of those we work with — both verbally ("I know your time is valuable…") and in our actions. Chronic tardiness to meetings with other busy people is a sign of arrogance as it implies one does not respect the other people’s time.

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The giving and receiving of advice has long fascinated me. Here’s my post on overvaluing advice when the problem is hard and undervaluing advice when the problem is easy. Here are more general thoughts of mine on the topic. Here’s my post on how disclosure of one’s bias doesn’t cancel out its effects — ie we don’t account for the bias of an advice-giver as much as we should, even when we know it’s there.

Anyone interested in business should slowly read these notes from a recent Q&A session with Warren Buffett. It’s making its way around the blogosphere for good reason.

Here’s Charlie Munger’s USC speech I’ve blogged about – also worth reading.