Keith Ferrazzi - Never Eat Alone: And Other Secrets to Success, One Relationship at a Time

One hour from Salt Lake City, in a Utah town called Eden, is a breathtaking vista of snow, trees, and sky called Powder Mountain. In 2013, a group of remarkable twentysomethings raised $40 million to purchase the 10,000-acre site. On it theyre going to build an eco-retreat and second home (or third or fourth or fifth) for successful entrepreneurs who want to make the world better.

Its an audacious vision. The story of how these young upstarts made it happen is the finest example I know of the principles, mind-sets, and practices of this book come to life.

In 2008, Eliot Bisnow, then twenty-two, had been hustling successfully as an ad salesman for his fathers small e-mail newsletter businessso successfully that the company had grown beyond their ability to manage and grow it. Bisnow knew he had a knowledge problem, but he didnt think business school. After all, he was in the weeds and needed answers yesterday.

Reading Never Eat Alone at the time pushed him to reframe the problem. What he really needed was access to a network that could provide him with the mentorship and advice he needed to help a rapidly growing business. This wasnt a knowledge problem. It was a people problem, with a people solution.

Just as the book prescribed, he created a Relationship Action Plan listing all his prospects, top entrepreneurs who could share with him the lessons of their success. Then he hit the phone for cold-calling with an offer so generous they couldnt refuse: an all-expenses-paid ski weekend (Bisnow charged $15K to his own credit card to make it happen) where they could rub shoulders with fellow successful entrepreneurs and mentor young up-and-comerschiefly, Bisnowwho were bent not just on financial success but on making a positive social impact.

A free weekend ski trip and an opportunity to change the world? I sure would have said yesin fact, I probably would have paid to attend. As it turned out, I wasnt the only one, and boom!, Bisnow had a new venture. Over the course of a few years, the retreats grew into a thriving event business called Summit Series, with both for-profit and nonprofit wings.

Summit isnt just in the business of helping launch entrepreneurs. Its in the business of creating community, the most valuable form of social capitalthe intimate, supportive relationships that spur collaboration while deeply satisfying our human need for connection, belonging, and meaning. Otherwise put, a lifelong community of colleagues, contacts, friends, and mentors.

What the past decade of social science research tells us is that satisfying these relational needs isnt just about some soft notion of the good life; these are the hard prerequisites for creativity, innovation, progressand, at the end of that chain, profit.

Now Summit Series is making a permanent home in Powder Mountain, where longtime Summit notables like billionaire investor Peter Thiel are among those who dropped up to $2 million apiece for their own plots of land. The move underlines the likely longevity not just of Summit but of the ideas that have driven its success.

Bisnows story is an inspiring walk through the lessons of this book: generosity in relationships, above all; audacity; social arbitrage; blending the personal and professional; connecting through passions; giving back; having fun.

Although Id really like to, I cant take credit for Summit Series. I am only a lucky participant in what Bisnow and his group have created. But I can honestly crow that Bisnow acknowledges Never Eat Alone as the operating manual that helped him to shape and execute his vision. And hes one of thousands whom Ive heard from who have built not just a career but entire organizations on the philosophy and precepts found in the book.

Heres Summits own informal code of conduct:

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 isnt about networking; its 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 rsums. Show love to the start-ups, and dont fanboy the big-timers.

5. Have Fun: If its not fun, it doesnt count.

What the success of Bisnow and his communityand that of the many other thousands who have written to me with their success storiestells me is that Never Eat Alone was much more than my story. What seemed to me to be my unique and zealous drive to connect and succeed as a poor kid in a Pittsburgh steel town was, in fact, shaped by forces much larger than what was afoot on our local golf course, where I learned so much as a caddy.

The world was changing, and changing me with itor maybe I had the right genetic code to thrive in this new ecosystem. Either way, this book turned out to be the field guide for an entirely new era of business.

In the decade since, Ive built a company to help our clients thrive amid the throttle of change by building and leveraging better relationships. Together weve invested heavily in studying and understanding subjects long left to other disciplines, such as emotion, intuition, behavior, trust, influence, power, reciprocity, networks, and all those things that touch on how we relate to and work with other people.

Two amazing things have happened concurrently:

Networking, once a dirty word, has become the lingua franca of our times, acknowledged as an inherently human pursuitnot ugly or exploitative, but inherent to the forces of reciprocity that drive human development and a collaborative economy. Todays most valuable currency is social capital, defined as the information, expertise, trust, and total value that exist in the relationships you have and social networks to which you belong.

Science has validated the equation that ten years ago was just my nagging intuition:

SUCCESS IN LIFE = (THE PEOPLE YOU MEET) + (WHAT YOU CREATE TOGETHER).

Your network is your destiny, a reality backed up by many studies in the newly emergent fields of social networking and social contagion theory. We are the people we interact with. Our paychecks, our moods, the health of our hearts, and the size of our belliesall of these things are determined by whom we choose to interact with and how.