They call him the most connected businessman on the planet, and most people who call him that also know that he used to be a drug addict.
And no, it’s not 50 Cent. Fifty’s too smart ever to get hooked on that stuff.
I’m actually speaking about Joe Polish, the marketing genius responsible for lifting himself up from rock bottom and building a multimillion dollar carpet cleaning business, before becoming one of Nightingale-Conant’s most well-known publishers with his program, “Piranha Marketing.”
Nowadays, when he’s not raising money and awareness to help current addicts clean up their act and make major moves forward in their lives (and change the discussion around addiction in general), he’s running Genius Network, one of the premier business masterminds in the world.
Last time I checked, membership fees were $25,000 per year, and their roster is a who’s who of people just crushing it in business right now.
So naturally, being an avid reader myself, when I saw that Joe had come out with a new book, What’s In It For Them?, I bought it immediately, inhaled it (maybe a poor choice of words) over a period of a few days, took dozens of excellent notes, and wrote up my key takeaways in a full book breakdown.
One of the ideas that stuck out the most was Joe’s idea (adapted from the futurist Ray Kurzweil) of being a brain extender for others.
Being a brain extender for others — a connector — makes you indispensable to them, and solidifies your place in their network.
A slightly more cynical version of this idea appears as Law #11 in Robert Greene’s The 48 Laws of Power: “Learn to Keep People Dependent on You,” but you can see how a good person like yourself can use this same idea for others’ benefit instead!
Versions of this idea keep coming up again and again in the relationship-building literature, which gives you some idea of how critical it is to the health of your network.
Extending the capabilities of others increases your value to the entire network, thereby making the entire network stronger.
Here’s where Ray and the idea of being a “brain extender” shows up in the context of What’s In It for Them?:
“One of Ray’s biggest ideas is the idea of ‘the singularity,’ when there will be a melding of humans and machines. In fact, we’re already experiencing this with smartphones, VR, and other technologies that he refers to as ‘brain extenders.’
While Ray’s ideas appear to be mostly about technology and brain extension, you can think of the network effects of appreciation in exactly the same way. Phones, computers, VR, and tablets expand our capabilities to find things out, to connect with others, to appear smart, to get answers.
If you become a brain extender for others, people will love you the way they love their phones. If you think of yourself as an extender of what people want, they’re going to want to hang out with you.
You do this by connecting them to people, insights, solutions, results, and so on that extend their capabilities, or simply by making them laugh or helping them get what they want.
By doing so, everyone you touch sees their value increase; you are quite literally appreciating them.”
Extend the capabilities of others and you will increase the size and number of the rewards that flow back to you.
As the motivational speaker Zig Ziglar used to say, you can get anything you want in life, just as long as you help enough other people get what they want.
My entire life has been shaped by that single idea, and so I’m always on the lookout for how I can make other people’s lives better. How I can extend their capabilities and make them more effective.
Because when I can make you more effective, I become more valuable.
In Joe’s book, he also recommends becoming a “pain detective” to discover what pain other people have and what you can do to lessen it.
It may not necessarily be physical pain, of course. The word pain can be extended to include anything in their life that they’re struggling with and would like to change, but don’t know how to — or are not able to.
You won’t have to travel far, if pain is what you’re looking for.
We’re all fighting our own private battles, and it doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes-level pain detecting skills to notice opportunities to render assistance to your fellow human beings.
Of course, it’s fantastic if you can do this with no regard for what you stand to gain in the process. Pretty sure that qualifies you for sainthood or something.
But regardless of whether or not that’s your motive (and there’s nothing wrong with that!), you do stand to gain from going out of your way to help others.
If you become a problem-solving pain detective, focused on connecting people to the insights, solutions, and resources that will help them get what they want in life, you will be rewarded in your relationships.
A rising tide lifts all boats. Simply put, if you make it your mission to expand the capabilities of the global network, you end up, in your own small but significant way, expanding the potential and capabilities of all of us.
All the best,
Matt Karamazov
P.S. If these book recommendations landed for you, I’d like to invite you to join 3,600+ other readers gaining wisdom and strength from the greatest books that have stood the test of time, and learning about brilliant new books before anyone else at The Reading Life.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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From The Good Men Project on Medium
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