The most successful people are constantly thinking about how they can help others. Paradoxically, this attitude is what propels them to astronomical success.
This is the central message of Everyone Wins!: How You Can Enhance and Optimize Business Relationships Just Like Ultra-Wealthy Entrepreneurs, a book co-authored by Oaktree Solutions founder Frank Carone.
To research their book, Frank and his co-authors spoke with successful business leaders and entrepreneurs, and pieced together some themes they all shared.
One of those themes is the centrality of putting others first.
Many people assume you have to be cutthroat to make it big, but according to their research, that simply isn't true. Treating people with a sense of decency shows them that you're on their side, which makes them want to align themselves with you.
One of the best ways to do this is to do favors for others without asking for anything in return. Of course, this will impel them to help you out if you need anything in the future. This is known as the “Law of Reciprocity”—and the ultra-successful follow it like it’s written in the Constitution.
The best leaders spend little time worrying about what others “should” do. They know that trying to change someone’s behavior usually just inspires the opposite reaction.
As the book explains, practicing “everyone wins” leads people to help you “not because they should but rather because you’ve made it crystal clear to them that your respective fortunes can be tied together—that they can achieve their key goals by working to further your pursuit of your key goals, and vice versa.”
Everyone Wins! illustrates the business relationship hierarchy as a pyramid, with optimal relationships at the top and simple transactional ones forming the base.
Shallow relationships mean little if you can't leverage them. So the ultra-successful expend a lot of energy deepening their relationships, moving people into higher levels of the pyramid.
By far, the best way to strengthen a relationship is by figuring out how you can help someone—and then actually doing it. That will build trust and reliability, which are invaluable pillars of an enduring partnership.
