Episode 112 - Keith Ferrazzi on Fear of Networking, 3 People Who Will Change Your Life & Vipassanā Meditation

Transcript

Susan Bratton: Welcome to Dishy Mix. I’m your host Susan Bratton, and on today’s show you’re going to get to meet Keith Ferrazzi. Keith’s the CEO of a company called Ferrazzi Greenlight and the author of two great books; the first, Never Eat Alone, a book he wrote a few years ago about networking and the importance and power of it. And his newest book, Whose Got Your Back, where we talk about creating, and I want to actually read right from the book ‘cause I love the way it’s written, “The secret to finding the three people who will change your life. It’s the breakthrough program to build trusting relationships that create success and won’t let you fail.” I know we all feel like we’re not doing everything we can in our lives to be all we can be, and Keith has some great ideas about how to get us all to the next level in that category. So lets welcome you to the show. Hey Keith.

Keith Ferrazzi: Hey, thanks a lot for having me, and the good news is that doing all we can do to make us more successful is a heck of a lot easier than we’ve ever imagined.

Susan Bratton: Nice! Alright, well tell me how come it’s easier.

Keith Ferrazzi: ‘Cause all the resources that we need are literally just right around us and the people that are there, and that’s nothing more than a personal choice to let them in. And we’re going to talk on this call and prove that that choice is easier than you’ve expected and would’ve ever expected and thought. There really are four principles to letting people in who really can have your back. And an individual that has your back is somebody that yes, you can let your guard down with, and know that’s tough for people but we’ll come back to that and how it can be easier. An individual that has your back is an individual that really bends over backwards to help you be successful as that kind of generous, and the trick to that you just need to be that kind of generous to other people. The third piece is it’s, someone who has your back really tells you the truth and all you’ve got to do is realize that when the truth is given to you that it’s a generous gift no matter who it comes from, how it’s given, it’s a gift and we can talk about that. And finally accountability, which we all know that greatness is inside of us and we all know that we more than likely deprive ourselves of the greatness that we have inside of us. Sure does help to have a partner pushing us, reminding us, kicking us in the butt when necessary. It’s what Gene Nidetch learned when she founded Weight Watchers as what Bill W found when he founded AA, that peers can be there for us to hold us accountable for the greatness that we deserve.

Susan Bratton: So it’s interesting because your premise is that you need to get three people almost for a personal and/or professional board of directors, that you enter into a pact with in a way where you’re going to hold yourself and their going to hold you accountable to the goals that you have for your business, for your life…

Keith Ferrazzi: Yes.

Susan Bratton: And yet, it’s funny, there’s almost this, there’s like two directions that my brain is going. The first one is that this isn’t really networking. This is much more specific than that. So for all of the people that feel like they’re not comfortable walking into a room at work, they’re not comfortable like handing out, they never bring their business cards, they don’t know why anybody would want to talk to them, they’re not sure how to give and get in those kinds of relationships or whatever their shyness or lack of self worth issues are around networking, which seems to be where people stumble, this is an entirely different and much smaller and more finite and more manageable way to think about connecting so…

Keith Ferrazzi: And…

Susan Bratton: Why don’t you compare the two. And easier…

Keith Ferrazzi: And easier.

Susan Bratton: Mm hmm.

Keith Ferrazzi: The reason I keep saying ‘and easier’ is because, look, if I had had my druthers and I had been ready I would’ve written the books in reverse order and not the way they should be read. You should read Whose Got Your Back first, because the daunting task of reaching out to strangers who are unsafe and bringing them into your life in the form of a network is tough for a lot of people. And that’s what Whose Got Your Back was intended to do, which was for those of us in the world independent of our networking capabilities we need a small group of individuals who can really be ourselves and practice being the humans that we deserve to be. What will begin to occur is that you will begin to have the courage to go broader from that. If you have a small group of individuals that you can let your guard down with a little bit, you’ll be able to do it more easily when meeting somebody and creating more instant intimacy in a networking or cocktail party. If you’ve got a small group of individuals who really, you learn that people are there to help you and to be generous, you’re not going to be as fearful as the broad masses. You know, if you’ve got a small group of individuals that you really learn to spar with each other and tell each other the truth, when you get your feedback at work you’re not going to be as defensive. So we need that group of three. And by the way, I don’t even care, maybe three is daunting to you. Start with one. And then the reason we go with three is because at some point the formalization of the process, just like showing up to weekly meetings or daily meetings at AA solidifies the importance and punctuates the importance of the program, so does your three. But right now just find one person you can let your guard down with a little bit and go have a cup of coffee and say, “Hey, what’s going on in our lives? Lets check in.” It’s as simple as that. And then that becomes contagious and more rigorous and more routine and more systematic and more strategic and then next thing you know you’ve taken those principles, you’ve got a weekly group that meets that is mutually supportive and it’s a lifeline group, the next thing you know those same principles and that same person and that courage steps up and goes into a cocktail party and you meet new people in way that you’ve never met anyone before because you’re standing on a more solid foundation.

Susan Bratton: So lets break it down. First of all, I saw a good quote of yours on Twitter, someone Twittered you saying, “It’s not how many people are on your Rolodex, it’s how many people you can pick up the phone and say ‘I need help.’”

Keith Ferrazzi: Yeah. And that will pick up the phone and call you when they need help.

Susan Bratton: Now how do you, lets just say it’s one person, two people or three people, the numbers don’t matter, but you’re essentially putting together your board of directors or your group, your personal group of people who are going to help you hold yourself accountable and be real about your own foibles and your own opportunities to get to the next level. Where do you go to find this person or these people, and then how do you approach them?

Keith Ferrazzi: Well first of all, they’re all over the place. They could be sitting in the cubicles next to you at work. But many people say, “Oh my gosh, I can’t possibly find people at work. You don’t understand where I work.” I got to tell you something, if you can’t find one person that you can bring into your confidence at work, then you clearly have the problem, not the work environment. But we can come back to that. You can find a professional coach; it could be a priest, it could be a coach, it could be a therapist if you need to, if you’re really that stymied relative to relationships that you can’t even imagine reaching out to somebody that’s not contractual, you can find them in your churches, you can find them on the bus, you could go to, you could go to your social networking and begin to find them. I opened a community site called greenlightcommunity.com, Greenlight Community, and the intent there is a group of people who want to commit to helping each other be successful. The only cost of entry is the agreement that everybody there will help other people. And now what happened is organically – and we didn’t even foresee this frankly – the groups are now sub organizing into regional groups and meeting physically on a monthly basis from which people are finding their lifeline relationships because this is a group of people that already share their core values.

Susan Bratton: So what about if there’s somebody that you would really like as a part of your lifeline group, and they could be instrumental in helping you understand how to take your business to the next level? They could really be what we would’ve classically thought of as a mentor; someone who’s further ahead than you in business. But you’re totally intimidated by them and you know they’re busy and why the heck would they want to bother helping you?

Keith Ferrazzi: Well they may not be. They may not be.

Susan Bratton: Well lets just assume they are ‘cause everybody is. So how do you get the courage to…

Keith Ferrazzi: Well not, but hold on a second. They might be… No, I disagree…

Susan Bratton: Okay.

Keith Ferrazzi: They might be a good mentor, they may not be a good lifeline. Lets distinguish the issues here.

Susan Bratton: Alright, go ahead.

Keith Ferrazzi: A mentor is somebody who will give you small bites of time, give you advice. They get a lot out of it because they feel that they’re helping the world and helping somebody, they feel good about themselves. Maybe the mentor will even pick up some tips from you. I mean a lot of my mentees have turned into my mentors because these individuals are teaching me social networking technology that I wasn’t aware of, ‘cause they’re younger folks and they’ve been living this more than I have and I’ve been learning so much from them, so it ends up being a mutual teaching environment. That is not a lifeline relationship. A lifeline relationship is a commitment where two people dig deep, they dig in and they say we’re not going to let each other fail. A lifeline relationship, at the beginning it doesn’t have to go from nothing to that, but at the beginning it could literally be just get together and check in, but at some point when a lifeline relationship is really a lifeline relationship, it’s transparently that. Two people look at each other in the eye and say, “We’re going to be there for each other. We’re going to hold each other accountable. We’re going to make sure we tell each other the truth even when we don’t want to hear it, and we both agree to forgive in advance when we slip up. We’re going to trust our instincts and learn from each other. We’re going to help each other”, and that’s a… “And we’re going to let our guards down, and we’re going to try as best as we can not to hurt each other when we let our guards down, but sometimes we will and we’re forgiving in advance.” That’s a lifeline relationship. So the person you mentioned may not be a lifeline relationship. It may be a mentor, which is great.

Susan Bratton: Got it. Well do you think that for lifeline relationships they are more your peers, or could they be someone who is in a more powerful position or a less powerful position?

Keith Ferrazzi: Absolutely. I have turned CEO’s of Fortune 500 companies into my lifeline relationships. And, you know, these individuals, because I’ve grown into my own confidence and my own abilities and my own insights, I have then showed up to others in that way. And it’s interesting because in the olden days I still had the insights, but I didn’t have the confidence in the insights, and therefore I didn’t show up with those insights. So much of this starts with the spiritual journey. It starts with the spiritual journey of myself to gain, you know, courage and motivation to believe in myself so that I believe I’ve got something to give somebody, and that came with trial and error over time.

Susan Bratton: You know, that is one of the things that’s on your bio that I wanted to ask you about. It’s the, the last sentence of your bio says Ferrazzi’s interests also include an examination of the relationship between leadership success and spirituality. Tell me more about that.

Keith Ferrazzi: It’s a big deal to me, because I spent most of my life not feeling grounded and comfortable with Keith Ferrazzi. You can certainly read it underneath the, you know, some of the lines of Never Eat Alone. People used to always say to me, “Keith, god, I love your book. I could never do all of that.” And I’m like, “Yeah, well you don’t have to”, which is good. I mean there’s so much stuff in Never Eat Alone that anybody can take a little bit from it and still do so much better than they’re doing, but imagine the craziness of the guy that actually did all of that. And, you know, a lot of that was just spurred by my own insecurities, my own insecurities of chasing out ahead of the person that I didn’t want to be anymore, I didn’t want to be that little poor kid in Southwestern Pennsylvania that, you know, that felt like he wasn’t worthy of being in those schools. And I’ve always sought a greater groundedness in my life through spirituality. And as I find it, you know, the Keith Ferrazzi chasing out front slows down a little bit for the little Keith Ferrazzi from Southwestern Pennsylvania to catch up to him and then they can walk together and help each other.

Susan Bratton: So what at a spiritual….

Keith Ferrazzi: Sorry, I didn’t mean to sound like Stuart Smallie there.

Susan Bratton: What at a spiritual level is it that you’re invoking in your life to create more confidence and more connectedness with humanity.

Keith Ferrazzi: Mediation’s been the most important thing.

Susan Bratton: And what kind of meditating are you doing?

Keith Ferrazzi: Vipassana meditation.

Susan Bratton: Oh wow, so you’re like a hardcore dude sitting there for ten days?

Keith Ferrazzi: Yup, yup…

Susan Bratton: Okay.

Keith Ferrazzi: Done it many times. And I can’t say that I keep my practice on a daily basis; I actually don’t. I don’t meditate daily. But I know that at any point in my life when anything could be crashing down around me I know that there’s a place that I can go inside of myself in one of those Vipassana meditations centers to really escape the truth, to escape the calm, to escape to a place that’s inside of me, and that’s, there were times in my life that I didn’t know that that place existed and I felt deeply alone. I’m never alone again. I know there’s a place I can go, and that’s powerful. But also just generosity. The more generous I am, the more I live my life to support and help others, the more grounded I become, the less frenetic I… I mean my business to a radical transformation in profitability when I stopped worrying about making money and supporting myself and started taking care of myself, and I started focusing on making a difference in my clients and prospects lives and making a difference in the world, and that all of a sudden transitioned me to a fundamentally different level, and my earning, my profitability, I just, my business is going so well right now. In this ridiculous market I am hiring left and right. I have opening if anybody would like to apply.

Susan Bratton: A large part of your success has come from the human connection that you’re making with people now that goes beyond just the business and the making money. Intimacy and connection are a really important part of the tenets of what you teach in both of your books, getting down to the bones of that person that you’re talking to and who they are, what they need and how you can help them. One of the things that I saw you blog about recently was something you called your RAC, Relationship Action Plan, and I thought that was really a wise piece of advice. Would you give us a quick cover off on that before we head to a break?

Keith Ferrazzi: Yeah. Well the Relationship Action Plan, I fundamentally believe that everybody in (unintelligible) needs to at first identify the 25 most important people to the success and joy of your life, and then proactively manage those relationships for deeper levels of intimacy on a week by week basis. It’s not different than the commitment you have to your own finances or should have to your own finances. The richness of resources and the people around you deserve to be managed just as tightly.

Susan Bratton: So what do you do? You list the 75 people and then what happens?

Keith Ferrazzi: Well then you assign… First of all you list your goals, and associated with the goals are the people. So you start with the goals. One of my goals is deeper levels of spirituality. As a result, some of the people on my list help bring that to me, just as higher forms of income and clients for Ferrazzi Greenlight, so some of the people are associated with that as well. Then I prioritize, A, B and C. That’s important because you can’t put the same amount of outreach to the A’s, to the B’s, to the C’s, so you’ve got to then allocate a certain amount of time and outreach, and there are different types of outreach. There’s meetings, there’s events, and events is very broadly defined from parties to dinners to conferences, etcetera. And then there’s my great contribution to the networking world called Pinging. It has a whole chapter in the book around Never Eat Along, but it’s just staying on the radar screen. So you assign and allocate outreach with the individuals based on the priority. There’s a lot more associated with it including how do you tap into the ambassador’s of your life, and we can talk about that when we come back.

Susan Bratton: Great. Thank you. Alright, we’re going to go to a break, and when we come back I want to make sure that we cover your book launch strategy. With Whose Got Your Back, you have a number one bestseller on your hands, which means that you’ve had some mobilizing of forces both online and offline and I want to hear that story. And of course it wouldn’t be Dishy Mix without a little bit of what’s happening with Keith Ferrazzi, so stay tuned. We’re going to thank our sponsors and we’ll be right back.

Susan Bratton: We’re back with Keith Ferrazzi, author of Whose Got Your Back, and Keith, you’ve done an amazing job driving that book up to number one bestseller, I think Wall Street Journal and New York Times, is that right?

Keith Ferrazzi: And Amazon…

Susan Bratton: And Amazon. Oh wow! Alright, so tell us the story about how you planned the launch and what you did.

Keith Ferrazzi: Gosh. Well it was instinct. The first thing I did was years ago when I went into writing Never Eat Alone, I rigorously interviewed 20 to 30 authors, very successful authors, bestselling authors, to understand what they learned from their book marketing. I actually wrote a very robust marketing plan for Never Eat Alone, which ended up being sold to publishers to train all of their authors. So I decided if I’m going to be in the business, I’m going to know the business better than anybody else who knows the business. And then over the last five years as I was writing the book I was accumulating best practices on a monthly basis and logging them in what we call our book marketing space shuttle manual. So this thing is pretty vast and it deals with, yes, online strategies. There are different buckets of online strategies. There’s direct campaigns associated with email campaigns. We probably had somewhere close to, oh gosh…. In the broadest sense I know the biggest blast we did was with Sponsor Blast to associate with about a million emails. But even just for the normal mortal, we had campaigns going out at the thousand mark, you know, everyday to people different email blasts. So that was a big chunk of it. I think that was a pretty high return on investment, accumulating all those email lists. The second was the broad, you know, blogosphere, Twittershere, that sort of thing and that was very powerful. Some of it we actually hired some online PR firms. Don’t trust your offline PR firms to do your online PR, totally different. Plus myself, I became a very active blogger, very active Twitterer; now I’m addicted and I love it personally. And you should, everybody on this call should create your community so that no matter what you want to tell the world what you want to present, whether it’s a book or an article or whatever, you’ve got a group of people anxiously excited to hear it because they already trust and believe in you. Then you go offline and you’ve got the typical media, but because of my Relationship Action Plan, I know the most important producers of some of the biggest TV shows, so that’s still important. I mean there’s no doubt Today Show and Good Morning America is important. What’s your relationship with the people who lead those, as well as the local papers and the magazines, etcetera. And so we had a real great PR blast, it was pretty significant because of the relationships I had. Not because of the PR firm that I hired, because of the relationships that I had. And then of course there was the PR firm that did the broad blast to the media and the world, and that’s sort of what we call roundup PR, which gets me to Dellis Newspaper and that sort of thing. Then I did something that was truly unique; I began to solicit sponsorships by mutually interested and beneficial corporations who could benefit from my book. And what I did was I said to them, “I’m going to come and I’ll do a talk at your corporate headquarters. You will buy books at your corporate headquarters for all of your employees. And then when I’m traveling around on this book tour – so lets just make up a company called David’s Company in New York. So David’s company in New York, I would go and give a talk at their headquarters, but then when I was talking to Jane’s company in Chicago, that evening in Chicago I would also do a public talk, open to my fans, open to the public, but interestingly enough all of the regional people from David’s company that happen to live in Chicago would also come as well. So I was giving, for the ability to buy books at home headquarters in New York to David’s company, I was giving them access for all their employees across the country to any of my public talks. So this was really well orchestrated. I had five full time people traveling with me on the tour. I had three full time people in advance of the tour doing nothing but managing the book marketing. And the funny thing about all of this is it ended up being a significant profit center. In addition to the books I made a bunch of money on the sponsorships.

Susan Bratton: So the one that I’m familiar with, I came to see you when you did the University of Phoenix open public forum. Tell me about that one. That was a brilliant move to get the U of P as a sponsor, ‘cause you…

Keith Ferrazzi: Well they’re a brilliant company. And all of this goes back to editorial by the way, which is why you got to think about this while you’re writing your book. The point was as I was writing my… and you got to do it in a pristine way if you’re going to be a good writer, so you don’t go ahead and sell pages for marketing. I discovered the University of Phoenix because they understand peer to peer support. They organize all of their classes in a small peer to peer support groups that commit to each other, not to let each other fail the course. It reduces the drop out rate and it extends the learning, the measurable learning and the sustained learning, and so I wrote about them because I was really proud of an educational institution. It was leading any other educational institution that I could find in peer to peer support in the philosophies of Whose Got Your Back. Well in the process you get to know these folks, and you create the win-win for their marketing. So here they were sponsoring that evening, and in the process of sponsoring that evening they got to invite their students, their alumni, and I actively worked to figure out what the win is for them. It’s so funny because so many people have approached University of Phoenix and other people to do sponsorships. Sponsorships are crap. I mean sponsorships are just me wanting to get in your pocket so you can help me. That’s not what I create. I create rich robust opportunities for people who deliver so much more value than the sponsorship that they’re paying.

Susan Bratton: So what was the thing that they wanted?

Keith Ferrazzi: They wanted to be able to give a huge gift to their students and enable their students, they wanted to give it to their alumni. They also wanted to get to know my network. So my network is very robust. And they sell into corporate training, and their network in corporate training is fairly nation to new. I was able to open up that whole world of chief learning officers, heads of HR for them, in return for them opening up their student body to me to send my message.

Susan Bratton: Got it. Pick two of these people from your blog roll on your blog, and tell me what you think their single biggest contribution is to us as an opportunity. Here’s who’s on your blog roll: Guy Kawasaki, Marcus Buckingham, Penelope Trunk, Tim Ferris, Tom Peters and Tony Robins. Pick two and tell us why we should learn more about them.

Keith Ferrazzi: Well Tony I think is a good example, just to go in reverse. A lot of people don’t understand Tony. Unless you’ve seen him lately, you might have preconceived ideas as the guy who is on infomercials. Tony cares very deeply, and by the way has more experience than most of us, if not any of us all put together relative to really helping people transform their lives, and his science, his technology, his use of both neural linguistic programming and all the things that he’s perfected since then around it is amazing. When you fill an auditorium and a stadium full of people who are paying a lot of money and you can pay, you can charge 65 thousand dollars a year for individuals who come to his master class, I got to tell you there’s real value there; give it the respect that it deserves. So that’s Tony. You know, Tim Sanders has been an old buddy forever, and he and I are very aligned in our philosophies and he just gives so much. I mean  his life, his life is focused on… Particularly on the online are, he spends so much of his time just, all he does is speak, write and blog. And as a result he puts so much time - just like Seth Goden does – into the online world, you get more of these guys in the online world than on most people. I mean I do a lot online, but I’m also running a business. These guys, this is their business.

Susan Bratton: Have you ever done the fire walking with Tony?

Keith Ferrazzi: Oh yeah.

Susan Bratton: Isn’t that so fun?

Keith Ferrazzi: Yeah.

Susan Bratton: Love the fire walking. Thank you for that. So a couple of quick questions before we end the show, just more Keith oriented questions. I’d like to know what you want to be remembered for professionally.

Keith Ferrazzi: Probably by unleashing personal growth and personal development into the workplace, and the recognition that the workplace can be a place and should be a place to become better humans, and in the process shareholder value is returned. And by the way, we spend way too much time at work not to make that a place of growth.

Susan Bratton: I was talking to Monica Broker – she used to run Google’s Personal Growth Institute, and she’s struck off on her own now – but she made an interesting point that in the 1920’s we didn’t, as a culture, really understand the value of daily exercise, and in today’s business world we now have onsite gyms. And she feels that personal growth is the same; that it’s just beginning to start being integrated into…

Keith Ferrazzi: Great analogy.

Susan Bratton: the business world. I liked the kind of timeframe…

Keith Ferrazzi: Yup.

Susan Bratton: construct of that. What’s the axiom by which you live your life?

Keith Ferrazzi: Lead with generosity.

Susan Bratton: Oh, that’s a good one. We’ve been talking a lot lately on Dishy Mix about how to benefit from social media with the catchphrase “Give to get”, and it’s exactly the same…

Keith Ferrazzi: By the way, I don’t like that.

Susan Bratton: Why don’t you?

Keith Ferrazzi: I don’t like that. It sounds like a balance sheet. That’s crass to me.

Susan Bratton: Uh huh.

Keith Ferrazzi: “Give to get” means you’re doing it to get. You do it because it’s the right thing, you do it because it brings you joy.

Susan Bratton: That’s a good point.

Keith Ferrazzi: You know, I’ve always, you know, the quid pro quo of give and get I find gross.

Susan Bratton: Okay. That’s a good point. So if you could change one thing about the business world what would it be?

Keith Ferrazzi: I would change the fact that in today’s corporate world, business is about people. If you want to sell something to somebody, there’s a person on the other end of that that’s going to make the decision. If you want to grow and get a raise and get new career opportunities, there’s a group of individuals on the other end. All the data shows that team cohesiveness builds higher shareholder value and higher productivity, and yet the corporations spend no time, energy or money in generating and focusing on the workplace. It’s my, it’s the bane of my existence. It’s the focal point of my mission and my movement. And it’s just a matter of time.

Susan Bratton: So you mentioned earlier in the show that if you had known what you know today you would’ve written your two books in the opposite order. You would’ve started with small group deep connection and moved and expanded out to networking. It kind of reminds me of the latest Star Trek movie that J.J. Abrams just did where he went back to, he did the prequel for Star Trek. Are you going backward? Is there, is your next book going to be the book even before this one, or what do you have your eye on for the future now?

Keith Ferrazzi: Well there’s actually four books that are in development right now. I needed to get my head screwed on straight for what business I was in, and it took a few years. Expect a lot more prolific writing to come from me in the next five years. Some of them are category specific like sales, others are more general, and I’m very excited about what’s in store for us. And we’ve staffed up for it. We’ve got a huge organization now very much focused on our users, on our community, our movement. It’s a real thrill for me right now.

Susan Bratton: Right now at Ferrazzi Greenlight, you’re doing ERM, Executive Relationship Management for sales, you’re creating executive communities, you’re doing ambassador development. So it kind of seems like it’s more, where you’re moving is more similar to what Marcus Buckingham is doing. Not exactly obviously, but a lot more of the relationship management within organizations based on peoples skills, capabilities, partnerships for putting together groups of people, cross discipline, you know, relationships and things like that…

Keith Ferrazzi: Well relationships have impact on sales, relationships have impact on teams, relationships have impact on innovation, because teams with greater levels of relationships intricity and greater safety and comfort take higher risk. Relationships have impact on so many different aspects of business, that’s our focus, in training and development and in consulting, both of those areas. But mind you, we’re also creating a pretty robust consumer business at the same time, which I think is unique. Marcus, you could say, has done a little bit of that with some of his work with Oprah…

Susan Bratton: Yeah and his bus tour.

Keith Ferrazzi: but he’s mostly focused in the B to B world.

Susan Bratton: Well I think The Truth About You, his intent with The Truth About You, was actually to help, you know, he’s got this big thing going out to college campuses now as well…

Keith Ferrazzi: Yup.

Susan Bratton: helping kids understand where their talents lie and where their passions lie, so that they can get a better earlier start at finding their way, you know, which I think is admirable.

Keith Ferrazzi: Yup.

Susan Bratton: Okay, this is my last question, the one we’ll leave everyone with, and that is Keith what’s the one action that you want us to take?

Keith Ferrazzi: The one action?

Susan Bratton: The one action after hearing about everything you said today.

Keith Ferrazzi: Pick up the phone, call one individual that you feel safe with and you haven’t talked to at this level of depth for a while and say, “Let check in. Lets go have a long slow dinner. Lets go have a cup of coffee.” And what I want you to do is I want you to test for whether this person could be the kind of person that eventually could be a lifeline. Is this someone that you could have candor with? Is this somebody you want to help and they want to help you? Is this somebody… And let your guard down just a little bit; talk about some hopes and fears, some struggles, some thoughts, and begin that path that I lay out in Whose Got Your Back. It stars with a phone call or a text or an outreach on Twitter.

Susan Bratton: Lets start it with a phone call. It’s the human way, no matter what all of these technologies are, right? Well thank you for that. And I, for Dishy Mix fans, have a bound galley copy, so one of the very original first copies of Keith’s books, Whose Got Your Back. If you go to dishymixfan.com and post your desire, I will send it to you. So Keith thanks so much for coming on the show. It’s my favorite thing in the world is networking and connecting, so you definitely always have a home here with me.

Keith Ferrazzi: Thank you very much. It was a real pleasure.

Susan Bratton: It was a pleasure. Thanks so much. I’m your host Susan Bratton. I hope you have a great day and make that phone call.