HOW DO YOU TELL the difference between a valuable connection (someone who will help you to greater success) and a waste of your time? Between a contact to cultivate and one you can safely ignore? The answer is: that’s the wrong question. I’ve found that every personal connection is worthwhile in some way, every person a potential part of my success—if I can learn to see how. Every person represents a mutual benefit waiting to be discovered, so don’t waste that chance. That’s why I ask myself about everyone I deal with: how can we benefit each other?
In other words, to get my third rule, I take my second one, see where you want to be, and apply it to my relationships, old and new, shallow and deep. I ask myself: am I seeing where this person and I could go together, or only where we’ve been? Once I find a common goal, big or small, that goal becomes my new vision for the relationship. That’s what I mean when I say: appreciate everyone.
It amazes me how often people don’t recognize all they could accomplish just by making use of the opportunities they have right now with the people around them. I remember when I acquired a new company for Dale Earnhardt Inc. whose public relations department had three talented executives. Before their company joined mine, the three of them worked as rivals, competing against each other for opportunities and influence within their own organization. Each one tried to do everything solo and nobody did anything well. They were frustrated with each other and with coming to work. It was a mess.
I felt they all could do great things if they would stop working against one another and begin to appreciate one another as allies. But when I took them aside, one on one, to suggest it, they were doubtful. Kevin had an unusual professional background, and Tara said she didn’t see how he could be any help to her. Kevin didn’t like Tara’s style. And Blair told me he was good at his job already and didn’t need two others around, interfering.
It was like a family that didn’t get along. They assumed the others would always be there, and took each other for granted. All they shared was competition. They didn’t see that they could help each other succeed.
What did I do? I made Kevin the head of corporate communications. Now every request we got for information about the company went directly to him. But our biggest need, as they all knew, was to have more consistency in our internal communications: among our staff, within the company as a whole, and with our sponsors. So I made Tara our specialist in internal communications. Meanwhile, I made Blair responsible for media requests specifically for the drivers, our talent, which is the smallest but probably the “sexiest” aspect of our communications work. Now instead of competing for the same turf, each had a particular focus that was of clear value. Even more important, this new structure gave them reason to look to each other for help. Kevin now had so much coming at him that he wanted to hand off some of the requests that came in, so he didn’t get buried under them. Instead of fighting to protect his turf, he accepted help and felt grateful for it. Tara and Blair quickly came to appreciate how good it felt to have more control of a smaller area, rather than feeling helpless and stretched too thin. They also discovered the advantages of having each other as peers they could turn to for advice. Before, they had been three competing jacks-of-all-trades, masters of none. Now, all three were independent “experts” with reason to consult each other.
Two months later I met with them again, and though I spoke to them one-on-one they all told me the same thing: it’s fantastic working together. They said things like: Now I don’t feel overloaded all the time. Now I’m learning so much from the experiences of the other two. They became real colleagues, they had a lot of camaraderie, and they liked coming to work more. I had changed their job descriptions, but they had made the most important change, which was to stop seeing one another just as competition and to start appreciating the opportunities they could offer. They were the same three people doing the same basic jobs as before, but work for them had become a different, more productive, and far more enjoyable world.
DO I REALLY MEAN EVERYONE?
I NEVER ASK WHO is a valuable person and who isn’t. I never segregate people into categories of “keep” and “toss.” Instead, I look at each person and ask how we could be valuable to each other. I look for everyone’s possible contribution, and that surprises people. Because, really—do I mean you have to appreciate everyone? Even those who might have let you down, betrayed your trust, or hurt you?
Yes, that’s what I mean. I know this isn’t always easy. We all have our resentments. I’ve felt them myself—even, if I’m going to be honest, with my own mother. It was after my father died, when my mother found Traci and me and showed us that he had been lying to us when he told us she was dead. She had a new husband and a home waiting for us. I remember how people acted like this family reunion was a miracle, but the teenager I was then didn’t see any miracle. In fact, I felt no interest in seeing my mother at all. As far as I was concerned, she should have stayed in Indianapolis and left Traci and me in Las Vegas. All I felt was anger over what had gone on between her and my father.
With the memories I carried, I could have worked up enough resentment about my childhood to poison a whole life. In fact, the only reason my sister and I got on the plane back to live with her in Indianapolis was that my stepmother said we had no choice.
Yet in time I came to see that while my mother behaved in ways she may have regretted in the pain of a broken marriage, and while she may have been an alcoholic prone to sometimes violent outbursts, she was also devoted to us. Slowly we restored that relationship, and the good that came was simply amazing. It started in small ways. Once, the bathroom doorknob broke and I fixed it. From then on she told me, again and again, that because I liked to find out how everything worked, I was meant to control and run things: her Max would become a businessman. And when indeed I tried to become a businessman, she was right there, wishing for my success at least as much as I did. She had an expression she used a lot, not just with me, as people who knew her remember to this day. She would say, “Take care of your business, boy. Take care of your business.” And she backed that saying up with action. When Mickey Carter and I got out of law school and started our talent agency on a shoestring, she even worked for a while as our office manager. She spent so much time taking care of Mickey’s baby girl that she became like a grandmother to her. So despite our rough history together, my mother became an essential part of my success.
Maybe I was able to grasp that chance with her because I had lost my father so young. It was terrible to lose him, but it did teach me something: appreciate people while they’re still around. Because once they’re gone, no matter what they might have done wrong, you feel their loss. That experience showed me early on that you don’t throw people away. Not even the people who disappoint you. Not even the ones who’ve done you harm. Thanks to that lesson, I was able to help my mother reach her goal of healing her broken family while she helped me reach my goal of launching my career. To this day I keep a picture of her high up on the wall of my office, to watch over me and to remind me: appreciate everyone.
Easier said than done, you might be thinking. And I know, it’s a lot easier to leave for work in the morning with the intention of appreciating people than it is to get through the day without feeling frustration, dislike, and a whole collection of impulses that aren’t very…appreciative. Not at all. So I would like you to ask yourself two questions.
Does your work bring you in contact with people who get on your nerves?
Do people at work sometimes make you bothered and upset?
If your answer to either question was yes, then I say: good. What’s so good about it? That upset you feel inside is like a warning light on the dashboard of your car. It’s shining to tell you it’s time to tune up that relationship before the whole thing breaks down.
A RELATIONSHIP TUNE-UP
HERE’S HOW I DO it. For each difficult relationship, I ask myself, what is our common goal? It may be small or big, but there has to be some good that this difficult person can do with me. The only trouble is, I can’t always think of anything. Not right away. So before I give in and get annoyed and say things I might regret later, when the relationship is upside-down in a ditch, I have to find something better to do. I take a step back and ask myself some more basic questions:
Even a tiny potential benefit can be a place to start. Say there’s someone at work you barely know, but even so, when you’re waiting for the elevator at the end of the day he talks your ear off. Say this person seems to think he was put on earth to tell everyone in the elevator some news he just heard on the radio or read on the Internet, and the truth is that after a long day you just dread seeing him waiting by the elevators. It’s almost enough to make you take the stairs. Maybe you’ve tried ignoring him, but he won’t stop his friendly chatter. He’s like a one-man radio station. And you may know it shouldn’t bother you so much, but it does. Well, all right then. Good. The warning light on the dashboard is now illuminated. Go to your questions. What does he know that you don’t? Are you the kind of person who forgets to check the weather before you go outside? Maybe you’ve just found your own personal weather forecaster, if only you’ll stop feeling annoyed long enough to ask him what they’re predicting for the evening or the next few days. He might just remind you to go back for your umbrella one night and keep you from getting soaked. That’s a small thing, I know, but it shows how you can take a relationship that feels like nothing but aggravation and begin to find a benefit that’s mutual: he gets a more enthusiastic listener and you get to stay dry on your way home.
Of course, to get more significant benefits, you’re going to have to find bigger talents and strengths to appreciate in the people around you. How do you recognize those strengths? It comes back to listening to understand, but now you’re going to combine the two kinds of listening I described in chapters 1 and 2. So far, I’ve talked about listening for what moves others and listening for what moves you. Now you need to do both at once, so you can hear the areas of overlap: What could move you both? That’s what you and the other person can do together. And if you accomplish something together, that will give you both something to appreciate in the relationship.
What makes this challenging is that often what you need from others is exactly what you can’t do, or don’t like to do, for yourself. That might be:
In other words, part of what you’re listening for now is the chance that this other person, who may be annoyingly different from you in many ways, has the piece of the puzzle that you’re missing exactly because he or she is unlike you. It’s not just a matter of tolerating your differences so you can find some mutual benefit. Very often, the benefit is in the differences.
When someone makes me uncomfortable, I like to ask myself: might what bothers me about this person, if it was used a different way or in a different situation, turn out to be a skill? Are the ways that we are different, or that we see the world differently, actually ways that person could benefit my team, and vice versa? They say in love, opposites attract, but in business opposites too often keep away from each other—and miss the benefits they could create together.
Here’s an example. After my law school roommate, Mickey Carter, and I first started our talent agency, the big question was whether we could make it pay. We had signed gospel singer John P. Kee and a few others, but could we make our agency a viable business? Or would we just go broke trying? Despite our early success, we were hitting some serious obstacles. First of all, the kind of clients we wanted to represent, athletes and artists, were expensive to sign up. We were based in Indiana, but our potential clients lived and played all over the country. To sign up college athletes we often had to fly to visit both the young players and their parents, making multiple trips so we could compete with other agents who wanted to sign them as well. It was time-consuming and expensive, and the income we saw came in fits and starts.
We needed a steadier source of income to cover our expenses, so we took on general litigation work, the kind of legal work we had done when we clerked for big law firms. But this created a second obstacle: the more time we spent on the general litigation work, the more reliably the bills got paid, but the less time we had left to pursue the sports and entertainment clients that would get us where we wanted to be. I found I was handling the small details of running the business, and there were days I felt like those details were an ocean that could drown me. Our short-run solution to our cash flow needs was putting our long-run vision in jeopardy.
We decided to hire some younger associates to help with general litigation work. Young attorneys were excited to work with us because of our clients—we had hot new recording artists and big-name athletes in and out of our offices all the time. But we also found that exactly because these young hires were motivated by our music and sports clients, they got distracted by them. Being near celebrity went to their heads. We would find that they were spending time with clients or angling to meet them instead of doing the work we needed them to do. Soon they were asking to be taken off the litigation work entirely and moved over to the talent-agent side. Now we had even more lawyers in our small firm who didn’t want to do the short-term work that would pay the bills. Instead of a solution, we had the same problem, multiplied.
One day, as our small firm struggled along, I got a letter from a friend named Lisa McCallum. We had clerked at the same large firm a few years back and I appreciated her both as a friend and as an excellent lawyer. In her letter she sent me an article about a sports agent who had secured his next-door neighbor as a client, then helped that client become a number one draft pick, launching them both instantly into the stratosphere of professional sports. In the letter she sent along with the article, she wrote, “I’m going to be coming back to the Midwest.”
Her letter reminded me of a few things. First, it showed me that, unlike the young attorneys we had hired, Lisa was someone I knew—someone I trusted and felt sure I could rely on. I had worked beside her and I felt sure of what I could expect from her. Second, her letter showed me that she still understood my vision: that story she clipped from the paper—in which a talent agent gained sudden success by making common cause with someone he knew personally—was like a sketch of my dreams. I started to wonder if we should ask Lisa to join us in the firm, instead of these young associates who weren’t working out. Lisa, I knew, wouldn’t drown in the details—she thrived on handling the practical.
At the same time, as I wondered if we should make Lisa an offer, I saw reasons to hesitate. Frankly, she could not have been less like me. She had no special passion for sports and entertainment law. She was not by any means an entrepreneur or a risk taker. To Lisa, my vision of a sports and entertainment practice looked more like some cockamamy scheme. For her, practicing law wasn’t about having a vision or taking unnecessary risks, it was about getting the work done. To some degree, I knew, even my partner, Mickey, agreed with her. If she was around, I was likely to hear a lot of questions and doubt from both of them.
Beyond the differences in our philosophies and tolerances for risk, Lisa was also different in more obvious ways. She was a woman, of course, and also white and Catholic. She hadn’t grown up in the streets—she was from the north side of Indianapolis, the well-off area, and as a kid she went to prep school. Our firm was known, at that point, as a “black” firm, with mainly black male attorneys and black male clients. There was no way Lisa would blend in.
But that didn’t concern me. I knew Lisa from experience and I knew I could rely on her. She was smart, hardworking, and loyal. She didn’t share my dreams because she wasn’t a dreamer, not in business terms. She was an executor, the kind of person who got things done, and that was what we needed. And so, as I tried to listen to understand both what she had to offer and what Mickey and I needed, I realized that it was her different ideas of what being a lawyer was all about, her risk-averse nature, even her doubts about my entrepreneurial dreams that made her a good choice. Her differences from me were either not relevant or they were actually benefits, if I could get past my own worries about them.
And so, despite our many differences—or, I should say, because of them—I came to appreciate what Lisa could offer the firm, and how we could benefit each other. Instead of sending a note that said, “Welcome back to the Midwest, and good luck,” I said, “How would you like to work with us?”
Once she joined our firm, Mickey and I could focus again on developing the talent side of the business. Slowly we made it profitable. Meanwhile, she was doing the litigation work to bring in steady income that kept the lights on. She took over a lot of the detail work that I hated. And as we had success bringing in more sports and entertainment business, she shifted so that half her time was spent working on contracts for the artists and athletes we signed to our agency. She had the skills to do it all, and I never had to worry about her saying, “I don’t want to do litigation anymore, I want to be with the sexy clients.”
Did she question some of my more ambitious schemes? All the time. I had the benefit of getting to test my plans against her doubts, and to learn from those challenging conversations. My schemes grew less “cockamamy” because I had her around to question them.
Did it matter that she was the only white woman in a “black” law firm? Lisa remembers it this way:
The only time it came up was if there was a joke; they would call me “Pollyanna.” I came from a different background, a more middle class background, so I didn’t always get the street references our clients used or recognize some of the subtler forms of racism the black attorneys would encounter sometimes. They teased me a little for not seeing the rougher side of things. If some hardcore rap client came to our office and then requested to work with me and asked for my contact information, they might say, “Sure, of course he wants the white Pollyanna.”
But in terms of doing our work together, it was not an issue. Mickey was black, Max was biracial, I was white, but working together it was just like with little kids. They don’t know the difference; they just play together and everyone is treated the same. What I felt from the two of them was that they respected me; we all respected each other, and so it was a good fit.
The need to appreciate everyone holds in every business I’ve ever encountered. For example, consider a story told by Jim Herbert, the president of Neogen, a global health care company. In the 1990s, as the company grew, Herbert had a new idea for expanding the company’s reach while staying true to its core mission, which was protecting the global food supply. He called a meeting and he made a proposal: “I think we should look into rodenticide.” There were two small companies in Wisconsin that might have been a good complement to Neogen’s work, and Herbert thought Neogen should buy them. But the reaction at the meeting was terrible. “What?” was the general response. “You want us to get into the rat poison business?” These were people who thought of themselves as working in the health care industry. They didn’t want to be associated with exterminators. That wasn’t who they were or what they did.
How did Herbert respond? He was the president and he knew what he wanted, but nevertheless he welcomed these reactions. He encouraged his team to express the full range of their objections frankly. Then he made his case to them, as if it was his obligation to win them over. The company’s core mission, he explained, was to make sure that food and animals were safe. Up to that point, they had achieved that mission with products that diagnosed safety risks and treated them. But now he said: if we’re in the cure business, shouldn’t we also be in the prevention business? Wouldn’t our clients prefer not to have a problem in the first place? Rodents transport bacteria and other contaminants that harm animals and spoil food, so let’s prevent rodents from causing problems in the first place. The mission is not to sell diagnostic tools and cures; it’s to keep our customers safe. That’s why they rely on us. Isn’t prevention a part of safety? When his people heard him out, they began to recognize the logic of his plan. Getting into the rat poison business stopped sounding unpleasant or crazy. This new approach stretched their images of themselves—and for that reason, it started to sound like a benefit.
What impressed me about this story was how Herbert’s entire approach showed his appreciation for his colleagues. He showed appreciation for their passion for the company by welcoming their strong feelings, even when those feelings were hostile to his plans. He showed appreciation for their intelligence and their insight by making a case to them rather than giving them marching orders. By showing appreciation for everyone, even those who most objected to his initiative, he won greater agreement for his plan. The company bought the two makers of rodenticide and soon achieved an even more important position in their industry.
APPRECIATE THE SKILLS THAT DON’T FIT THE JOB DESCRIPTION
IT HAS BEEN A hallmark of the most successful companies in which I’ve worked that we made use of people’s skills no matter who they were or what their job was. It didn’t matter if you were an executive vice president or the guy who emptied the garbage cans, if you could do something the company needed, whether on the marketing side or working creatively with the artists, you would get a phone call.
At DEI, to give a more detailed example, I was advised to hire personal security because some of the fans felt so strongly about Junior’s decision to leave the company that emotions could run very high. I hired a man we all called Sarge, a former marine who had run a homeland security fusion center with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. But as I got to know him, I realized he wasn’t just an experienced police officer with a great understanding of event security. He was also a serious racing fan with a deep understanding of the sport. The same protective instincts that made him so good at his job turned out to have an application at the track as well. He became a “spotter” for one of our drivers, which meant that he would stand on a roof high above the track with the other spotters and watch the race through binoculars, keeping in radio contact with the driver at all times. Since the death of Dale Earnhardt Sr., drivers have worn protective gear that immobilizes them in their cars so their backs won’t get broken in a crash. But this protective gear prevents them from looking over their own shoulders. The spotters tell the drivers what’s coming up behind them and warn them about accidents or debris on the road they can’t see up ahead—any potentially dangerous conditions for a car going two hundred miles an hour. It’s a uniquely NASCAR form of “security.” With Sarge in this dual role, we all won: Sarge got a bigger, more interesting job using a wider variety of his skills and giving him the chance to participate in a sport he loved; and we had the benefit not just of his many skills but of the companionship of this admirable man who developed them.
APPRECIATE EVERYONE, AND LET THEM KNOW
I SHOULD BE CLEAR, though, that appreciating what others have to offer you isn’t enough to move people. Just because I can see that you could do a lot for me isn’t, in itself, going to inspire you to do it. In fact, if all I can see is what you can do for me, you might start to wonder whether I’m looking for a partner or just someone to use. So if I want you to work with me, I’ve got to make sure I not only appreciate what you can do, but also make you feel that appreciation. Sometimes, as in the stories of Lisa and Sarge, I can show my appreciation of someone’s talents and effort by offering them a new job, but it isn’t very often that one has a new job to offer. So I’m always looking for other ways to show my appreciation. This isn’t a burden for me; I like to do it. It feels good. But it’s also essential to making any kind of alliance or partnership work.
Here is a list of the approaches that have worked for me. Some of these I’m sure you use yourself. Some you’ve heard before. But I suspect that you don’t know them all, or go as far as you could with them to show your appreciation, and you may not realize just how much it can move people to help achieve your goals, or how dramatic the results can be. The biggest dividends come when you go beyond the ordinary and push yourself to appreciate everyone, every time, so they can feel what a difference they can make:
CAN YOU APPRECIATE PEOPLE WHO’VE DONE YOU WRONG?
I WOULD BE LYING, though, if I said that this practice is always easy. In the last chapter I told the story about the doctor my mother worked for when she was a nurse, the one who agreed to let me visit his office when I was a teenager, so I could get to know his profession and how I might break into it myself. I described how he took one look at me and set out to discourage my interest in medicine every way he could. That might have sounded like the end of my relationship with him, but life is long, and as it turned out there’s a sequel to that story. Years later, a talented young woman applied to be an intern at my law firm, and when I met her I realized that this young lawyer was the daughter of that doctor who had sent me away. So the tables were turned. Now he was the parent seeking help for a child who wanted to break into a profession where African-Americans were scarce, and I was the successful black professional in town, the one being asked to be generous with my time and my insight, and even to let his daughter work in my office.
So what did I do? I gave her the internship. My wife, Jennifer, didn’t get that right away. “You did what?” she asked me. “You hired her? Why?” Jennifer is a very loving woman, and one way she expresses her love is to be protective of me and all those she cares for. If she feels someone is trying to take advantage, or if she feels that someone has been hurtful or dishonest, she speaks her mind. She said, “I can’t believe you would do that man a favor! Why did you hire her?”
Jennifer was upset, and she had her reasons. As we talked and I listened to her some more, I realized that there were at least two good reasons she thought I was wrong, beyond just her caring impulse to defend against someone who had hurt me in the past. First, she didn’t understand why, as a practical matter, I would make that choice to help a man who had slammed a door in my face. How would that do me any good? Second, even if it was useful, she couldn’t imagine how I could do it, emotionally. How could I find it in myself to be forgiving and welcoming of this man’s daughter, when just the story of his treatment of me as a kid made her so angry?
As a practical matter, I have found through my whole life that it’s better to maintain a relationship, even one that has its problems, than to break it off. You can’t get any mutual benefit out of a relationship you don’t have. And so I strive to live by the advice I’ve probably given to everyone who is close to me, whether in business or in my personal life:
To me, it’s practical. If you are waiting on the other person to make amends, you could wait your whole life. If you forgive them in your heart, you can be free today. So if you’re serious about getting where you want to be and not just staying where you are, then you will find out pretty fast that you can’t know what’s around the next corner. You don’t know in what direction God is taking your life, and you don’t know what He has in mind for the person who hurt you yesterday. Maybe the two of you will meet again and you will need each other. Maybe the situation you’re so upset about now was the result of passing circumstances, and when circumstances change you will find you can get along, work together, and make something good happen. So if someone does you wrong, or if you leave a work situation with resentment and visions of revenge, I always say: put it behind you and look for what you can appreciate about that person or situation in the future.
This is not a new idea. In fact, its effectiveness has been tested pretty thoroughly over the years. In the Sermon on the Mount, talking about the wish for revenge, Jesus said, “Do not resist an evil person. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.” But does turning the other cheek mean that you ought to go so far as to help that person? Jesus was pretty clear on that, too: “If someone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles. Give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you.”
In my experience, these aren’t just admirable sentiments. They succeed. Given the choice between this beautiful spiritual teaching and sound business practice, I’ve found there is no choice. They’re one and the same. Because while forgiving and moving on may feel hard, staying angry is even harder. Practically speaking, it’s exhausting—holding a grudge and maintaining your frosty silence will wear you out. You have to let these things go or they’ll drain away the energy you need to reach your goals. Have you ever seen a movie or a play about revenge? Have you noticed how they’re always the same? The hero spends a whole lot of time and energy plotting and struggling and fighting, and in the end there’s a big mess everywhere and a lot of people wind up dead. That may feel good to watch for a couple of hours when you need to let off steam, but when it’s your own life or your own company that gets messed up, and your prospects and potential connections that get killed, it doesn’t feel good for long. Who has the energy for that? To me, the best revenge is making more of yourself than someone else thought you could.
So my answer to Jennifer’s first question—when she couldn’t understand why I would give that doctor’s daughter an internship—was that as a practical matter, putting the past aside was the most productive choice. But that didn’t make it easy, and one thing I don’t ever want to do is to give out advice that sounds easy but turns out to be only so much rhetoric. In the church community sometimes you hear quick answers like that, answers which make hard choices sound like nothing. People say, “You just have to let it go.” They say, “Let go and let God.” There’s nothing wrong with those sentiments, nothing at all, but how are you supposed to do it? For me what matters is not just to give a surface answer that sounds good, but to dig down to the deep motivation that helps people live the most productive choices they can. That was what Jennifer meant by her second question for me: even if you think forgiveness is good business and the right thing to do, how do you find it in yourself to do it, especially if you start to get upset?
I feel a special obligation to teach what I know about this, because it has benefited me so much. Again and again, when I talk to the people who have influenced my life, people I trust for guidance, they point to what I call forgiveness as the practical key to my success. My brother says that what stands out to him about my life is that, even with all we went through, I didn’t get hung up on the past—and that now, it’s as if the hard times we knew didn’t matter. In the same way, my former wrestling coach has said that lots of families at our high school had troubles like mine, including divorce, substance abuse, and early death. Really, what I went through was nothing special. He says that what might be special is facing up to it and not letting it hold me back.
Do I find it hard to forgive sometimes? Sure. I feel the same feelings as anyone else. If someone has really hurt me, I can get overwhelmed and lose sight of what I could otherwise appreciate in them, and what we might accomplish together. But I try never to let my feelings, whatever they may be, dictate my behavior. I try to remind myself that feelings will change, but what I say or do will last. To keep that focus, I ask myself, often: what result do I want? Then I try to break what I’m feeling down into small pieces. It’s the same approach I take coming to work when I feel swamped by things that need my attention; I know that I have to prioritize, so I can knock them off one at a time.
Here are four ways in which I try to break down my feelings into more manageable pieces and find the understanding and forgiveness to see where I want to be and not where I’ve been hurt in the past. I don’t always manage to use all four in every challenging situation, but they have all helped me.
In time I realized that while I hated the way she used it, my stepmother’s ability to keep up appearances was a powerful skill—to behave with the right etiquette and to present herself to strangers and even members of our extended family as stable and trustworthy. I saw how far it got her, and I learned that it pays to keep up appearances. Now, when I think of her, I try to let go of the anger and remember that she was, in this narrow way at least, educational. Focusing on appreciating even one small thing about her keeps me from wasting my time on the negative. And if I can appreciate her, then by comparison appreciating even the most challenging person I work with is a whole lot easier.
DON’T PEOPLE TAKE ADVANTAGE OF YOU?
I’M SERIOUS ABOUT WORKING to appreciate everyone, about practicing patience and generosity and forgiveness in my dealings, both in business and personally, but sometimes when people understand this rule, they get worried. Isn’t it risky to be so appreciative? Don’t others take advantage of you?
I tell them, yes. There are some coldly calculating people out there who care for nothing except their own gain no matter how you handle them. But while some are like that, most are not. Among selfish people, most are capable of thinking beyond themselves if you give them a reason to do so. So sure, if you are willing to listen to understand then you’re going to find that some people talk your ear off, telling you all kinds of things—whether business troubles or personal troubles—that you would never have had to endure otherwise. You may also find you get asked a lot of favors. (I remember at a certain point in my career, it began to affect Jennifer as well. She was the wife of the head of the company, and people were treating her differently. One day she told me, “People come up to me now and they say, ‘So…what does your husband do?’ And when they ask in that certain way I just feel like saying, ‘You already know what he does. What do you want?’”)
I told her, I know it’s a burden to be approached in this way, but hasn’t it been a blessing for us, too? We have found so many great opportunities, so much good fortune and such a good life because we actually listen to people, and some of them have responded by taking us places that most people never get to go.
People always come to you with their agendas—but sometimes their agendas overlap with yours. I know that when I share information and ideas, when I invest in a new start-up, even when I take the time to try to mentor someone, I am not just being generous. As my own mentor, Jack Swarbrick, would say, I’m investing emotional capital. I remember the people who invested in me early on, the teachers and mentors who went out of their way for me, and I’ve come back to them with further benefits and opportunities.
But what about the ones whose sole agenda is their own, the true opportunists who only take and give you nothing? There are such people, as I’ve said, and for that reason I have to draw a line. I’m free with my personal time, with my ideas, and with sharing information, but when it comes to professional time, there are only so many hours in the day. If someone wants to use my resources or my name, which I’ve worked so long to build, arranging meetings and signing deals they couldn’t have gotten without me, then in exchange for my time and the use of my brand we need to discuss how their endeavors are going to benefit my endeavors, which I undertake to benefit my family.
In other words, the way to keep from being taken advantage of when you are out there trying to appreciate everyone is to keep your own agenda in mind. Make sure that what you are appreciating in them is the possibility of benefit that is truly mutual. Appreciation does not mean being nice. It is the basis of accountability. When I show someone I appreciate them, that I recognize the good and the value they bring and I want to deal fairly with them, I am letting them know that I expect the same. It’s like a contract: I will treat you with the respect you’ve earned, and I expect you to do the same for me. There are psychological studies that show that when you remind people that their actions have consequences for other people, they start to behave more ethically. That’s part of the reason why institutions like schools and the army have honor codes: when you remind people of the standards they’ve agreed to, they are better at living up to them. But I don’t need psychological studies to convince me of this, because I’ve seen it all my life.
That’s the serious, ethical side of this rule. The other side is that it feels good and it can be a whole lot of fun. It’s a spiritual and practical core of my life, but it is also my idea of a great party. When I first moved to Charlotte, I threw a party that wasn’t like the usual gatherings in any industry, where it’s all the usual people schmoozing in the usual cliques. To start with, at my party, hardly anyone knew each other. There were influential people from the music business, major league baseball, and NASCAR of course, mixing with noninfluential people, neighbors, and friends. What all these different people had in common was enthusiasm to figure out what they could do together. People got to talking and they realized, hey, not only do we have a lot in common, but we have plans we want to develop and businesses we want to grow. I think everyone walked away that night with some new connections, but also with some specific plans to get moving on. It was a whole house full of people looking for ways to appreciate one another, and it was the dopest party I’ve ever thrown.