When I was in graduate school, there was a student who I looked up to. His name was Peter. Peter was the type of person you wanted to be like. He was smart, articulate and winsome.
One day I saw Peter in the library. It was his final quarter in our program and he was about to graduate. "Peter, congratulations. You must be so excited." His response surprised me. "I am, but I haven't built my network like I should have, so I don't have any jobs lined up yet."
His answer terrified me. If someone as impressive as Peter didn't have a job lined up, then what was I to do? As the son of two immigrants, education was the key to success. I could not afford to waste this opportunity.
I found myself feeling anxious and fearful. I had to find a way to protect my career. The stakes were too high for me to finish school without having a job lined up.
Then I remembered the advice I'd been given countless times. Go network. Build relationships. After all, it's all about who you know, not what you know. They were right. Education wasn't the highway of opportunity. It was merely an on ramp. The highway of opportunity was social capital. Your network, the people you know, and more importantly, the people who know you.
I was determined. I set off to build a network that would guarantee my success. I spent as much time as I could building relationships with people who could hire me when I graduated. The process worked. But it didn't feel right. I was having the right conversations, I was meeting the right people. Internship and job opportunities began to open up, but networking and building relationships began to feel gross.
I was approaching people as a transactional consumer, not as a relational investor. My driving question was focused on what can I get from this person? How can they help me? I was asking the wrong questions. Networking was a necessary evil. It felt gross.
Then one day, the tables were turned. I saw a childhood acquaintance at a coffee shop. We started a conversation. He then spent the entire time trying to convince me to join the multi-level marketing scheme that he was a part of.
(Laughter)
You see, the more people he signed up underneath him, the more money he would make. But that's not all. He'd help me build an empire as well. In fact, I could make so much money, I would never need to work again. I could give to my parents for all that they had given to me, and all by simply helping people change their spending habits and just begin to buy products from us, products that they were already going to buy on their own anyways.
It was at that moment that I began to realize, if networking ever feels gross, you're doing it wrong.
It turns out that social scientists had studied what I've experienced. In 2014, researchers from the University of Toronto, Harvard and Northeastern teamed up to investigate the impact of building social capital on people's sense of morality. What they discovered across their work was that when people built relationships for selfish pursuits, it left them feeling psychologically dirty and even morally stained.
Decades of research confirms the common advice about networking. Building social capital leads to a host of positive outcomes: job performance, salary levels, employability and so much more. If you want to build your career or your business, then networking is a good strategy. But here's the dilemma. When people built relationships for selfish gain, it left them feeling dirty. And when they felt dirty, they were even less likely to engage with those people and to build those relationships. Even though that might be exactly what they needed for their success in their careers.
There's a reason that I felt gross when I was approaching people as a transactional consumer, instead of as a relational investor. How do you do relationships in a way that you don't feel like you need to rinse off after every coffee meeting?
I began to ask a different question. Instead of "What can I get from this person?" I began to ask, "What can I give to this person?" Everything changed. I discovered generous relational investors who introduced me to a different paradigm, a new way of doing relationships.
Jeff, a business leader in Seattle, was one of them. If you ever sit with him for coffee, you quickly realize his goal is to understand how he can serve you, not how you can serve him. This new mindset moved me from being a greedy, transactional consumer to being a generous relational investor.
Relational investors leave people better than they found them. The goal isn’t giving to gain or even about paying it forward so that positive things circle back around for you one day. Relational investors give out of the overflow of who they are and what they've already been given. They bring generosity beyond reciprocity. They ask a different question. Instead of "What can I get from this person?" They ask, "What can I give to this person?"
It represents a mindset shift from fixating on pathology to focusing on potential. The human default is pathology. Pathology is all about the barriers, the obstacles, the brokenness, the things that are going wrong. My PhD is in industrial and organizational psychology. For decades, psychology and many other human-centered disciplines have focused on pathology. What's broken? How do we fix it?
Over the last 30 years, there's been a revolution that's pushed against pathology, though, and begun to look for potential. What's working? What's going well? How do we make things even better? It's a shift from scarcity to abundance. And it starts with the assumption that there is possibility, and there is potential to be realized.
Both are important. We have to pay attention to barriers and limitations, but we also need to recognize possibility and potential. But our baseline is self-preservation. Protect my career. Position myself for success. When I became free from the fear of finding a job, I was able to move from protecting my pathology to looking for potential.
As the old saying goes, it's even better to give than it is to receive. And you don't have to be wealthy to be a relational investor. I was a poor student. I discovered that generous relational investors give their time, their treasure and their talent. Generosity looks different in different seasons of life. It could be as simple as the gift of your undivided attention. The next time you're meeting with somebody. Or maybe it's a heartfelt thank-you note, letting someone know you've appreciated how they have invested in you. Perhaps it's a timely introduction. You've built a relationship with somebody and you know somebody else who would be mutually beneficial for them to meet. So you make that connection. Generosity could even look like helping a coworker who's behind on a deadline. Taking a little extra time to help them get caught up. It could even be as simple as the offer to review someone's resume for them.
The possibilities for generosity are only limited by your imagination. Because people aren't a process. People are the purpose. And business is all about people. It's not about extracting value or leveraging relationships. It’s about building meaningful, generous and mutually beneficial relationships, looking for ways to serve other people, even if they are the ones who are helping you.
You might not get anything back right away, or even at all. But there's still value in the relationship because every person has inherent dignity, value and worth, regardless of the outcome.
Years after my conversation with Peter in the library, I found myself working in a university helping lead a graduate business program. I was meeting with a prospective student to learn about his goals. He was a great candidate and I really wanted him in our program. But over the course of the conversation, I began to realize what he was looking for wasn't quite what I had to offer. Reluctantly, I pointed him in a different direction.
A year later, I had another similar conversation with a young woman who was also exploring our program. She was incredible. Her goals aligned with our training and she became one of our best students. But it wasn't until after she started when I discovered she had found out about our program from the young man I'd met over a year before. He had told her if she met with me, I'd put her interests first. And that if she wasn't the right fit, I'd point her in the right direction.
Focusing on the interests of other people can absolutely pay off for the long term. But that's not the point. There is nothing more rewarding than giving to other people.
My parents, they impressed the value of education on me, but they also demonstrated the value of generosity. They have been avid suburban gardeners for over 40 years. They started composting in Seattle before composting was the thing to do. Every year I have watched them till the ground, fertilize, prepare and plant seeds, water them and care for their garden with great intent. They do such an excellent job that every year, they harvest so much produce, there's absolutely no way they can possibly consume it all themselves. They have so much that it will go to spoil. It will go to waste. So what do they do?
Instead of letting it go to spoil, they spoil their friends. They take all the excess. They put it in bags and baskets, and they generously share it with all of their friends and neighbors. Most years, they even take their extra seeds to help friends start their own gardens for the following year.
Looking back, I realize, my parents didn't garden just for themselves. Don't get me wrong, they enjoyed the fresh fruit and produce, but they had equal, if not greater, joy in giving to the people around them. The relationships in their lives represented a place for giving, not a vehicle for getting. They showed me that you can get more than you give by giving more than you get.
Our networks, our relationships are also like a garden. If we tend them well, they will grow and they will produce fruit. So much, in fact, there's absolutely no way we can possibly consume it all ourselves. Instead of letting relationships go to waste, we can invest in them, give to them, serve them, connect them with each other. When we give social capital, we don't lose it. It doesn't decrease. It increases. Who knows, we might even help someone start their own garden.
Becoming a generous relational investor, it's a lifestyle. It's a different paradigm of relationships. So what's your relational posture? Are you a greedy, transactional consumer or a generous relational investor? Are you protecting your pathology or pushing for potential? It's never too late to begin to ask a different question and to start to look for what can I give, not what can I get?
(Applause)
