Episode 156: Networking Mastery with Jordan Harbinger

[INTRODUCTION]

 

[00:00:31] Jon Berghoff: Achieve Your Goals podcast listeners, goal achievers it’s Jon Berghoff here. We are at episode 156, you’ve heard us mention a few times in the last few weeks that this is an exciting moment because we are honoring… This is three years that this podcasts Hal has been delivering them to the world. If you are jumping to this episode mid-stream and you are not aware either who I am or why I’m standing in for Hal at the moment please go back and listen to episode I think it’s 152 where we share a little bit about Hal’s journey where at the moment he is battling cancer. If it’s the first time you are hearing that go back and listen to episode 152 and as always send your positive love, energy and vibes not only to Hal and to his family but to anyone in your world that could use positive support.

 

In honor of three years we’ve got a really special guest today. We have none other than Jordan Harbinger of the Art of Charm Podcast.

 

[INTERVIEW]

 

[00:01:28] Jon Berghoff: Jordan how are you doing buddy?

 

[00:01:30] Jordan Harbinger: Hey, I’m doing good thanks for having me on man I appreciate it.

 

[00:01:33] Jon Berghoff: I told you a minute ago this is our first time meeting and I’m laughing at myself because I’ve heard of you, known of you but I know I don’t fully appreciate the extent of your story. I’ve not heard all of your episodes through your podcast and I’m totally pumped to be bringing you to the Miracle Morning Community here or the Achieve Your Goals Podcast community. Where do we want to start? I know we were going to talk about networking and relationship development which is something that you’ve been recognized for being really exceptional at. I think there’s some gold here when it comes to goal achievement but I guess I also want to make sure anyone who might be meeting you for the first time here understands how you went from whoever or wherever you were to leading a podcast amongst other things that has become massively influential. I’ll let you start that wherever you’d like.

 

[00:02:23] Jordan Harbinger: Sure, so I essentially had an unusual story but also very usual at the same time. I was a shy kid, surprise, and I ended up skipping a lot of school when I was a kid because I had I guess  you’d just in retrospect you’d call it social anxiety. Back then people just referred to us as nerds and that was the way things were or geeks or whatever but I wasn’t unpopular. I didn’t get picked on, I didn’t get bullied, none of that really. I just had some weird thing or I assumed everybody was looking at me and judging and it was all internal.

 

I kept skipping school and I go into computers because my parents had gotten me one of those early because I basically terrorized them until they did which wasn’t my usual way of getting what I wanted honestly. It’s just I was so into my friend’s computers. It was this magical portal into another world especially with the modem. For those of you who don’t the modem, it’s the way you connected to the internet before you had just to plug in your house broadband. I got one of those for Christmas I spent all my money on phone bills calling different bulletin boards and connecting to the internet and all that stuff and AOL and I started getting into trouble inevitably because I wasn’t satisfied. There was no web to surf, you had to find chat rooms and you had to find interesting things and you had to break things and hack and do that kind of stuff. That’s just what people did online so I started talking to these computer science geeks and stuff like that and these phone hackers and I started doing wiretapping.

 

I started to figure out cellphones and landlines and I was obsessed with the phone system like I was obsessed with computer systems because again it was this portal into another world. Here I am an only child I feel a bit self-isolated frankly. My parents are at work all the time and I got to figure out systems and I’m starting to listen to my neighbors’ phone calls and which hopefully the statute of limitations has passed on this. I started listening to phone calls and one of my neighbors was getting a divorce and I remember him being one way with me. Like all adults when you are thirteen, fourteen years old basically they’re just people who yell at you, feed you, give you homework, drive you places and if they are your parents they love you.

 

[00:04:31] Jordan Harbinger: That’s it or they are family memories and stuff like that. This is the first time I had experienced an adult being a three dimensional human, if this makes any sense. So it was like this was the first time where an adult, I’d heard him talking with his soon to be ex-wife, I heard him talking with his sister, his brother, his friends, his mother and he was a different person with each one of these people. It was the first time I saw an adult as a three dimensional human just like me with their own issues and I remember thinking things like, “If he had talked to his soon to be ex-wife the same he talked to his mother he probably wouldn’t be in this situation.”

 

As if I’m thirteen and a half years old like that qualified to give this guy some marriage advice or whatever. So that got me interested in human behavior. I never really thought that this is a useful skill for life. I just thought, “This is a fun thing that I like doing,” the end. It was never something where I thought like this is a useful life skill I should focus on or pay attention to.

 

Later on I went to law school and I had outworked everybody in law school and in college and before that I was smart enough to skate by and I think most people listening are like probably very familiar with what’s it’s like to be a smart person and just skate by on that school. The problem was when I got a job on Wall Street after law school not only could I not outsmart everybody because I was definitely not the smartest guy in the room anymore and hadn’t been since high school, not even then probably, but I couldn’t outwork them either because the people who’d spent law school drinking and hanging out and skating by and all that they were not working in these types of firms. So the playing field was once again levelled and I had no competitive advantage and I eventually started to pay attention to this guy named Dave who was one of the guys that hired me there. He was never in the office but yet he was one of the most powerful partners in the firm especially the department.

 

[00:06:29] Jordan: He was the guy from Brooklyn with a tan which is always a clue that they know something that you don’t and the other partners would be working at 3 am on a Saturday and there I would be sitting there thinking, “Where is Dave? He is not even here at 3pm on a Tuesday let alone at night on a weekend.” One day I asked him because we have these Q&A mentorship sessions. I saw him in the office like twice the first four months that I was there and I said, “How come you are never in the office but people say you make a lot of money and you are one of the top partners? I don’t get it, you just work from home all the time?” You know this is a Brooklyn guy so you can be a little bit straightforward like that normally you might not want to do that with everybody.

 

He was like, “Well you know, actually I bring in a lot of the deals and so since I bring in a lot of the deals I don’t worry about getting a billable hour bonus,” because as lawyers we bill things in six minute increments I mean that’s how we make money, it’s how the firm makes me money. This blew my freaking mind because I thought, “Wait a second, how on earth are you making more money bringing in deal, I mean duh right, how on earth are you making money bringing in deals and not billing hours?” I mean if that’s more lucrative I’ve got to learn how to bring in deals because I’m not just going to be able to outwork these people and I’m certainly not going to be one of these guys who’s got some new novel idea for how to structure a financial product. I mean give me a break. I can barely do pre-algebra or pre-calculus or whatever and I don’t even know the difference between those two things.

 

He sort of explained, this, that and the other thing and he basically said what all naturally good networkers do when you ask them for advice, “Yeah you just put yourself out there and you make your friends and then your friends give you work and bla, bla, bla and you go cool, cool.” I had no idea how to do that. Everybody else that I asked about networking was like, “Well you spend enough time in the game and you meet people and over the years you become friends and then those people give you work.” I just thought, “That’s sounds like a really terrible non-system for doing this.”

 

[00:08:26] Jordan Harbinger: That is just one of those if I wait long enough… I mean if you compare this to dating and relationships for example, it’s the same strategy as if I just stay in my house long enough the perfect person who I should marry will eventually cross my path and da, da, da and everybody gets married, don’t worry about it. That’s the advice that this guy was telling me about networking and bringing in business and becoming a good attorney and I just thought, “I’m going to pass on that.”

 

I’ve already seen that people skills can be learned, that people skills can be something that we can focus on but I’d never really put my foot on the gas. I had just been more an observer of that since the wiretapping incident of 1993 or 94 or whatever. And so I thought, “Wait a minute, this is my competitive advantage potentially.” This is the secret third path. What I mean that is this is the way in which I could potentially find that I’m able to create relationships and networks and by the time the other people here who are working their butts off, smarter than me et cetera et cetera, by the time they wake up and smell the coffee on Wall Street I will at least be good enough with the relationships that they won’t be able to catch up which is good because they’ll be the work horses and I’ll be smart and we’ll all be able to work together and I won’t get fired.

 

I wasn’t thinking, “How do I beat these people?” I was thinking, “How do I not get fired from this firm when they find out I’m like the dumbest guy here?” It was essentially this imposter syndrome that had started to kick in but the good part is it spurred me to get a competitive advantage instead of just sitting around worrying about it. I dedicated my life at that point, this is fourteen years ago or something now, to studying human behavior, networking, applied psychology, relationships and things like that and that’s where we started with it. Of course when I was 24 and I started learning this stuff or started applying this stuff it quickly became, “Wait a minute, this stuff works on women? Okay, let’s focus on that for five years.”

 

[00:10:28] Jordan Harbinger: That was all I did and then as I grew older I realized, “Wait a minute, one, get your head back in the game this is for professional reasons. Two this is something that will actually apply to everybody and every field I should say. It’s not just how do you meet more people and make more friends. This is professional connections, this is friendships, this is familial relationships et cetera.”

 

That worked out really, really well. That was really, really good and that’s been something that The Art of Charm has essentially been focused on for the last ten plus years.

 

[00:11:04] Jon Berghoff: Wow, Jordan this is fascinating. A lot of folks that are on this podcast are solo entrepreneurs or sales professionals who maybe got into what they are doing because they wanted freedom of being on their own. One of the things that I’ve discovered is that often times succeeding through relationships, through partnerships is even more important than I gave credit to back when I first went into working for myself. I guess I would love any thoughts you have on helping us to value how important it is to be able to build relationships even if we think we are in a business or we think we have goals that don’t necessarily rely on others. Does that make sense?

 

[00:11:44] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah definitely. I think the way that we… What is it called? The problem of the instruments? It is like inverse of the problem of the instruments and the problem of the instruments is when you are a hammer every problem looks like a nail. Ever heard of that?

 

[00:11:56] Jon Berghoff: Yeah.

 

[00:11:57] Jordan Harbinger: If you are good at internet marketing, “Well oh this isn’t going well with your life it can be solved by internet marketing, make more money, solve the problem or your business is getting this da, da, da, internet marketing.” People do that all the time and it makes sense I mean its human nature. The problem is we have the inverse situation here where people go, “Well I’ve never been much of a networker or I have my close friends but I hate schmoozing,” or they throw some stereotype and they are like, “I hate being fake.”

 

It’s like okay nobody said you have to that but what they are doing is the reverse or the opposite of the problem of the instrument which is, “Since I don’t have this tool it’s not going to be useful for me. I’m going to work around it and I won’t need it.” That’s why a lot of people have this issue with networking is they go, “Oh, go to a mixer? That sounds like a huge waste of time or boring or terrible or I don’t want to speak on stage and go to this event. That sounds awful.”

 

They just avoid it and then they go, “Look I work from home I don’t really need this.” I hear that objection a lot when people say things like, “I don’t really need this because most of my business is done online,” or something like that. It’s just like actually you are running into this exact problem which is that you don’t know what you can have with this and you are probably running uphill. What is it? You keep pushing the boulder uphill and then it rolls back down. That’s how business goes when you have to do it all on your own. It’s really easy to sort of delude ourselves into thinking we don’t need that. It’s just like if you were single your whole life and you don’t get married and you see this stuff online where there’s these little communities of people who are like, “I’m better off now that he cheated or I’m better off now that I got divorced because I’m a free man now.”

 

You are just thinking, “Okay,” I mean to say that you don’t need a family because your last one didn’t work out is a little bit of a stretch. Let’s be realistic here and we see that with businesses and with individuals who don’t want to create these networks and create this because they are scared or because they think, “Ahh learning that whole skill set is going to be such a nightmare. I’m just going to work on what I’m comfortable with which is copyrighting and try to make up for it that way.”

 

[00:14:03] Jordan Harbinger: It does not work, it doesn’t work. Everybody at the top of any industry and like the people that you see on The Art of Charm Podcast I’m always asking them about this. Like General McCrystal or the head of CIA or NSA, those guys have been on the show, Peter Diamandis or Tony Hawk the pro skater, I ask those people about their business and their success and inevitably it’s always about the team.

 

It’s always about the team, it’s always about an opportunity they glean through this, the relationship they had through that. That’s 100% of the time it’s something to do with that. That’s not a coincidence and that’s not just lip service because those people are on a show that talks about social skills. Let’s be real. 99% of people that come on the show at that level aren’t listening to The Art of Charm for ten hours to get a feel for what we do, they show up and they answer the question and I’m not feeding them the answer. We have a very strong commonality here that shows us that, “Hey look, nobody succeeds in a vacuum.” If you are listening to this right now and you are in the Miracle Morning Community somehow, well why are you there? Well, for the reasons we are talking about right now.

 

It’s impossible to succeed that well in a vacuum and the reason that people are looking for, if you are sitting there going, “Well, what about this person?” Because you are looking for an example to counteract this, you are showing the exception that proves the world where people are like well… It’s like when people say, “Well Mark Zuckerberg didn’t go to college.” Okay are you Mark Zuckerberg? If not follow this part of the flow chart and go back to… Do not pass, go do not collect two hundred or in his case $60 billion because it’s very, very easy to delude ourselves into thinking that we don’t need this because it’s uncomfortable or this won’t work for me because I don’t want to put in the work. It’s just not a plan for action, it’s a losing mindset and I want to get people to realize that.

 

The sooner we stop believing our own you know what, the quicker we can move past it and fix the problem itself.

 

[00:15:59] Jon Berghoff: Yeah so for our listeners who are either already out there networking or they buy into a belief, “Okay, I’ve got to build quality relationships,” what advice can you give us so that the time is well spent? Where do we go wrong? I can think of myself spending years thinking I was networking, attempting to network, not getting positive results then finally getting them. What have you learned about that?

 

[00:16:24] Jordan Harbinger: Sure it’s not just about the time, it’s about the places and the opportunities that we leverage. One of the reasons that people hate ‘networking’ so much and I completely understand this is they go and do things like, “Well I signed up for this mixer this one time and it was super boring or none of the people were in my industry or none of the people I met there panned out and I’ve done that ten times and it’s just a waste of time.” One very golden rule that’s very non-PC and if people listen to the The Art of Charm they’ll know I’m very non-PC in very many ways I’ll just leave it at that, is that networking events, these generalized mixers, these, “Hey show up we are all entrepreneurs here,” they are almost without exception an enormous waste of time because they are not curated.

 

Any event that’s open to everyone will get exactly the type of people you might imagine will go to something that requires no actual invitation. That’s a big problem because what ends up happening is and I mean no offense to people who are financial managers or whatever, is you show up to these ‘networking events’ you sit down and people go, “Hi, what’s your name? Oh interesting, oh cool, that’s what you do need, cool. Well if you need someone to manage your retirement funds here’s my business card.” And then you do that 87 times and then you poke your eyes out with the little toothpicks that they put in the Vienna sausages that they are passing around as horderves and then you go home going, “I will never do that again, what the hell,” and you throw all those cards in the recycle bin not the trash because we are eco friendly.

 

You throw them in the recycle bin and you never get in touch with those people and you just hope all those business cards that you wasted giving to them in return are never acted upon because now you are on seven people’s newsletter and you can’t unsubscribe and you are just thinking, “I’m never doing this again.” The problem is not networking doesn’t work or this type of thing is a waste of time. The problem is non curated events. Go to the events that are curated, they don’t have to be super expensive although that’s generally a good sort of filter for a lot of people. You can go to ones or you can create one yourself where you invite people and you connect people on your network because the way to scale your network is to not try to help people yourself but to make introductions to other people inside your network who can help each other.

 

[00:18:37] Jordan Harbinger: For example, when I got to LA… And the reason for this is because you can’t see opportunities over the horizon and so this story will illustrate this. When I got to LA I had a toothache and this is like eight years ago. I had a toothache and I didn’t have a car I just moved. I went to any dentist near me that I could find on Google, there was no Uber at this point, and they were all like, “Sorry we don’t take new patients, oh sorry we don’t kind of insurance so you should go to the ER.” I’m thinking, “Ah I just need my tooth handled and if I go to the ER they are going to reach in there with pliers like some sort of Jason Bourne or Arnold Schwarzenegger movie and they are just going to yank my tooth out and it’s going to be terrible.”  

 

So I posted on Facebook in desperation and some random stranger who I didn’t know coz its public post was like, “Hey, your friend of a friend of a friend might answer dentists near you. Do you want me to call and see if she can help?” I said, “Oh yes, anything.” So he did, she came in early, she set up everything over the phone for me the day before so I could just come in get my tooth taken care of and got out of there. I thought, “Man do I owe this guy one!” Well, he says, “Look I’m a graphic designer and I’m looking for a job.” I didn’t need any help with graphics, nothing so I was unable to help him directly and I just said, “Yeah cool I’ll keep my ear to the ground for you.”

 

Well, three four days later a friend of mine said, “Wow your website, the new website looks awesome. Who did it?” And I said, “We do it in-house sorry,” and she goes, “Oh man my designers keep flaking.” I said, “Look I’ve got this portfolio from this guy who helped me find a dentist. I’ve never worked with him, the portfolio looks okay though, I don’t know, if you need a designer he’s looking for work so he’ll show up.” She ended up hiring this guy, full time gig 60-70 grand a year I think doing graphic design and bear in mind he’s probably 22, 23 years old. He got a job doing what he wanted to do, quit his job at this lame old café in LA where he lived and that happened because he helped me find a dentist on Facebook. Now I’ve never met this guy and I’ve never spoken with him… Well maybe once or twice since.

 

[00:20:36] Jordan Harbinger: The idea that people have where they go, “Well I can’t help this person directly,” that’s the wrong way to think about networking and relationships. You’re not going to be able to help 99% of the people that you meet directly, you are just not but if you collect people in your network like a creepy little menagerie of connections like I do, what happens is I know somebody that can help you and I know somebody that you can help inside my network and I will ask.

 

I do the double opt-in intro which means I will ask one person, “Are you open to being connected to this person for this reason?” and I’ll do the same for the other person and when they both say yes I’ll make the introduction. The reason I do the double opt in by the way is because if they already know each other we avoid that, if one person is too busy we avoid that. If one person does not want to connect with that person, we avoid that and there’s a whole host of other reasons that I won’t get into here. The double opt in is basically mandatory especially with busy people but this makes networking scalable when you connect people to each other in their network because look, I can’t do graphics from my friend’s website and I’m not hiring a graphics designer. It’s a really obvious match to connect those two people.

 

The trick is to get good at noticing what people need by anticipating their needs and then using that to connect to other people in your network. Rather than if I had to do that over again I probably wouldn’t wait for a graphic design gig to fall from the sky to help that guy out. I might say something like, “Look I’ll keep my ear to the ground for you and then if I’m surfing around or looking at my friend’s new project and I go, “Ew these graphics are awful, who does them?” And they go, “Oh yeah we are trying to find a designer.” I might say,” I might have somebody for you.” I’ll look in my contacts for graphic designers, pick two or three and get the portfolios from them and then I’ll send them to my friend and he’ll be not only very thankful that I helped him find a designer or if not if it doesn’t work out but the designer will be very stoked that I got them a job. This is fully scalable because that takes me three emails, four emails to do that instead of trying to help them myself.

 

[00:22:32] Jordan Harbinger: That’s what people run into, is this problem of curation so you go to things that are going to be in an industry that you need with the type of quality of people that you need or you create your own event. Scalability which is, “Well I can’t help this person because I don’t know how to edit graphics so I guess they can’t do anything for me and I can’t do anything for them.” It’s a wrong way to think about it. You’ve got to think about who in my network can help them and who can they help in my network and you give generously. This is ABG instead of ABC Always Be Closing, ABG Always Be Generous. What that means is, Look, if I help you eighty times on your podcast, I mean a hundred times, whatever I don’t want to think about what you are going to do for me in return.

 

It goes on, it’s don’t keep score. It’s sort of the model that we are looking at here and the reason is because keeping score does something that’s called creating covert contracts and covert contracts, this is maybe a relationship term from psychology but it’s essentially if I help you three times and I haven’t asked you for anything in return but I expect you to read my mind about what I want and you are not doing that because you are a normal person and you don’t think about my needs all day you think about your own, I get mad at you if I have a covert contract. I think, “I have helped Jon like six times and this guy he hasn’t done anything for me. This guy is a taker, what a mooch.” Meanwhile you are like, “Gosh this Jordan guy is so great, he helps me all the time. I should help him with something but I don’t know. I don’t really have anything to offer so I’ll just keep quiet but man what a good guy.” Meanwhile I’m annoyed with you.

 

Now this makes no sense and the reason it’s happening is because I’m keeping score where I shouldn’t be. Don’t keep score, get used to other people not helping you back, nine times out of ten. It’s not because they are selfish or it might be, and it’s not because of any particular reason that has to do with you. If you just get used to that and you get used to the idea that you are helping people for the sake of helping them then when people do help you in return it’s a bonus and you never get mad at your contacts.

 

[00:24:34] Jordan Harbinger: You just keep on helping people get what they want and then one day something may come back to you. The idea is that if you help 100 and 95 of them never help you but five of them give you something major or minor to help you in your life or business I’d say that’s a really good trade especially when you helping them involves like sending three emails or introducing them to other friends of yours. Those people owe you one as well for helping them out. Does this make sense? You are building social capital by connecting two or more people in your network and now they both ‘owe you one’ except since we are not keeping scores they don’t owe you anything so it doesn’t sour the relationship if they never end up helping you in return. Does all that make sense?

 

[00:25:14] Jon Berghoff: I love it on so many levels Jordan on so many levels. This idea of encouraging us to consider being a connector versus just a taker. I think about what you just shared reminds us that every time we leave the house or leave the office, instead of thinking of everybody we meet as, “Okay is this somebody that I can either do business with or not,” you just gave me now I can be listening for their problems or challenges or what are their strengths. If I’m listening for those things, I love the way you talk about it making networking scalable and to your point if 95 out of those 100 don’t ever bring me anything specific I would argue that, “Yeah, think about what my reputation is though because now 95 other people think positively about me.”

 

That is so positive to me and I’m so grateful that you just shared this double opt in strategy and introductions because every once in a while I get an introduction and I can tell it’s so well intended and I think, “Gosh that’s not what I need.” And now it actually creates a problem because I feel like I’m a bad person if I don’t reply to this introduction let alone the fact that I’m going to decline even needing to talk to the person. I love that, that’s awesome.

 

[00:26:25] Jordan Harbinger: There is so much there and I think there’s probably a lot more that we can share here but I don’t want to overload people. I know we’ve been going for a while on this so I want to make sure that people get a chance to sort of digest that. The goal of this was not for me teach a full networking course here to everybody. I just want people to start to make those mindset shifts and there’s a lot more where that came from.

 

[00:26:49] Jon Berghoff: Jordan speaking of that, if anyone who was just introduced to you for the first time today can you make to help me where they can they go to learn more, hear from you in addition to the The Art of Charm Podcast.

 

[00:26:58] Jordan Harbinger: Sure essentially listening to our podcast I definitely recommend checking out of course, obviously self-serving, check out The Art of Charm Podcast. I’d love for people to tune in there or just go to TheArtofCharm.com that’s where we’ve got a lot of resources as well. We actually have a challenge that helps people get people out of their shell and make some new connections and it’s got weird experiments and challenges that people are really loving. You can get that if you go to theartofcharm.com/challenge or if you are in the states and you’re sitting in your car right now, you can text the words charmed c-h-a-r-m-e-d to the number 33444 and it will basically say, “Cool, what’s your email.”

 

You can text that back that way if you are driving or you’re walking around you don’t have to remember to do that when are in front of your computer. We’ll send you all of these little missions and it’s very cool because the coaching team from AOC is interacting with everybody doing that to help people get out their shells a little bit, make new connections, follow up better. It’s a little mini challenge for everybody.

 

[00:27:57] Jon Berghoff: That’s awesome and for all of our listeners Jordan also agreed to offer something additional unique that we are going to do where we are going to bring Jordan into The Miracle Morning Community on a live stream coming up sometime after this episode. Make sure you are in that community to maybe answer any question you have or go a little further with this topic today. Jordan, hey this was awesome buddy and on behalf of Hal thanks for contributing your talent and your time today, so much appreciated.

 

[00:28:22] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah thank you man, this has been super fun.

 

[00:28:24] Jon Berghoff: Awesome. Take care buddy.

[END]