It’s been a dozen years since I wrote the first draft of my book, Love Is the Killer App: How To Win Business and Influence Friends. Since then, the world has changed significantly, and so has my perspective.
In the digital future, it will be easy to make corrections to a book, to keep it from getting out of date or in my case — out of practice. While the thesis of the book (promote others’ success) is more true than ever, there are some corrections I’d like to make:
1. eBooks are how I gather deep knowledge. In LITKA, I argued that we should buy only hard cover books and utilize the blank pages at the beginning and the end of the book for note taking (cliffing/tagging). This was in comparison to soft cover books and pre-Kindle/iPad times. When I wrote the book, eBook readers were clunky and inventory was incomplete. These days, I read almost everything on my Kindle. I’ve also figured out a way to highlight and take notes in such a way so I can easily re-study a book in just a few minutes. My new reading habit has enabled me to read many more books, and when traveling, to bounce around between multiple titles instead of just choosing one (light) book.
2. Protect Your Network While You Network. More than ever, our network is our net worth, it’s our platform to move forward and do good. We should protect it by making sure our networking efforts are productive. Networking people, just because they ask you to, isn’t an act of BizLove. It’s an act of compromising your existing relationships out of a sense of duty or guilt.
For exmaple: I get requests by entrepreneurs to ‘hook them up’ with my old boss Mark Cuban (Shark Tank). In a few situations, I truly believe that the introduction would be good for Mark as well as the entrepreneur, and in those situations, I make the (email) introduciton. The key here is to make sure there’s a win/win for both the asker and your network node, otherwise it’s just more noise (and still, no real value add). One other way to network appropriately is to collect a little information for the prospector and shop it to the target to see if an introduction is desired.
3. Hugging Is Risky At Work. When I wrote LITKA, it was still OK to be warm at work with others, and give them a hug as a greeting. Over time, the litigation environment is as of such, that I suggest we practice discretion prior to any phsycial contact with others, beyond a hearty handshake. This is especially true between members of the opposite sex.
Last, but not least, I’d like to make a disclaimer: Being a Lovecat doesn’t mean you say yes to all requests of you. It doesn’t mean that nothing can upset you. It doesn’t mean that anything you have is available to anyone else. I’m growing weary of people who tell me, “Hey, you aren’t being very Lovecat!” when I say, “no” to them or criticize an idea or an action. In my book, I defined a Lovecat as someone who “intelligently share his or her intangibles to promote growth in others.” I never claimed that they were pushovers.