The Education of Millionaires - Michael Ellsberg [44]
I’ve been astonished at the caliber of people I’ve been able to connect with, simply from this little bit of marketing knowledge. It’s like a cool party trick. In fact, I was at a party, where I had the opportunity to meet the famous novelist Erica Jong. I asked her what she was excited about, and she told me about an anthology she was putting out the next year. As she told me about it, I could see right away that the marketing efforts planned by her big corporate publisher would be helped by some direct-response efforts on the Net. I began giving her unsolicited marketing advice for her book launch. A few minutes into this, she grabbed a pen, scribbled down her contact info on a paper, and said, “I have to talk with you more.” Erica is now a friend, and not only have I had the honor of helping her quite a bit on her book marketing, but she has also been extremely generous with advice, guidance, and help in my writing career.
I probably would not have been able to bring her into my life as a friend without having built up the connection capital of valuable advice, which I was able to give her at that party, on a topic important to her.
The fun continued. Erica invited me to a party she was throwing, where she introduced me to her PR agent, Sandi Mendelson. Same thing. I started giving Sandi some marketing ideas around social media, which I had been studying a great deal. Sandi invited me to her office to continue the discussions, and we’ve since done business together. Sandi was also responsible for my meeting my literary agent Esther Newberg, who played a huge part in this book coming into being, as Esther connected me to Portfolio. It all started with some unsolicited marketing advice to a novelist, at a party.
It’s almost a cliché and an inside joke among my friends now. Whenever I meet new people, I compulsively start finding out what they’re up to, and then giving them unsolicited marketing advice on it. Maybe it’s cheesy. But I’ll be damned, it works. In almost all cases, I find it’s greatly appreciated. If you find yourself saying, “Yeah, but I don’t know as much about marketing as you do,” remember, I only studied Eben’s stuff for a few months before I started applying it in the real world. If you really are going to tell me you can’t be bothered to study something for a few months in order to get all the benefits I’ve described here, please, now, return this book for a full refund, plunk yourself down on your couch, and flip on the tube. Seriously!
FOOD, WEIGHT, AND NUTRITION. Most people who are successful in the worlds of business and money are highly driven. And many people who are highly driven ignore their health; their success so far has come at the expense of their health. If in the course of your life and self-education you have learned to overcome your own chronic health challenges, or have achieved your ideal weight or learned a lot about nutrition, fitness, and healthy lifestyles, you’ll often know a lot more about these topics than many successful businesspeople do—particularly if you read up on these topics and experiment with what’s best for you in your own life. As with all advice, you need to be extremely tactful in bringing these topics up. But if the conversation steers in that direction, in response to your “challenges” question discussed above, you’ll often find that people are desperate for advice in these realms. You can often be of tremendous service, much more than you realize. I was able to do this for Bryan around his formerly abysmal, now fantastic eating habits. As a result, I served