The Go-Giver: A Review
Impression:
I think this book does a wonderful job of introducing 5 business principles in a compact way. This book encourages talking to people who are successful. It also puts forth an impression that truly successful people are not always busy and stressed, but are easygoing. Despite this, they get a lot of work done. They also love to help others and share their success. This book encourages me to think about approaching tasks with a sense of calmness and soft focus.
The Five Laws of Stratospheric success:
Law of value: “Your true worth is determined by how much more you give in value than you take in payment.”
This law makes me think about the first question we should ask in a business. It should be “Is my product/service of good value to my customers?” and not “How much money can I make off my product/service?”. In the book, Ernesto (an extremely successful restaurant owner) says something like, A bad restaurant tries to provide enough food and service, both in quantity and quality, to justify the money it makes from the customer. A good restaurant strives to give the most quantity and quality for the amount of money it makes. In this scenario, the former restaurant puts the priority on the payment and the latter put the priority on the value. According to the first law, the latter restaurant is destined to enjoy more success in the long run.
Law of Compensation: “Your income is determined by how many people you serve and how well you serve them.“
The second law builds upon the first law. The factors that determine your income are; 1) The value you provide, 2) The number of people you reach. Reaching more people is important because it is a win-win. If your product/services are valuable, they can help people out and the more people you help out, the more you will be compensated. Nicole Martin, who is used as an example to prove the validity of this law, has a knack for teaching young kids. In a classroom, she can only reach students on the order of 10s. In the spirit of the second law, she makes a software company. Her company can provide valuable learning to students in multiple countries. That increases the people she reaches by orders of magnitude.
Law of influence: “Your Influence is determined by how abundantly you put other people’s interests first.
The worst way to form a network is to keep score. If I did something good for you, you owe me something; 50-50 is always a losing game. You need to learn to put other people’s interests before your own, be an ambassador for someone. Sam (a financial advisor) does this extremely well. He has an army of personal ambassadors. The people who truly want him to succeed. How did he get there? By giving. By putting other people’s success before his own. It created a positive culture where others also put his success before their own.
The Law of Authenticity: “The most valuable gift you have to offer is yourself.”
It has become a little cliche in today’s world to be yourself. We are told again and again to be ourselves. But what does that mean? One interpretation can be that we force ourselves to stay in a system that does not give us the results we need. We should come up with a system that provides us with the most probability of success instead of following a system that worked for someone else. This is exactly what Debra did. She is a ridiculously successful real estate agent. Before she became successful, she was in a system that thought of her as a liability. She gave up, and purely out of obligation, went to her last assignment. She had nothing to lose so she just tried to be herself. The customer liked her so much that they bought the house. That changed her outlook on life and helped her turn herself into an asset for the real estate business.
The Law of Receptivity: “The key to effective giving is to stay open to receiving.”
The go-giver attitude is also about being able to receive effectively. If you do not openly receive, you take the right from other people to be givers, and that messes with the flow. Balance is an extremely important concept in everything. No night without the day, you cannot succeed without the failures, and you cannot just give without also being open to receiving.
