Never Eat Alone: And Other Secrets to Success, One Relationship at a Time

Success in any field, but especially in business is about working with people, not against them.

Identify the people in your industries who always seem to be out in front, and use all the relationship skills you've acquired to connect with them. Take them to lunch. Read their newsletters. In fact, read everything you can. Online, there are hundreds of individuals distilling information, analyzing it, and making prognos-tications. These armchair analysts are the eyes and ears of innovation. Now get online and read, read, read. Subscribe to magazines, buy books, and talk to the smartest people you can find. Eventually, all this knowledge will build on itself, and you'll start making connections others aren't.

real networking was about finding ways to make other people more successful.

I’ve come to believe that connecting is one of the most important business—and life—skill sets you’ll ever learn. Why? Because, flat out, people do business with people they know and like. Careers—in every imaginable field—work the same

Relationships are all there is. Everything in the universe only exists because it is in relationship to everything else. Nothing exists in isolation. We have to stop pretending we are individuals that can go it alone. —MARGARET WHEATLEY

Poverty, I realized, wasn’t only a lack of financial resources; it was isolation from the kind of people who could help you make more of yourself.

It’s better to give before you receive. And never keep score. If your interactions are ruled by generosity, your rewards will follow suit.

Your network is your destiny, a reality backed up by many studies in the newly emergent fields of social networking and social contagion theory. We are the people we interact with.

by giving your time and expertise and sharing them freely, the pie gets bigger for everyone.

Human ambitions are like Japanese carp; they grow proportional to the size of their environment. Our achievements grow according to the size of our dreams and the degree to which we are in touch with our mission.

There is only one place to find real peace, real harmony. That place is within,

I believe that every conversation you have is an invitation to risk revealing the real you.

Today’s most valuable currency is social capital, defined as the information, expertise, trust, and total value that exist in the relationships you have and social networks to which you belong.

Business is a human enterprise, driven and determined by people.

Living a connected life leads one to take a different view. Life is less a quest than a quilt. We find meaning, love, and prosperity through the process of stitching together our bold attempts to help others find their own way in their lives. The relationships we weave become an exquisite and endless pattern.

Who you know determines who you are—how you feel, how you act, and what you achieve.

Wherever you are in life right now, and whatever you know, is a result of the ideas, experiences, and people you have interacted with in your life,

His statement flew in the face of everything I knew. He thought of relationships as finite, like a pie that could only be cut into so many pieces. Take a piece away, and there was that much less for him. I knew, however, that relationships are more like muscles - the more you work them, the stronger they become.

connecting. It’s a constant process of giving and receiving—of asking for and offering help. By putting people in contact with one another, by giving your time and expertise and sharing them freely, the pie gets bigger for everyone. This karma-tinged vision of how things work may sound naïve to those who have grown cynical of the business world. But while the power of generosity is not yet fully appreciated, or applied, in the halls of corporate America, its value in the world of networks is proven.

Our careers aren't paths so much as landscapes that are navigated.

I remind myself how people with a low propensity for success whose behavior is guided by fear, have a low propensity for success.

Relationships are all there is. Everything in the universe only exists because it is in relationship to everything else. Nothing exists in isolation. We have to stop pretending we are individuals that can go it alone.

Be sincere - the surest was to become special in other's eyes is to make them feel special

Friendship is created out of the quality of time spent between two people, not the quantity.

A goal is a dream with a deadline.” That

SUCCESS IN LIFE = (THE PEOPLE YOU MEET) + (WHAT YOU CREATE TOGETHER).

The problem, as I see it, isn't what you're working on, it's whom you're working with. You can't feel in love with your life if you hate your work; and more times than not, people don't love their work because they work with people they don't like.