When we think about the skills of millionaires,
most people immediately think about technical skills
and you're probably expecting me to talk about skills
like learning how to code in this video.
But what we're gonna talk about instead
is the skill of building relationships.
And you've probably heard that saying
that it's not what you know, it's who you know.
And I always felt a bit weird about that
because of the kind of nepotism and privilege
and all the stuff that goes into that.
But I recently sat down and did an interview
with a ridiculously successful chap
called Cliff Weitzman, who's changed my view on this.
Cliff is the co-founder and CEO of Speechify,
which is a text to speech platform
that's absolutely massive.
They've got like insane amounts of five star reviews
on the app store.
Cliff also did the whole Forbes 30 under 30 thing.
Now, when I first met Cliff, I'm not gonna lie,
I had a reasonable dose of envy in my heart
because it was this guy who was my age
and who was way more financially successful than I was.
And he's also doing cool stuff,
traveling the world with his team,
building a cool company,
and networking with all these famous people.
And he's actually a nice guy as well.
So I was just like, damn, this guy is winning on all fronts.
But then when I interviewed him in depth
about his kind of success on the podcast
and how he got there, I realized that actually,
it's the so much hard work that's gone into this.
And the way that he thinks about success
and building things is so much about relationships.
And I realized that this was a level up
that I needed in my own personal life.
And so in this video,
I wanna break down the seven habits
that Cliff and I talked about
that has helped propelled him
to these ridiculous levels of success.
The first tip is to send as many cold emails
to people that you admire
and people that you wanna get to know.
One of the strategies I developed
once I got to the point where I'd read all the books
that I could read to learn about a topic
is I'd make a Google sheet of the hundred people
who knew about the topic the most.
And then I'd message every single one of them
on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, email,
and then I'd follow up.
Now Cliff's whole strategy for this
is so systematic and absolutely insane.
And I have never met anyone who has that like level
of just comfortableness with sending cold emails.
And he says that the amount of value he's generated
for himself and for his business
and for everything in his life
broadly can be attributed
to just sending loads of cold emails.
And this is the thing that most of us just don't do.
I don't send enough cold emails.
I've sent a few cold emails in my time
and like one or two of them,
two or three have directly led to over a million dollars
in like an outcome just by virtue of me
sending the cold email
and the chain of events that followed that.
Similarly, a bunch of people who now work for me
and my team have gotten there through a cold email.
And in the podcast episode, which is linked down below,
but you can also find it on Spotify, iTunes,
wherever you get podcasts,
we break down kind of step-by-step
how to send a decent cold email
because it's just a strategy
that has a ridiculous return on investment
provided you know how to do it well.
I get a ton of cold emails these days
and it's really nice that people are doing it,
but it's also very saddening
that mostly people are very bad at doing it.
But there's so many potential benefits of it.
You can get mentorship from people,
you can learn from people who are at the top of their game,
you might even get a job,
you might even get an internship.
You might even find the love of your life
through a cold email.
All right, so habit number two
is that when you do find someone that you admire
and you wanna connect with,
and they have some kind of content out there on the internet,
whether it's a book or they've been interviewed on podcasts,
then a very easy way of developing
a sort of relationship with that person
is to just actually consume all of their content.
And these days, almost anyone with good ideas to share
is also sharing them online.
So it's actually not too hard to do this.
If I fly from like California to New York
and I listen to the book Obama wrote
before he became president,
that book is eight hours long.
I listen at 2x speed, 3x speed,
by the time I land, I finish that book.
It's like I sat next to Obama the entire time.
And I use this strategy a lot.
Like for example, there's a guy on Twitter
called Pieter Levels, who is a indie developer
whose work I've been admiring for absolutely years.
And so what I did is that I searched his name on Spotify
and I just found every podcast
he's ever been interviewed on
and I just listened to all of them
at like two and a half times speed.
And now it's great because that was basically
like I downloaded the things that he's saying,
his talking points into my brain.
And then I messaged him on Twitter
and now we've had a back and forth on Twitter.
And then at some point, I'm gonna go visit him in person
and we'll do a podcast episode, fingers crossed.
All right, habit number three is to get comfortable
with asking people to hang out.
Now Cliff has another inspiring story about this.
And that was when he was at university,
he would spend a lot of time in the dining hall,
making sure he was sitting with different groups of people
and trying to get to know as many people as he could.
And I very quickly realized the best thing about college
is the people who are there,
much more important than the classes.
And I would have two dinners every single night.
I would go to a table, I'd be like,
hey, can I join you guys, what's your name?
Ali, I'm Cliff, nice to meet you.
Can I grab a seat?
Sure, how's it going?
And then I'd talk to everybody in that table.
I' get two more plates and I'd go
and I'd sit at another table.
And I would do this for the first two months
every single semester, and I did this every year.
So I got to know 60% of my freshman class
within the first two months.
Now at this point, you might be thinking
that this is way easier for an extrovert to do.
And what if you're shy or what if you have social anxiety
or what if you're an introvert?
And yeah, some people have an easier time
of this thing with other people,
but no one is physically unable to do this sort of thing.
And there are plenty of people I know who do, for example,
have social anxiety, who by virtue
of just systematic desensitization over time
and putting in the effort,
over time they've built that skill
of interacting with strangers and trying to make friends.
This is a thing, honestly, that I don't do enough.
Like if I'm sitting next to someone on a plane,
I'll still feel that like,
oh, I know I wanna say something,
but like I also don't wanna say something.
I also wanna do my own thing.
And it's like, I'll be in my head so much.
And then there are so many kind of serendipitous
conversations where I've had
that have just been incredibly valuable to my life,
whether it's making a friend or a business associate
or getting a cool idea, or even just having a nice time.
And I know that this is a thing
that I would like to do more of.
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Habit number four, Bond over ambition or vulnerability.
Now, when you do meet people,
generally very little actual bonding happens
over small talk.
And it's really when we bond over things like vulnerability
that that's when we kind of develop
a deeper relationship with a person.
So small talk does have its place,
but ultimately the way that we bond with people
is generally through bonding over shared vulnerability
or shared ambition sometimes or shared experiences.
And there's something that I find useful
to keep in mind here,
which is kind of the structure of a good story.
Like when you have a character in a story,
whether it's a book or a film or whatever,
there are kind of two things
that you want to know about that character,
which helps you kind of get invested
in what's going on with the character.
And those two things are firstly, what do they want?
And secondly, why can't they get what they want?
It's like Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone,
for example, what he wants, it's kind of clear.
He's kind of, he just wants to be understood.
He just wants to have friends.
He wants to kind of survive.
Why can't he get it?
Well, because the Dursleys are like downtrodding him
and like being mean to him and things like that.
And that makes us really connect with that character.
And I find it useful to keep those things in my mind.
And kind of Cliff talks about this as well.
When trying to connect with someone,
like just trying to suss out what are their goals
and what are their challenges?
What's your biggest struggle on Earth right now?
What's your top three goals in life?
What gives you energy in your work?
All these things, and you get to like the meat
of the person.
And the easiest way to do that is you form relationships
with people, either you bond over ambition
or you bond over vulnerability.
Now, obviously it's a little bit weird
if this is the very first thing you say to people
and that's not what Cliff is suggesting.
You wouldn't just go up to someone and be like,
hey, what's your biggest challenge?
What's your deepest desire?
All that kind of thing.
But I think it's a useful thing to keep in mind.
Like I want to be interested in this person.
Therefore, I would love to know what are their goals
and what are the challenges?
What do they want and why can't they get what they want?
And that generally sparks so much conversation.
By the way, if you're enjoying this video so far,
I would love it if you can drop a little thumbs up
because it really helps us
for the YouTube algorithm apparently.
All right, so habit number five is to write thank you notes.
And this could be to people that you know personally
or people that you don't know personally.
And this is just nice.
It costs us very little to send a thank you note
but it generally means quite a lot
for the person who's receiving it.
In fact, psychologists have even done studies
that show the benefits of writing thank you notes.
So for example, in this study
by the University of Chicago's Business School,
the researchers asked a bunch of people
to write thank you letters
to someone who's done something nice for them
and then to anticipate their reaction.
And in every experiment, the people that wrote the letters,
they really overestimated how awkward it would be
and really underestimated the impact
that it would have on the recipients.
And on top of that, the people who wrote the thank you notes
also felt better about themselves.
So this is really like a win-win-win across the whole board.
Now in the interview with Cliff,
we discussed a bunch of ways
that he's applied this to his own life.
Like he sent a random thank you note
to the guy who invented Audible
because Audible helped Cliff
essentially overcome his dyslexia.
I basically sent him this email and it was like,
hey, you don't know me, I don't know you,
but I just graduated college
and I'm writing thank you notes
and the list would not be complete without you.
In fact, I would not be the person I am today without you.
And it was to Don Katz, who was the founder of Audible.
I sent that email, it was a long email, like eight paragraphs
and he responded like 40 minutes later
with a longer email than the one that I sent.
And he went, you know, messages like this
don't make my days and weeks, but my months.
And we built a relationship.
But the second really cool thing that Cliff does,
which is a habit that I wanna incorporate into my life,
is that instead of scrolling on social media
as a form of procrastination,
instead, scrolling through the contacts list on your phone
or your recent text messages
and just sending a nice thank you message
to whoever catches your eye of like,
oh, I haven't thought about this person in a while,
or oh, I haven't messaged this person in a while.
Let me just message them and ask how they're doing
or say something nice.
If I'm procrastinating,
I'll just send gratitude notes to people that I love.
And it might be that it's the first time
I thought about this person in six months,
but I'll just send them a message.
By the way, that's how I maintain connection
with people who I'm close with,
even if I'm not closer than the person.
And when I heard that, I was like,
oh, that's so sweet and so nice.
I'm sceptical that Cliff does this all the time
instead of scrolling social media,
because I know he also scrolls social media a lot,
but it's a nice standard to aspire to.
Habit number 6 is to put good energy into the world
without an expectation of return.
And this is something that the book,
The Go-Giver talks about a lot.
It's one of my favorite books.
I was on a road trip with some friends a few months ago,
and we listened to that audio book.
And these are cousins of mine
who don't normally listen to self-help stuff,
but they listened to that book and they were like,
oh my God, this is so good.
But essentially the vibe is that
when you put out value into the world,
preferably without an expectation of anything in return,
then loads and loads and loads of value
just comes back to you.
Don't try to get paid.
Don't try to like arbitrage.
Just put good energy into the world.
And if you do that, good things happen.
So one example of this is making videos on YouTube
and just chucking them on the internet for free.
And preferably doing that without an expectation
that you're gonna get X number of views,
X number of likes, or X number of revenue.
Or if you wanna work for someone that you admire
and you're fairly early in your career,
you can actually work for free.
I know people complain about this,
but like working for free is a way of putting value
into the world without the expectation
of anything in return.
And if you do a good job at doing the thing
and working for free,
then chances are the person is gonna wanna pay you
back for the work that you've done. who also need that work being done.
If it's good, you're putting value
without the expectation of anything in return,
stuff will come back to you multiple fold.
And habit number seven is to work in your zone of genius.
And this means creating opportunities for yourself
in areas where you personally can really shine.
Now we all have different skills,
we all have different personalities,
but really, ideally, the place where we wanna spend
our time working is where it feels like play
rather than work.
You want to work inside of your zone of genius
and never step outside of your zone of genius.
And so one of my zone of genius things
is I'm really good real time, live.
High pressure environments are where I shine.
And so I try to put myself in those things
as much as I can.
And if I have an opportunity to go full force
into my zone of genius, I will clean my calendar
and I'll go full force.
So for example, for me, filming a video
or like doing writing or coming up with ideas
or teaching in some form,
that to me feels like play rather than work,
most of the time.
Whereas for example, for me, going through numbers
or looking at spreadsheets or like being doing
like operationsy type stuff really feels like a lot of work.
Whereas I know people, for example,
who just love spreadsheets and they love organising things
and keeping their kind of business finances
meticulously organised.
And their rooms are always really tidy.
And for them, that feels like play.
Like tidying is the thing that they do,
even if they weren't being paid for it.
And so you just got to figure out
what is that zone of genius for yourself?
What is that area in which you can personally thrive
and flourish?
And if you have a sort of competitive attitude
towards like the world and you want to be better
than like 99% of people, any of that stuff,
it's way easier to be better than 99% of people
if the thing that you're doing for work
is also the thing that feels like play to you.
Because as Naval Ravikant says,
you cannot compete with someone who's having fun.
Now, if that sounds too much like follow your passion,
that's not what I'm saying.
In fact, this video here is all about
why following your passion is really terrible advice
if you want to succeed in the world of work at least.
And so you should definitely check out that video
or alternatively, you can check out this video here,
which is my full long form interview with Cliff Weitzman,
where we expand on a lot of this stuff.
So thank you so much for watching
and I'll hopefully see you in the next video.