Adopt the Helpful Mindsets

In the previous chapter, we learned how the people who have the easiest time networking are the people in society that are high in power (high-power). We also learned that, since perceptions are reality, if you present yourself to the world in a way that communicates you are high-power, people will assume that you are. This means that you’ll have an easier time networking as well as a higher success rate connecting with powerful contacts.

Before moving further into this chapter, make sure you’ve placed your self-development and life management as your top priorities. Your mental and physical health must always come first. Take special, attentive care to work on the action steps in the last chapter by improving your daily habits. (For example, one of the traits of a high-quality man is exercising. Exercise can improve your mood.) Look after your mental and emotional health before seeking out networking strategies and opportunities.

Now, we must tackle the conundrum that is mindsets. When I made the decision not to commit suicide, I made a deal with myself: I would do my absolute best to change my life in a way where I could enjoy it again. If, after doing everything I could, I wasn’t able to achieve that, I would accept that life just wasn’t for everyone.

I tried therapy, and that didn’t work out, so I had no idea where to start on my journey to beating my personal demons on my own. Google was giving me advice like “visualize a happy memory”[1], which only made me feel worse when I realized how much things had changed since those happy times.

There were books lying around the house that I always knew were there but had never considered reading. After skimming across a few titles, not even bothering to read the back of the books or open any, I came across a book titled The Power of Positive Thinking by Norman Vincent Peale. I decided to give it a chance, and I am so glad I did. The strategies outlined in that book only worked for a little over half a year, but it was enough to engage my curiosity about what else I could learn about mindsets.

As curious as I was, I was still frustrated that I hadn’t cured my depression yet. I genuinely thought that with a few positive mindset shifts I would feel better again. That thought was true for the most part, but I hadn’t properly anticipated how long making those mindset shifts would take.

When I started practicing things like gratitude, optimism (within proper reason and without the delusion), and healthy positivity, I started to become more productive. Being more positive also helped me network better, since people prefer associating themselves with positive people. This is because positive people are typically higher-warmth than people who are always negative, angry, and intimidating.

A mindset is an established set of attitudes held by a person. However, mindsets can also be seen as arising out of a person’s worldview or philosophy of life. For instance, when I had a serious go-giver attitude as a young child, my mindset was to always give, give, give. Always giving was one of my values, one of my life philosophies.

A mindset in this regard is referred to as a frame in social dynamics.

“In social psychology, we can define frames as a set of beliefs, morals, and perspectives with which people interpret the world, or a specific topic.”[2]

The concept of frames is also mentioned in Stephen R. Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People but is referred to as a “paradigm.”

“The word paradigm comes from the Greek. It was originally a scientific term, and is more commonly used today to mean a model, theory, perception, assumption, or frame of reference. In the more general sense, it’s the way we “see” the world—not in terms of our visual sense of sight, but in terms of perceiving, understanding, interpreting.”[3]

This is important to understand, because mindsets and frames go hand-in-hand for success at networking. All of our behaviors stem from our mindsets, because it’s hard to act outside of our beliefs. For example, if one of your frames is that networking is a complete waste of time and that money is the only way people can get to their goals, your actions will align with that frame and your success rate in networking will go down. Your belief, moral, and perspective with which you interpret the topic of networking isn’t conducive to success at networking. If you truly believe networking is a waste of time, it will be hard for you to act outside of that frame (that belief) and suddenly start networking like all your goals depended on it.

It’s imperative that you adopt the mindsets and frames that are good for your networking goals. We each have many different frames that we interpret everything through. Those frames can be split into two categories: our frames on how things are (“realities”) and our frames of how things should be (“values”). Two frames that you will commonly find on your networking journey are collaborative frames and competitive frames.

When people network within a competitive frame, they are networking with the belief that they have to look out for number one. The lens they use interprets life as a game, a race, a competition. They have to either win it or suffer the consequences that come with losing.[4]

When people network within a collaborative frame, they believe in creating win-win situations. Their frame (the lens they use to view the world) involves benefiting everyone in the relationship and interaction. In other words, they approach networking with the belief that “more for you means more for me, as well.”

People who network within a competitive frame don’t see things this way. They are influenced by the fixed-pie bias, which is basically the idea that “the more they win, the less there is left for me.” Even if their frame of how things should be (values) is that they should be more collaborative, their frame of how things are (realities) leads them to do more taking or else they will “suffer the consequences of losing.”

Chris Voss, a former FBI hostage negotiator, says, “Everything in life is a negotiation.”[5] The collaborative frame allows you to negotiate for what you want while keeping your eye on ways that you can make the pie bigger for everyone in the process.[6]

Let’s take an example that pulls all these ideas together. Let’s say you hold a competitive frame while meeting a professional in your industry. Throughout the duration of the entire interaction, your mindset is: what can I gain from this person?

Eventually, he asks you what your goals are. You let him know some of the things that you’re working toward and he asks you how he can help support you. He inquires as to how he can help you reach your goal. You both brainstorm ideas, eventually settling on a great deal.

For the sake of this example, let’s say that this professional you’re talking to is great friends with an expert in graphic design and he’s offered to connect you two so you can improve your business cards. You let him know that his offer would be a great help and you thank him for his goodwill, but you don’t ask him about his goals. You don’t ask how you can help him. You exchange numbers and walk away, feeling good because you gained something; you won. You’re operating within a competitive frame, so there’s no incentive for you to help anyone but yourself.

Now, it is possible for you to get ahead in life using this competitive frame. The purpose of this book is to give you networking strategies that work, not a lesson on ethics and morality. This strategy could work, and has been proven to work, but only in the short-term. In the long run, you’ll be labeled as a “taker” and your behavior will breed distrust. Your actions while networking—even if you’re using so-called good human-relations techniques—will be perceived as you only looking out for yourself [7] because your reputation will precede you. Before people see you, they will see your reputation. Having the reputation of someone who is a “taker” will cause people to hesitate to befriend you and eventually diminish your success over the long run.

As we discussed earlier, perceptions are reality. Seeing a woman without a ring on the ring finger of her left hand could lead you to perceive her as unmarried. However, perceiving a married woman as unmarried doesn’t change the fact that she’s married if she actually is. In that same regard, perceiving competitive frames as superior to collaborative frames doesn’t guarantee that competitive frames are superior, especially if they lose their effectiveness over time.

So, what should you do if you have a competitive frame? You could try working on your behavior more—“you could try harder, be more diligent, double your speed. But your efforts would only succeed in getting you to the wrong place faster.”[8] This is because you still haven’t changed your lens; you’re working harder, but using the same unhelpful beliefs and mindsets. To put this a simpler way, you would be networking faster as a taker, and because you still hold a competitive frame, you would only succeed in eroding your chances of long-term success faster. You still believe you have to come out on top, and if you truly believe that, it’s illogical for you to start acting collaborative out of nowhere. Our attitudes and behaviors grow out of our assumptions, and your assumption is that you have to be number one. “The way we see things is the source of the way we think and the way we act.”[9]

“...conditioning affects our perceptions, our paradigms [frames]...what about the conditioning of a lifetime? The influences in our lives—family, school, church, work environment, friends, associates, and current social paradigms [social frames]...all have made their silent unconscious impact on us and help shape out frame of reference, our paradigms [frames]...”[10]

We’ve had our frames conditioned by society our entire lives. We are often unaware that these frames even exist until we choose to deeply examine them. To achieve sustained, lasting success, work within a collaborative frame. Keep an eye on how to make the pie bigger for everyone. Avoid the urge to take as much as you can in an interaction before walking away.

While collaboration is what I strongly recommend (since collaborative frames are superior to competitive frames in the long run), your “why” is the determining factor of which frame you decide would work best for you.

Your “why,” your reason for working hard to get better at networking, your reason for working hard to build a strong network, and your reason for wanting to achieve your goals, is important for your productivity. It is also important for your ultimate decision on what approach you want to take to networking. Your why has four different levels. [11]³:

1. Survival

- “The first level of why is survival. Let me explain what I mean by survival: Everybody who has a job that makes money is making that money why? To survive and pay bills. When people make enough money to pay their bills and cover their mandatory living expenses, some people stop there and never graduate.”

2. Status

- “The second level of why is all about status. You’ll hear people say things like, ‘You know, I want to make six figures.’ Why? Status. Or they may want a nice car, house, or to go to a good school. They want to be able to talk about having this or that. This is all about keeping up with the Joneses. Status is still lightweight, but it’s better than survival.”

3. Freedom

- “The third level of why is freedom. People may say, ‘You know what? I’m so sick and tired of six figures. Man, I want to be free. I want to make money. I’m not worried about working hard, I want to make money and I want to have freedom. I want to have some breathing room. What do I need to do to have breathing room?’ They may want to live in a particular community because they want their kids to be able to play outside and not have to worry about them. Or they may want to have a big backyard so their kids can run around and play safely.”

4. Purpose

- “The highest level is purpose. Now what are we talking about with purpose? Some people say, ‘My why is to one day own a football team.’ That’s still empty. Is that really the purpose of making millions or billions of dollars? No. There’s got to be a bigger purpose. So how does one go from survival, status, freedom, to purpose? What is truly your purpose? What’s your purpose? What is the bigger picture? When your why is purpose, you know what you’re driven by. But that doesn’t happen overnight. As the saying goes, sometimes on the way to a dream, you get lost and find a bigger one. A bigger dream. It takes time, patience, self-discovery, and experience. You think it was all about the car. You think it was all about the recognition. You think it was all about the fame. You think it was all about the status. You think it was all about landing that girl. You think it’s all about all these other things, but it’s much bigger than that. Then all of a sudden, one day you have a conversation with somebody or watch a video or a movie, or you meet someone and boom; it just hits you in the face, and you realize what you were put on this planet to do. Now you’re talking purpose.”

To illustrate my point, if your “why” is survival and you only care to do well enough in life to get by, maybe you don’t care about the long term. In that case, you might read this book and walk away with the decision to hold a competitive frame and maybe that frame will help you achieve that goal. After all, the takers of this world make money, too. But for anyone who has a why any level above survival, networking within a collaborative frame is the most effective and beneficial mindset for the achievement of your goals.

When you know your why, and you’ve decided on your frame of choice, you can start networking with more intention and clarity on your approach. But even though your networking is intentional (because you know your why) and strategic (because you have clarity on what frame you’re networking with), that doesn’t mean you’ll be networking confidently.

Being a confident networker is important. We already established how important it is to be perceived as high-power. A strong indicator of who is the most powerful in an interaction or a group is whoever the leader is. Powerful people lead. It’s uncommon to see weak people with low self-esteem who are also effective and influential leaders. Your typical powerful leader is usually confident in themselves and has a healthy ego. That means if you want to be perceived as powerful, you need to be (or at the very least, appear to be) confident while you’re networking.

In society, people tend to make the mistake of conflating confidence and self-esteem. The two are often (incorrectly) used interchangeably. Confidence is your trust in a single ability. In other words, where I could be confident in my ability to cook, I may not be confident in my skydiving abilities, because I’ve never skydived before. Self-esteem is defined by how highly you value yourself. If you don’t respect or love yourself very much, you would be defined as having low self-esteem. What you need to understand is that because most people see confidence and self-esteem as the same thing, by developing your self-esteem, you will be perceived as more of a high-quality man and as a confident networker.

Being a confident networker doesn’t just help you appear more powerful; it also helps you appear as though you have been networking for a long time. Since confidence is your trust in a single ability, if you are confident while networking, people will see that you trust your ability to network and begin to see you as having more authority in the art and field of networking. This is definitely an added benefit, because authority helps build your networking success.

Once again, “The principle of authority states that we are (much) more likely to listen to someone when we perceive them as having authority. Especially if we’re dealing in his field of supposed expertise[12].” When you introduce yourself with confidence, build relationships with confidence, and use effective networking strategies that show you know what you’re doing, people perceive you as having authority in networking. This gives the impression that you’ve networked many times before and leads them to believe that you are high-power. After all, if you meet someone who always knows the right thing to say and networks like they’ve done it a thousand times before, chances are you would wonder how big their network is and what kind of connections they have.

This is the effect you have on others when you’re networking with high self-esteem and sound networking strategies. They take you more seriously. They may even wonder what kinds of powerful connections you might have to be so confident while building professional relationships with people you have never met before. But it all starts with having the high self-esteem of a high-quality man.

To gain this power, you must develop the traits “He Generates His Own Self-Esteem” and “He Has a Growth Mindset” that high-quality men have. You must cultivate an antifragile ego.⁴

“Antifragile, as defined by Nassim Taleb, doesn’t mean strong and it’s not even a synonym of strong. ‘Strong’ is defined by its breaking point, while antifragile means that the more you attack it, the stronger it gets[13].” To generate a self-esteem that doesn’t rely on external forces and circumstances that are always in your favor, you must build an identity that is antifragile and derive your self-esteem from that identity[14].

“Most of us form our self-esteem around two typical identities and one event. The first identity is being good at something (meaning: their ego/identity is ‘I’m good at X’); the second is ‘being good in general’ (meaning: ‘I’m a great fella’). The event is usually achieving a certain goal (meaning: getting that job, making X money, sleeping with that person etc.). Being good at X becomes a bit like adopting a fixed mindset. You start becoming defensive about your defining qualities, because failing at them would mean showing, to you and to others, that you are not good after all. That means that you get worried about failing. That means you stop experimenting, and trying and learning and growing. That means you slowly start building your own mental straight jacket. Not good. And what if something happens and you’re not good anymore? Or if you have to switch fields, or a bunch of new and more skilled people enter the scene? Identity crisis! The solution?”[15]

“When you build your ego around antifragile qualities you shield yourself from plateauing and from ever becoming defensive of the status quo. Here are some examples of antifragile identities:

● I’m an eternal learner

● I go for it and do my best no matter the situation

● Winning is great, but the real art, poetry, and beauty is in the struggle

● My worst moments are my best learning experiences (and fuel to achieve more)

● I love reality, even when it’s not good. Especially when it’s not good

● I’m a gritty mofo and I never stop

See what the beauty of these is? The more difficulties you throw at them, the more chances you have to validate yourself. Your pride grows when you move forward. These identities you pick for yourself are aligned with eternal self-development (and greatly increase the likelihood of your success).”[16]

You have to be willing to fail to learn. You have to be willing to learn to grow. You grow in order to become the kind of person capable of achieving their goals, but it all starts with being willing to fail. Now, that doesn’t mean that your antifragile ego will make failing totally painless; failing still hurts. But now you’ll have the self-esteem to get up and go again.

The antifragile ego is connected to networking in more ways than just how people perceive you. The antifragile ego helps you understand and internalize that networking is an art form. It takes practice, just like any other art form. There will be moments in networking where you don’t succeed in building that relationship or connection you wanted, but now you can detach your identity from always needing to win. You will have more personal and mental power than those who must win to protect their ego and feel good about themselves.

Achieving “the good life”—achieving health, wealth, love, and happiness—requires self-development. Self-development demands you grow as a person. Growth requires learning lessons, and learning lessons requires failure.

Whenever I’m afraid to send an email to a top-dog in my niche or cold-call a celebrity, I think to myself, “I take pride not in doing things perfectly, but in having the courage to do it even when it’s far from perfect.”[17] Then, I send that email and I make that call. As a result, many of the people whom I connected with were surprised I had the confidence to reach out to them without the help of a mutual friend introducing me. Little did they know, it wasn’t confidence. It was high self-esteem and a healthy ego.

I used the antifragile ego to work on my progress toward becoming a high-quality man. Throughout my personal journey to becoming a high-quality man, when I worked on the action steps in the last chapter, I realized that I needed to work on my personality. I wanted a personality that was masculine, because I wanted to be and feel like a “real man.” Not having a father figure as a good role model for most of my life, I did my own research on what it took to become a man. I began by searching for a deeper understanding of masculinity through my exploration of male psychology.⁵

“The age-old concepts of masculinity involve being abusive or domineering. But mature masculinity is instead generative, creative, and empowering of the self and others. The four mature male archetypes that stand out through myth and literature across history are: the king (the energy of just and creative ordering), the warrior (the energy of aggressive but nonviolent action), the magician (the energy of initiation and transformation), and the lover (the energy that connects one to others and the world).”[18]

“The King is the ‘executive’, mature masculine personality. It makes the decisions and is grounded in his own reality – he serves as a rock in times of trouble. Men that have fully developed The King archetype of masculinity live with integrity, protect their kingdom (friends, family, etc.), and bless others. He also embodies creative energy, with a joy so strong that he wants to share it with others.”[19]

“The Lover is not merely concerned with sex, however—The Lover, in its fullness, has a deep love for life itself. Love for family, for friends, for food, for reading, for activity and for progression; the Lover is passionate in whatever he does. The Lover is sensual, and enjoys all types of (healthy) pleasure; good food and drink, beautiful art, poetry, songs, sex, and others.”[20]

“The Magician is the masculine personality that deals with knowledge and wisdom. The Magician personality manifests itself when you try to solve a problem, introspect, or improve your life with knowledge. The Magician is the master of technology and of mastery; he enjoys gaining new skills and knowledge not only so that he can better his life, but also because he simply enjoys expanding his mind.”[21]

“The Warrior personality is that assertive, aggressive, masculine energy that wants to conquer things and further its cause. The Warrior manifests itself when you hustle and struggle to improve yourself; he is the personality of purpose. (Without the Warrior archetype in its fullness, you cannot embody your masculine purpose.)”[22]

At the time, I was working on developing the Warrior archetype of masculinity. I started taking cold showers to improve my mental discipline and strength of will (struggling to improve myself). The problem was, I would turn on the water and then second guess stepping inside to put myself through that immense physical torment. To gain the strength I needed, I would shut my brain off, jump in, and as the cold water cascaded over my body I would say to myself, “I am proud of myself every time I show up to a difficult situation because I am able to prove and validate to myself my strength of character while growing my personal power.”[23]

With that antifragile identity in mind, I was able to resist the immense urge to reach for the temperature knob and develop a consistent cold shower habit, finishing my cold showers strong and emotionally rewarding myself after stepping out to a bathroom that was warmer outside the shower than inside.

Now that we’ve established the topics of frames and the self-esteem of a high-quality man more in-depth, we can transition into another important part of your mindset: motivation.

Having the ability to stay motivated to complete and achieve your goals with your “why” in mind is important for your productivity, success, and inner feelings of fulfillment. To do that, find what motivates you and use it to your advantage to bring out the best in yourself. Here is a list of the twenty things that motivate people, separated into four categories:[24]⁶