Would you like to increase the amount of influence you have and do it in a way that feels good and will have everyone celebrating you as someone who's a person of goodwill? If this sounds intriguing to you, you've got to join me on this edition of The Inside BS Show. Hey now, I'm Dave Lorenzo. I'm the Godfather of Growth and today I'm giving you my three big takeaways from the great book, Give and Take, written by Adam Grant.

That's right, today we're talking about the three things that I use every day in my business and in my life that I learned from the book, Give and Take, by Adam Grant. We're going to dive right into these three huge takeaways from this book. The first is that there are three types of people that you're going to meet in the business world, three types of people.

There are takers, matchers, and givers. And the takers, as you can imagine, are always out for themselves. They're going through life with a catcher's mitt on both hands.

They're out there looking for what they can get for themselves and for their business first and foremost. And business is a game where you need to provide value, you need to provide a return on the investment of your time and your money to your shareholders. 100% true.

But the way to do it is by looking to help people in a selfless way. You will hear me talk about this all the time as having an external orientation. The first thing you need to do is think to yourself, how can I help the person that's in front of me? What problem can I help solve for them? What goal can I help them achieve? If you think that way and you act that way, you will be considered a giver.

Now, if you're the kind of person who goes into those relationships thinking, I'm going to give to Mr. Jones because Mr. Jones knows five people that he can give to me, you're probably a matcher. And matchers are not horrible, but they don't do as well as givers. Now, the worst thing you can be is a taker.

You connect with Mr. Jones and you say to Mr. Jones, hey, Mr. Jones, you should buy my product because it's going to be good for you in this way, in this way, and in this way. Now, that may seem like a normal sales approach, but a better approach would be, hey, Mr. Jones, what's the thing that's keeping you up at night? What's the biggest problem you're facing? Let me help you solve that problem and develop a relationship with you that way. And then once you develop that relationship, down the road, you can sell something to Mr. Jones afterwards.

The giver approach, the last one I just described, is the one that's going to make the most sense. And here's how you determine who's going to be the next big relationship for you. I'm going to tell you the story of Jane.

Jane is the CEO of a business and she spends a lot of her time. She works in a software as a service company. She's the CEO of a SaaS company.

And what she does is she mentors people in startups all the time. She selflessly gives advice. She speaks at conferences.

She volunteers for SCORE. She does a number of different things to put value out into the world. And when she does this, she's often given the opportunity to speak at conferences.

Now, she doesn't get paid for speaking at these conferences. How did this pay off for Jane? Well, one day, she seemingly got an offer out of the blue for someone to invest in her company and essentially help her double the size of the company. This investor not only wanted to put money into her company, but wanted to introduce her to another company that could be acquired.

He made the investment, made the introduction. Jane's company doubled as a result of that acquisition. And the whole thing came because this investor was on a panel with Jane at a speaking engagement that she volunteered to do for tech startups.

Jane, by being a giver, received this opportunity. Now, the ancillary benefit to being a giver is that you're known as a person of goodwill. You're known as somebody that wants to help people.

You're known as somebody that gives back to others selflessly. When you do that, people want to be around you. You're magnetic.

If you're a matcher, people know that you're expecting a quid pro quo. As a giver, you have this external orientation and you tell people, I am thrilled to do this for you because I know down the road somehow it'll come back to me. The universe will provide.

And that is exactly what happens. People want to be in your presence. They want to connect with you.

They want to give back to you because they see you as a giver. I've received some of the best opportunities ever in my career from people to whom I had given nothing, but from whom I had heard that they thought I was a person of goodwill because I had done something nice for somebody they know. Being a giver makes all the difference.

Being a taker is definitely not something you want. You don't want that reputation. I'm not even going to spend any more time on being a taker.

Being a matcher is okay, but you don't want the reputation of being a matcher. Be a giver and set boundaries on your giving. And what do I mean by setting boundaries on your giving? Set aside 10 to 20 percent of your time to give to others and then 80 percent of your time is spent doing whatever it is you do, your regular job.

But 10 to 20 percent of your time as a giver, that's where the boundary lies and expect nothing in return and be surprised happily when you get something back. The second concept from Adam Grant's book, Give and Take, that I love and I follow regularly is the concept of the five-minute favor. I set aside one hour of my time each day just to do random acts of kindness, random five-minute favors in a business setting for people.

Now, I'm not talking about leaving the change in the vending machine. I'm not talking about going through the McDonald's drive-through and paying for the person behind you. I'm not talking about giving a $100 bill to the person in Dunkin' Donuts and saying, buy $100 worth of coffee for everybody who comes in today until it runs out.

Those things are all great and those are good things for you to do in life in general. And those are random acts of kindness to normal everyday people. In business, the five-minute favor goes something like this.

You wake up tomorrow morning and you allot your first hour of the day to doing five-minute favors. What does this mean? You have a list of people who you're going to write LinkedIn recommendations for. Maybe you do five LinkedIn recommendations and then you have a list of businesses that you patronized over the last week and you're going to write five Yelp reviews for those businesses.

And then after you write those five LinkedIn recommendations and those five Yelp reviews for businesses, you're going to call up three people and you're going to say, who can I connect you with that would change everything for you? And you're going to make those email introductions. Each of those favors only takes five minutes and you're going to spend one hour doing consecutive five-minute favors. So you're going to do six or 10 five-minute favors over the course of an hour and then you're going to go about your day and spend the rest of your day doing whatever you want.

Here's the reason why that's important. You do this for one month and you will get a reputation of being a generous, kind person who wants to help people. Those five-minute favors will come back to you 10 times over because people will go out of their way to help you because you'll be known as a kind, generous person.

In addition, you're putting good karma out into the world, into the business world where we need it the most. Those five-minute favors accumulate over time. If you do this for two months, three months, six months, or a year, you will completely transform your reputation in the business world.

You could be the person who has been the most ruthless, kick-in-the-butt business owner. If you do this for six months, everybody will say, this person has changed. This person completely now focuses on other people.

They want to give. They're the kind of person I want to be around. That's the bottom line.

By giving to others, you become more magnetic. The five-minute favor is an easy way for you to become known as a kind, generous person because you will be. Doing 10 five-minute favors a day is an incredible way for you to become known as a kind, generous person.

The third thing that I took away from Adam Grant's phenomenal book, Give and Take, that I want to share with you is the strength of weak ties. The strength of weak ties. Here's the theory and the reason that it works.

If you ask someone you know really well for an introduction to someone else, there's a pretty good chance that you and that person have a lot of overlap in your networks. Somebody who's a running buddy of yours, somebody who's in business with you, they know the same people that you know. If you ask someone who you know just as an acquaintance for an introduction, they will have met you, had a conversation with you, and hopefully will have liked you.

Now you're asking them for an introduction to someone. They're going to know people that you don't know. Their networks are different from your networks.

Their network is not going to have an overlap with yours. Because you're an acquaintance of theirs and they value you as a person, they're going to want to try to help you out. It's not like you're asking a stranger for something.

You're asking a casual acquaintance for something. That casual acquaintance is going to bend over backwards to help you because they're going to want to become a better friend to you. Their networks are not going to have an overlap with yours.

This is the strength of weak ties. It is incredibly powerful. Adam Grant in the book describes his research behind it.

I've proven it in my real life. I've gone back to people that I went to college with 30 years later, 25, 30 years later, and I've reconnected with them, rekindled the relationship, and 10 minutes into the conversation I've said to them, hey, by the way, since you work in this industry, I have a business opportunity for somebody who does these three things. Do you know someone? These people bend over backwards to try and make introductions for me.

Why? Because we remembered one another. We knew we were people of goodwill. Our networks didn't overlap and they want to help me.

More importantly, they want to help the person in their network and they think I can be valuable to them. The strength of weak ties is your third key takeaway. It's incredibly valuable.

The final thing I want to say about this book, Give and Take by Adam Grant, is if you're in business and you haven't read this book two or three times, you need to get to work because this is by far the best book on networking because it focuses on having an external orientation, being a giver, connecting with people first, delivering value, deepening relationships, and then building those relationships into business opportunities. That's what this is all about. Become a giver.

Don't focus on taking. Focus on giving. Give and you will become a person of extreme influence.

My name is Dave Lorenzo. I am the Godfather of Growth and I'm here every day with you at 6 a.m. Please join me again tomorrow. Until then, here's hoping you make a great living and live a great life.