The frontman and the two ways to pick your trench mate | Insider’s tricks on assembling your support team
Have you ever though about the people you are surrounded by and how they came into your life?
Did you choose them or did you allow circumstances to choose them for you?
In this 67 steps program lesson, Tai Lopez explains the importance of choosing the right people in your life and how picking the wrong ones can cause major set backs.
How to assemble your support team
Let’s take a look at Warren Buffett for example, he understands that choosing the right people for the right job is so detrimental that he has a system which he follows to hire people for his companies.
Here are the main three attributes Warren Buffett looks for in his hires:
1 — Energy
2 — Intelligence
3 — Integrity
How about you, what traits do you look for when choosing your friends, teammates, partner? Have you even thought about that?
Take audit of your own life
In order to get a real understanding of how you made your choices and how they affected you, you must start auditing your life as well as those who you are surrounded by.
For example, as I took an audit of my life and friends I made along the way, I realized that most of my female friends were not loyal and in fact, always tried to be in competition with me.
However, what I never realized is they were just competitors by nature, it wasn’t a personal attack against me. With that in mind, I made the decision that I no longer wanted to have friends that were highly competitive in every aspect of life.
Not that there is anything wrong with being highly competitive, my preference just leans more towards team work rather than competition so I started setting guidelines and start paying attention to the signs people give.
Because people always gives you signs of who they truly are, you just have to be ready to catch them. They usually come in forms of jokes, indirect comments, body language; pay attention and you will see how people give themselves away very easily.
But how do you go about choosing who stays in your life and who goes?
How about choosing someone who isn’t in constant competition with you? How about choosing someone who is going to have your back and help you improve rather than the one who will constantly be setting traps so they can be on top?
If you are at war, you don’t want your battle buddy to be in competition with you and end up shooting at you instead of shooting at the enemy. From now on, be sure that the people that are on your side are not competing with you.
The best way to make sure of that is by picking people who are strong where you are weak, and weak where you are strong. People who’s ego are so high that they have the need to prove they are better than you.
The real trick is finding out who the person really is.
As you first meet a person, you won’t be able to see any fallacies, it is said that it takes about a year to discover someone’s true character and values.
Tai provides two different approaches on how to find that out so you can make a decision based on facts rather than just feelings or circumstances.
Approach A is used by the billionaire Charlie Munger. When Charlie Munger wants to hire someone, he never relies on a interview. Why? Because humans are vey good at hiding who they really are. Take actors, for example, they can easily incorporate a different character.
For that very reason, Munger is very adamant about interviewing referrals and not the ones that are provided by the interviewee. He takes time to dig a little bit deeper in order to find references that will be able to relay exactly who the person is.
On the other hand, approach B consists more of a direct approach and it is slow and steady. Considering it takes about a year for a person to show it’s true colors, approach B analyzes how the person reacts and acts in certain occasions.
Take this example, a company looking to hire a CEO takes a candidate to dinner and observes them to see how many thanks he/she gives to the people around such as waiter, driver. If the minimum amount of thanks expected aren’t said, then the person does not get hired.
Why? Because if the person cannot be grateful towards others that are working hard to make sure his experience is a great one, then he is not best suited for the position of a leader.
You see, observation takes time but understand that people will always show you who they are if you are willing to take time to pay attention. It isn’t that you are judging a book by its cover but rather that you are judgments are based on observation and only through analyzation can you make the determination whether or not that book will bring you any value.
Finally, remember that if you don’t set guidelines and keep them, circumstances you will bring you all kinds of people, including those you don’t want in your life.
Books Mentioned in this step:
Working Together: Why Great Partnerships Succeed by Michael D. Eisner
