Do you know how to find the most important person in any room?
Most of us would agree that we can learn something from anyone we meet, right? Attempting to argue that point would probably leave you looking like a real jerk.
We’ll say that… then we’ll ignore the next person we have an opportunity to strike up a conversation with.
And we’ve all been ignored at one time or another.
Have you ever been talking to someone who’s always scoping the room while they pretend to be paying attention to you? That’s annoying.
It doesn’t matter if you’re at a party, a networking event, an after-work gathering, or even a friendly neighborhood cookout—there’s always someone looking for someone, ahem, more beneficial to be visiting with. You know, someone they view as mort important.
I try to keep myself in check with some go-to questions.
I also write a weekly post on LinkedIn that I call “This Week’s ESSENTIAL QUESTION.” The questions are thought provokers that keep us headed in the right direction. One recent question was, “Am I giving my attention to the right people?”
That post was inspired by a quote I read during my morning online time-wasting ritual (Take that, hustlers!). Here goes…
“The SMARTEST dude you know and the RICHEST dude you know are not the same person.”— Shared by Antonio Neves, author and entrepreneur
(Please pardon the gender-specific pronoun… hey, it’s a quote).
A lot of us make assumptions like that without even thinking about it, don’t we? We use the same faulty thinking in other ways too. Try this version…
“The SMARTEST person in the room and the person doing all the TALKING are not the same person.” Also true.
We tend to make assumptions like these all the time.
If we’re not careful, we can find ourselves connecting all sorts of dots that aren’t meant to be connected. Radio talk show host, Dr. Dean Edel, used to love to point this out saying something along the lines of, “90% of all people involved in a car accident ate vegetables in the week prior.” Clearly, not a cause and effect relationship, is it?
So, be careful the dots you connect.
The point I’m trying to make is it’s worth checking ourselves on the value we unwittingly accredit to others. It begins with whom we give our attention to at most any gathering.
A better approach is to have a what can I give to this person mindset and leave those what can I get from this person tactics behind.
Maybe it goes all the way back to high school when most of us were desperate to find our way in with the cool kids, but never quite made it. And we never gave up hope, did we?
Well, that was a very long time ago. A time better left in the past. Sigh.
I’ll close with a good thought to keep in mind…
I was attending an internet marketing conference a few years back where getting to know new people was a huge part of the event. Internet entrepreneur, Stu McLaren gave us this tip on how to find the best people to talk to…
“There’s no one better to talk to than the person you’re talking to right now” — Stu McLaren
Sounds like sage advice, doesn’t it?
I look forward to chatting with you someday!
Be untucked.
p.s. Thanks for dropping by LifeUntucked®… If you found this post helpful be sure to share it with a friend. I owe you one…
Copyright © 2021 Jeff Meister – All Rights Reserved
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