What’s in It for Them? is a book written by Joe Polish and published in 2022. It focuses on networking and helping others succeed in order to achieve one’s own goals. The book provides nine unique networking principles and explains how to use them to create strong relationships and get what one wants from those connections.
The book also includes stories from Joe’s own life and experience to illustrate the different principles.
3 Big Ideas from What’s in It for Them?
People want to connect. People want to feel special and cared about. People want to feel appreciated. People want to have their problems solved. And if you’re a person who cares about others and can solve their problems, there’s no limit to what you can accomplish or the peace and joy you can find in your own existence.
To build deep connections with others be useful, grateful, and valuable. These are the foundations of strong relationships. It starts as an awareness in your mind of other people’s needs, wants, and pains, and it continues with identifying what you could add to an interaction to address or alleviate those things.
Connecting with people requires a balance of trust, rapport, and comfort. Rapport is trust plus comfort. Trust is comfort plus time. Deep trust can only be established over time because time proves a person’s reliability.
Trust, Rapport, and Comfort
To connect with people, you need a balance of trust, rapport, and comfort. Rapport is the ultimate goal and is achieved through developing trust and comfort. Comfort means someone feels at ease with you, while trust requires time to prove reliability.
Everyone knows people prefer to do business within strong relationships. The unanswered question was always exactly how to build those relationships.
Ask yourself these two questions
- How can I be more useful, grateful, and valuable to my company, to my clients, to my community, and to my family?
- How am I NOT being useful, grateful, valuable, and attentive to the same group of people?
Investing just 10 or 15 minutes on those exact questions will lead to countless new ideas and opportunities to be a better person.
How are they suffering? How can you help?
To be better at life and relationships, learn to ask, “How are they suffering, and how can I help?”
Before you can identify and help people who are suffering, you have to know what you’re looking for. In brief, suffering is pain. Suffering can be physical, emotional, mental, or spiritual
Question for you:
What is the source of your most persistent suffering? Think about something in your life that has frustrated or challenged you for a long time—why is this still causing pain?
To connect with others
- Be genuinely curious
- Sell yourself authentically
- Communicate or connect instead of escaping
- Focus on the other person’s suffering and offer empathy and solutions.
Be useful, grateful, and valuable
The specifics can change, but in virtually any situation, being useful, grateful, and valuable are the three keys to connecting with others—and they never depreciate or go out of style.
The secret is to know what will make you seem useful, grateful, or valuable to someone in any given situation. It’s being tuned in and attentive!
While your utility has a lot to do with what you can bring to the table in terms of skills, it really begins with being concerned and conscientious—with caring about other people.
It starts as an awareness in your mind of other people’s needs, wants, and pains, and it continues with identifying what you could add to an interaction to address or alleviate those things.
It also involves true listening, which not everyone knows how to do.
Three connection skills to master
- Active listening.
- Empathize and don’t overwhelm.
- Offer solutions that are simple to execute.
Givers tend to be very grateful—and what’s interesting is that the more you give, the more your gratitude seems to grow. Think about it: How often is the most grateful person in the room also the most valuable person in the room or the most useful? How often is the most useful person the most valuable?
