It Takes A Network - Your Personal Flywheel for Success

The mid-way point of Q1 is here and we wanted to kick off our 11th year of Branches & Roots by following through on our promise to deliver the best information we have on a series of topics that will allow you and your teammates to increase their individual competency which can then hopefully be woven together to help you in your joint mission of collective success. 

It takes a network – Your personal flywheel for success. 

The adage that “it is who you know not what you know” may take on some new importance as generative AI starts to eat into the relevancy of what we know. However, with the AI timing variable still hard to quantify it might be more appropriate to focus on having definable skills and making an impact in the lives of those you care about in equal parts. 

A personal interest and strength in competitive golf allowed Sara and I to spend long periods of time with interesting people early in our lives, which helped us get to know a diverse range of people earlier than most of our peers.

LinkedIn came along in the early 2000’s right when we were both relaunching our post professional golf careers, and this took the power of Metcalf’s law of networks and made it more transparent and approachable. 

Venture Capital firms and their partners who were playing power law games quickly learned the power of being well networked and even Reid Hoffman a self-proclaimed introvert wrote about the power of good network in his first book “The Start-up of You”.

Once we founded Banyan in 2013 and had full autonomy on what we could publish, we have tried to memorialize what we have learned and have identified best practices for building solid and mutually beneficial relationships. 

You can find an in-depth look at the business lunch with “50 Lunches a Year, that will change your Career”
We have a short overview of how to create a business oriented network here.

We created two short email courses for college students at www.drewsanders.com to help them understand that the point of education is action as much as it is knowledge as their potential employers are hoping they might do something vs just think. 

We also self-published a 100 page book called the Next Gen Almanac for new college graduates that outlines the recipe we learned from others along the way about the power of a meaningful shared experience. 

• SE=C=T=Joint Success
• SE stands for shared experiences.
• C stands for a window into your character.
• T stands for Trust.
• The formula is perfect for young people who want to do well, but don't know where to start. 
• This is when we share with them the power of pitching in or giving back to a cause they care about.
• One of the natural byproducts of helping out is that you meet other people who have the same interests, and your relationships build quickly in that environment. 
• Here is a quick how-to on community service.

All of these resources represent just how much we have learned and benefited by being in relation with and helping others and watching the good will of others be contagious. 

The most frequent conversation we have had in the first 45 days is to encourage people to write about the pains they are solving in their work and publish it on LinkedIn or a blog. Take the people involved out of it and focus on the issue at hand and the process followed for success.  There is very little intellectual property in most industries, just hard work and tactical empathy applied to a problem. 

It may seem counterintuitive to give it away, but our experience has shown that is a best practice. 

If you have a young person in their 20’s who you think might benefit from these resources, please forward this email to them and if they complete one of the email courses (it’s only 8 emails) I will meet with them for 30 minutes via a video call and discuss their answers to the questions provided. 

Have a great rest of Q1 and we will check back in early April. 

Thank you for your readership and friendship. 
​
Drew & Sara

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