Estimated reading time: 3 minutes

It’s Only Common Sense: Don’t Burn Those Bridges

In sales (and in life, for that matter) you are only as good as your friends and co-workers. You are only as strong as your affiliations. You have to be willing to work with everyone if you are going to be successful life. So, with that in mind, embrace every bridge you have and never, ever burn those bridges.

“Allow me to be generous” is my philosophy, and it has served me well. I believe that if you go out of your way to help people in general, and your business associates specifically, you will never go hungry. That if you “pay it forward,” as the popular phrase goes, good things will always come back to you.

Harry Truman once said. “It is amazing how much you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit,” and nothing could be truer. If we all look out for one another and try to help one another, good things happen. They always have and always will. It’s simply a matter of “allowing me to be generous.”

Although I have been living by this credo for more years than I care to remember, with the onset of social media, networking has become big business. What I always considered a nice, natural and normal enterprise has now become an art, and a science. Networking has become a formal subject that is being taught in business classes! There are all kinds of books and seminars covering the right way to network, whom to network with, how to participate in a network, how to create a network, how to grow your network, and how to get the most out of your network.

I think this is all well and good and I encourage everyone to learn everything they can about being a great networker. But I’m somewhat bemused at how networking, which I always took for granted as the right thing to do, has become a business strategy, even more of a business tactic to get what you want out of people. To me this should only be common sense (sorry, it just fits so well here). It should be something that we learned from our parents, something that has always been the right thing to do.

I refer back to my old favorite book, Rev. Robert Fulghum’s All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten. Fulghum explains how all of the things we learned when we were five years old still apply today. In fact, in terms of social behavior, by the time we were six years old we had been taught everything we would need to know to be successful in life.

Look, the new books are great; there is nothing wrong with picking up some new tools and tips. Social media is fine, a wonderful way to put people together. But is any of this really new? Is there anything that will change the way we interact or should interact with people?

So, here I will list my 10 simple rules for connecting and working with people, also known as networking:

1. Treat others as you want to be treated.
2. Allow me to be generous. Let me help you in any way that I can.
3. Let’s not keep score. I am happy to help you without limitations.
4. Feel free to share, especially ideas, people and opportunities.
5. Trust people until they prove you wrong and then re-trust them if they express remorse for having been untrustworthy.
6. Every time you meet a new person, think about what you could do for them.
7. Every time you meet a new person, think about what they could do for someone you know.
8. Never expect anything in return, except maybe the warm comfort of knowing that you did the right thing.
9. Never stop connecting people you know if they can help one another.
10. Never look at life as a zero-sum game. Instead, look at it this way: if someone you know wins, you all win. And in the spirit of underpromising and overdelivering:
11. Avoid having enemies. If you do for some reason find yourself with an enemy, turn that enemy into a friend. Having enemies is counter-productive. A friend of mine gave me this quote the other day: “Holding a grudge is like drinking poison and thinking it will hurt the person you are holding a grudge against.” If you find yourself with an enemy one day, do something nice for that person. It will confuse the hell out of them and put a smile on your face.

So, what rules do you live by? You need to think about this…a lot. It’s only common sense.