This YouTube video (Lauren Bateman, July 24, 2024) offers practical advice for connecting with influential people: identify and understand their problems, assess whether you have skills to solve those problems, learn to "speak their language," build relationships (including via intermediaries), and be willing to offer help for free to create goodwill and future opportunities.
When you're trying to level up and you're trying to reach out to people like Lauren, how do you work for someone like Elena Cardone? And you have to start speaking their language. You have to start, one, understanding what are their problems. Do I have something to solve someone's problem? Two, do you have the skill set to help them? And if the answer is yes, then you need to start speaking their language. And you need to start building relationships with either people that know these people. You might not be able to get to the top right away. I had to work through this relationship through other people, and I kind of worked my way up the ladder by helping lots of other people for free. So sometimes doing things for free, don't underestimate it. You never know where that goodwill is going to lead. So if you're trying to play a bigger game, be open to all the relationships and opportunities there are in life, because you never know where one relationship's going to lead into the next.
