Ramit Sethi and Tim Ferriss explain how to actually reach busy people: research them first, show what's in it for them, not you, and offer concrete value like free work. One person got introduced to Tim by editing Ramit's videos for free.
Here's what. In my opinion, when you want to meet someone, the first question is, why do you want to meet them? A lot of times we get intoxicated by the idea of, I want to meet Oprah. Well, why? What's the point of that? Sometimes you just know, though, you know, like this person is interesting and I bet we have stuff to talk about. The first thing I would say is put yourself in their mind. If you're trying to meet Oprah or Tim Ferriss or something like that, you got to do your homework. What is it that someone. Somebody really busy wants? Stop thinking about what you want and think about what they want. And I'll give you an example. This is a great case study, applying pretty much what Tim just said. So a friend of mine wanted to meet Tim and what did he do? He went through me because I wasn't as busy as Tim, and he asked me what I wanted. He did his research, he looked up all my delicious stuff and he realized, oh, Ramit needs help editing video. And so he said, I'll help you do video and I'll help you do it for free. He offered to help me for free, which was a huge incentive for me. What is it that I'm concerned with in terms of mitigating risk? It's like paying some dude who's not going to deliver. Just wasting my time for three months. This guy said, I'll help you. I'll do it for free. In fact, here's a video that I've already done. What better way could you use to meet someone and impress them? So after I qualified him to be pretty good, then I introduced him to Tim. And I'll just say that he didn't ask for anything upfront. He certainly didn't ask for anything that would require a lot of time. But. But he spent time researching what I needed. And then he showed himself to be a cool guy. He showed a couple people he had in common. And then it turned out that Tim and I were in common too. So I would just reiterate what you said. Don't go to someone when you need something. Do it a year or ideally two or three years before. And the other thing is, make sure you're interesting too. There's a lot of people who want to meet and they're just like, oh, yeah, we should grab coffee. There's like 50 people who want to do that a week. So hopefully you have something in your portfolio, whether it's a blog or anything that will get people to be interested in chatting with you. Because I bet there is something interesting. You just have to figure out how to represent it.
The other thing that I like to point out, I'm not going to mention by name, but the same guy has been very specific. Yes, okay, so it wasn't hey, let's meet up. I'll do anything to help. I just need you to give me direction in my life. That is a scary email to get because it's like can you please be my free consultant for life or therapist for life even worse. Instead it's like hey, you seemed like you could have needed this and this. Or I saw in your comments on this post and in Delicious that people were asking for this. I just went ahead and did it. Here's a link. No hard feelings if you don't use it.
I just went ahead and did it is the sweetest words that I can hear.
