Chapter 24: How to Reach the Unreachable

Larry Gagosian once had dinner at Marc Jacobs's apartment in Paris. A few days later he called about two paintings he'd noticed on the wall. Jacobs named a price: $11 million. Gagosian made a handful of calls, closed the deal, and wired the money within three days, pocketing roughly $2 million for an evening of conversation.

Befriend the Rich and Powerful

Lyndon Johnson understood this before he had a dollar to his name. At thirty-one, three years into the House, he had less than $1,000 in the bank. Then he befriended Charles Marsh, who "loved Lyndon like a son" and offered to sign over oil properties worth roughly $12 million in today's dollars, for nothing down. That is what rich friends do. They hand you fortunes because they like you. Johnson turned it down, wary of how oil money would look on a politician's record, and the friendship proved worth more than the wells anyway. He had given his college roommate the same advice years earlier: "The way you get ahead in the world, you get close to those that are the heads of things."

Thomas Lamont ran the same play with financiers. In 1929 his firm, J.P. Morgan & Co., was allotted shares in the new Alleghany Corporation at $20 while the public paid $35. Lamont did not keep the spread. He offered it to a private list of "friends of the firm"—former President Coolidge, Charles Lindbergh, Bernard Baruch—each invitation framed as a personal courtesy. "We just want you to know that we were thinking of you in this connection." The stock was incidental. What Lamont distributed was goodwill, and goodwill compounds.

Build a Favor File

Every enduring network runs on the same ledger, whether or not anyone writes it down. Nancy Pelosi's mother kept a literal one. The Favor File recorded every constituent request that came through her husband's office as mayor of Baltimore, tracked it until it was resolved, and noted who now owed the family loyalty.

Roy Cohn kept his in his head. When Barbara Walters's father faced an arrest warrant over unpaid taxes, one phone call to Cohn made it disappear within a week, through channels Walters never understood. "Roy was like a godfather," she said. "You do a favor for me, I do a favor for you."

Walters spent the rest of her career on the other side of that ledger. When affiliate stations dropped The View and ratings sagged, she personally called station managers in Boston, Philadelphia, Miami, and Washington to win them back, then leaned on decades of relationships to book Tom Selleck, Sylvester Stallone, and Michael J. Fox in the first week. She had been accumulating their phone numbers and their trust for years before she needed to spend any of it.

Deposits do not have to be large. Nancy Pelosi remembered the birthdays of political rivals like Bob Dole and Harry Reid with her signature white orchids every year. Dole, nearing ninety-seven, still looked forward to the delivery, and said that whatever he thought of her politics, he counted her a friend. When Norman Ornstein was sitting shiva for his son, she stayed three hours during one of the most hectic stretches of a new Congress. She could have sent a note. She came instead, and stayed. Years later the memory still brought Ornstein to tears.

Know Where to Go

In 2012 Adam Sosnick struck up a conversation with a stranger at his gym. Eight years later that stranger, Patrick Bet-David, made him second-in-command at Valuetainment. Sosnick got lucky. But he had put himself somewhere luck could find him.

Most people leave who they meet to chance. They assume connection is a matter of charm, when it is mostly a matter of geography. The people you want in your life—mentors, allies, lovers—are never distributed evenly. They cluster. They shop at certain stores, train at certain gyms, drink at certain bars, live in certain neighborhoods. Every room has a demographic, and the room you choose does more filtering than anything you will say once you are inside it. The work is less about becoming more likeable than about finding the cluster.

One room is reliable in nearly every city: the expensive gym. The membership fee does the filtering for you. Anyone who shows up consistently has the discipline to value their health; anyone who can afford it has cleared a financial bar. Many bring something better still—knowledge, connections, and a willingness to open a door for someone who reminds them of themselves. Find the most expensive gym in your city and go. Then do what Sosnick did: talk to strangers.

The Wall Is the Map

Around 1880 a teenage boy tracked down General James A. Garfield, then running for president, and asked whether it was true he had once worked as a tow boy on a canal. Garfield wrote back. The boy then wrote General Grant asking about a specific battle. Grant did more than reply: he drew a map by hand, invited the boy to dinner, and spent the evening telling him stories.

As Dale Carnegie later observed in How to Win Friends and Influence People, the boy had stumbled onto something almost no one thought to try. He read the lives of famous men, then wrote asking about their childhoods. He listened. He asked them to tell him more about themselves. That was the whole method, and it worked on a Civil War general and a future president.

The unreachable stay unreachable on purpose. Give people your number and they will take your time, so every person of consequence eventually builds a wall. The wall is not the obstacle. It's the map.

Do not aim for the person. Aim for the tier just below—the assistants, the managers, the early collaborators who form the wall. But you cannot simply show up; they do not know you yet. Study what they care about, find a real point of connection, and open there. Someone who plays competitive chess responds differently to a note about chess than to a cold pitch. Bond first. Ask later.

The easier strategy is to skip the wall by arriving before it is built. George Mack found Chris Williamson when Williamson's podcast was new, long before three million subscribers, and became his friend. Consume niche work from people who show early signs of becoming significant. Reach them while the tier below has not yet calcified, and the relationship forms between equals rather than between a supplicant and a gatekeeper.

Be a Connector

Access is the beginner's version of this game. The advanced version is becoming the node other people depend on: the one everyone turns to when they need a job, a mentor, a book, a restaurant, a sponsor, a partner. Not the one asking for the introduction, but the one who makes it.

A friend's friend should get their job through you. Someone should meet their partner through you. Every introduction is a deposit, made at almost no cost, in an account you may not draw on for a decade.

Know When to Stop Saying Yes

Early on, say yes to almost everything. You cannot yet know which connection will matter, and the cost of a wasted evening is small next to the cost of a door left closed. That math changes once you have what you want: a stable marriage, sufficient wealth, real expertise. The goal shifts from expanding the network to protecting your time, and the only invitations worth accepting are the ones that move you forward.

Almost everything in this chapter assumes you are still accumulating. Very little of it applies unchanged once you have accumulated enough. The skill is knowing which stage you are in.

The Conversation

Verbal Fluency

Thomas Harrell, a professor of applied psychology at Stanford, spent years tracking the school's MBA graduates to find what separated the successful from the rest. Grade point average told him nothing. A decade out, the trait that distinguished the most accomplished alumni had nothing to do with intelligence or credentials. It was verbal fluency. The ones who built companies and rose fastest were the ones who could talk to anyone, in any room, with confidence.

Lyndon Johnson had the gift from childhood. Doris Kearns Goodwin describes a boy who "struck up conversations with everyone he met," a favorite of the old women in town, hovering at the edges of men debating politics on the sidewalk. At ten he took an after-school job shining shoes at a barbershop, precisely because it was where the town's news and politics got hashed out. Even for him it was not effortless: a congressman who knew him well noted his "nervous mannerisms."

Talk to a Wide Range of People

Abraham Lincoln lived it on the judicial circuit. A fellow lawyer said no one carried himself with less pretension; Lincoln claimed no superiority "over anyone, not even the most obscure member of the bar." Told to move up the table and sit with the judge and the senior lawyers, Lincoln asked the tavern keeper, "Have you anything better to eat up there, Joe? If not, I'll stay here." He kept the habit as president, holding open sessions with office seekers, critics, grieving parents, and ordinary citizens, sessions he called his "public-opinion baths." The hours were heavy, he admitted, but none were better spent, because they kept him out of the bubble that isolates the powerful. Being smart is common. Staying connected to the people you serve is rare.

Social media algorithms work against this by feeding you only what confirms what you already believe. Consciously choose the wrong feed: if you lean left, watch a conservative commentator; if you're a woman, listen to a locker-room podcast; if you're old, get on TikTok; believer or skeptic, read the other side's best case.

Ask Questions

Elizabeth Stokoe offers a simple diagnostic: if two minutes pass without a question, correct course. The best conversationalists ask constantly, including questions that sound obvious or naive, because a question keeps the exchange alive. Push too far and a conversation curdles into an interrogation.

One question does more work than any other: who is a successful person you admire? The answer reveals what someone values and where they see themselves belonging, more honestly than anything they would say about themselves directly. Dale Carnegie's claim about this is stronger than it first sounds: how a person gets their sense of importance defines their character. He points to John D. Rockefeller, who found his by funding a hospital in Peking for millions of poor people he would never meet, and to Dillinger, who found his by robbing banks and announcing himself with pride to the agents hunting him.

Asked the same question by Patrick Bet-David, the con artist Matthew Cox named a string of other con men, whom he had idolized since boyhood. It should have surprised no one what he became.

Listen

A question only works if you listen to the answer, and listening takes more effort than speaking. Ernest Hemingway put it plainly: "When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen." Freud was famous for it. A man who met him once described a focus so complete that even a badly phrased thought seemed to matter: "You've no idea what it meant to be listened to like that."

Franklin Roosevelt made a strong first impression by refusing to lead with politics. He asked about people's work, their families, their lives, and he learned to listen—really listen—nodding along with real interest. Dale Carnegie explained why it works: everyone you meet cares about their own toothache more than a famine on the other side of the world.

Remember Names and Facts

Lyndon Johnson's gift for names and faces looked innate and was nothing of the kind. His driver recalled him muttering to himself after every encounter on the trail, running back through who he had met, what mattered to them, who their relatives were, fixing it all in memory, then grading his own performance and vowing to do better.

Sid Levy once called on a client everyone else lazily called "Nick," short for a name nobody bothered to learn: Nicodemus Papadoulos. Levy practiced the full name until he could say it cleanly, then greeted him properly. The man was silent a long moment. In fifteen years in this country, he said, no one had ever made the effort to use his real name. Then he wept.

Smile

A smile is the cheapest thing you can give and among the most reliably effective. It works even when no one can see it: telephone companies once trained salespeople to smile while on the phone, because a smile changes the sound of a voice. The ancient Chinese had a proverb for it. A person without a smiling face should not open a shop.

The Diplomat

Be Diplomatic

In the fall of 1842 Abraham Lincoln published anonymous letters in a Springfield newspaper mocking the appearance, manners, and politics of James Shields, the Illinois state auditor. They were funny. They were also cruel, and Shields worked out who had written them. He demanded a retraction. Lincoln, who by then knew Mary Todd had written some of the later letters herself and could not say so without humiliating her, refused.

Shields challenged him to a duel. As the challenged party Lincoln had choice of weapons, and he chose cavalry broadswords, knowing his reach was longer by the better part of a foot. On September 22 the two men crossed the Mississippi to Bloody Island, outside the reach of Illinois law, and stood on a sandbar with swords in their hands. Lincoln, by one account, reached up and sheared a branch off a willow well above Shields's head, to make his advantage clear. Friends intervened before either man swung in earnest.

Lincoln never forgot it. He never again wrote an insulting letter or ridiculed anyone in print, and from that day almost never criticized a soul. His law partner, who watched him at close range for sixteen years, could not recall a single quarrel between them.

This is the whole art of diplomacy: you do not have to like everyone, but you must be able to work with anyone. Schopenhauer offered the best metaphor. Wax, naturally hard and brittle, softens under a little warmth and can be shaped into anything. Politeness does the same to people who would otherwise be crabbed and difficult.

Benjamin Franklin was tactless in his youth and became one of history's great diplomats. His method: "I will speak ill of no man, and speak all the good I know of everybody."

Understand Their Point of View

Henry Ford offered what may be the best advice on human relations ever given: "If there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person's point of view and see things from that person's angle as well as from your own." Everyone is a product of their genes and their environment; had you lived their life exactly, you would think and act as they do. When people around Lincoln spoke bitterly of the South during the war, he replied, "Don't criticize them, they are just what we would be under similar circumstances." Carl Rogers named the obstacle: our first reaction to almost anything someone says is to judge it rather than work out what it actually means to them.

Never Insult Someone's Goodness, Intelligence, or Free Will

No one believes they are evil. Stanton Samenow, after decades studying criminals, wrote that the most surprising feature of the criminal mind was that every offender believes they are, at heart, a good person. "If I thought of myself as evil, I couldn't live," one told him. A 2013 study of prison inmates found the same from the other direction: they rated themselves higher than non-prisoners on every prosocial trait—kindness, morality, decency—except law-abidingness, where they rated themselves merely average.

The same self-flattery applies to intelligence. The unintelligent believe themselves clever, just as the evil believe themselves good. Schopenhauer drew the practical conclusion: nothing makes a person prouder than their intellect, and to let someone see you are plainly superior in this respect is to invite their thirst for revenge.

Albert Einstein never learned this. Certain of his own rightness, he discarded his professor's lab instructions and redid experiments his own way. Heinrich Weber came to despise him, and when Einstein graduated in 1900 he was the only one in his group not offered an assistantship. Weber's references followed him through two years of failed applications and into a clerk's job at the patent office while his classmates walked into academic posts. Genius bought him nothing with the one man who controlled his fate.

Free will is the third rail, usually violated by whoever holds the power—a boss, a parent, anyone with leverage. Telling someone they will do what you say regardless. Offering a choice whose outcome is already fixed. Speaking to them as though they cannot be trusted to decide anything. Each says your will does not count here, and people remember that longer than almost any other slight.

Tell the Ninety Percent Truth

In Interstellar, Cooper asks the robot TARS what its honesty setting is. "Ninety percent," it replies. Pressed, TARS explains: "Absolute honesty isn't always the most diplomatic, nor the safest, form of communication with emotional beings." Cooper accepts ninety percent. So should you.

This is not license to deceive, but a recognition that total honesty, indiscriminately applied, is its own kind of cruelty. Esther Perel describes a patient whose husband confessed, just before he died, that he had been unfaithful throughout their marriage. She spent the following years in sleepless agony. Was his honesty a gift or a wound? Honesty is not a value that sits above every other consideration, exempt from cost. The exception is for the people you genuinely care about, where the truth might change their life for the better.

Franklin learned this the hard way. A Quaker friend told him flatly that his opinions carried a slap for anyone who disagreed, that his friends enjoyed themselves more in his absence, and that because he already knew everything, no one would bother telling him anything ever again. A person who insists on the whole truth ends up talking only to themselves, because most people do not want truth so much as an illusion they can live with.

If You Must Debate

Debate rarely accomplishes anything. Win and you likely have not changed the other person's mind; lose and the same is true in reverse. If you must engage, steelman the other side. Karl Popper would open by laying out his opponent's position so fully and so fairly that it sounded as though he were championing it himself, and only then take it apart.

If you do want to dismantle a position, Thomas Sowell's three questions do it cleanly: compared to what, at what cost, and what hard evidence do you have. Most people, pressed this way, discover they have no evidence for what they believe at all.

Consider the Impact of Your Words

Tone often matters more than content. Nietzsche observed that people frequently reject an opinion for no reason beyond the tone in which it was delivered.

Socrates was, by the Oracle at Delphi's account, the wisest man alive, precisely because he knew the limits of his own knowledge. He was also insufferable: belittling in conversation, and honestly surprised when the people he questioned resented being made to feel stupid. Tried for corrupting the youth of Athens and given the chance to speak before sentencing, he told the jury they should be paying him for his service. They voted for death by an even wider margin than they had voted to convict, and Athens lost the teacher along with the man. Franklin, every bit as brilliant, was nearly universally loved, and went on teaching until he was eighty-four.

That is a form of intelligence too: the kind that persuades and builds rather than merely proving a point. If you cannot get along with people, your other talents will not save you. They will only make you more effective at sabotaging yourself.

Never Burn Bridges

Robert Greene's warning is worth committing to memory: "Swallow the impulse to offend, even if the other person seems weak. The satisfaction is meager compared to the danger that someday he or she will be in a position to hurt you." The vindictive are patient. They will wait years, decades even, for the moment you are weaker or they are stronger, and then collect the debt, whether or not you ever believed you owed one.

The collapse of FTX is a case study. Binance's founder, Changpeng Zhao, announced he would liquidate his holdings of FTX's token, triggering a run that helped bring down Sam Bankman-Fried's empire. By most accounts the animus had built less from any single insult than from Bankman-Fried's repeated efforts to undermine him with regulators in Washington. Zhao later said that Bankman-Fried's bad-mouthing of him had not been smart. It rarely is.

Elon Musk offers the opposite lesson. After being pushed out of PayPal in what he compared to Caesar's assassination in the Senate, he refused to retaliate. Had he done so, Peter Thiel's Founders Fund would likely never have invested in SpaceX in 2008, when the company badly needed the money to survive.

Schopenhauer adds a caveat. Do not befriend your enemies either. People rarely change, and a friend who betrayed you once, taken back, will read your forgiveness as weakness and do it again.

Carry a Big Stick

Diplomacy is not the same as spinelessness. As governor of New York, Theodore Roosevelt moved to remove an insurance regulator tied to the party boss Thomas Platt, who controlled the state Senate and threatened to block any replacement indefinitely. Roosevelt refused to lose his temper and held his ground for weeks. Had he "yelled and blustered" publicly, he explained afterward, he would not have found ten votes; but had he been unwilling to wield the big stick, the machine would never have backed down either. What preserved the relationship was candor. Roosevelt always told Platt to his face, before anyone else knew, when he was about to do something Platt would not like.

Diplomacy softens the wax. It does not mean you have no shape of your own underneath it.

Presence and Persuasion

Charisma

On the evening of September 26, 1960, Richard Nixon arrived at a Chicago television studio underweight, recovering from a knee infection that had put him in the hospital for two weeks, and gray under a five o'clock shadow. He was offered makeup and declined. John F. Kennedy, tanned from campaigning in California and rested, took the stage beside him.

Seventy million people watched. Those who listened on the radio generally thought Nixon had won on substance. Those who watched saw a sweating, exhausted man beside a composed one, and they gave Kennedy the presidency. Nixon never forgot it. Decades later, asked about Ted Kennedy's chances in 1984, he said the senator would need to lose twenty pounds first. Appearance is not vanity; it is strategy, and it decides outcomes before a word is spoken.

Charisma can be learned. It is a performance, and the most influential people know it. "My chief trait in business is that I'm an actress," said Atoosa Rubenstein. Anna Wintour reduced the rule to a sentence: pretend to be completely in control, and people will assume that you are.

The body. Olivia Fox Cabane notes that body language carries veto power over every other signal of status. You can wear the right title and the right clothes, but an insecure body kills the effect instantly. Confidence is defined largely by stillness. Picture James Bond fidgeting, tugging at his jacket, bobbing his head. You cannot. He is still, and stillness is what reads as command. None of this requires extroversion; Cabane found introverts can be every bit as charismatic as extroverts. Eye contact is the cheapest lever available: most adults hold it only 30 to 60 percent of the time, while people need closer to 60 to 70 percent to feel a real connection.

The voice. Powerful speech avoids hedges like "sort of," uses "um" sparingly, and often comes in threes. It repeats key points, because repetition persuades, and it matches the register of its audience. The same discipline applies to listening: excessive nodding or repeated "uh-huhs" signal eagerness to please, which reads as insecurity.

The costume. "Politics is like theater," Roger Stone said. "An actor has confidence when he knows he is perfectly costumed, made-up, and lit for the boards or film." Con men have always understood this from the other side of the law. Ferdinand Waldo Demara served as a surgeon aboard a Canadian destroyer during the Korean War and operated on wounded men, having skimmed a textbook the night before. He had no medical training of any kind. What he had was the uniform, the bearing, and a complete absence of hesitation, and nobody aboard thought to check.

Then stop thinking about it. Barack Obama wore only gray or navy suits so that he would never spend on a wardrobe the decision-making energy he needed for larger choices. Master the costume, then forget it.

Know What People Want

Lyndon Johnson's power in the Senate came from a single skill: he could read people. Conversation by conversation, he built a full accounting of every colleague—their strengths, their fears, their vanities, how far each could be pushed and by what lever. You had to understand what every politician craved—fame and honor—and then find the one emotion that ruled the person in front of you. This is the foundation of influence: know what people want before you ever ask them for anything.

Every person we meet, we size up along two axes without meaning to: power and warmth. Can this person do something for us, and would they bother to? Of the two, warmth is the one most people neglect, and the cheapest to give.

Lincoln understood it: everybody likes a compliment. William James called the craving to be appreciated the deepest principle in human nature. But the trick is not flattery in general; it is aimed flattery. Find the quality someone is unsure of, not the one they are confident in, and offer reassurance there. Praise a strength they doubt and you will be believed. Praise one they have already claimed and you will be dismissed.

Andrew Carnegie paid Charles Schwab, the first president of U.S. Steel, over a million dollars a year at a time when fifty dollars a week counted as a good wage. Not for his knowledge of steel; Schwab admitted freely that men beneath him understood the metal better. He was paid for his ability to handle people, which he attributed to a rule he never broke: never criticize. Nothing kills a person's ambition faster than a superior's judgment.

Oprah Winfrey learned the same lesson across thousands of interviews, with murderers, presidents, grieving parents, and Beyoncé alike. Every one of them, when the cameras went off, asked some version of the same question: was that okay? Did you hear me? She recalled leaving her own boss's office once after asking for a raise, sensing without being able to name it that he had neither heard her nor seen her, and knowing in that instant that she would not get what she came for.

We feed the bodies of the people around us and starve their sense of self-worth. A meal builds energy for a day; a word of real appreciation can echo in someone's memory for years. It costs nothing, and it is the one currency every person will accept. Spend it freely, and it comes back as loyalty, as trust, as goodwill that outlasts any single exchange.

Similarity

People gravitate toward their own tribe. Part of Drake's commercial reach comes from an ethnic ambiguity broad enough that Black, Latino, South Asian, and Muslim audiences could each see something of themselves in him. He did not have to belong to any one of those tribes. He only had to be plausibly readable as belonging. Find the similarity first, and lead with it.

How to Ask for Favors

Asking for help is a rarely used superpower. Steve Jobs, launching Apple, asked industry veterans like Robert Noyce and Andy Grove whether he could buy them dinner once a quarter just to pick their brains. Most requests fail for the same handful of reasons: no common ground established, no effort to see the thing from the other side, no explanation of why that person specifically was chosen, and no evidence the asker has done their homework.

Give a reason, even a weak one. In Ellen Langer's photocopier experiment, later popularized by Robert Cialdini, people trying to cut a line succeeded far more often when they attached a justification, and the justification barely had to mean anything: because I'm in a rush worked, and so did because I have to make copies. A reason gives the other person permission to do what they were already willing to do.

Phrasing matters too. "I need this" invites a calculation of what it will cost them. "You will find this worth your time" invites them to picture the reward. Every persuasive request should start with you, not I.

Friends and Mentors

Friends

"A man without friends is a man without power," Renly Baratheon says in Game of Thrones. Friendship is not a luxury you enjoy after the work is done. It is the work.

Oprah Winfrey spent years in Chicago apartments not knowing the name of the person across the hall, telling herself she was too busy. Then she moved into a house in California, and a stranger stopped her in the cereal aisle to welcome her to the neighborhood. That single act of warmth undid years of self-imposed isolation.

The circle should be chosen with intention. Conor McGregor's version of this is blunter: he has no use for friends who are not walking the same path he is. That sounds cold until you have tried to explain a hard year to someone who has never attempted anything difficult.

Friendship as Leverage

The most successful people treat friendship and business as the same discipline. The lesson from my first business was simple: business is friendship. Clients who are genuinely your friends do not shop around.

Larry Gagosian applies a version of this in reverse. He is said to prefer private collectors to museums, because a painting that disappears into an institution never comes back to market, while a collector who is also a friend returns to him again and again when they want to sell. The friendship is the inventory.

None of this happens instantly. A 2018 study by Jeffrey Hall found it takes roughly fifty hours together to move from acquaintance to casual friend, another forty to become a real friend, and two hundred hours in total to earn the label close. That is the actual price, and it explains why most professional networks are thinner than the people inside them believe. Fifty hours is a dozen dinners. Two hundred is a habit.

Be the First to Reach Out

Abraham Lincoln, once established, made a habit of being the first to greet young lawyers arriving at the bar, the first to shake a new clerk's hand and congratulate him on his election. The gesture was free to him, and it built a following for life.

The same instinct built a career for Arsha Jones. She scanned grocery shelves for small regional brands—a local barbecue sauce—and cold-emailed the owners asking how they had done it, how they had gotten onto the shelf in the first place. People sat down and answered. That was how she cleared her early hurdles.

Mentors

Lyndon Johnson attached himself to men of power the way a son attaches himself to a father he is determined to learn from. There were no lessons and no formal instruction, only years of proximity: running errands, whipping votes, campaigning, raising money, handling the unpleasant tasks nobody else wanted. All the while he was watching, listening, asking questions, mimicking technique. As Ryan Holiday writes in Wisdom Takes Work, "Lyndon Johnson was a professional son." Even as president he kept the habit alive, asking Kennedy's cabinet to stay on so he could keep drawing on their guidance.

None of this requires a formal arrangement. Bill Walsh never had a head coach or general manager in his early NFL years who considered himself Walsh's mentor. It made no difference. As Walsh put it in The Score Takes Care of Itself, he "consciously assimilated as much of their great know-how" as he could, asking those coaches about the logic behind their decisions, studying how they managed people, drawing his own conclusions. He built the mentorship himself, and extracted nearly as much from it as if he had been taken under someone's wing.

One caution before you adopt anyone's advice: weigh not only their arguments but the shape of the life those arguments produced.

The Value You Can't Name

What makes mentorship irreplaceable is the transfer of knowledge too tacit to teach any other way.

Carl and Gerty Cori ran a laboratory at Washington University in St. Louis in the decades around the Second World War. They shared a Nobel Prize themselves in 1947. More remarkably, six people who trained in that lab went on to win Nobel Prizes of their own. Washington University was a good school, but not so exceptional that it commanded the best young scientists in the world, and the committees in medicine and chemistry name only a handful of laureates a year between them. The odds against a single laboratory producing six are not merely long. They are absurd.

Something in that lab—never written down, never made explicit, possibly never articulated by the Coris themselves—passed from mentor to student and made those students vastly more successful than their peers. For complicated work, the most important knowledge is transferred through close contact with someone who already has it.

Reaching Beyond the Room

The Power of Speech

On the evening of October 14, 1912, outside the Gilpatrick Hotel in Milwaukee, a man stepped out of the crowd and shot Theodore Roosevelt in the chest at close range. The bullet passed through a folded fifty-page speech and a steel glasses case in his coat pocket before entering his body. Roosevelt coughed into his hand, saw no blood, and concluded the bullet had not reached his lung. He refused the hospital. He went to the auditorium instead, opened his coat to show the crowd his bloodied shirt, and told them it took more than that to kill a bull moose. Then he spoke for ninety minutes with the bullet still in him. He carried it the rest of his life.

Franklin Roosevelt understood the same thing and hired the best ghostwriters he could find—Archibald MacLeish and Robert Sherwood among them—coaching them to skip dry facts, build vivid images, and use small words instead of large ones. The result was lines like "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself."

Fear of public speaking is nearly universal. Even Lincoln felt it. The only cure is preparation and repetition. Dale Carnegie called a well-prepared speech ninety percent delivered before a word is spoken, and built his own skill reciting speeches aloud on horseback rides to and from college. When there is no time to prepare, the fallback is redirection. Barack Obama described being coached this way by David Axelrod, who told him the goal was never to answer the question asked but to pivot to the message he wanted to deliver.

Delivery is not everything, and it is worth knowing that before you overinvest in it. Lyndon Johnson's commanding presence in a room evaporated the moment he stepped behind a podium, and it cost him nothing he could not recover elsewhere. He also grasped a simpler trick worth more than most oratory: a five-minute speech followed by fifteen minutes of handshaking moves people further than a twenty-minute speech that leaves no time to connect at all.

Books as Instruments of Power

History remembers kings, killers, the wealthy, and authors, and the authors often outlast the rest. A book is a lever few people think to pull. David Ogilvy wrote his to attract clients, prime the market for his company's public offering, and build his name. Writing works because it travels farther and lasts longer than any speech or meeting, and because it reaches people you will never meet and could never have found.

The proof is everywhere. Edward Thorp's Beat the Market brought him wealthy clients and an introduction to Warren Buffett. Abraham Lincoln found his army chief of staff by reading the man's book on military logistics. When Dov Charney, the founder of American Apparel, read Robert Greene's The 48 Laws of Power, he put Greene on retainer for round-the-clock strategic advice and later gave him a board seat.

Nassim Taleb described the effect precisely: publishing a book put him on what he called the envelope of serendipity, drawing unexpected letters and collaborations from people whose work he had long admired. That is the largest version of the principle this chapter began with. Gagosian had to be at the table in Paris to sell the paintings. A book sets a table you never have to attend.