by Brian Wong
Some people get this. For them, it’s the best possible advice I can offer.
Some people don’t get it at all. For them, I have no advice that will help.
I would continue, but I’ve made my point. It would be just another fifteen minutes taken away from me actually doing something.
Or you actually doing something.
That’s all for today, on Coffee with Brian!
“Duh” would be a reasonable response to that—until you think it through.
You may think, “The last time I got drunk at the office was…never.” That’s a start. But please note that the title of this cheat is not “Don’t Get Drunk at the Office.” It’s “Don’t Get Drunk at Work.” And if you’re an entrepreneur or in any kind of management position, you know that a lot of work gets done outside the office. A great deal of that work is critically important, because it typically presents a good opportunity to get to know someone above your pay grade, in a relaxed setting, unconstrained by the barriers of hierarchy, rank, or job title. A chance to get drunk with the boss: That’s a great opportunity, right? Wrong.
The Mad Men days of three-martini lunches are not the modus operandi of the new economy. Lunch, though, is not the danger zone. That hour arrives at 5:00 p.m., with “a” drink after work with a business contact, colleague, or, worse, a superior. And it hits high gear at every networking event or office party you’ve ever been to.
I’ve been to hundreds of those parties—maybe thousands—and many of the people I met there became important business associates. Realistically, if you’re not meeting important people at these parties, you’re going to the wrong parties.
The social myth we’ve concocted is that at a party, everybody gets a free pass on decorum—especially if you’ve got a glass in your hand. It’s a cherished myth, because it can be hard not to be nervous at parties. You might not know anyone, and the atmosphere is usually artificial—one of bravado mingled with gaiety—generally because most people are pretending it’s just a party when it’s really work.
After you’ve tossed back a few, it’s easy to feel like you got instantly funnier and cooler—and maybe you did. But that’s usually not how it comes across. If you’re acting even a little tipsy, you’re undercutting your intellect, your emotional intelligence, and your gravitas.
If you’re acting drunk, you’re just a clown.
The best people in business don’t do that to themselves. That doesn’t mean they’re stodgy or puritanical. It means they know when, where, and with whom to party.
The same principle goes double for company office parties. Think about it: These are the people whose own livelihoods depend to some degree on your good judgment and character. Do you really want them to see you flirting inappropriately with the secretary or falling off a bar stool?
My just-say-no stance goes quadruple for drugs, even if you live in Colorado. For every person who thinks it’s cool that you smoke weed—even if it is legal—there will be someone else who thinks you’re just another slacker druggie.
Still, it can be awkward to look like the only Puritan in the crowd, so it’s usually smart to have a drink in your hand. It makes you seem warmer and more relaxed, and it keeps serious drinkers from feeling judged.
It’s also smart to actually drink from it. Sometimes just having something to do with your hands—like sip a drink—can put you more at ease. Just try to keep the actual booze in it to a bare minimum. Ask the bartender for a nonalcoholic cocktail. Ask for tons of ice. Cut it with water. Just nurse it.
The unexpected irony: You’ll feel more relaxed and comfortable, because you’re at the top of your game mentally. You’ll be funnier, sound smarter, and look more together. That’s what your colleagues want from you. If they want silly, they’ll watch reality TV. Or they’ll get silly drunk on their own time, at home. And that’s totally fine. Just don’t do it at work.
In every entrepreneur’s life, there’s a time to let go—of a project, an idea, or even a company. But how do you know when that time has arrived? Some people let go when the money’s gone. Bad idea. Too late. You should have seen it coming.
Some people let go when their product doesn’t work immediately. Bad idea. Too early. If it’s a good product, based on a great idea, a few years later somebody will probably finish what you started and make a bazillion dollars.
Kodak invented the digital camera in 1975 but did virtually nothing with it, because they made most of their profits selling film. So they abandoned it, and eventually went bankrupt. They clawed their way back—more or less—but today they’re not even in the photo business anymore; they mostly make commercial printers. Too bad, because if they’d stuck with it, they could have made it huge in the era of computers and mobile devices, the way some of their competitors did.
Imagine how the poor folks at Kodak who created digital photography felt having the rug pulled out from under them by their corporate overlords who saw no future in digital, and watching other companies explode with success a decade later, when the digital revolution erupted.
Some people who launch start-ups let go when they can find somebody to take over and buy them out. That’s okay if you’re ready to wash your hands of it and do something different. That’s not for me, though. I love my company. I love the idea, the people, the impact, and the way we’re manifesting it and growing it, month after month and year after year.
That doesn’t mean the day will never come. Things change, and change has its own demands. Knowing exactly when to let go boils down to perfect timing, and timing is usually a gut feeling.
It’s super-important to develop your knack for timing before you let go of something. If you don’t hone those skills, you won’t recognize the right time.
You learn timing in every phase of a project or business. Your lessons come one at a time: knowing when to start something, when to add to staff, when to accelerate, when to scale back, when to take risks, and when to pull your time and money away from risks.
The hardest single element of timing is learning to control your thoughts, perceptions, and actions during a pivotal moment. It doesn’t matter if the moment is negative, like dealing with a financial setback or the loss of a key employee, or positive, like having an amazing opportunity. Either way, you’ll notice that a lot of people around you are going into a frenzy and leaping before they look, or getting paralyzed, or running in circles. They become a victim of time instead of its master.
When cataclysm occurs, it can be tempting to cut and run—out of fear, out of excitement, or out of sheer panic. Resist this urge. Instead, stay focused. Channel the energy away from freaking out and toward analyzing the potentials. See that every major decision is just another fork in the road.
People who let themselves fall into the fast-forward mode—which feels kind of good, because it burns off nervous energy—end up focusing on obstacles: either obstacles to success or obstacles that threaten them with failure.
The key here is to reinterpret the obstacle. If you think of an obstacle as an obstacle, then it is a fucking obstacle. Chill, and look for the opportunities that surround every obstacle. Once you gear your gut to that way of thinking, you’ll automatically know when to do what. By then, if the smart thing is to let go, you’ll let go. If it’s not, you’ll hang on.
If I’m making it sound easy, it’s because it is, once you get the hang of it. Life really isn’t all that hard.
What makes it seem so hard? We do. It’s all in our heads.
If you can control yourself during those times when chaos surrounds you, you’ll slowly learn to develop the knack for sensing when it’s time to step out of the ring and when it’s time to stay in the fight.
Once you know your superpower, a primary goal is to find complementary superpowers in other people. When you find those people, make them part of your network, even if there’s no business you can do with them at the moment. As always, the whole is always vastly better than the sum of its parts.
&nbs
p; A classic example in any tech scenario is the symbiosis between the marketer and the creator or engineer. I’ve told many techies that we complement each other perfectly because I’m good at bringing things to market—branding, communicating, and getting people excited—and they’re great at technology. That’s such a specific compliment that people never mistake it for idle flattery. (Digression, and the randomest micro-cheat of the day: To remember the correct spelling of “compliment” and “complement,” use the mnemonic device “I like to compliment people.” Sorry to say, but your teacher was right—spelling counts. So does neatness.)
The same power of complements (not compliments) applies to the businesses you choose to work with. I can go to Coca Cola and tell them, “You guys are great at mass advertising, but weak in one spot—personalized, targeted advertising—and I’ve got the company that can cover that.”
Here’s another example. Automakers make some great cars, but they’re not great at audio, so they go exclusively with audio companies like Bose or JBL to power their stereos. Each type of company plays to their appropriate complementary strength.
But you can’t find the right fit—in an employee, business partner, or anything else—if you’re not the right fit for someone else. It’s a two-way street. You’ve got to hold up your end. If you’re not excellent at something, don’t expect to attract people who are.
Be warned: It’s not valuable to achieve excellence unless your function is truly differentiated. That’s what makes you the most indispensable. It’s far better to be a great car designer than a great car mechanic. Why? Because there aren’t a whole lot of people who know how to design a car, but there are tons of mechanics.
Bottom line: Know what you’re not good at, and find someone who is.
People tend to think that making the maximum amount of eye contact is a key to trust. It’s not.
There is truth in the old saying that the eyes are the window to the soul. But how comfortable are you when you find somebody looking through your window and into your deepest and most private thoughts, fears, and emotions?
It’s not always a welcome intrusion. That’s the thing to remember about eye contact.
If you’re in a business meeting with someone, don’t sit directly across from them—sit at least slightly perpendicular. That way, your line of sight is not always straight at them, and you won’t have to stare into each other’s souls the whole time—or worse, risk looking evasive, shy, or dismissive by blatantly avoiding eye contact. It’s human nature for people to stare off into space when they’re concentrating on something, and if you’re off to one side, you can do that more comfortably.
Some people are less comfortable with eye contact than others, and we tend to assume that’s because they’re a little more emotionally withdrawn, but that’s not always the case. All good businesspeople are good actors, and sometimes acting shy is just part of the act. Maybe they’re playing hard to get, or trying to draw you into their own sphere. There’s no way to be sure, so don’t presume too much.
When somebody acts shy, displaying the body language of reticence—including a soft tone, a protective stance, and minimal eye contact—some people try to compensate for the other person’s introversion by acting more extroverted and applying more eye contact. It doesn’t work. It usually makes people even more hesitant to look at you—either because they’re genuinely shy and don’t want to be stared at, or because they’re playing you.
People sometimes also do the opposite and try to mimic the other person’s avoidance of eye contact. That’s not good either. It can just add to the awkwardness.
Another mistake people make is trying to be a hotshot interpreter of body language. If they see you looking down and to the left, they assume you’re lying—usually because they’ve spent almost fifteen minutes on the Internet learning about nonverbal cues and saw that written on some random website. If they’d spent twenty minutes, however, they’d know that there are all kinds of other possible explanations.
The best strategy is to avoid the gamesmanship and focus on the desired agenda of clear, friendly communication. If you do, you’ll look people straight in the eye when it’s appropriate, and you won’t when it’s not.
In business, if you’re looking to make a fair deal with somebody—one that’s going to work equally as well for them as you, in the interests of a continued business relationship and common decency—just look at people as if they’re people.
That’s how we all want to be looked at, isn’t it?
Successful people—especially young people—need to know two things about manners: (1) they’re very important, and (2) the definition of “good manners” varies tremendously from group to group, country to country, and person to person.
Young people sometimes dismiss manners as some inconsequential relic of a stodgy, stratified culture of gentility that is fading fast. Big mistake. Manners evolve as quickly as technology, and matter to everyone—just as much today as in the past.
In fact, they are as important to young people as to older people, oftentimes even more so. The problem many young people have is just not knowing what constitutes good manners.
For example, if you’re doing business with somebody in Asia, you’ll almost never hear a flat-out no in response to a question or request because it’s considered rude. If you ask them if they can deliver something by Friday, they will say, “We can try.” That doesn’t mean it will arrive Friday. It means they were being polite.
If you want a straight answer, ask in a way that doesn’t require a yes or a no. They’ll tell you the truth, and you’ll get the answer you need. The point is that culture is everything when it comes to manners. And culture doesn’t have to be tied to nationality or country of origin either.
For example, in today’s modern workplace, where so many millennials now work right alongside baby boomers thirty or even forty years their senior, there are huge generational differences when it comes to manners. For example, a young businessperson might avoid striking up a conversation with an older, established executive if they just happen to pass them in the hallway because they think the older person would consider them presumptuous or even rude. They think they need an introduction, and are then supposed to be very kiss-ass and make small talk. Wrong. That attitude comes from watching too many old movies and not paying attention to the evolution of manners.
Important business executives know the only reason you’re approaching them is because you want something. They don’t want to play buddy-buddy, and they don’t need you to tell them that you’re a big fan. They want to know what you’re after. So tell them. Fast. Get straight to the point. If you can’t get to the point in the time it takes to walk with them from an elevator to an office, you’re being the rude one.
The principle of straightforwardness also applies, oddly, to older people trying to connect to people who are very young. Remember that today’s millennials grew up in a 140-character era, in which an emoticon is considered an entire unit of communication. If you want their attention and respect, don’t email them an essay, or even phone them. Text them. Then you’ll be talking their language.
The point: Be on somebody’s wavelength. Respect their culture, just as you would the Asian businessperson’s. That’s good manners.
A key element of this is staying current with what’s in among various subcultures. If you’re talking to millennials, you need to know what Game of Thrones is. You don’t have to like it, or even watch it, but if you act like you’ve never heard of it, you run the risk of seeming irrelevant and out of the loop—or, worse, aloof or disinterested. I’m too young to know why I should respect, let’s say, Aretha Franklin, but I’m polite enough to keep that opinion to myself when I’m talking to a baby boomer. By the same token, I might not give a hoot about what some politician said last week, but if I’m doing business with someone passionate about politics, I would never act like it doesn’t matter. That would be like telling the person I’m doing business wit
h that they don’t matter, something that’s universally rude in any culture.
And speaking of universally rude, I would never go into a significant meeting of any kind without putting my phone on Do Not Disturb. I know that if I even glance at my phone during a meeting, there will be certain people who think I’m a self-absorbed millennial airhead.
One question I frequently get from people when I talk about the topic of manners relates to hugging in the workplace. Is it a polite show of warmth and affection, or a rude and inappropriate intrusion on another’s personal space? The answer is that it depends, but when in doubt, take the other person’s lead, especially if the other person is of the opposite gender. For example, I would avoid hugging a female executive unless she clearly initiated it.
Another potential minefield for manners: punctuality. In certain cultures it’s rude to be late; in other cultures it’s more polite to be late than early. For example, I would never arrive at a business meeting in New York late, but I would never arrive at a business meeting in Jakarta on time.
When it comes to minding your manners, keep your eyes and ears open and try to be respectful of every person that you meet. Try to get to know them. Try to see things from their perspective. And always say please and thank you—that’s just universally polite everywhere.
One last universal truth: No one on earth is ever offended by an apology. So if you do offend someone inadvertently, as a result of not understanding their cultural norms around manners, apologize immediately. Please, thank you, and I’m sorry are the heart and soul of all manners, in any culture.
They say that ignorance is bliss, and nowhere is this a truer statement than in the world of entrepreneurship and business. The bliss of ignorance frees you from the fear of failure, the fear of disappointment, and even the full knowledge of how hard the road ahead actually is.