Though I am not left handed, I do actually eat left handed … and the story of why I do that will probably explain a lot.
how i discovered the magic of eating left handed
It all started several years ago as I was rushing to a networking event. In my busy haste that day, I realized I had skipped lunch. As I was walking to the event, I had already created a mental plan. I would head straight to the food table, load up a plate with finger foods and find a quiet spot to eat before starting to network.
Unfortunately, my plan immediately hit a wrinkle because there weren’t really any quiet spots—so I joined what appeared to be a not-so-crowded standing table. I quickly realized that shaking hands to greet anyone would be a messy affair while eating so I switched to eat with my left hand.
That simple shift made shaking hands and meeting people much easier at that table, and for the rest of the evening as well. Heading home that night, I realized the conversations from that event had somehow been better than any other event I had been to in the past several months—but I wasn’t sure why. It couldn’t have been the fact that I was eating left handed, could it?
Unsure but curious, I decided to try eating left handed again the following week.
When you go to a lot of networking events (as I was doing those days as part of my job), or even a lot of parties at bars or clubs to meet new people, it can be intimidating to start a conversation. Though I would describe myself as an extrovert, I was never one of those people comfortable walking up to total strangers and randomly starting a conversation. Most people aren’t—even if they pretend they are.
It was at that second networking event that I realized why my connections with people had been so much better.
Eating left handed helped me change my mindset. Instead of forcing myself to start conversations with a goal of collecting as many business cards as I could, I was able to step back and just be easier to talk to. I asked more questions and listened more intently. I was in less of an impatient rush. I invited new people into conversations and focused on others instead of myself.
In a room filled with people thinking about their agendas or selling their products or finding their next employer—I accidentally became the most approachable person in the room by focusing on others instead of myself.
Since that moment, always eating left handed has become my reminder to always be generous with my time and to focus on other people. It has helped me stand out for kindness and opened up more opportunities than I could have ever imagined. And it led me to write this book.
how to read this book
In the short chapters to come, you will read about fifteen more “secrets” like this one. Each of them is something you can do right now. You don’t need special abilities to eat left handed. You don’t even need to be left handed.
The aim of this book is to offer you a collection of approachable ideas you can use right away. It is a compilation of some of the hidden, counterintuitive, and sometimes baffling lessons that I have uncovered often by accident through a career that has included fifteen years working with some of the biggest companies in the world on branding and marketing, then walking away to start three successful businesses, write four best-selling books, travel to over thirty countries as a professional speaker, and work with some of the most inspiring and successful people in the world.
All the secrets are organized into four goals—to help you think, work, communicate and connect better—and they are shared here as a collection of stories.
If there is one theme that links them, it is that there is power in the tiny intentional choices you make every day—from what you wear to which hand you choose to eat with.
I believe making those choices deliberately can indeed help you kill it both at work (and even more importantly) in real life too.
chapter 1
The Pomegranate Principle
“Whatever happens, I can’t let them
see the inside of my book.”
This wasn’t what I expected to be thinking as I was getting ready for my first interview to launch my new book.
It was just weeks before Personality Not Included would go on bookstore shelves and already my months of planning were being pushed off track.
The day before, my publisher McGraw-Hill had sent me a sample of the dust jacket in advance of my planned book tour with a short apology that the actual book wasn’t quite ready yet. I had a cover, no book, and my first big interview was in less than twelve hours.
I was starting to panic. Should I cancel? Try to reschedule? Do the interview without the book?
Finally, I had an idea. I started combing through my bookshelf to see if I had another book that was about the same thickness and dimensions as my soon-to-be-completed book. I found one and wrapped the jacket over top to see how it would look.
It was a perfect fit.
Almost immediately, my mind filled with all the worst-case scenarios. What if I had to open the book during the interview? What if I had to read something from it? I was already imagining a moment when my entire charade would be embarrassingly exposed for the online world to see.
Still, I decided to do the interview anyway.
The next day I showed up to the interview and proudly held up my book cover, fitted carefully on top of a worn copy of Made to Stick. I made it through the interview without my secret being exposed.
Many years (and interviews) later, I realized just how silly my concern had been. No one ever asks you to read from a business book during an interview. And no one, from a brief look, can tell that the interior of a book doesn’t match the dust jacket anyway.
Of course, at the time I didn’t know any of that and my problem felt monumental. Looking back, the “secret” to surviving that situation was self-confidence. The kind of self-confidence I had been sorely lacking nearly a decade earlier when I had what I not-so-fondly remember as the worst meeting of my life.
how to fail miserably at selling your idea
The year was 1998 and I had an idea that I thought was going to change the fine dining industry. At the time, very few restaurants had a website and so I had come up with an idea to use the Internet to bring these restaurants into the 21st century (literally, since it was still two years until the year 2000!).1
My business model consisted of services (getting restaurants to pay me to build their websites) and media (creating an online directory of websites that would become the place for anyone to find a restaurant).
To start, I registered the domain name www.dc-restaurants.com for my directory and then started my efforts by going door to door in a part of Washington, D.C. called Georgetown to try and convince restaurant owners to pay me $200 to build their website. Everyone asked me the same question: “Why would any restaurant need a website?” It was, after all, still 1998.
After more than a dozen rejections, I decided to go to one restaurant and offer to build their website for free just so I could pretend I had a paying client and entice other restaurant owners to give me a chance. After I built that site, I listed it on my directory along with the handful of DC area restaurants who already had websites that I had found online. Then I visited a few more restaurants. Even that didn’t work.
As a last-ditch effort before giving