I: INVEST

It’s easy to get invested in relationships when the payoff seems obvious: if you’re a new food blogger and you happen to meet an executive vice president of the Food Network, you don’t need me to tell you that’s a relationship you should invest in. The potential payoff from investing “up” and growing that relationship is obvious.

It’s pretty typical to think that the more status a person has, the more potential there is for a rewarding relationship. You have to be in touch with reality, though: the truth is that just because a person has more stature and could do more for you than another doesn’t mean she will do more.

So, instead, we’re going to talk about investing down. The fact of the matter is, you never know which relationship is going to be “the one” that will improve your existence, and it’s especially difficult to judge this at the beginning of a relationship, when we’re most likely to categorize someone as useful or not. My grandfather used to always say to me, “Janitors and kings.” He never said more than that, but his intention was clear: no matter what someone’s status in the community is, you have to treat everyone with the same respect and genuinely invest in all types of people, no matter what their position or abilities, or how they’re perceived. To be a great Relationship Architect, you cannot be proficient at building only certain relationships; you have to excel at building all relationships because you never know which ones will enrich your life.