Rolodex: Track Your Friends, Connections, and Network

What?

A Rolodex is a tool helping you centralize your network.

If you understand that network = net worth, you understand you need a Rolodex.

Why?

There are five leverages you can use to get rich.

1. Time: people that invest in the stock market use time to get rich.
2. Money: people that borrow money to buy companies or real estate use money to get rich.
3. Skills: people that study certain skills (marketing, software engineering, copywriting, etc) acquire skills to get rich.
4. People: people that hire other people to work for them use people to get rich.
5. Network: people that can access rich and influential people can become rich and influential too.

The last one is the least talked about, let's dive into it.

Mindset

The main thing you need to understand is that how you feel about yourself is how people will feel about you.

The most charming people in the world also happened to be in love with themselves (search for “dark triad personality”) which is not surprising at all.

Therefore, you must fix all of your self-esteem, confidence, and impostor syndrome issues before going to talk to presidents and prime ministers.

People and Strategies

Andrew Tate: Tate bought a Bugatti because the brand organizes events with other Bugatti owners. He figured that accessing a network of people rich enough to buy a Bugatti would more than repay the few millions he spent to get the Bugatti in the first place.

Dan Bilzerian: Bilzerian got to meet lots of people by playing poker. However, he had already developed sufficient charisma so that people would enjoy hanging out with him. He also quickly understood who liked what. Let me explain.

Bilzerian created an affiliate program to get girls: he paid party promoters $1k if they presented him with a girl he’d end up having sex with. This way, he started meeting all of the prettiest girls in the city (Vegas, as it happens).

He found out that men, no matter how powerful or rich they were, also wanted to hang out with pretty girls. So he brought them together by hosting poker nights. The girls would be happy to come as they’d make tips (up to $30k/night), and the men were happy to come because they knew there were always pretty girls around Bilzerian.

Andrew Henderson: Henderson wrote Nomad Capitalist, a really bad book yet with one interesting idea about networking: lawyers.

Henderson’s strategy to get a network of people quickly was to hire a lawyer, overpay him, and ask him to introduce him to everyone he knows in the city.

Bernard Cheynel: Cheynel (gun dealer) is one of the best networking people that ever existed. Here’s how he did to create a network of ministers and presidents in almost countries on earth.

1. Find out who it is that you want to meet.
2. Go to the reception of your hotel. Ask for the most expensive restaurant.
3. Go to the most expensive restaurant. Ask when the person that you want to meet comes to eat. Book a table on that day, next to the person you want to meet.
4. Come early to the restaurant. Introduce yourself to the person you want to meet.

Cheynel, like Bilzerian, also knew what powerful men wanted: women. He had befriended a bunch of pretty girls in his native France that he took on trips with him to “satisfy” the men he wanted to sell guns to. When that country was too dangerous, he didn’t take the girls there and invited the men instead on “vacation” in France where they mainly partied.

That Guy I Met Once In Mallorca: that guy was a hotel director for Marriott. He had worked in a lot of different countries, and lots of heads of state had slept at the hotels where he was working, so he could meet all of these people.

Another Guy in Estonia: that guy simply talks to everyone he meets, then connects, and adds these people to WhatsApp groups where other interesting people hang out.

Yet Another Guy: that guy’s purpose wasn’t to reach the top people in the hierarchy, just to make as many friends as possible. His strategy was to hang out in the hall of the co-living where we lived and talk to everyone that would be in and out of the elevators. He also often smoked outside, and would talk to more people there.

Finally, he frequently went to the same clubs. Since people would often see him, they’d end up striking up a conversation.

Christian Audigier: Christian Audigier was officially a fashion designer, but the truth is that he was just super good at people.

Consider that he got into nightclubs and managed to befriend celebrities despite being a nobody, managed to escape a prison in Indonesia (where he was trafficking drugs) by paying off his guards, then move illegally to the US to develop fashion brands.

His marketing strategy was simple: he gave free clothes to celebrities, then paid paparazzi to photograph them wearing his clothes (it was before the word “influencer” was invented). He eventually became really rich, and “bought” the friendship of a lot of people by paying them to attend his events.

This Pretty Girl: this pretty girl got a job as a bottle girl in an exclusive nightclub in New York where she met a bunch of artists and musicians.

Your Value

Let’s be honest: if you want to reach the top, you need to be valuable somehow (like Bernard Cheynel was, or simply be a politician, a judge, a policeman, etc), or have gained external validation.

What does that mean?

External validation is any indicator that acknowledges that you are one of the most successful people in the world, which you need to be, in general.

Why would the most successful people hang out with people that aren’t successful?

See? If you want to get to know the people at the top, you need to be:

1. Already successful
2. Incredibly good at relationships (like Christian Audigier)
3. Incredibly valuable (like Bernard Cheynel)

The most common indicator of success is money.

You can be dumb and annoying, you’ll still be invited to parties once you get rich.

The second one is being famous. The bigger your audience, the better it is (Bilzerian).

The third one is your level of success in your domain. It can be fashion (Anna Wintour), sports (Federer, Tiger Woods, Usain Bolt), music, movies, books, even paintings (Picasso).

The fourth one is how smart you are. Nassim Taleb gets invited to parties because he says interesting stuff. Same thing for Nobel Prizes. It’s cool to hang out with Nobel Prize winners.

Bottom line: if you’re the best in the world at what you do, you’ll likely get invited to parties that the elite organizes.

Conclusion

Meeting people is hard work. A Rolodex will help you not waste it.