Quotes from Keith Ferrazzi

the currency of real networking is not greed but generosity.

time for the new CEO to feel that he or she knows what the issues and problems are, but not enough time to have gotten his or her arms around the solutions.

The choice isn't between success and failure; it's between choosing risk and striving for greatness, or risking nothing and being certain of mediocrity.

People used to say there were only six degrees of separation between anyone in the world. A 2011 study of 720 million Facebook users determined the true magic number to be 4.74. LinkedIn's system is built on three degrees of separation. Whichever way you slice it, we're all only a couple of mouse clicks away.

Oh, I'm really sorry, I'm a personal friend of a friend of his. I just moved into the city, and Jane suggested that I should meet Michael, and honestly, I don't even know why besides the fact that Jane is a good friend of Michael's. Maybe you're right. Maybe it's all wrong. Maybe Michael doesn't know Jane well and he wouldn't want to meet me. I apologize if this is the case.

Ralph Waldo Emerson once said: "Every man I meet is my superior in some way. In that, I learn of him.

like to finalize with something like "I'm going to be in town next week. How about lunch on Tuesday? I know this is going to be important for both of us, so I'll make time no matter what.

Then I made a suggestion: "Why don't I just send Michael an e-mail?" And at this point, she's thinking, "I want to be out of the middle of this thing." So finally, I got his e-mail address.

What will set you apart from everybody else is the relentlessness you bring to learning and presenting and selling your content. Take

Johnson's reply was cordial and short. "When convenient, I'd be happy to meet." So I went back to his assistant with the information that Michael said he'd be happy to meet and that I was now calling to find out when. And finally, we did in fact meet.

The future is dynamic and not fully in your control. Celebrate that fact instead of fighting it, and life gets a lot more interesting.

More than ever before, zero-sum scenarios where only one party wins often mean, in the long run, that both parties will lose. Win-win has become a necessary reality in a networked world. In a hyper-connected marketplace, cooperation is gaining ground on competition. The game has changed.

Our careers aren't paths so much as landscapes that are navigated. We're free agents, entrepreneurs, and intrapreneurs—each with our own unique brand.

We have a tendency to romanticize independence and see autonomy as a virtue. In my experience, such a view is a career killer. Autonomy is a life vest made out of sand. Independent people who do not have the skills to think and act interdependently may still be good individual producers, but they won't be seen as good leaders or team players.

Creativity in business is often nothing more than making connections that everyone else has almost thought of. You don't have to reinvent the wheel, just attach it to a new wagon.

If I'm going to take the time to meet with somebody, I'm going to try to make that person successful. But David kept score. He saw every social encounter in terms of diminishing returns. For him, there was only so much goodwill available in a relationship and only so much collateral and equity to burn. What he didn't understand was that it's the exercising of equity that builds equity. That's the big "aha" that David never seemed to have learned.

Also try to create your own "schtick," for lack of a better word—a content brand defined by that thing you do that no one else does. For example, there's a guy named Noah Scalin whose project was to make a "Skull-A-Day" and post pictures of them all at skulladay.blogpost.com. He committed to doing it for a full year.

Over time, I came to see reaching out to people as a way to make a difference in people's lives as well as a way to explore and learn and enrich my own; it became the conscious construction of my life's path.

think of the blue flame as a convergence of mission and passion founded on a realistic self-assessment of your abilities.

Mark Twain said, "There are two types of speakers: those that are nervous and those that are liars.

If you plan your whole life, by definition you can't get lucky. So you have to leave that little slot open.

there are two types of people in this world: those who make excuses and those who get the job done. No excuses. You are 100 percent responsible for anything that has your name on it.

Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead

The one thing no one has figured out how to outsource is the creation of ideas. You