Secret Tradecraft of Elite Advisors

Highlights

• What a life it is to get paid to think and talk and write. I hope you realize how fortunate you are.
• You must care a little less about winning the business than the prospect wants you to take him on as a client.
• If your “deliverable” reports are still as long as they were in the beginning, you’re either copying/pasting drivel or you’re wasting a lot of time hiding behind length instead of depth.
• You are selling objectivity, which comes from externality. One of the only reasons you can actually help them is that you are not in their world. They are inside their own jar and can’t read the label.
• First, it’s hard to be that present in a client relationship and retain your objectivity. The longer you are around, the more you are part of the problem and not the solution.
• Second, clients will not pay a premium for ongoing presence, long term. They will only pay a premium for episodic presence.
• The residents of a country welcome a liberating force more than the occupying force. When the former arrives, there’s cheering in the streets and gifts of food and adoration. When the latter stays, they take over the homes of the citizens, eat their crops, and get friendly with their daughters. Don’t be the occupying force.
• Your mental model must not depend on “accomplishing all the right things” but on “doing most of the right things,” regardless of the result. You will need to be okay with walking away, again and again, from unfinished business as clients make your advice their own, adapting it, bending it, interpreting it.