Your Network Is Your Net Worth: Unlock the Hidden Power of Connections for Wealth, Success, and Happiness in the Digital Age - Hardcover

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Porter Gale is an internationally known public speaker, networker, and entrepreneur with more than twenty years of experience working in marketing, advertising, and independent filmmaking. From 2007 to 2011, Porter was Vice President of Marketing at Virgin America. Prior to Virgin America, Porter was a consultant and held the post of general manager at Kirshenbaum Bond + Partners San Francisco. She was awarded the Changing the Game Award by the Advertising Women of New York (AWNY), was on AdAge’s Digital Hotlist, iMedia's Top 25-Digital Marketers, and named a Digital Passionista by The Huffington Post. She lives with her daughter in San Francisco. She is also a blogger for AdAge and The Huffington Post.

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Your Network Is Your Net Worth

Contents

Foreword by Guy Kawasaki

Introduction

Part I
Develop a Transformational Attitude

1. Find Your Authentic Foundation

To Discover Where to Go, Know What’s Holding You Back

2. The Funnel Test

Focus Your Passions, Then Define Your Purpose

3. Positive Productivity

Connect Purpose to Action

4. Give Give Get

Why It’s the Real Networking Secret

5. Shake It Up

Change Your Routine to Unlock New Growth

Part II
Build a Values-Based Team

6. Three Degrees of Separation

Accelerate Your Connections with Technology and Social Media

7. Build Out Your Core

Cultivate Positive Relationships, Support Your Purpose

8. Power Pockets

Define the Places, Events, and Groups That Accelerate Networking

9. Hub Players

Find and Learn from Connectors Who Belong on Your Team

Part III
Cultivate Fields of Creativity

10. Everyone Is a Producer

Create Content, Products, or Services to Share Your Purpose and Improve Your Reach

11. Reaching Critical Mass

Harness Influencers, Partners, and Groups to Accelerate Positive Change and Growth

12. The Ask

Clarifying Requests, Interviewing, and Making Successful Pitches

13. Head, Heart, or Wallet?

Understanding and Nurturing Your Path to Happiness and Success

14. Unlock the Hidden Power of Connections

Review Sample Exercises, Do the Work, and Track Your Progress

Afterword

Acknowledgments

References, Additional Reading, and Twitter Handles

About Porter Gale

Index

Your Network Is Your Net Worth

Introduction

Chances are that if you are reading this book you are currently in a process of assessment. You may be facing a challenge—a career interruption or transition, a new life stage, or perhaps a financial difficulty—that you are trying to overcome. Or you may be working toward a specific goal in your personal or professional life and need to find the missing link that will take you into the final stretch.

If you are one of the millions who are aspiring to do better—in work, relationships, and financial growth—you have probably found that the process of assessment is a constant companion, and making a change in one area of your life inevitably calls for an evaluation of others. I have gone through this process enough times, during career moves and relationship bumps, to know that in order to make a positive change you need to have a sense of your overall net worth. And by “net worth,” I don’t mean the status of your financial accounts.

I believe in the power of social capital to improve your productivity, expand your professional options, and raise your overall quality of life. I believe that seeking out and working in collaboration with others who share your interests and values will provide a stronger foundation, enabling you to reach a higher level of success than you would on your own. I believe in the power of connections, not just between people but between passion and productivity, between value and profit, between authenticity and purpose, and ultimately between your heart and your wallet. Therefore, I believe that your “net worth” will be based not on the size of your portfolio but on your ability to define and stay true to your passions and values and that working with other people who share them will allow you to build a strong and enduring interpersonal safety net that will carry you through any financial calamity to greater output and personal fulfillment.

In Your Network Is Your Net Worth, I will show you how to unlock the hidden power of connections. And I will show you why your social capital, or your ability to build a network of authentic personal and professional relationships, not your financial capital, is the most important asset in your portfolio. I will show you why your net worth should be measured based on relationships, happiness, productivity, and job satisfaction and not solely in dollars and cents.

I will explain why strengthening and growing your network is the fastest way to improve your real net worth. For years, net worth was a quantified number or a collection of assets. In Your Network Is Your Net Worth, I will show you why investing in your network is the new model for improving your real net worth.

This kind of worth—wealth as interpersonal creative riches—is at the heart of my approach to networking. Fortunately, the postindustrial, information-age economy that has so profoundly altered the way we build our worth has also provided us with countless new tools to do so. In this book I will show you how I, along with other entrepreneurs and business leaders, have used these tools creatively to build our networks to achieve happiness, success, and true wealth.

In Your Network Is Your Net Worth, I will give you clear steps, tools, and ideas to use to build and grow your network. The process of connecting to like-minded people for pleasure and profit, though timeless in concept, has, since the rise of information technology, altered dramatically in methods and potential. The days of mandatory reading of the daily newspapers or bestseller lists to impress someone at a cocktail party, sharing the latest office gossip to bond with a colleague, or controlling your subordinates as you claw your way to the top are past. We’ve entered a new era where shifting cultural values and improved technology enable us to network in vastly improved, more focused, and more enjoyable ways that are more in tune with our personalities and passions.

The old way to network involved climbing a ladder while pushing others down or to the side for individual benefit. The past was about competition, pursuit of materialism and “keeping up with the Joneses.” Networking was all about your position in the game and the number of degrees on your résumé or titles placed after your name. This process worked for some people, to be sure, but not for most. Thankfully, networking has evolved from a transactional game into a transformational...