The Giver's Blind Spot
This past weekend I walked into a ballroom in Austin full of people who compete for my paycheck.
The National Speakers Association annual conference — a thousand professional speakers in one hotel, chasing the same stages in front of the same meeting planners.
Let me be honest about the math in that room. There are people there who have won stages I wanted. There are people there who lost stages to me.
You'd think that would make a guy guarded. It never has.
Anyone who's been to one of these with me can tell you how I work the room. Introductions, all weekend. "Who do you need to meet? What are you stuck on? Let me connect you with so-and-so."
I organize the dinners. I'll spend hours at the bar putting friends together. Honestly, I go for the people more than the content.
I'm a connector by nature, and I'd do it again next weekend.
But somewhere on the flight back to Dallas, I ran the weekend back. A dozen introductions, easy. More conversations than I could count where somebody walked away with something they needed.
And not one where I said out loud what I've been wrestling with in my own business since May.
A thousand of the most useful people in my industry, three days, and I carried the same problem onto the plane that I carried off it.
You know the other kind. The guy who only texts when he needs something. Every message a withdrawal, until you quietly stop opening them.
I've spent my whole career making sure I was never that guy.
What I built instead is an unusually long list of people I've been useful to. I'm known by a lot of people. I'm not sure I'm known to very many.
Both ends of that scale are a way of never actually being in the relationship. He never gives. I never ask.
Neither one of us has to be exposed in front of anybody.
The difference is that his version gets corrected. People stop taking his calls, and eventually he finds out. Nobody has ever pulled me aside and said, "Jake, you're being too generous."
You get thanked for this one. For years.
I had asking backwards. I thought it was the taker's move — the imposition, the thing you do to people.
When you ask someone for something, you're telling them they have something you need. That isn't a cost to them. It's the most direct way there is to tell a person they matter to you.
I've spent a decade making people feel valued. I'm not sure I've ever made anyone feel needed.
Nobody in that ballroom got a turn. And I'm the one who decided that — every time I give and never ask, I'm quietly assigning a role. You're someone I help, not someone I lean on.
You don't earn a peer by being useful to them. You earn one by needing them.
So pick the person you've helped the most this year — the one who'd take your call in a heartbeat and has never once seen you struggle.
Text them today. Tell them one true thing you're stuck on. Not the polished version you'd give from a stage. The actual thing, in one sentence, with no request attached to it.
That's it. No ask, no favor, no agenda. Just let one person see you.
The strongest people I know are surrounded and unknown.
Don't spend another year just being the most helpful stranger in the room. Go compete.