Conclusion: Putting the Book into Action

Likability is more than a nice idea, or a concept of which you should stay mindful—it is an approach to your life and the people in it. The point isn’t for you to like everyone and for everyone to like you. Instead, the point is to create meaningful connections that strengthen your relationships, your self-awareness, your productivity, and inevitably, your results. Be authentic in your interactions, and follow the paths of what you truly want to do, not what you think you should do.

Although the abiding principle is set out in law number one—the law of authenticity—the book is not meant to be linear. All the laws of likability are intertwined and work in concert with one another. Based on where you are in your career and how you want to enhance your relationships, you can focus in on the laws that will be most useful for you at this point in time. Choose one and work on incorporating it into your interactions with other people. Once it has become second nature, choose a new law to focus on. Apply the laws with openness and authenticity in mind, and you will become more connected.

People ask me all the time, “How do you get your clients, and how do you build your business?” This book is my attempt to answer those questions. I never knew quite how to explain it until I began to fully understand the value of likability. I used to think that “likability” was something nice but nothing that needed to be taken too seriously. But after that one fateful day in my NYU classroom, I realized that likability is the key to the whole process of developing meaningful relationships. It is the essential bedrock upon which everything else is built.

My business has grown because I “live the book.” I go out of my way to provide value beyond the work I am hired to do, without expecting that I will get anything in return. I find that I get repeat business from the clients with whom I have built the strongest relationships, and those relationships have been able to grow because we’ve found commonalities, we’ve been proactive about staying in touch and therefore staying in one another’s minds, and we talk about things other than work. We simply like each other. And people do business with people they like.