Your employees are your main assets, even if you’re in an industry that has a tendency to regard people are easily replaceable, like the janitorial industry (where I started) or the restaurant industry. But the difference between a good janitor or waiter and a bad one is tremendous. One makes your life easier; the other one makes your life miserable.
But how do you end up in situations where one of your employees is such a bad performer and yet another is so good? They both looked alike the day you hired them, right? Let me show you how to minimize the risk of hiring the wrong person and increase the odds of finding an uncut gem—a diamond among the rough.
Now, if you’re the kind of person who views employee turnover as a necessary evil, we don’t think alike. When a breakup occurs, I find it very damaging for both parties. Rather selfishly, from the business owner’s perspective, it’s expensive in terms of money, energy, and time. These are the questions we need to ask ourselves: (1) is there a way to find the right person from the very beginning, so that nobody wastes their time? (2) is there a way to KEEP them galvanized?
Answers
As this subsection is essentially about dealing with other human beings, this is, by definition, the most complex one and also my favorite. Over time, HR will actually become an essential part of your job, because from a certain point, it’s no longer about the money. It’s about impacting other people’s lives, whether it’s your clients or, perhaps more importantly, your employees. You have to communicate with your people regularly, so don’t think that your first priority is to provide happiness to your employees. Your job is to provide a purpose, a meaning to their lives—at least during their working hours.
What employees expect from you is certainty, vision, commitment, dignity. Top-flight character traits!
You are the captain of the ship they agreed to jump aboard, because they’re attracted to the destination and they trust you. They don’t expect the journey to be easy; nobody signed up for an easy ride. But they expect to go on adventure, feel a part of the crew, and be rewarded with a share of the treasure. Otherwise, you run the risk of a mutiny.
You may have heard it said that most people are not only attracted by the extrinsic rewards (salary, bonus, pension) but also by the intrinsic rewards (respect, praise, development opportunities, esprit de corps) of working in a great company. Believe it or not, experience shows that’s all true. It was hard for me to believe at first, because I thought nothing could beat financial rewards.
To this day, I still believe an envelope of cash is the best incentive. Unfortunately, that all but seems to be phasing out as we head into a cashless society. So we’ll have to get more creative. Regardless, many HR surveys show that once people’s basic needs are met, money is further down the list of importance.
Let me be clear: I don’t believe in HR surveys, but I can accept that financial rewards are only one part of the equation and that employees’ motivation, loyalty, and commitment is essentially the remaining part. You see, employees want many things, such as:
We can continue the list above with dozens of other bullet points, but this is enough to see a clear pattern—employees essentially look for two things:
And, of course, employees also look for financial rewards. That remains the most essential thing. Whatever HR surveys want us to believe, experience shows otherwise.
Now, do employees want to be happy? Yes.
But happiness is a byproduct of accomplishment, and all of the above is about how they’ll stretch their creativity and find accomplishment in their work. Keep that in mind for your relationships with your employees. Fine tune the right mindset from the very beginning. You don’t want to be nice. You don’t want their love. You want their efforts towards an agreed-upon goal that is a small portion of a grander shared vision.
By acting so, you’ll earn their respect, and they’ll end up being some of the happiest people in the world.
The following diagram says it all about the right relationship to have with your employees to maximize their performance:
If you don’t challenge them at all and don’t have any kind of connection with them, you’re not a leader; you’re a QUITTER. On the other hand, if you do challenge them a lot and connect with them emotionally, you’re a STRONG LEADER. If you just connect with them emotionally without challenging them at work, you’re just a weak APPEASER. If you only challenge them without connecting with them, you’re a despicable OPPRESSOR.
HIRE, EMPOWER, AND SUPERVISE
When you start your business, that’s the framework you’ll use with all your people, because they’ll all be hired by you and report to you. Once your company grows, you’ll delegate most of the hiring process to your managers. Therefore, they are the ones who’ll apply this three-step process: hire, empower, and supervise.
1-Hire
Keep in mind that the real turning point in your business’s life is when you go from one to two people. So hire the best you can find, as if HR was your only job. If you can’t afford to hire the best, hire the second best. Sometimes, they’re as good as the best. Just don’t settle for the third best. Instead, hire the hungry, those who have the propensity to be the best.
Having great employees is the CORNERSTONE of any successful company. Don’t cut corners, especially if you’re just starting to hire. Don’t forget that a company is only as good as the team behind it. You want GREAT things to happen? Have a GREAT hiring process.
The best way, bar none, for sourcing new employees is via referrals.
Referrals are gold.
They should come from EMPLOYEES (the best source), advisors, friends, colleagues, and other contacts. Ask your contacts who they know that could be great for the open position you have. For your current employees, offer a generous reward for new hires they refer THAT WORK OUT; for example, pay the reward ninety days after their referral is hired, once the new hire has proved themselves.
Other potential sources for finding new employees include job posting boards, LinkedIn, and recruiters, but they’re all much riskier than referrals.
Ask The Right Questions
Once you have your applicants, question them to learn exactly how they performed in past roles listed on their resumes. Ask accurate questions because you want accurate answers, and call references to confirm their validity. Avoid, like the plague, people who complain or tend to blame others for their own failures.
Here are some examples of questions to ask, all of which are open-ended:
The Killer Question
The reason why you spend time with an applicant and ask them several questions is to know if they’re the right match for your job. You want to get to know them better and mitigate any risk with all the information you gather.
There are questions your applicant will answer well and others they will answer wrong. But if you want to save your time and spot the bad applicants right away, take a shortcut—there’s one question to ask:
“Who are our competitors?”
The question isn’t that difficult, and when someone answers it right, that doesn’t mean a lot. But if they can’t answer anything meaningful, then … NEXT! This is unforgivable in today’s day and age, given the access we have to so much information at our fingertips. Clearly, they haven’t done their homework. So there’s no need to waste any more of your time. Ask this question early in the process, and if they mumble some nonsense, just end the interview in a gentle way in the next five minutes or so. Once you acknowledge their carelessness, just respect your time. They’re not interested in working in your company anyway.
The Hire-Right-Away Question
There’s one question that allows you to learn a hell of a lot about an applicant. Actually it tells a lot about anybody. I suggest you ask this question to whoever you want to know more about, even to the person you would consider as a potential spouse!
The thing I really like to ask candidates is what kind of ongoing education they’ve had or have planned. And I’m not talking about grades here. I want to know if they look to improve on a constant basis. Probe for details. Sometimes they’ve had training, or they’ve read books on the topic, or they’ve taken courses, online lessons, or whatever. Sometimes it was paid by their ex-employer, sometimes they financed it themselves, sometimes it was free.
It tells a LOT about how much they care about updating their skills. It also tells a lot about their state of mind: some people think they have nothing else to learn; they pull over and cherish their out-of-date knowledge forever. You want to avoid this kind of person. It sounds obvious, but you need people with a growth mindset in order to grow your business.
I’ve found this to be CRUCIAL.
People don’t usually expect this question. If, however, the candidate can’t answer or struggles to understand the question, they’re not totally a lost cause. It might be that the person is somebody you need to train and upskill. If it appears that the person has a natural inclination to knowledge acquisition, it’s likely you’ve just stumbled across a gem. I would go all-in and hire this person right away. Why? Because I’ve never been disappointed by the attitude of a person who’s willing to IMPROVE—to the point where it’s become the #1 ESSENTIAL character trait I look for in an employee.
Live Tests
During your recruitment, you might come across what I call “professional candidates”. Those people are used to interviews and come across as slick and prepared, yet sometimes they end up being really average employees.
That’s why in addition to the questions above, it’s always a good idea to give your prospective employees real-life tests—to see them in action. For example, if you have an open position that requires writing, give the prospect a writing assignment. Likewise, if you have an open research position, give them a research assignment. The key is to give them easy but SPECIFIC things to do. You want to know how reliable and diligent they are.
If you give somebody an assignment and they do a mediocre job, they’re NOT going to magically start doing a better job when you hire them. If you’re hiring for a sales position, have the candidate talk you through a skill demo on the spot. As part of the exercise, tell the candidate something along the lines of, “I doubt your ability to learn the technical aspects of the product in order to make enough sales.” A good salesperson would combat your remark with a quality sales pitch on why they could learn the technical aspects and why they should be HIRED. A weak salesperson would take the criticism and walk away.
The selection takes care of itself.
Regard the assignment or the live test as a benchmark of their BEST possible work, without (obviously) the training you’re going to give them if hired. How quickly did they perform? How accurate were they? Did they follow directions? You can learn a ton about prospective hires even from simple TESTS. When applicable, these tests can ACCURATELY predict their future performance so much better than any interview question.
Who Conducts The Interviews?
Ideally, MULTIPLE people within your organization should interview prospective hires. This ensures that candidates are thoroughly VETTED with regards to both job competence and fit within the company’s culture. The bigger your company, the more important it is to hire someone who will fit with your business’s culture.
Probationary Period
Despite the soundest recruiting and interviewing processes, there’s still a risk that an individual could be a poor fit. There’s an easy way to identify that. Ask your new employee the following, from the very first day, to SEND you an email with the following information, every day:
If the person doesn’t send it to you every day but performs, then fine! If the person sends it to you every day but doesn’t perform, there might be a resource problem or a communication problem. Something that you can easily solve. If the person doesn’t send it to you every day and doesn’t perform: RED FLAG.
Within a couple of weeks you’ll know a lot about your new recruit: if they’re curious, how they handle challenges, what they perceive as problems, if they’re on time, and so on.
Here’s what to look for in your employees to know how to handle them:
If a new hire has spirit and delivers results but lacks honesty, keep them at middle management level. Certainly don’t promote them to the top. If they have only integrity and are able to deliver results but an inability to thrive in a team, find them a job where they can work independently. If they have integrity and spirit but produce average results, find them a role in a supporting function such as customer service, support, or accounting. If one produces results but doesn’t fulfill the other criteria, hire them as a contractor.
2-Empower
In most companies, employees’ minds are focused on one thing: how to avoid looking bad. How sad it is when people’s abilities are dormant because of emotional insecurities? But it’s not only about that. Believe it or not, the number one reason employees fail to perform their duties is that they don’t always know EXACTLY what needs to be done.
The five-word phrase you want your employees to be guided by is: what needs to be done?
Gilbert’s Law tells us that the biggest problem at work is that no one tells you what to do. You must clearly define their job duties and how they will be measured what you want each of them to get done, and by what due date. It should be summed up in a paragraph or two.
Ensure that every employee knows the what, how, when, and WHY of their job.
Keep in mind that, most of the time, employees don’t deliver because they don’t really know what is expected of them. So make sure they know what great results look like, and have them review their most important goals (between two and four goals) by spending a few minutes each day on them.
Moreover, share the context and the intention behind the directives with your people, so that when chaos ensues, they still know what to do even if they lack direction.
Give clear guidelines, provide the right resources, a timeframe, and GET OUT OF THEIR WAY!
In addition, have each employee pitch you a plan to improve their function or service. Look for ideas and get them engaged.
That’s how you’ll get them to appropriate their job, make it their own thing, and find their respective place in your organization. Winning as a team is the most rewarding feeling you can have as a business owner. Winning as a team is when the energy comes from THEM, when your people are growing, individually and collectively.
Timeframe
Regarding the timeframe, it’s helpful to remember Parkinson’s Law: work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. It means that the actual amount of time that a task takes to be completed will never be less than the projected timeframe. Work and time interact with each other as smoke does in space: it takes up all the time and space you give it, but if you give less, it fits all the same!
By all means, apply it to your employees, but test this law on yourself first. Compact your deadlines, and see what happens. It forces you to focus even more on your task and get rid of the useless stuff. And when you get it done, you’ll realize you underestimated yourself this whole time.
Lead by example, because your people are watching you. Once you demand more from yourself, you earn the license to be demanding with others. But bear in mind that employees will rarely be as excited as business owners, so it’s unfair to demand the same standard from them that you would expect of yourself. It’s normal for a business owner to do a task 5x faster than an employee: you have a supreme incentive—your grand vision.
Being aware of Parkinson’s Law is important. It’s a firm reminder to not let anybody abuse you with regards to allotting unnecessary timescales and creating lengthy project scopes. But DON’T abuse it either, and be mindful not to pile on too much pressure and expectation on the team.
The general rule to keep in mind is that LESS control, not more control, leads to the highest results. In addition, it brings out the best in people, because that FREEDOM breeds TRUST, which delivers a higher performance.
Always remember that people’s performance is their response to who they perceive themselves to be for you.
If they feel good about themselves, especially when you’re around, they’ll produce great results. Most people want to do a good job. Whether they do it or not is simply a reflection of how they feel towards the one for whom they work—that’s YOU.
2. SUPERVISE
When your company grows, you need to know a little bit about everything.
This way, you can keep up with conversations with your accountant, your social media manager, your designer, your copywriter, anybody.
You may not be the most proficient in each of these areas, but that in itself is a blessing: your goal is to work with people who are better than you on each of these crafts, but you know their areas of expertise well enough to be able to supervise their work.
Give your employees succinct and honest feedback. The #1 tool to inspire people to do a great job is to give them regular feedback on obtained results (coming from a credible authority). Employees—especially the best ones—are eager to know how they’re performing. Don’t wait until the yearly appraisal to tell them what you think of their work. If not on a daily basis, talk to them about their work on a weekly basis, especially in the beginning.
If something is wrong, here’s the easiest way to give them constructive criticism:
“I’ve seen you do it right a thousand times and I know you can do this. You’re doing great with your […], but you’ve got to […].”
To put them on the right track from the very beginning, tell them how well they’re performing, that is, as soon as the green shoots of their efforts appear. Your encouragement and praise will bring them towards the desired results, showing them how close they are from excellence, and how easy it is for someone as skilled as they are to carry on and deliver the outcome.
This way, you’re showing them how to manage themselves, because you want them to perform when you’re not around. Remember that while some employees will love you, your company, and its culture to the extent that they would take a bullet to protect it, some others have their own personal goals and aspirations, which are the real reasons they work for your business—and that’s totally fine. Try to find out more about their personal wants and needs. Once you learn what makes them tick, that’s the key to motivating them. Seek to discover their hopes and dreams, but in a non-invasive way.
Be transparent and patient. Cultivate trust, and sooner or later, you’ll be able to build a bridge between their goals and the vision of your company. If you can’t, you might have hired the wrong person.
Here, I’m giving you everything I’ve learned from very high achievers, and everything I practice in my own businesses. This has been my favorite topic, and a something I could talk about for an eternity, but let’s move forward.
KEEP YOUR BEST PEOPLE
Lock in your top people either by giving them equity or a long-term incentive program. Here’s an example of what I’ve seen work really well:
Let’s say you pay your employee a salary of $80k/year and a bonus of $20k/year. You tell them that you’re going to match the bonus and put it in a pool, and do the same the following two years as well. At the end of the third year, and only then, can the employee withdraw up to a third of what’s in there. At the end of the fourth year, they can withdraw what you matched three years ago. And so on. If you’re satisfied with their work, you keep matching their annual bonus, that is likely to increase each year, but they can’t withdraw it before three years.
As a result, your cherished employee can see that there’s always more money to withdraw, provided they keep working for your company. That’s for the financial part—which I believe is still the #1 factor which promotes retention, at least up to a certain point. For the remaining, here’s a recap of what we must give our employees to keep them for the long-haul:
TRAINING
To put it bluntly: training is the most underrated management tool.
Fact: out of the hundreds of companies I’ve worked with, I’ve seen that the more often the employees are trained, the better the companies performed. I can tell you with 100% certainty there’s a correlation. In the greatest companies I’ve worked with, all the employees received ongoing training, not only during their onboarding process but on an ongoing basis, for EVERYBODY!
Your employees must go into training sessions on a regular basis, whether it’s one hour per week, two hours per week, or four hours per month. All the employees, whether it’s the assistants, the sales people, or the customer service need to undergo training.
Give your people your core material regularly and let them digest it. If what you want them to learn is something they have to remember for their day-to-day operations, give them the same training CONSTANTLY, but just switch a couple of things around so as not to make it boring. You need to reinforce the core concepts that you want them to apply, whether it’s methods, practices, scripts, processes, reflection. To repeat is to RELEARN, which is ten times more powerful than to learn.
Skills can be improved, but ONLY by constant repetition. So make these training sessions mandatory. Think about it: how did you learn to drive? How did you learn martial arts? How did you learn to play the piano? How did you learn to throw that damn ball in the basket? The answer is always the same: REPETITION.
You have to update their knowledge because things move so fast. Only those who are highly prepared and highly specialized survive. They must know their job like the back of their hand. With each time session, they get closer to mastery.
If you already have employees and you implement ongoing training and repetition of the same material again and again, your employees will show some reluctance. As for your new employees, they won’t show any resistance, as it’s just the way it works in your company. But the beauty is that they’ll finally thank you for this at the end, because only then are people really improving. Only then do people really come to learn their roles inside out. They become real experts, and they’ll enjoy it even more.
As a bonus, your retention rate will increase. So not only will you have better employees, but you’ll keep them longer, and your reputation in the marketplace will improve.
Remember salespeople who worked at Xerox in the 1970s? They all went through exhausting and regular mandatory training, but they were the most sought-after salespeople in the world.
TRAINING is your answer to productivity problems, as a hard-working visionary leader. Lazy, short-sighted, greedy bastards think that FIRING is the answer to everything, despite never even trying to put their employees in adequate conditions to succeed. Ongoing training is proactive. It PREVENTS problems. It keeps your company in shape and prepared, regardless of outside influences.
There are no emergencies in my businesses. Depending on my mood, I laugh or I deeply sympathize with business owners who spend half their time putting out fires on a daily basis. One of the reasons for that is precisely because my people are trained on a regular basis. I confess that training is much harder and less fun when everybody’s working from home, but it remains doable. But there are benefits to that too, which technology affords: for instance, being able to record training sessions allows the trainee to rewatch the content over and over again without the trainer being present.
Again, one training session per year isn’t enough: some basic learnings will embed, but most will be soon forgotten. It’s your RESPONSIBILITY to set up at least a couple of hours per month training, or two hours per week, or half a day twice a month. You get the point.
If 5% of your people’s time is dedicated to training and upgrading their knowledge, you’ll systemize EXCELLENCE in your company.
By the way, don’t think that knowledge is power, as so many often proudly state these days. Knowledge is not power. The USE of knowledge is power. You must first understand this difference to change your behavior. In addition, you must highlight this difference to your people if you want them to change theirs. Train them to learn AND to apply what they learn.
The important thing is not to know, but to BECOME. People hear something that they’ve already heard and say, “Yes, I know all that,” and yet they don’t delve deeper and fail to evolve. Until we LIVE what we know, we never really know for certain. If it doesn’t transform us, knowledge is useless. If you don’t apply what you learn, you haven’t learned anything. The meaning of LEARNING is to change a behavior in your life.
FIRING PEOPLE
Firing is the least exciting thing to do when you own a business because it’s the acknowledgement of a failed relationship.
I’ve never owned a business large enough not to be aware of somebody being fired. Therefore, I was always involved in the firing decision, and this isn’t something to be taken lightly. We’re talking about the financial, professional, and social life of a fellow human being and their impact on other human beings’ lives who depend on them.
It’s about choosing the least damaging solution, and this is your duty as a business owner, so don’t avoid it. Don’t hide behind your managers. If you feel bad about firing somebody, think of all the problems this person may generate among your employees, clients, suppliers, partners … You’re taking the risk of making other peoples’ lives miserable!
If you still feel bad despite giving this person several warnings, give them three to six months’ severance. If you keep this person, you’ll waste months of paying them for nothing anyway.
Similarly, if someone in your organization isn’t willing to improve themselves daily, this is a red flag: at some point, you’ll have to either handle them or get rid.
Shoot the dogs EARLY! If you spot a complainer, fire them right away. Complainers are like thieves, robbing you and your company of its good energy. Your whole team’s outlook will shine brighter once you’re rid of them.
You hire people for their attitude, so you’ll also fire them for their attitude. You can’t afford to keep a whiner within your walls. For the sake of the other employees, you should hire slow, fire fast.
MICROMANAGING
Of all the most annoying things a person can do to inhibit the growth of your business, the MICROMANAGING of employees is the worst. Being too involved in the hiring and training of people who don’t report directly to you is a bad allocation of your time. You’ll almost certainly be involved in the hiring of the first twenty people who join your company, because (1) it’s a critical time and your first hires are, to some extent, cofounders, and (2) you’re building your business’s culture with them.
After some time, you’ll have to delegate this work to your managers. They know exactly who they need. Just supervise the process, but don’t be the one who runs the interviews from A to Z. You have the final word, but keep them accountable for the whole work. Your job is to SUPERVISE your people’s job. Apart from the first twenty people, the only time you’ll have to be closely involved in the hiring process again is when you hire someone who will report directly to you.
Train your people the right way, give them clear guidelines and criteria, and let them recruit the people they know they need. People don’t want to be managed, they want to be led. Have you ever heard of a great political manager? No. Or a great religious manager? No. A great political leader? Yes! A great religious leader? Hell yes! So be a great leader: lead by example. Be a model that others can follow.
Micromanaging is the extreme close supervision of other people’s work. Not only does nobody like it, but it also harms your company for two reasons: this isn’t the best use of your time, and this is not the best use of your people. If you’re the one who makes the final decisions on absolutely everything in your business, then you’re prioritizing too many small things. This is the downfall of the perfectionist. As a consequence, you’re not only wasting your personal time, but your team can’t develop their skills and grow.
The only reason why micromanaging is not on the no-value task list is because you do get some results, or should I say MICRO RESULTS. They are very short term, and most likely harm your business in the long run. By micromanaging, you’re killing your employees’ initiative and creativity. Besides, when you micromanage, who’s actually in charge of the job? Who will answer if anything goes wrong? Who will reap the rewards if it’s done successfully? Nothing is clear there.
Managers get the people to do what needs to be done. Leaders get the people WANT to do what needs to be done … and get it done. Guess how people work better … when they’re FORCED to do something or when they’re EAGER to do something? As a leader, you must give your people the WHAT, and let them figure out the HOW. Nobody wants to be micromanaged, and yet in this day and age so many people are. Nobody wants to be the micromanager, and yet the same still holds true: so many people are.
You’re a micromanager if:
By the way, feeling overwhelmed is not the result of having too many things to do, but rather NOT KNOWING what to do next.
Just break your activities down into smaller tasks, and you’ll be like a CHESS PLAYER: whatever the situation is, you ALWAYS know what to do next.
You get the point. Managers do things right. Leaders do the right things. Managers climb the ladder fast. Leaders position the ladder in the right place. You’re a leader. Show your people the way, and get out of their way. Otherwise, here’s what happens: you ingrain in your people the wrong habits, and they come to you for anything and everything, because they know you’re the one who wants to control it all and doesn’t let them take the initiative. If that’s you, don’t be surprised to be interrupted at your door every half hour by your employees, or each time you run into one of them in the corridor.
I have to confess—I’m naturally a perfectionist, which in itself automatically goes with micromanagement. In the beginning, it was hard for me to adapt. After I received people’s work, I always re-worked it to make it better, which meant that instead of one person working on one specific task, there were ALWAYS two people on the same task. Talk about productivity … Nevertheless, I had to get over it and accept that, sometimes, a job done well enough was enough. Once I learned to train my people, it was more satisfying, and they all improved over time.
Hence the importance of working with people who want to sharpen their skills, AND the importance of training. Until they get trained, you still have to let them make their mistakes, and the job will never be perfect. That’s how it works.
I know it hurts: that’s called growth.
MENTORING
Nothing is more rewarding than passing on your rock-solid knowledge and seeing the transformation in other people’s lives. But first, let’s establish what a mentor is. The dictionary states that it’s, “a wise and trusted counselor or teacher.” To me, being a mentor is being able to inspire and influence someone else in a positive way—at least in one area of their life. Being the mentor means being the guide.
Once you reach the 7-figure stage, you’re ready for that, at least from a business standpoint. You’ve grown your company to seven figures, and you’re on your way to eight figures. The time has come. Don’t hold knowledge to yourself. As a mentor myself, I know there’s no grandstanding or power plays that benefit you as a result of keeping your cards close to your chest. Your ego doesn’t need this kind of crap. The greater your ability to mentor, the more confident you become. If you lack confidence, your mentee will lack commitment. Lead with certainty.
Look at the people in your business and around you. Given the success you’ve experienced at this stage, you’ll easily find people who would gladly be mentored by you. But don’t mentor just anybody. Your time is precious. You want to invest in the right people and be sure to not waste your time.
Here are the steps to follow:
Mentoring people is the icing on your cake.
“Everyone to whom much is given, from him much will be required.”
I guess you know who said that.
What if you spent your entire life bringing several businesses to eight figures but never shared your expertise with anyone else? To quote Abraham Lincoln: “Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.” What will you do with your power? History shows us that power leads to ABUSE of power, then to LOSS of power, unless it’s to SERVE people.
Mentoring is the key to creating a lasting legacy. Be an achiever by helping others succeed. Your goal is to bring them to where you are, and above if possible. If they surpass you, that’s your ultimate reward.