Quote from JP on October 12, 2020, 7:53 am

Hey so I've been wondering about this for some time. I've always had the mindset in the past that whoever is the more powerful one is the one that grants favors rather than ask. Unfortunately, because of this mindset, I've refused many favors in the past that probably would've helped me out substantially. But I now know that by NOT using my connections, I was also allowing my connections to grow stale and eventually die. Obviously, as per the Power Formula, less connections mean less power. Is there a way for me to gain power when asking for favors? This made me think a bit.

As I write this post, here are a few instances where asking a favor would gain you influence:

• If a CEO or celebrity (anyone that already has power), asks an average person for something, the powerful person will gain influence over that person because the average person will gain value just by association with a powerful person (however remote it is).
• The other instance is if the person doing the favor thinks they'll get something back at some point. A prime example is when a man is willing to do anything an attractive woman asks, because he thinks it will increase his chances of getting with her. 

Obviously, I think the majority of us are on the lower part of the power spectrum, so the first instance won't apply. The second instance is something that is well within our grasp--although technically, the first instance falls under the second one since the average person would think that they would gain more value when they are doing the favor for a celebrity.  

What are some ways that you could gain power when asking favors from your connections? Find out something they want, and something you could help them with.  This one seems obvious, but many people don't really do this. Setting yourself up requires you to know what specific information to get, know how to extract this information, and know what you can leverage.

This is where you need to do some work on your part. During your conversations and interactions with them, you'll need to do some intel gathering on one or more of these:

• Goals. What are his goals in life? Fairly straightforward.
• Dreams. What is the purpose of his goals? If his goal is to be rich, then his dream might be to take a tropical vacation to the Bahamas every month. 
• Obstacles to the goals. What are some hurdles he is facing when working on his goal? Fairly straight forward.
• Fears. What is he afraid of? The opposite of dreams. Maybe he is afraid that he will disappoint his parents.
• Values. What does he value the most? Friends? Family? Religion? Money?

There are many ways of gathering information, you could ask directly, but I personally prefer more indirect, since people have a tendency to give half-truths and lies when asked too directly. Here are some ideas on getting the information:

• Ask directly, and watch the non-verbal and verbal reaction 
  • This requires that you get a decent baseline for comparison for more accuracy
• Ask how they spend their time. 
  • If they say that going to the gym is important to them, but haven't worked out in two months, then what they say probably holds less weight.
• Talk about your own hopes and dreams to bait them into talking about theirs
• Make assumptions and see if he bites.
  • For example, if you think that his dream is to become CEO of his company, you could say "Hey, maybe with all the hours you put in at work, you'll become CEO one day".
• Ask someone else that knows him
  • Maybe he's closer with someone else, ask that person what your buddy is up to.
• Look for clues in his space (his house, his office, etc,...)
  • If his house is completely decked out in high-end furniture, and his house is nice, then that's an obvious clue that he might value money, unless he inherited his family's fortune.

Now the purpose of doing this intel gathering exercise is to find out what you can leverage, but what if everything you found out about, you're unable to leverage? For instance, his goal is to make a six figure income, and you're poor with no business connections. This is where you can use the "why" technique and dig more information using some of the ideas above. Here's a demonstration of the "why" technique:

• He wants to make six figures. Why?
  • Because he sees himself traveling the world with his friends. Why?
    • He wants to experience new things and live a life of adventure.

In this simple example, we've found out that although you aren't able to help this person make six figures, you can probably sell yourself as one of the cool people that he wants to travel with, someone that's always down to try new adventurous things (appealing to his dream of living a life of adventure), or literally anything else that you could think of. This particular case is how cool, popular people get stuff seemingly for free. It's all about giving value with the least amount of effort on your part.

Now, assuming that you're able to gain leverage over your friend or acquaintance, he'll probably WANT you to ask him for favors, just so he doesn't feel like a leech. This is when asking for a favor BECOMES a power move. Sometimes I'll even find that they'll suddenly preemptively ask if you need a favor, and insist on helping you.