E 64 Jordan Harbinger - Just be cool, man

On this episode of The Massimo Show, 

Rod sits down with Wall Street lawyer turned podcast interviewer with an approachable style and knack for securing high-profile guests. His show, The Jordan Harbinger Show was selected as part of Apple’s “Best of 2018.”

Jordan had a lot of thoughts in high school: 

• “at what point are they going to teach us where we can find jobs and what we should be doing with our lives and all that stuff.”  
• “am I employable?”
• “I have plenty of time to figure this out”

Things I’m sure we all thought about at one point or another. In the meantime, Jordan just kept getting in trouble until his family said, “Hey, you can't just do bad stuff until the end of high school, even if you're getting good grades.” So he went on a foreign exchange to Germany, “which was life-changing, and thank goodness I did because I look back now and I go, holy smokes, I was one year away from getting arrested for sure.” Jordan tells Rod. In high school, Jordan could show up for the test and get a B+, no problem but he quickly realized that you couldn‘t do that in college. Everyone there was smart enough to show up and get a B+ so Jordan put his head down and studied. 

Then came law school and Wall Street. Jordan realized these guys were smart enough to show up and get an A on any test, plus they were willing to work seven days a week, 16 hours a day. 

Jordan felt like his competitive advantage was gone and the imposter syndrome quickly crept in. 

His plan was to work from home (before it was cool) and make himself scarce so that none of the senior partners would know he wasn’t good enough to be there. So he connected with another colleague who was never in the office for a little advice. 

“So Dave said, when I asked him, ‘How do you work from home all the time? what's the cheat code here?’ He was like, ‘Oh, I'm not really working from home that much. I mean, here and there. But I'm actually doing a lot more to drive business for the firm’. And I was like, ‘well, what does that mean?’ And he's like, ‘well, you know, I'm doing jujitsu, I'm going with investment bankers. I'm playing racquetball, squash, whatever it was, I'm going with the investment bankers, playing golf, doing it with potential clients, going on a charity dinner, cruise, doing it with potential clients', and I was like, ‘Oh, okay. How do I do that networking thing?’. 

And of course, this is where the train stops because he goes 'just be cool, man.” 

Clearly, this answer wasn’t going to help. Jordan felt he was the antithesis of cool. So he started learning things about body language, nonverbal communication, persuasion influence, taking Dale Carnegie courses, and sales courses. “But I quickly realized that if I'm going to learn how to pull in multimillion-dollar deals, from Goldman Sachs to my Wall Street law firm, I'm not going to learn it from a guy wearing a sweater vest at the learning annex on Tuesday nights” Jordan explains to Rod. 

So he started to go back to first principles and to connect with really great people in the field of sales. He sought out authors who wrote books on influence, he started to read those books and contact a lot of the authors to learn directly from them, “because I just knew there wasn't a class on doing this, which is why those people who can bring in deals for a firm are so valued because there is no book you read a course you take...there's no master class for this stuff.” It become Jordan’s mission to bring in business through networking and relationships and to be indispensable for his company. 

But then came 2008 and the housing crisis. Jordan’s firm was heavily leveraged in the real estate, finance, and derivatives and when the crash came they laid off everyone, and then the firm went out of business. 

That co-worker, Dave, jumped ship and worked at another law firm as a partner. He was young and had an amazing skill. But it wasn’t that easy for the other older partners. “And I had a front-row seat for that. And I was like, okay, whatever organization I go to, I have to be the Rainmaker” Jordan recalls. So Jordan focused even more on his goal of networking. “It's the only secure position around really, is that the person who has the relationships.

When Jordan realized that he didn’t want to hang his hat in the same world he saw crashing down around him he knew he would have to do something a little outside the box. And from there, his podcast was born. Jordan interviews all kinds of people who rely on networking, relationships, and outward appearance for their success. From Charles Koch to Kobe Bryant. But what he’s really focused on is bringing amazing content to his listeners while avoiding the pitfalls of his position of power at the mic. 

Rod and Jordan spend the rest of the podcast discussing the challenges of being a young professional in a world based on long-term relationships, the importance of finding your niche platform, and why building a product that serves his listeners first has lead to years of success.