Inflectors: Finding your Max

While traveling, I had an epiphany, the kind that literally may change the direction of my life. The kind of change I’ll call an inflection point.

I often travel alone and frequently to places normal people don’t go. This month took me to the wilds of Guyana and Suriname, sleeping in rain forest lodges without A/C, driving the “major” highway made of lightly packed red dirt and doing night boat trips to find massive black caimans. Travel experiences cause me to reflect on my life’s journey. Maybe it’s waking in a hammock at 6:00 AM in a haze of mosquitos buzzing around my head to cross the river in a rickety ferry that only operates once the sun comes up…maybe I got malaria…regardless it’s caused me to thing deeply about my life and my career.

Spend any time on LinkedIn and other social media platform and you realize the struggle people are facing to start or restart their careers. I don’t think a recession has been officially announced but I’ve been through enough to know what they look like.

It sounds sarcastic but I’m lucky to have entered the job market in the worst of times. ?I graduated college into the 1991 to 1993 recession, returned to the job market with my MBA in the 2001 to 2003 recession (the dot com bubble burst) and radically changed careers during the 2007 to 2009 recession (the Great Financial Crisis).

Finding a job was hard and you had to do that thing that people often speak of as if you were doing something sleazy…networking.

I think networking has a negative reputation because most people don’t do it the right way and they don’t do it until they need to, which is too late. BTW, I’m an introvert, so, if you are reading this, and thinking, “ya, networking only works for social people”, well, stay tuned, I’ll have posts on that.

Back to that epiphany. With repeated career starts during tough times, I’ve learned a little about how to find a job. Along the way I’ve encountered some amazing people that caused inflection points in my life. These people have literally made my career. I’m a big fan of Malcom Gladwell and his book:

My epiphany caused me to re-read it to see if I was on to something new or just stealing his ideas. Gladwell’s focus is on how three kinds of people. Connectors, Mavens and Salespeople can cause massive changes in outcomes. He mostly focuses on the impact these people have on products, services and companies. I’ve used the term Connector for a long time, but, I realized the sentiment I was trying to communicate was a little different than his.

And I created a word. Inflectors. Inflectors are people that you “bump into” and the experience sends you off in a different direction. I already started reaching out to some of my Inflectors last year to thank them for how they had altered my life. It’s only this month that it occurred to me that one’s level of success is directly related to the quality and quantity of Inflectors one meets. ???

It’s also made me want to share some of my experiences in the hopes of altering how people approach networking and interacting with others. I’ve thought a lot about my path and have identified my some of my Inflectors. I’m planning to tell the story of my career and I hope my stories about Inflectors and how they changed my life path will inflect you and make your life better.?

While I have Inflectors prior to this person, I don’t think any of them has had as deep and long lasting of an impact. I come from a blue-collar family and headed off to college without the insight that college educated parents or other family members could provide. I did at least choose a major that would prepare me well, accounting. I didn’t enjoy the studies but it was meant to be a fallback career. My goal was to become an international attorney and I used my other classes to bulk up on languages and pre-law in preparation.?

That was my path until I met Charlie Manger . I was serving on a not-for-profit board early in my career, took an international business certification program taught by Charlie and was blown away by his accomplishments. An international attorney fluent in multiple languages engaged in complex business transactions all over the world, his stories were exciting and just the kinds of things I wanted to do. This is why I wanted to go to law school.?

I invited him to join our board. He was already overcommitted, so, declined. But we stayed in touch and as my accounting career was winding down, I asked Charlie to lunch, explained what I wanted to do when I “grew up” and asked for advice.?

He listened intently and asked two powerful questions that changed the path of my life. “Why law school and not an MBA?” Now, I knew in high school that I was going to be an attorney, college was just about getting to law school while also developing a back-up career just in case. I had never thought about an MBA. The second question: “Have you ever heard of 美国雷鸟商学院 ?”

I had not, but, I researched it that weekend. Thunderbird was this program that was the number one school in international business for years in the 90s and 2000s. It’s a place I had never heard of that has changed my life more than any other choice I’ve made.

Talk to Charlie for a while and you find out he knows thousands of people and he has an amazing gift of bonding with them. He’s definitely a Connector in the sense Gladwell discusses and he’s probably also a Maven, but, Charlie is also an Inflector. Based on my interactions with him, I can guarantee you I’m not the only person who’s had their life path altered in a good way by Charlie.

Charlie displayed a couple of traits Inflectors have that I’ll try to tease out:

• Inflectors are busy people but they always make time for others.
• Inflectors listen deeply, make connections and offer insight, but they don’t try to influence you, they offer information that increases your options.

If you’ve read this far, I have a few asks. 1. Share this post with people you think it will help. 2. Give some deep thought to who your Inflectors are. Reach out and thank them if you never have. We want to encourage this behavior. 3. Think about how you interact with people. Are you an Inflector? Can you be? And 4. Share your story in the comments. Tell us how someone has positively influenced your life, how they’ve sent it off in a direction you never considered. We need more positive stories as those that struggle to continue their careers encounter bad behavior in a tough environment. ?

I titled this post, “Finding Your Max”, I’m not going to explain exactly what that means yet, but, when I head out to an event where I’ll meet new people, I’m looking for my Max, I'm looking for Inflectors like Charlie and I'm looking for people I can inflect. I'm hoping my stories will help change your approach to networking and get you to take action.