Leading behavioral psychologist reveals how to be a successful narcissist and why you should stop trying to be happy
Adam Grant is an organizational psychologist and a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Grant is the author of "Give and Take," "Originals," "Option B," and the audio book "Power Moves: Lessons from Davos." He sat down with Business Insider at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland to discuss decision making an individual and aggregate level. Following is a transcript of the video.
Sara Silverstein: Climate change is at the forefront of Davos this year. It seems to be millennials and a whole generation of people who care very much about this, but as a group, we aren't making huge progress. How do you get people to shift those individual incentives for the greater good for a better outcome?
Adam Grant: I see a couple mistakes happening systematically as a psychologist when I watch how people communicate about climate change, and I don't even think this is about incentives it's often just about motivation and persuasion. So one mistake is it is a very abstract, seemingly far in the future cause. A lot of the communication is designed to change that to say we need to act in the next eight years, or we're going to have big problems in 12 years. That's still much further in the future than most people plan to make decisions. It's also hard to personify the effects of, OK, so we're going to have maybe rising temperatures and sea levels and the whole planet's going to be affected. I'm not used to caring about a planet, right? It's too big, it's too abstract and I also don't feel like my individual actions actually matter.
And so I think we need to do a much better job humanizing the immediate effects of climate change. One of the best examples of this that I have ever seen was the Environmental Defense Fund. A few years ago they sent out postcards with an image of polar bears on a melting ice caps, and it just immediately tugs at your heartstrings and you think "you know what, this is not OK." Somebody should do something about this. And then you start to feel like, well maybe I could do something about this. And I think that if you can get people to care about a polar bear, you can definitely get them to care about the human impact of climate change, and so I think we need some very immediate, very individualized, "here are the consequences that you can effect now" communication in order to move the deal a needle bit.
Silverstein: People sometimes make the wrong decision for their best interest. And when it comes to voting, it sometimes seems like people do that as well. Have you thought at all about the dynamics of voting and how people make that decision?
Grant: Yeah, so this is way out of my expertise. So I'm a psychologist who studies work, and I don't think we become fundamentally different people at the voting booth, but I think we certainly often consider different values and different aspects of our identity, so you should take everything I say with many grains of salt, but I actually think this whole idea of voting your interests or not, it's sort of a misnomer. Because when it comes to interest, people don't just think narrowly about what's good for them. They include in their interest their community, often their state, their country.
And so one of the things I like to think about is what's often called the "circle of moral regard." Do you care about just yourself, your family, your friends and then stretch it outward. And I think when people are accused of voting against their interest, what they're actually doing often is voting for a different part of that circle than what you might be thinking about. I don't know what to do with that necessarily but I think it's something that we should be more aware of and we should allow people to be interested in things that do not immediately affect their economic WellBeing.
Silverstein: And we've talked before about how the people are selected for management positions aren't necessarily the best managers, the qualities that make them chosen by executives. That seems like something that might also be true in political leaders. The thing that the characteristic that gets you there is not necessarily what makes you a good political leader. Is that true, is there any way for us to correct for that?
Grant: They're negatively correlated. So the more likely you are to get elected, the less likely you are to be effective. And that's I think in large part because the things that we admire from a distance are often really toxic up close.
If you look at research on narcissists for example. If you watch a narcissist from afar, they're often perceived as very charismatic. You love the confidence, the bold vision that they bring to the table. If you have to work with that person, all of a sudden you realize, oh they constantly blame other people for their failures, they take credit for other people's successes, they don't listen well and learn well from other people, they tend to be overconfident in their own bets, which occasionally works out well and other times leads to disastrous decisions, and there's a whole body of research on how in teams even, when we're working with narcissists, we're more likely to elevate them into leadership roles and then we're more likely to regret it afterward.
And so I think for me the fundamental problem with elections is I think it's a popularity contest when it should actually be a competence and character contest. So the place that I would personally want to start if I had a chance to kind of reinvent this whole system, is I'd say," you know what, you have to take a test in order to get a license to do most things that have real consequences." So if you want to fly a plane, you need a pilot's license. You even need a license to drive a car. You need to go to medical school and then take a test if you want to practice medicine. Same for practicing law. I think it's crazy that we don't have a test or a license to serve the public in office.
My first thought was well why don't we have a civics test? Or a history test? Where you're not eligible to run for office unless you demonstrate that you have some basic knowledge of what's gone on in your country, in your world, or even in your city. But then I wouldn't want to stop there, I also want to assess all kinds of abilities that leaders need. I want to know how well you make decisions, I'm interested in your forecasting skills, can you predict the future, can you resolve conflicts? And so obviously the complexity of developing all these tests and deciding who should be the arbiters of them is something that I've not figured out yet, but I think it deserves some real attention.
I would even say, let's just do a simple knowledge test. We'll allow you to phone a friend, multiple friends, and I want to know can you assemble a group of people who actually have accurate knowledge? That seems like a useful thing to gauge in potential future leaders. I would even be willing to make it open book and say "the test is going to be too long, you can't use the book for every question, but if you know where to find valid information you can feel free to access that."
Silverstein: Is there a characteristic that can make that person succeed as a leader?
Grant: Believe it or not there's such a thing as what's called "humble narcissism." This is some really fascinating research launched by Brad Owens in the US and that has been extended to China recently, and the finding is that if you survey people about their CEO or about their manager, that they can identify very quickly whether that person tends to be narcissistic. They tend to think they're better than others, they tend to have a sense of entitlement and grandiosity, and that can be a huge problem for the reasons we've talked about.
But it's also possible to have some elements of humility along with that. Knowing that you have weaknesses as well as strengths, being motivated to overcome those weaknesses. Maybe occasionally recognizing strengths in others and appreciating those. When you think about what it means to be a humble narcissist that research says it's possible to couple the bold vision, the grandiosity, with a constant desire to improve and overcome your shortcomings, and if you can do that, that actually can make you a really effective leader.
I think about Steve Jobs and his return to Apple. So early days Steve Jobs, I think just a plain narcissist, or maybe an extreme narcissist if you look at the typical signatures. If you look at his return though, he gave a speech once where he said getting fired from his own company was awful tasting medicine, but the patient needed it. I don't think he necessarily fundamentally changed as a person, but everyone I know who worked closely with him in both of those windows has said what you got was a more humble Steve Jobs. Somebody who knew he didn't have all the answers who occasionally listened to other people, and that made him a more effective leader, but he still had that incredibly bold dynamic vision. I think there's value in that. There's also another type of narcissism that I think is kinda interesting.
There's a difference between what's often called agenetic and communal narcissism terrible academic terms, right? So I wouldn't wish them on anyone, but the basic idea is that agentic narcissists are people who define their success as being a superior to others, whereas communal narcissists are people who often believe that they're special, but part of the way they define that is to want to make a real difference for others. And they end up being much less toxic than the agentic kind.
I always think of the Silicon Valley episode where Gavin Belson says, "I don't want to live in a world where someone else makes the world a better place better than I do." That's a little bit of a flavor of communal narcissism, but I think the common thread across humility and being communal or a little bit other oriented is if it's not all about you. If you have very high expectations and maybe even you're a little bit overconfident but you care about other people, you listen to other people, you learn from them, that can channel some of your narcissistic traits in a more productive direction.
Silverstein: And let's talk about setbacks a little bit. How do you use that in a positive way so that it doesn't derail you?
Grant: There are a couple of good empirical answers to that question. The first one is you want to avoid the traps that Marty Seligman and his colleagues have written about when they study the psychology of our explanatory styles.
So the question is when something bad happens, how do you explain that to yourself and others? And what we find is that some people have a very pessimistic explanatory style that sort of shoots them in the foot, where they interpret bad events as completely personal, permanent and pervasive, so they're often called the "3 P's." So you say "look, this is my fault, this is going to ruin every aspect of my life and it's always going to be horrible." And so the thinking style that people are supposed to learn in order to become more resilient in those situations is to say look, it's not always true that those three P's apply, and so it's worth asking, yeah you want to take personal responsibility for your failures or your setbacks, but what other external circumstances contributed to those?
And then what's the proof that, maybe other parts of your life are unaffected by the job that you lost or by the failure you experienced at work. And especially, I think the permanent one is that, to me, the biggest trap because you'll catch people, you can actually see it in their language when they talk or when they write, they'll say things like, "well I will never be happy again," or "I will always be a failure."
I'm sorry, can you predict the future? Do you have a crystal ball? I don't. It's an incredibly difficult task, and so what you're supposed to do then according to this evidence is you're supposed to edit your own language and say right now, it feels like I will never be successful again.
Silverstein: A lot of your work is around how people make decisions, either with their best intentions or against them and I've always wondered what guides your decision making process?
Grant: So I think this is a great area where there's what's often called a "knowing-doing gap." As an organizational psychologist, I study these things daily and yet I notice, this happens every year, I only teach in the Fall, and one of the things I teach is this trap that's called "escalation of commitment to a losing course of action." It's where you make an initial commitment, it might be an investment of money, it might be a project you take on, it might be a person you decide to collaborate with, and then it doesn't go as planned. So maybe you get negative feedback, maybe you fail, maybe it's just horribly frustrating, and then you have a choice, are you going to cut your losses or are you going to sort of double down? And what data shows is that people often double down.
So managers end up spending more money on failing projects and also struggling people than they do on their star performers and their really promising projects. They also end up over investing time in the people who are not doing well, as opposed to the people who are excelling. I
talk about this every Fall and then as soon as I'm out of the classroom, I find myself falling victim to it. And I think there's a really challenging part of this so I've learned from this is that I actually have to teach this stuff regularly in order to practice it. And what that means is when I'm not in the classroom I need to do interviews like this so, I have an excuse to talk about these principles. But I found myself a lot going back to the research but just writing a little bit about some of these principles, I find myself sort of deliberately talking through them in conversations that I have with people who are looking for advice, when normally I would just go right to the advice. I need to be reminded of how difficult it is to de-escalate.
So let's take a concrete example. One of the things I constantly do is I get over committed and I end up thinking wow, this project sounds really exciting and then pretty soon, I've way overextended myself. So I know that's an escalation situation. And as I'm talking about it, I realize OK, one way to prevent myself from doing that is to set a rule which is I will not ever say yes to a new project until I finish an old one. And as I had that rule handy, I'm a lot more likely to remember that and say you know what, I would love to work on this, right now my plate feels very full, so is it OK if we circle back in a couple months once I finish what I'm currently working on? And then the reality is what I'm currently working on takes several months longer than I expected it to and then I know once enough time has passed whether this is really a project that's going to sustain my interest or whether it was exciting in the moment and then not at all.
Silverstein: And one thing I'd like you to touch on a little bit that I've seen you post a little bit on is how you make a decision about your career, and it seems so attractive to be seduced by the power of a position or the title of a position or like you talk about, like a book, like a final project, when what it actually takes to get there maybe doesn't work with your style or what you actually want to do. Can you talk a little bit about how you get people to remind themselves of that?
Grant: Look, I think we're all affected by concerns about status and image. I see this though all the time with my students. I'll give you a few examples of where it jumps out at me and the first time I ever noticed it was, I was actually teaching my first class. I had a student come into office hours asking for advice about grad school, and I said, "why are you considering to go to grad school?" And the answer was, well because I've always wanted to get my PhD. And I thought it was such a weird phrase to say "my PhD." One, you don't have one, two, most people want to get "a PhD."
And it was very clear that this was kind of a centerpiece of her identity in this case, that having a PhD was an important way either to feel educated or to, I don't know, not disappoint her parents, and I came back and I said, yeah there are lots of people who want to have accomplished something, the question is, what do you think about the process of working toward that goal? And what she realized really quickly was she loved consuming the results of research, but did not enjoy at all the process of producing it, and so it was pretty clear that a PhD program was probably not a great fit for her.
I've seen this over and over again since, where I have students who say I want to go and work for an investment bank, and I say OK why? And they say, well because these companies are very prestigious and you get to work with a lot of very important people. I'm like, do you know what you'll be doing all day? Do you like Excel spreadsheets? Do you like working 90-hour weeks? Do you like not having say over who you work with and what you work on and what you get to learn? And I'm not telling anyone they should necessarily never work in finance, but what I want to get to is do you actually enjoy thinking about markets? Do you like trying to figure out a merger and acquisitions, or an initial public offerings? And if you find that kind of work interesting it's probably a better job fit for you.
I guess my takeaway here is to say that too often when we think about jobs, we think about who the job will make us, the title we get to carry, and I just think it's a travesty that people are drawn to titles and positions that will impress other people, but then end up being depressed by those experiences, and so I think it's worth asking how do I feel about the day to day work, do I find it intrinsically interesting, is it meaningful, am I going to learn something from this set of maybe knowledge and skills that I'm exposed to? And I think again, it's a knowing doing gap. We can probably give that advice to others, the question is how often do we take it for ourselves.
Silverstein: And that's hard to reframe it in that way.
Grant: I think it is. I mean in my case, I called an advisor when I was finishing grad school and I said, I know that there are certain places that it's hard to say no when Harvard calls, and I said I want to make sure that I'm really evaluating the immediate people I'm going to be surrounded by and the teaching role that I have, so please remind me do not go just because it's Harvard. I actually ended up, I turned down Harvard for my first job offer and went to UNC because I felt that I was going to learn more from the people that I'd be collaborating with there. And it was an incredible learning experience and after two years, I ended up getting poached by Wharton and one of my closest collaborators ended up going to Harvard.
Silverstein: Oh wow.
Grant: So I don't know what that means, but it suggests that sometimes I don't practice what I preach.
Silverstein: One of the topics that I've been most obsessed with lately is happiness and trying to figure out if that is the ultimate goal and what will actually make people happy and if they're actually making decisions that will lead them to happiness. Is that what people are trying to achieve? How good are we at achieving it?
Grant: I think happiness is not always a good goal.
Silverstein: OK.
Grant: John Stewart Mill actually wrote, centuries ago, that one of the only ways to achieve happiness is to have your mind fixed on some goal other than happiness. And there's actually some new research in psychology to back this up.
So Iris Ma uss and her colleagues have done these interesting studies where they track how much you value hap piness. So they would ask, how important is this to you? Is it a central life goal for you to be happy? And then they follow you and they survey you to find out how much joy and pleasure and satisfaction do you have in your life? And it turns out that the people who place extreme value on happiness are significantly less happy than people who just say yeah, happiness is important but it's not my most important objective. And then you can say OK, well maybe there's a reversal of causality there, and miserable people become obsessed with becoming happy. But then what they do is they run these experiments where they randomly assign people to try to pursue happiness and they find that their happiness drops a little bit.
So the question is why? When people start to think about becoming happy, they get too focused on their own internal states and say well how do I feel better? As opposed to saying, OK what can I contribute to others? I think another piece of it is they get stuck in this mode where they're never experiencing. They're constantly evaluating. So I'm trying to be happy, wait, am I happy right now? I don't know, am I enjoying this conversation? Are you enjoying this conversation? Oh no, what if I could've been doing something more delightful? And then you start to experience this horrible fear of missing out and being plagued by FOMO makes you really unhappy. Over time then that turns into what I've started thinking about is ROMO, the regret of missing out, which happens after the FOMO.
I love what Oliver Berkman has called for as an alternative, which he calls JO MO, the joy of missing out. And he says every time you're thinking about all the great experiences you could've been having instead of the one you're currently having, you should instead think about all the unpleasant things that you're not doing and how thrilled you are that you got to avoid them. And I found that really helpful.
But I think in the workplace, this is a mistake that people often make is, I've watched a lot of people who maybe put too much emphasis on status in early career decisions and then they realize, OK, I've gotta really pay attention to what's important to me. And then they try to choose a job that makes them happy and the problem is, I think that joy is often fleeting. The job that makes you happy today might be boring next year because it's become too easy. It might also become repetitive, it might be that your interests change.
Some research I've just read recently that's brand new which shows that when people try to pursue passions, if they think about passion in terms of immediate joy or momentary happiness, they're less successful in pursuing that passion, less likely to find it, even, than if instead they think about a passion as what's personally important to them. It's less about what you enjoy, it's more about what you value, and saying can I find a job that brings me meaning? Because the work that I do is going to allow me to become the person that I want to be and contribute to the world what I want to offer.
Even If You Love Your Logo, It Still May Be Off-Brand. Here's How to Create a Better Design
© Getty Images Blank logo Sign Cafe shop front display Brick wall
Stop creating logos that you like and start building ones that match your brand.
One of my least favorite tasks as a branding strategist is having to tell a client that their current logo or website design does not represent their brand in the best light. The responses I get range from "Yeah, we know, but we needed someone to confirm that" to "But everyone loves our logo!" Loving a logo, or any brand identity or product design element for that matter, should not be the bottom-line basis for design decisions.
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Design-- including logos, colors, websites, typographical elements, fonts, packaging, etc.-- is as much about consistency with your brand as it is about style and preference. When creating a logo or brand design, here's what you need to keep in mind.
What you like is different than what's on brand.
Just because you find your logo pleasing to the eye doesn't mean that it aligns with your brand message. Keep in mind that subconscious factors such as color and design "say" something to the viewer about who you are.
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A real-world example of this would be the most recent Starbucks logo change in 2011, the fourth logo design change in its history. In this latest version, all the text was dropped, the mermaid made the sole focus and her color was changed from black to the iconic Starbuck's green. It communicates a "strong" brand, as the image and color stands on its own, sans text.
A visceral response is not that same as an intellectual one.
To the point above, many entrepreneurs will test a logo's effectiveness by asking their family, friends and clients "Do you like this?" But the real question to ask is "What does this say to you?"
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As Malcolm Gladwell highlighted in his book Blink, thin slicing is the visceral response we have to something, without thinking. It's that instant feeling you get. One study from Google found that it takes about 50 milliseconds (0.05 seconds) for visitors to form an impression about your website and determine if they will stay or go.
Whenever I need to test a new logo for a client, I start by asking a few people I know to tell me their first visceral impression of the logo with the simple question "how does this make you feel . The answers always provide a great insight into how the logo (or other visual element) is coming across.
Test your current logo.
If you find yourself stuck in a logo design conundrum, one way out is to see if said design passes the "on brand" test. Here's how.
Based on the scores you get in the exercise above, decide on one of the following actions.
Designing a logo isn't an easy task to begin with, but being clear on what you are trying to say -- not just what pleases your eye -- will take you a long way toward creating a logo that communicates who you are and what your brand stands for.
How A Yorkie Enthusiast's Passion For Pets Sparked A Million-Dollar, One-Person Business
Tiffany Williams knew her days as a senior sales consultant at a daily deals website were numbered. She kept hearing rumblings that the company planned to lay off team members in smaller territories, like the one where she worked.
Instead of waiting for the inevitable to happen, the New Orleans resident decided to go full time with a side hustle she’d started—an online, print-on-demand T-shirt business. She launched it through Teespring, a platform that lets entrepreneurs create and sell products online, in 2012, two weeks before the layoffs hit her company.
"I don't want to go back and work for anybody else," Williams said to herself. "I have to make this work."
Determined to leave the 9-to-five behind, Tiffany Williams launched a Yorkie-themed T-shirt business ... [+] that became the foundation for Rich Girl Collective, a business that educates women about entrepreneurship.
Rich Girl Collective
Inspired by her pet—an adorable Yorkie named Prada—Williams hired graphic designers on freelance platforms such as Upwork and Fiverr to design Yorkie-themed T-shirts for her. Then, by popular request, she branched out into totes and aprons.
It wasn’t easy to grow the business but her hard work paid off. Williams, 39, now brings in more than $1 million in annual revenue in a one-woman business selling her products, which have evolved beyond T-shirts to digital products, such as courses that show other women how to create businesses, under the brand Rich Girl Collective.
Williams is part of an exciting trend: the growth of the million-dollar, one-person business. The number of nonemployer firms—those with no paid employees but the owners—bringing in $1 million to $2.49 million a year in revenue hit 36,984 in 2017, a 2% increase from 36,161 in 2016, according to U.S. Census Bureau data. That tally rose 38%, from 26,744, in 2011. Most non-employer firms are solo businesses, but some are partnerships and family businesses.
How did Williams make it happen? Here are some of her strategies.
Dive right in. Williams had an advantage in starting a business because she'd earned a BA in business management and marketing from Dillard University and an MBA in technology management from University of Phoenix.
Nonetheless, she didn’t have a steady source of income or a big startup kitty available at the moment her career circumstances led her to take a leap of faith and go full time in her business. She made the decision to do her best with the resources she had available, even if circumstances weren’t textbook perfect.
"A lot of people think that they need to borrow money from the bank or write a 100-page business plan to get started," says Williams. "A lot of times you don't. You can start where you are. As your business grows, you invest more."
As Williams considered her options as an entrepreneur, growing her print-on-demand T-shirt business seemed like the smartest path at the time. “There was no money upfront,” she says.
That was because in a print-on-demand model, the entrepreneur does not have to stock inventory. When the entrepreneur uploads a T-shirt design to Teespring or a similar site and selects a selling price, customers pay the site and then the T-shirt is printed. The site takes a cut in each sale, then mails a check to the entrepreneur or direct deposits a payment.
Creating the T-shirts and finding a place to sell them was just the first step to building a successful business, though. Williams also needed to find a way to let dog lovers know the T-shirts were for sale. She had always enjoyed social media, so she started a free Facebook group for fellow Yorkie owners to chat with each other, investing about $150 in Facebook ads to attract people who shared this interest. When she had a new design ready, she would present it to the Yorkie group for sale.
Be patient. Although many of the Yorkie group members did buy her shirts, Williams did not replace her corporate salary right away. Still, she continued to show up at her laptop, day after day, to keep moving the business forward. She knew this was an important part of her education as an entrepreneur. “I was in business, but I was learning,” she recalls.
To bring in additional income, she tapped what she had learned in her past corporate life and through her experiments to start an agency, Buzz Social Media, in 2013. Between her business ventures, she built her revenue to the high five figures over two years.
Then, in 2014, she experienced a major breakthrough. She began experimenting with new revenue streams, such as running an online Kindle store where she sold eBooks, and began purchasing household items on sale at Target and Walmart and selling them at a markup on Amazon. By using this approach, she was able to grow the business to the point that once she subtracted her expenses from her revenue, her profits hit $350,000 that year. “That was my breakout year,” she says.
Take your cues from the market. As her business grew, Williams began hearing from other women who learned about it and were interested in launching a business of their own. First, she heard from a woman who wanted to leave her insurance company job to stay home and raise her children and wanted to know how Williams pulled it off. Two weeks later, Williams got another similar inquiry. Soon, the questions were snowballing.
Williams was excited to help but realized that speaking with each woman one-by-one wasn't practical as a solopreneur. "It started to take up time when I was running a business to answer everybody's questions," she says.
Her solution was to start her free Facebook group, Rich Girl Collective, to support other women who wanted to start their own businesses. That would allow her to give back to the entrepreneurial community while still staying focused on her own business. “I could answer everyone’s questions at a time in a group,” she says.
Williams chose the name of the group carefully to reinforce her view that wealth isn't about buying material things but rather building a better quality of life.
“For me, the ‘rich’ in Rich Girl Collective stands for more than money,” she says. “It is an acronym: ‘R’ stands for relationships and family. ‘I’ means ‘invest’ in entrepreneurship. ‘C’ is for community and ‘H’ is for health and wellness.”
Bring discipline to your business. Williams kept her group very active by posting three times a day, Monday through Saturday. She also live-streamed Q&A events where members could ask her questions about starting a business. Over several years, the group grew to 15,000 members, as members wrote to her to ask if their friends could join.
To make sure the discussions stayed focused on business and that no one was spamming the group with sales pitches, Williams set ground rules. Potential members had to apply to the group, answering questions that showed whether they were serious about starting a business. She also checked out their Facebook pages, to make sure the profiles looked legit. “If they have no profile picture, they can’t get in,” she says.
Anticipate what your customers need. Over time, Williams began to notice common themes in the conversations taking place on the site and tailored her messaging to her community’s concerns.
One was that perfectionism was holding some women back from starting their businesses. "They try to have the perfect logo, the perfect website," she says.
She advises followers to let the perfectionism go. “I tell them branding is important,” says Williams. “However, don’t try to be so perfect you’re taking months to get started. Learn as you go.”
With many of the women in the community percolating with business ideas and not sure which one to pursue first, focusing was also a problem for many. Williams encourages them to master one business before moving onto the next.
"We have so many passions, so many businesses we want to start," she says. "I encourage them to start with one thing. Get that one thing flowing and then, if you want to think about branching out to another business, do that. If you've never been a business owner before, you don't know how much work it is. You are going to spread yourself way too thin if you start out doing too many things."
Don’t do it all alone. Williams was fortunate in that her mother was available to help her with a wide variety of projects as she grew the business, working as a contractor. “She knows all of the ins and outs of the business,” says Williams. “She is my biggest supporter and helper.”
As the pace of the business picked up, Williams enlisted other contractors, so she could stay focused on strategy and business development. Currently, she relies on five contractors, including a personal assistant, someone who handles customer support and moderators for the Facebook group, who vet each membership application and make sure members have a good experience. “They make sure no one spams the group,” she says.
Williams’ willingness to delegate enabled her to grow the Facebook group to 37,000 women. She is now looking to add a couple more contractors in the next few months and possibly a full-time employee. The additional investment makes sense, she says: “We’re growing.”
Put your health first. Everything seemed to be moving ahead smoothly when Williams went to the doctor one day at age 37 and got a scary diagnosis. She had very early-stage ovarian cancer. “It was a shock,” she recalls. “I don’t have a history in my family. It was a tough time in my life.”
She opted not to share the news with her community at first, as she went through four months of chemotherapy, preferring to keep her focus on the business. “I wanted people to treat me the same way,” she says.
She kept up business operations throughout her treatment, maintaining her regular live streams. She didn’t tell her followers about her diagnosis until the last day of her treatment. “I wanted them to see the entire time that I still pushed through, that I got work done,” she says. “I wanted that to be a lesson: Whatever comes to you, you can push through.”
Six months after completing her chemo treatment, Williams held her first Rich Girl Live conference, a two-day event in New Orleans. “I wanted to test the waters,” she says. “I was determined to do it.” She was able to pull it off and is getting ready for the next one, to be held in Atlanta in September. This time it will include 300 attendees.
Meanwhile, Williams says her health is now excellent— “I’m back and better than ever,” she says—but she makes sure her life is balanced. She spends much of her free time outside of the business involved in community activities, at the gym or with her family. "You don't want to be so focused on your business you're not spending time with family," she says.
Productize your knowledge. Williams’ business plateaued in 2016 and 2017 while she coped with her illness. It was during that period she realized it made sense to focus more on digital products, so she could scale back her hours and focus on getting well. “I wanted to work but I didn’t want to do as much work,” she says.
With that in mind, she started introducing online classes in areas of business where she had expertise, such as starting a T-shirt business, launching an online boutique and selling products on Amazon. “I only teach what I’ve done and have gotten results with,” she says. As her digital products took off, she deemphasized the physical products, like her T-shirts.
To host the classes, she uses the platform Podia. She likes the fact that for set price per year, Podia allows her to offer classes, downloads and monthly membership groups.
Podia’s capabilities came in handy when, in response to requests from her followers, Williams introduced a live training class in 2018 called Rich Girl Academy, for which she charges $37 a month through the platform. In addition to providing personalized support to the women business owners who join, such as an analysis of their websites, she invites monthly guest speakers to talk about topics such as business finance, credit, and mental health.
“I realized a lot of people need additional help—accountability,” she says. “They need the push. They need the camaraderie to see that if other people are doing it, they can do it, too.”
With her classes growing, Williams has been moving full steam ahead this year. She registered the trademark Rich Girl Collective this year. She also recently introduced live chapters for members of the Academy that meet quarterly in seven cities, with the goal of turning it into something akin to a sorority.
Ultimately, it is all about building a successful brand.
“I really want this to be a brand that, when someone hears someone say, ‘I want to start a business. I need help with my marketing,” Rich Girl Collective is the first brand that comes to mind," she says.
That's a tall order, given all of the competition in the space, but following her illness, she says, she became very clear on how important it was to her to focus her life on helping women. “My mission now is I want to impact as many people as possible,” she says.
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Podia - Sell Online Courses, Memberships, and DownloadsPodia
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