How to get advice from powerful people | Hacker News Reader

How to get advice from powerful people

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34 pointsfumar8 comments

Somewhat related, some great tips for contacting busy people. http://www.kalzumeus.com/standing-invitation/

Great tips on this. Especially "People love to back underdogs but they hate backing losers." and "Conciseness is a virtue."

A lot of people come to me for job advice. I'm happy to give people a chance, but not self-defeatist people. I'm happy to help folks, but don't ask me to read a 6 page resume.

I wrote a similar essay called "How to get your Professors’ Attention — along with Coaching or Mentoring" (http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2010/10/02/how-to-get-your-pro...), which is also about the need to explain culture issues that are often absorbed tacitly instead of articulated.

One point I make that's important and related to "specifity is king:" be ready to prove yourself in some way. It might be large or small, but a lot of powerful people get more requests for help or knowledge than they have time; they use various proving methods to weed out time wasters.

I'm not a powerful person, but it took teaching for me to realize how useful and pervasive that technique is among the powerful or knowledgeable.

According to some experimentation and anecdote, the most effective way to get your professor's attention is to have a female name with a corresponding email address.

Similar to Jimmy Wales’ advice on Quora — be concise.

http://www.quora.com/Jimmy-Wales-1/What-are-the-things-we-ca...

You don't need to get advice from powerful people, you need to get connections from powerful people.

Connections should eventually lead to money (directly or indirectly). If you want money, ask for advice. If you want advice, ask for money.

you have to crawl before you can walk. before people will make connections, they need to have a good relationship with you because their reputation is on the line when they make connections.

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