You can earn their trust by showing that you really know your stuff or understand their needs. Or offer them something useful; connect with them in a new way so they feel assured that they’re making the right choice with your company. You tell them a story they can connect with.

A good story is an act of empathy. It recognizes the needs of its audience. And it blends facts and feelings so the customer gets enough of both. First you need enough insights and concrete information that your argument doesn’t feel too floaty and insubstantial. It doesn’t have to be definitive data, but there has to be enough to feel meaty, to convince people that you’re anchored in real facts. But you can overdo it—if your story is only informational, then

it’s entirely possible that people will agree with you but decide it’s not compelling enough to act on just yet. Maybe next month. Maybe next year.

So you have to appeal to their emotions—connect with something they care about. Their worries, their fears. Or show them a compelling vision of the future: give a human example. Walk through how a real person will experience this product—their day, their family, their work, the change they’ll experience. Just don’t lean so far into the emotional connection that

what you’re arguing for feels novel, but not necessary.

Because in the beginning you’re not going to have HR to help you find and hire a world-class team. You won’t even have a recruiter. For the first twenty-five or so employees it’ll all come down to you and your cofounder—your vision, your network, your ability to convince people that you know what you’re doing. You can lean on your mentors and board (and hopefully early investors), you can put them to work to prop up your reputation, but ultimately you’re selling yourself and your vision for success.

You need a story people can get behind. [See also: Chapter 3.2: Why Storytelling.] People you respect. People who will help you create something great. Your team is your company. And your first hires are crucial—they’ll help you architect what your business and culture will become.

This kind of follower-driven opining may have value in the world of social media, but it’s far less likely to serve you in the world of work. Here you will build the greatest value if you can show yourself to be someone who has stayed focused enough in their field to know all the details, and which details truly matter. Regardless of your field, this sort of expertise is always valued on a team. It has heft. It is rare. It is recognized even if other folks on the team don’t understand the details themselves. It is intimidating, which is no bad thing. And it leads to you being deeply trusted.

Contrary to what you may have heard or read, being focused in this way doesn’t make you narrow, or less open to novelty and innovation. The opposite is true. It is only when you know so well the existing ways of doing things—which ones work, which don’t, and when and why—that you are able to imagine what a more effective way might look like. Focus such as this not only helps you anticipate the future—you are deeper into the forest, further ahead than anyone else, and so can see round more corners— but also helps you create the future. This focus prepares your mind with actions, experiences, and results played out over many years, and as all innovators know, creativity comes only to the prepared mind.

In a study reported in the MIT Sloan Management Review, more than 200 executives were asked to reconnect with such people and to use their interactions to get information or advice that might help them on an important work project. The executives reported that the advice they received from these dormant sources was, on average, more valuable and novel than what they obtained from their more active relationships. In fact, many of the “weak ties” activated by Granovetter’s job hunters were connections developed earlier in their careers that had been dormant.

What makes a contact useful for a job change, argued Granovetter, is neither the closeness of our relationship with them nor the power of his or her position. It is the likelihood that the person knows different people than we do and, therefore, bumps into different information. The acquaintances, neighbors, and coworkers who operate in the same spheres as we do can rarely tell us something we don’t already know because they hear about the same things we do. Of course, having an Ivy League, Oxbridge, or Grande École connection can dramatically improve one’s prospects for moving into certain closed circles.