Help enough people get what they want
"You can have everything in life you want, if you will just help enough other people get what they want." Zig Ziglar said it to salespeople decades ago. I heard it well into my career and realized I had only been running half of it.
In sales, the line is mechanical. Stop pitching what you need to sell. Find what the buyer needs to win, and supply it. Quota follows. Every good seller learns this eventually or plateaus.
The half I was missing: it's not a sales technique. It's a career engine, a leadership style, and if you let it, a life rule.
Run the test on any role. Why does a COO exist? To help the CEO get what they want: an execution machine they don't have to think about daily. To help the team get what they want: clear priorities, unblocked paths, credit that lands where it was earned. To help customers get what they want: the thing they paid for, on time, every time. Do all three at once and your career takes care of itself. I have never had to fight for a promotion. I made sure enough people around me were winning, visibly, because of systems I ran.
Two warnings, learned the slow way.
First, "enough other people" does the heavy lifting. Helping three people get what they want makes you nice. Helping three hundred makes you wealthy in every currency that matters: money, trust, options, friends. Scale isn't greedy. Scale is the point. It's why I build systems instead of doing favors.
Second, it only works if you actually care. Zig's line has a cynical reading: help people as a transaction, collect later. People smell that within a week. The compounding only starts when the help is real and the ledger is loose.
Learn, do, teach is this rule wearing work clothes. Learn so you have something worth giving. Do so you know it actually works. Teach so the help scales past your calendar. This site is the teach step. Every system on the board, every note here, is something I wanted to exist and someone else can now copy.
That's the whole philosophy. Help enough people get what they want. The "everything in life you want" part shows up on its own schedule. But I can report from 30 years of operating: it shows up.