 Without wasting any time in getting started, our first killer strategy is initiative. Now what do I mean when I say the word initiative? Del Carnegie, the celebrated author of How to Win Friends and Influence People, once wrote, I'll tell you, it's doing the right thing without being told. Doing the right thing without being told. Harvard Business Review in an article by William Onkin Jr. and Donald L. Was. Go one step further in offering five degrees of initiative from lowest to highest. Number one, wait until told. Number two, ask what to do. Number three, recommend then take resulting action. Number four, act but advise at once. And number five, act on own, then routinely report. Now I learned about the importance of initiative very early on in my time with Matthew, actually my very first day, the very first hour of my very first day. I was assigned the task of creating an email account for myself on the company's domain, so Edward at company. And at 17, not knowing what a hosting account was or how I could in any way attach this to a Gmail account, I turned to the technical looking person next to me and as meekly and subserviently as I could said, is this something that you could help me with? Only take a couple of minutes to do, right? Without missing a beat, this person turned and said, it'll take 30 seconds. But if I do this for you now, you'll come to me with everything. And if that happens, you won't last here very long. This might seem a little bit cruel. I was 17 years old, it was my very first day. But these were the kindest words that this person possibly could have said and were now very good friends. I consider those words fundamentally shifted the trajectory that I've been on ever since. Now, initiative isn't just a defensive play to stop you from bothering your colleagues. It's also the greatest offensive play you can possibly have in your arsenal. Winding the clock forward two years, Matthew has just landed a book agent. And he's going out to various different meetings with book publishers both in the UK, where we're both from, as well as the US. And at this time I had no involvement whatsoever with the project, nor was there any reason why I should be involved. But I wanted to be. Now Matthew has this saying, it's actually something he talked about when he spoke at the 21 convention a number of years ago. And it's rather profound, so prepare yourselves. The saying is, stuff leads to stuff. If you want more stuff in a particular area, do more stuff in that area. So I wanted some more stuff in the book world, the book project world specifically, to do with book marketing. And so I read everything that I possibly could about that area. I looked at competitors and studied their launches and asked what are they doing, as well as people in other industries. And I wrote up all of my findings, I put it into a 10 page report and I shared this with Matthew and he was rather impressed. The very next day, Matthew got a phone call. This wasn't from his book agent at this point. Both of the deals had been settled, but this was from his television agents and it was a call to say that he had just been invited to go and be part of a major NBC show called Ready for Love. It was one that Eva Longoria would be executive producing. The kicker was that he had just two weeks to uproot his entire life from London and move to Los Angeles permanently. So with that, which he was absolutely going to say yes to, the filming during the day and then the writing of the book, evenings and weekends, it left Matthew with absolutely no time whatsoever for the actual book marketing. And so he basically said, this is now yours, go see what you can do. I was 19 years old. I was very fortunate in the way that the deals had been structured in that the UK version would come out four months ahead of the US version. So this was acted as a kind of dummy run, allowing me to test a few things as well as to prove myself to Matthew and prove that my ideas were effective. The book came out in January, 2013 in the UK and it was a pretty good success. I then went back to Matthew and said, I've got a few more ideas of things I think we should do for the US version. And by this point, he really trusted my ideas and we decided we would go forward with them. Now one of them was to do a book trailer video. And at this point, I should say that Matthew's coaching business is a dating advice company for women, a company called Get the Guy. So kind of hitch for women on a very big scale. And the concept that we came up with for the trailer was a video called Kids Talk Dating Problems. It was child actors playing out the relationship dilemmas of adults. It was an adorable little video that was also quite controversial and that we had a very young girl say the word lesbian, which a lot of people didn't like. So this video came out two weeks ahead of the book coming out in the US. And within 48 hours, it had over two million views. It was a very big success. It was picked up and put at the very top of Reddit. It was on the homepage of YouTube. It was also picked up by The Today Show. Matthew was subsequently invited to go in and speak about the book on the show. And because he's pretty good on camera in that sort of environment, he was invited back a further three times in the space of a week, something which is otherwise unheard of and went on to become a regular contributor on the show for over a period of two years. Now, the climax of the launch was me being flown out to New York to give one big last push. And we were staying with the cast of the television show and with ABC's, excuse me, NBC's enormous advertising budget. The cast were on the top of just about every yellow cab in the city, so that was pretty cool. Getting to go behind the scenes of The Today Show and the Rockefeller Center, seeing how all of that happens and being a year or two too early to even crack a beer legally in the States in order to celebrate. But the book came out and it was an immediate New York Times bestseller and it was just an incredible experience. At 20 years old, I really felt on top of the world. And I'm here to tell you that if you want that sort of experience, it can only come through initiative. It can only come as a result of you being a driving force behind your own career. So with that, I want to offer four hard-hitting tactical ways that you can develop more initiative in your career.