The Most Successful People I’ve Met Are Just Easy to Work With
If you love this content (please share it), but also check out my Podcast & connect with me on YouTube / Twitter.
We turn your favorite newsletters into podcasts at 10minmindset.org
Talent gets you in the room. Being the person everyone wants to work with again is what keeps you there for decades.
A few years ago I was trying to book a guest for the show. Big name. Best-selling author. The kind of person whose team usually takes six weeks to respond to an email and then asks you to submit a 40-question intake form before they’ll consider a 20-minute pre-call to discuss whether the interview might potentially be a fit.
His response came in 11 minutes. “Sounds great. Here’s my calendar link. Pick whatever works for you.”
No team. No gatekeepers. No intake form. No pre-call. Just a direct reply from the person himself, making it as easy as possible for me to book him.
I remember thinking, “This guy has sold millions of books and he just replied to my cold email in 11 minutes?” It didn’t fit. Everything I’d assumed about how successful people operate — the layers, the friction, the inaccessibility — he just skipped all of it.
The interview was the same way. He showed up two minutes early. His audio was perfect. He was engaged the entire time. When we finished, he sent me a follow-up email thanking me for the conversation and asking if there was anything he could do to help promote the episode.
I’ve since had him on the show two times. I’ve referred him to other podcasters. I’ve recommended his books in at least a dozen newsletters. I’ve introduced him to people in my network who became partners and collaborators.
All because he replied to an email in 11 minutes and was pleasant to work with.
The Compound Interest Nobody Talks About
We talk a lot about compound interest in finance. Small investments that grow exponentially over time. Put a dollar in, let it sit, and decades later it’s worth something meaningful.
But there’s a type of compounding that’s far more powerful than money and almost nobody discusses it: the compound interest of being easy to work with.
Every time you’re reliable, responsive, and pleasant in a professional interaction, you’re making a deposit. Not into a bank account. Into someone’s memory. Into their mental filing system of “people I’d work with again.” And that filing system is where the best opportunities in the world come from.
Not job boards. Not LinkedIn. Not cold outreach. The best opportunities come from someone thinking, “Who do I know who would be perfect for this?” and your name being the first one that comes to mind. Not because you’re the most talented person they know. Because you’re the easiest to work with.
I’ve seen this pattern so consistently over 800+ interviews that I’ve stopped thinking of it as a nice personality trait and started thinking of it as a career strategy. Maybe the most underrated one that exists.
What “Easy to Work With” Actually Means
I want to be specific here because “easy to work with” sounds vague. Like something you’d put on a performance review. “Scott is easy to work with.” Great. What does that mean?
From watching the people who benefit from this the most, it means a handful of very specific behaviors. None of them are complicated. All of them are rare.
They respond quickly. Not because they’re not busy. Because they understand that a fast response, even a short one, removes friction from the other person’s day. The author who replied in 11 minutes didn’t write me an essay. He wrote one sentence and a calendar link. Took him 30 seconds. Saved me a week of follow-up.
I’ve noticed this pattern across almost every highly successful person I’ve worked with. The busiest people respond the fastest. The people with the least going on take the longest. It’s counterintuitive until you realize that responsiveness isn’t a function of how busy you are. It’s a function of how you think about other people’s time.
They make things easy for others. They don’t create complexity where it doesn’t need to exist. They don’t send emails that require three follow-ups to decode. They don’t schedule meetings that could be a message. They don’t add friction to simple processes. They remove obstacles instead of creating them.
One founder I know sends every potential collaborator a one-page document before their first call. It has everything the other person needs to know: what they’re working on, what they need, what the timeline looks like, and what a good outcome would be. No guessing. No wasted time. No 45-minute call where the first 30 minutes are just figuring out why you’re talking.
When I asked him why he does this, he said, “I assume everyone is busy. If I can save them 20 minutes, they’ll remember that. And they’ll want to work with me again.”
They follow through on what they say. If they say they’ll send something by Tuesday, they send it by Tuesday. If they say they’ll make an introduction, they make it within 48 hours. If they commit to something, they do it.
This sounds basic. It’s not. Most people follow through about 60% of the time. They forget. They get busy. They meant to send that email but it slipped through the cracks. And each time it happens, they make a small withdrawal from the other person’s trust account.
The people who follow through 95% of the time aren’t doing anything extraordinary. They’re just doing what they said they would do. But because the bar is so low, because so many people are unreliable, consistent follow-through becomes a genuine differentiator.
They’re pleasant. Not fake pleasant. Not networking-event pleasant. Just genuinely easy to be around. They don’t bring drama to professional interactions. They don’t make everything about status or ego. They don’t need to win every conversation. They ask questions. They listen. They make the other person feel like the interaction was worth their time.
Why This Compounds
Here’s where it gets interesting. Each of these behaviors, on its own, is small. Responding to an email quickly doesn’t change your career. Following through on one commitment doesn’t land you a major opportunity. Being pleasant in a single meeting doesn’t transform your professional life.
But these behaviors compound. And they compound in a way that’s invisible until it’s not.
