Dig Your Well Before You're Thirsty
Harvey Mackay · 1997
Harvey Mackay's classic on building a living network of relationships before crisis hits: how to give first, stay visible, keep contacts warm through relentless follow-up, and turn relationships into a career-long safety net and opportunity engine. The book itself reads as a stream of short chapters, stories, and one-line takeaways rather than a single system.
The definitive case that your network is an asset you must build in fair weather, because the moment you actually need help is the worst possible time to start asking.
Two of the ideas you’ll keep
The Clif summary of Dig Your Well Before You're Thirsty pulls out 7 insights. Here are the first two.
- The title is the whole thesis: dig your well before you're thirsty. Build relationships when you don't need anything, because by the time you're out of a job or chasing a deal, you have neither the time nor the credibility to start from scratch.
- Mackay reframes 'networking' from a distasteful transaction into a lifelong habit of connecting people to each other. He argues you profit most not by extracting from the network but by making its members more useful to one another.
The other 5 — and the full 11-minute summary — are in the app.
What’s inside: 8 chapters
The whole summary runs about 11 minutes, read or listened to.
- The Well You Dig in Fair Weather
- Give First, Keep No Scorecard
- Build It Big — and Keep It Real
- The Mackay 66: Know Your People
- You Can't Network From Your Office
- Nurture It or Lose It
- Networking Through Adversity
- The Lifelong Two-Way Street
Finish Dig Your Well Before You're Thirsty tonight.
Read or listen to the full summary in about 11 minutes, then keep the ideas with a minute of review a day. Start with the 2-minute quiz — no card required.
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