How to Be Liked
I’ve been reintroduced to Influence by Robert Cialdini recently. It’s usually described as a book about persuasion, but that framing misses something essential. This isn’t really about manipulation. It’s about how people respond to who you are being over time.
Most of the principles only work if you embody them. They don’t activate on command. You don’t do them. You become them.
That sent me down a more personal line of thought: how to be liked.
I was voted Most Friendliest in high school, which obviously makes me a leading authority on the subject (mostly kidding).
But being liked isn’t trivial. It isn’t shallow. And rereading the book made me want to put words around the principles I’ve found myself returning to over and over. Not techniques. Not charm. Ways of being that make you easy to trust, easy to relax around, and ultimately easy to like.
Here are my five rules:
- Keep your word
- Clean up after yourself
- Encourage others
- Only hang with good people
- Connect good people to good people
1. Keep your word.
This idea is ancient and everywhere. Religiously (Matthew 5:37, The Analects). Philosophically (Meditations, The Four Agreements). Scientifically (Thinking, Fast and Slow, Atomic Habits). When you keep your word, you create cognitive coherence, alignment between what you think, say, and do. That internal consistency reduces friction inside you and uncertainty around you. People feel it immediately, even if they can’t name it. Liked people are predictable in the best possible way.
2. Clean up after yourself.
This is about more than messes. When you clean up after yourself, you’re communicating that you don’t expect others to carry what’s yours. Emotional, physical, logistical, or relational. Everyone already has enough weight. Being someone who doesn’t add to it makes you easier to be around. Over time, that ease becomes reputation.
3. Encourage others.
Most people are quietly unsure of themselves. They’re standing at the edge of something they want, wondering if they’re allowed to want it. Encouragement isn’t about motivating. It’s about witnessing someone before the outcome is known. When you encourage people at the moment they doubt themselves, they remember. Not because you were right, but because you stood with them when it mattered.
4. Only hang with good people.
This takes discernment. There’s a difference between people who are trying to be good and people who already are. By “hang,” I mean real investment: time, presence, invitations into meaningful moments. You don’t become better by effort alone. You become better by proximity. And proximity isn’t limited to physical space. Some of the people who shape us most live in books, conversations, and communities we return to regularly. Who you’re around sets the tone for who you’re becoming.
5. Connect good people to good people.
You know who also likes being around good people? Good people. Don’t hoard them. Make introductions. When you connect good people to each other, you expand everyone’s world, including your own. Over time, this becomes a quiet flywheel. Trust circulates. Opportunity compounds. You’re remembered not for what you took, but for what new experiences you made possible in other people's lives.
Those are my five rules.
They aren’t clever. They aren’t new. And they don’t work if you try to deploy them. They only work if you live them. When you do, being liked stops being the goal.
It becomes the byproduct.
And yes, if things break just right, you might even end up Most Friendliest in life too.