Dr. Benjamin Hardy — one of the most prolific writers on Medium has co-authored a book WHO NOT HOW. He has co-authored this book with one of my favorite thinkers Dan Sullivan.

The basic premise of this book is that if you leverage your relationships, you can solve all kinds of problems more easily as well as much much more quickly.

I finished reading this book yesterday and saw the immediate applicability all across my life. 

But what surprised me when I was going through the book was the fact that two of Indian Mythologies’ the Ramayan and the Mahabharat are completely about WHO NOT HOW. Both are huge texts and its not my agenda to go into a religious discourse but if you see the key architects of these texts you will immediately see the applicability of this rule.

In Ramayan — Lord Ram’s wife Sita is kidnapped by the demon king Ravana. Lord Ram and his brother Laxman are travelling in the forest helter-skelter trying to figure out where Sita could be when they come across the Monkey King Sugreev and his able chieftain the Monkey God Hanuman. 

In true “give” before you “ask” form that Dr. Ben Hardy suggests —Lord  Ram first helps Sugreev get his kingdom back from Bali and then the complete army of monkeys ably led by the Monkey God Hanuman help identify where Sita is and then with their help Ram and Laxman fight with the demon king and kill Ravana and his generals.

If it was not for the Monkey God Hanuman they would have not been able to identify the location where Sita was held captive by Ravana. They used the Monkey God’s key capabilities to fly long distances and get an aerial view to isolate the location in Lanka. After that if it was not for the monkey army — who created the rock filled walkway in the sea — Lord Ram & Laxman would have not been able to cross the Indian Ocean to get into Lanka and fight Ravana

Lord Ram did not instruct them how to do their jobs —The Monkey God  Hanuman and his army of monkey were good in their jobs and were wanting to get Lord Ram to succeed…. exactly as Ben Hardy talks about the “WHOs” that you need to choose and not micro manage.

If Lord Ram and his brother had tried to do everything on their own they would have taken a much longer time to first figure out the location and then go about trying to get there. 

I am sure if you try to think about it, most of the major achievements in the world would not have happened without a WHO being involved. And this is not ONLY a vendor — customer relationship, that we are talking about. Its about also relationships where there are no payments getting made.

Till next time.