Shane Parrish

She was only sleeping five or six hours a night, working from 5 a.m.

until 10 p.m., and seeing her children only in brief windows, and earning maybe $30 a day on a good day, and most days less.

It was barely survival.

But this is when something changed.

She became what she called a follow through person.

And this is one of the key ideas that I took away from her.

And it started with the basics, correspondence, returning phone calls, letters.

And she writes, correspondence is an area in which most people often fail to follow through.

Most of us don't like to write.

We naturally tend to put off those things we don't like to do.

But here's what happens when you don't answer calls or letters.

People get irritated.

They take it personally because it kind of is personal.

So Mary Kay answered everything, every phone call, every single letter, every note from a customer.

That's follow through.

But the real breakthrough came from a story she'd heard about an efficiency expert named Ivy Lee and an industrialist named Charles Schwab.

Lee walked into Schwab's office with a proposition.

He told the president of Bethlehem Steel that he could increase his people's efficiency by spending just 15 minutes with each executive.

Schwab looked at him and asked the obvious question.

How much will this cost me?