The other day while I was on a Networking Times editorial call, a friend (Art Jonak) commented that one of the prime reasons people use Facebook is to find old friends they’ve lost touch with. I tried it. Before our call was over, I’d found a friend I hadn’t communicated with in over 30 years — and had written to him and heard back from him.

His name is Robert Gehorsam, he lives in Manhattan, and if you’ve read me writing about the high school I started with some friends when I was a kid: Robert was one of those friends.

I sent Robert a copy of The Go-Giver (it turns out, he knows Seth Godin and went to college with our publisher, the amazing Adrian Zackheim: small world indeed!), and he took it with him to an Ayurvedic retreat he was on his way to attend the day he received the book.

Here’s what he wrote, a week later:

“I’m back from my panchakarma retreat. It was wonderful: nine strangers in a 21-room house designed by a crazy Hungarian art deco artist from the 1930’s on a mountainside in Brewster. Sort of like a spiritual Agatha Christie moment, but no crime.

“One of the guys there was an eighty-year-old Armenian-American from Rhode Island named Leon Kayarian who had been that state’s biggest tire dealer. He was a bon vivant: made, lost and made millions in his twenties, and now was looking for something more grounded, though he couldn’t quite articulate it. The kind of guy you or I might never encounter in life but for moments like this.

“I had read the book on the train up to the retreat, by the way. It is sweetly written and the five laws are thoughtfully composed. I have never forgotten your love of Buckminster Fuller and our days at the World Game at the Friends School [a Buckminster Fuller event Robert and I attended in NY — JDM], and I think that there is the same love of grandly systemic thinking here, however simply expressed (which is no small art). [Sharp observation! — JDM]

“That first evening, as we gathered in the living room, Leon started talking in a sort of gregarious codger/salesman way about his life. And then he said, ‘You know, the one thing I’ve learned is that the more I give, the more I receive … and not just money, either.’

“I practically jumped out of my comfy leather chair.

“I gave Leon the book to read that night, and the next morning he told me he’d been up all night reading it, and realized it basically articulated everything in his own head about his life’s experiences. He borrowed it again the next night to read again.

“The third morning he asked me if I could order 10 copies for him so he could distribute them to friends, and he would pay me back. He said, ‘I want you to get credit for doing that, because I know the author is a friend of yours, and I want him to see that.’ It was very endearing.

“I did order 10 copies and shipped them to him. He called me this morning, even before they’d arrived, to say he wanted to order 15 more. He was very moved. Given that he’s a guy who spent sixty years in the tire business with people who are probably not highly introspective, he seems so grateful to be at a new place in his life. — Robert”

Wow. Thanks, Robert — and I think I need Leon’s address.

Hey, Art? Thanks for telling me about the whole Facebook thing.

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