Make Other People Come to You — Use Bait if Necessary.

Position yourself in a way that compels others to seek your involvement or approval. Create incentives or enticements ('bait') that attract others to engage with you or pursue your favor. By making others come to you, you can assert control over interactions and negotiations, shaping outcomes to your advantage. Exercise patience and strategic positioning to draw others towards you, leveraging their eagerness to your benefit.

Chasing signals need, and need gets priced into whatever you are offered. This is not about playing hard to get; it is about not surrendering the terms by arriving eager. Most of the work is the unglamorous part — being genuinely worth approaching, so that the approach happens without you asking.

You follow up on a job application four times in a fortnight. The recruiter now knows you have nothing else in play, and the offer, when it arrives, sits at the bottom of the range she had in mind.

Choose one thing you were about to chase today and do not. Spend that time on the work that makes the next approach unnecessary.