Unresponsive people drive me crazy. I hate sending an email to someone and then waiting days to hear anything back. (Admittedly, I have sometimes been guilty of this myself.) This is particularly maddening when you don’t hear anything at all.

Recently I was interviewing candidates to be my virtual assistant. One of the questions I asked was this: “Do you consider yourself a responsive person?” For me, this is a must-have attribute. Naturally, everyone says, “yes.” However, you can tell a lot by how they answer the question.

A while back, Michael Smith, Associate pastor of ClearView Baptist Church in Franklin, Tennessee, interviewed me as part of a research project he was doing on leadership. I thought his questions were so powerful that I posted them on my blog under the title, “20 Questions to Ask Other Leaders.”

Last week, I twittered a link to one of my most popular blog posts ever, “Yes, You Can Stay on Top of Email.” Almost immediately, I received two email messages.

The first person said, “I really want to catch-up on email, but I have over 2,100 unread messages in my inbox. Every time I think about trying to catch up, I get a knot in the pit of my stomach. I don’t know where to begin!” The second person expressed a similar sentiment, confessing to more than 2,500 unread messages.

Responsiveness is a critical life skill. In fact, I think it may be the single most important factor to your success. People who are not responsive miss out on many opportunities. Why? Because others get tired of waiting on them.

It takes years to build a brand. Unfortunately, there aren’t many shortcuts. You build a brand—like a reputation—one impression at a time. Every encounter with a customer results in either a “deposit” or a “withdrawal” in your “brand account.”

In many of his books, Andy Andrews talks about the butterfly effect, a theory put forward in a doctoral thesis by Edward Lorenz, a mathematician and meteorologist.

Twenty years ago, Robert Wolgemuth and I started a publishing company. We had a dream to publish books that truly made a difference, in people’s lives and in the overall culture.