Non-bullshit networking

Here’s a scenario that makes me uncomfortable: I imagine myself in a room full of strangers with the task of meeting as many people as I can in the lowest amount of time possible.

I find networking events to not suit me at all. I can’t stop imagining the invisible walls between all these strangers, who ambition an increase in their followers list and engage in scripted, automated behavior - “Hi, what do you do?“.

I can reasonably justify my aversion to forced people networking:

1. It’s shallow. Networking tends to incentivize quantity. You measure the network of a person as the size of the people connected. In a room full of opportunity, your opportunity cost is high and so you try and meet as many people as you can. The most asked question to oil the social setting is “so what do you do?”, and the only right answer is a subset of your human existence which is your work. It’s rarely “what’s been exciting you?” - no wonder; how weird is that question for someone you just met?

• It’s utilitarian. Most of modern people networking I’ve seen has one thought in mind “how can this potential new connection be useful to me?“. This makes the whole ordeal of chit-chatting transactional. The purpose is not meaningful, it’s tainted by some external incentive.
• It’s a forced construct: people collide ¹ naturally and have made friends for centuries. Hell, there’s been balls and social gathering where people get together to talk about particular topics or conversations. But these have been about building meaningful social connections even if they start forced. “Networking” today feels like you just want the ‘new’ and more.
• It’s about you: It’s collecting human stamps looking to find one that finally values your collection or yourself. It’s about how you can become better or sell more or be more interesting. It’s not about the connection itself because it’s shallow.
• It’s against human nature: Modern people networking suffers from a need to scale what is not naturally scalable. You want to know more people in less time. But getting to know people is as natural as raising a baby. And the same way we can’t scale, automate and create processes for growing children, why would we expect to be able to do that with the act of meeting new people?

It’s no wonder that most, if not all, of the people you meet in networking events end up being non consequential in your life. Like discardable batteries, ‘networked’ people you’ve met go first in your brain, then in a list somewhere that you mean to follow up with and then ultimately to the shadow realm of loose human links; of people you vaguely met and are not at all comfortable to reach out to for any reason whatsoever.

In most of the networking events that I’ve been, I’ve always found myself looking at the clock thinking about leaving. Part of me has always thought about the type of software I’d like to write so that I could automate the unpleasantry of it all.

I don’t enjoy it and, despite thinking that I’m not particularly bad at it, it’s no wonder that I am greatly jealous of the people that are natural at it. I have a few affable and charismatic friends who become more alive in social gathering with strangers. One of my friends is so charismatic that he gets dinner tables laughing and engaged with him, even wanting to be friends with him afterwards. He’s so good at it that his networking shockwave has allowed me to meet people as well.

It seems to me, nevertheless, that for the rest of us mortals networking is puzzling and unaffecting. In fact, after years of many networking events I’ve seen the opposite of the desired goal: my friend and acquaintance list reduce greatly or stay the same. Now, if we’re connecting with dozens or hundreds of new people per year, how is that possible?

What I have not realized until this year is that there is a whole funnel to this. Networking events can be a form of acquisition (i.e. meeting new people). But then you have your activation (getting to know people, making yourself relevant in their lives and vice versa) and, importantly, retention (Maintaining your relationships like a well kept garden). What I have realized is that most of my relationships were falling into a leaky bucket.

So with this, startups can teach us a lot:

Retention is the foundation of all growth ²

This is what I have applied for a year when it comes to my relationships³. To grow, I have been focusing on fixing retention. And to fix retention you need to worry about 1.

Each person should be your sole focus. When you’re engaging with that person, the whole world should disappear. You should listen carefully and mindfully to everything that person is saying. Listening not as a tactic to make that person like you but truly try to understand what makes that person tick. You should ask questions to get deeper into the subjects and you should remember what people tell you. Their concerns, fears, anxieties should bring out compassion. Their projects, ideas and wishes should bring out excitement. Over time, this will make you a loving person, creating a physical miracle of increasing gravity of your being (no wonder: you’re having denser conversations compared to ‘what do you do’) and enabling others to gravitate towards you; wanting to be with you and call you when they have something to say.

Each person is the whole world. And if people feel like that when they speak to you, you are on your way to retaining. When you give people the ultimate respect of your undivided attention, the full privilege of your ears, then the growth part of the network will happen.

Then this will take time. You’re focusing of the fundamentals of things. You’re not trying to add a quantity of relationships. You’re making sure each relationship is meaningful. Life will then find a way to send more people your way.

After a year of this, the most fascinating learning is that you take the most value from focusing on the people that would seemingly give you nothing. You also start noting a number of people you’ve payed little attention to; people you’ve neglected in favor of more.

A friend of mine is going through cancer. Witnessing her struggles, fears, good and bad days has been made my existence more meaningful. After months of chemo, she told me something that made me feel more joy in all my years of fake human connections: that feeling listened to made her feel less alone.

Honestly.. That’s it. I focused on the relationships that I had and tried to make them better. I haven’t been fully successful. It’s hard. But I paid more attention. I’ve heard more. And I think I have better relationships because of this.

If your end goal is a hundred (or thousands of) lost connections in your life, by all means, go to all the meetups around your area. If you want to connect more meaningful, then you have to be willing to be content with one.

I am writing this not for the eyes of the many, but for yours alone. Each of us is an audience enough for the other
Epicurus