Networking is a dirty word, but it's important

Ever found yourself a little stuck in life, not sure what to do in order to progress and keep moving?

Same. It’s semi-common for people who do a lot of work on themselves and have a discipline of self-improvement. In fact, it’s often precisely this self-focus that can lead to the stuckness.

I’ll say the thing the self-improvement crowd rarely admits: you cannot self-help your way past needing other people. I know that, for me at least, the intense self-focus was downstream of a fear of people — of judgement, of rejection.

Don’t get me wrong — I’ve always cared very deeply for the people close to me. I’ve worked with my mum; lived with my grandparents; had our relationships galvanised by the pain of grief, and stresses of illness or divorce (several times). I believe it is fair to say that I’ve put my life on hold many times to be able to support those dear to my heart (at least that’s how my own internal narrative goes).¹1 I have often felt most of my life I was one of the “parents” rather than one of the “children.” This is not without its upsides. But I realised I let it drastically shape my relationship with responsibility, and risk, without much conscious assessment. I’m working on that.

I say all this to showcase that I, of course, think these people are important.²2 I also think people in the abstract are important — and as evidence of this, I donate monthly to effective charities. Needing them is self-evident.

Prior beliefs

Because I felt like I had such strong bonds with those in my inner circle — friends and family — I felt like there was no reason to put energy into cultivating other relationships.

Since I was about 20, I used to think of my relationships as like a fried egg. This is not a literary device — god, the greats of literature would be rolling in their graves if that was the best I could come up with. I genuinely thought of my relationships through that lens. And, more importantly, I thought the ideal was to have as much yolk (your core, inner circle) as possible and keep the white (acquaintances) to a minimum.

Many will see the problem immediately: it sorts people into two crude boxes, and walls you off from everyone you haven’t yet let in.

To me, it was not so obvious. It may not be to you, either — and it is for you that I write these words.

Why did I think like this? Well, I’ve formulated a lot of my values through anti-mentors. People who teach you things by showing you what you don’t want to emulate or be. It was that brand of slimy, opportunist networking — the person who had no friends and innumerable acquaintances — that I rejected so strongly. An intuition that many of us share.

Goodbye baby, goodbye bathwater.

Reversed stupidity is not intelligence. Knowing what not to do does not tell you what you should do. It only removes one alternative, among a vast class of options.

Grokking this — the importance of networking and building relationships — left me dumb-founded. And rightly so.³3 We want to experience many viewquakes (substantial revisions of our fundamental beliefs) throughout our lifetime. If we do, something is going right.

Updated beliefs

So here’s the thing…

People can drastically improve your life, and you can drastically improve the life of others — which is a really good thing to do (and you’re rewarded with warm-fuzzy feelings for doing so).

It also doesn’t need to be in this corpro-political, ladder-climbing way. Relationships can help improve your financial standing, but they can also improve your well-being, impart knowledge, or help you accrue experiences you wouldn’t have otherwise — among many other things.

Networking should result in subtle and substantial improvements in one — but ideally both — parties’ lives.

That means networking really boils down to one thing: solving problems.

This can take many forms, but here are some examples of how relationships solve problems:

Friends: how can we spend 2 hours together, have fun, and feel seen
Spouse: how can we get more out of life than we could alone (and, possibly, how do we raise children with our shared values in a world that seems to get crazier by the minute)
Business partner: how can we combine our skills to create value for others and build wealth while we do it

You want to develop a habit of consistently encountering new people, getting to know them, find out what they’re working on, what problems and skills they have. Not so you can determine if they can help you and quickly move on if not. Often it is so you can put them in contact with someone else who you know can help them.

It can be anything from “Oh you work in some-niche-aspect-of-a-highly-regulated-field, I know someone who needs help with exactly your expertise” to “Hey, you’re a writer — I have a friend who wants to get into writing, would you consider letting her review and give feedback on early drafts of your work in exchange for some mentoring?”

Being able to provide a warm introduction for someone else is essentially the holy-grail of networking. You know people who are amazing at what they do. But the market of life is currently short on them because they haven’t yet met the right people or been welcomed into the right rooms. Don’t let the quality of what they do be dismissed by the success rate of a cold email or other impersonal forms of outreach.

New model

My prior model of networking was wrong. It’s not two layers (core and acquaintances) and the goal isn’t to completely maximise the core and neglect or minimise everything else. The ideal, as I now see it, is much closer to something like:

Core: Nothing changes here, friends and family are one of life’s greatest joys
Allies: People who know what you’re about, they support you — including, or especially, in rooms you’re not in — and they believe in your mission
Acquaintances: General contacts, you know them and they know you, but neither is going to extend themselves much to help the other

What separates these tiers is how much each of you will extend to solve the other’s problems — and people climb as the problems you solve for one another multiply.

How to network

I’m still figuring this out. I’ll continue writing about it, sharing my mistakes and lessons as I go.

But here’s how I currently think it is best done.

I hate to say it, but you need to build a relationship funnel. Unfortunately, funnel is such an abused term in sales and marketing — so it brings about the completely wrong connotations from what I’m trying to convey here. Please, try to put aside any of those prejudices for the moment.

What I mean is simply a system for consistently connecting with people in a meaningful way — and upgrading your relationship with them. Genuinely wanting to become closer with people, and help them, is not at all a bad thing.

Networking is just the process of finding the people you genuinely want to get closer to, and help.

The task is simple: turn strangers into acquaintances; acquaintances into allies; and, hopefully, allies into friends. I’ll cover the first two moves. Turning allies into friends is its own essay.

From strangers into acquaintances

Cold outreach. This is a roll of the dice. Less successful, by most accounts, but the key to this is converting well when it lands.
Attracting them. More successful, but requires making yourself visible in some way which, therefore, requires more work.

Both of these are surface and substance problems. You’re essentially trying to get the attention of someone, and then demonstrate — with a hard-to-fake signal — that you mean what you said/advertised/whatever got their attention initially. Attraction just means you’re often leading with the signal to begin with, not a pointer to it.

But either way, you need the signal. Far too often people think the pointer alone is enough.

From acquaintances to allies

You need to take responsibility for being the optimistic first-mover. Make an offering — of some kind. It’s not exactly a peace offering — because you’re not at war — but something of that nature.

The offer has to cost you something, though — even if it’s only the small sting of being ignored. That cost is the point: bearing it signals you’re not just another taker, and it hands the other person an easy chance to reciprocate. Repeat that. Reciprocity is just another word for trust.⁴4 The formal version, for the curious: a one-off exchange here is a prisoner’s dilemma — not extending yourself is the dominant move, so cooperation never gets off the ground. Repetition changes that: in an iterated game, cooperation becomes rational — it’s the logic behind tit-for-tat, and the folk theorem. The costly first move is a costly signal — too expensive to fake — which is what makes it credible.

Conclusion

I used to think there were good and bad things to do. And there are — some. But far less than I originally thought.

It’s much more the case that there are good and bad ways to do certain things. And when most people are bad at doing the thing, we tend to just think the thing itself is bad.

If everyone was REALLY good at hitting on strangers while that stranger was with a group of friends, or discussing religion and politics at the dinner table without deteriorating into conflict, we’d be ok with these things. But most people are terrible at them — absolutely shocking — which is why they are seen as a social taboo.

Or, conversely, if everyone was terrible at driving — and crashed their car or hit something every other day — we’d think that driving is bad. But again, it’s not. It’s how well the thing is done that concerns us.

To paraphrase the proverbial, skill makes up for a multitude of sins.

And this is exactly the case with networking. Doing the networking isn’t the issue, doing it poorly is. There are many things in life you should learn to do well, even though it might feel better to avoid them — often due to the social judgement of partaking in that activity.

But you can survive a little social judgement.

And, you may come to find, people actually respect you for it. Many of us are years — or decades — past high-school, and yet still living our lives like nothing has changed. At a certain point, putting yourself out there, trying hard, introducing yourself to strangers, sharing your passions and interests becomes cool.

There is so much to be gained, and so little to be lost, by trying to get a little better at networking. Connecting with people, genuinely, and trying to help solve their problems will enrich your life in unexpected ways.