7

The Right People, the Right Rooms

When I moved to New York City a few years back, I soon came to a stunning realization: I didn’t have any friends. I had professional acquaintances, of course, and I could scare up a networking meeting if I wanted to. Lunch on Thursday? Coffee on Monday afternoon? Filling business hours was no problem. But once I’d finished with the hubbub of unpacking and I got back into normal rhythms, I discovered that every evening on my calendar was free—into infinity.

I had to do something. I’d told people I was moving to the city, but they still thought of me as living in Boston. When there was a party or a dinner, I wasn’t top of mind. And the people I did know were casual acquaintances, not necessarily friends who might invite me to hang out on a Friday or Saturday night. Staring out at the glittering lights of the skyline, the city humming below me, I wondered: How could I find a way to connect with interesting people and build the circle I desperately wanted?

I knew one thing: I didn’t want to be a victim. I didn’t want to complain that no one was reaching out, or that things were unfair, or that it was “just too hard” to make friends in New York. There had to be something proactive that I could do—something within my control. I flashed back to my mother’s advice from childhood, deployed whenever I wasn’t invited to a birthday party or classmates had planned an adventure without me: “To get an invitation, you have to give an invitation.” It’s still good advice.

Too often, professionals—even smart, accomplished ones who have no problem pitching major clients or delivering on high-stakes engagements—assume they have no agency when it comes to networking. They think, “Why would he want to meet with me?” or “She’s way too busy” or “I wouldn’t want to impose” or “I don’t want to look needy.” And it’s true: not everyone wants to have coffee with you. I can guarantee that Jeff Bezos is probably too busy, and Warren Buffett would turn you (or me) down. But that doesn’t mean no one wants to connect. In fact, what I realized during that lonely New York summer was that other people are often just as hungry to connect. They’re waiting for an invitation that never comes—and if you’re the one to step up and proffer it, they’ll be enormously grateful.

I found a Mexican restaurant I liked, with decent acoustics and circular tables that could seat ten, and set about my invitations. I started with people I knew, but quickly broadened it: I’d sometimes recruit a cohost, and we’d each be responsible for inviting four guests so we could cross-pollinate our networks.

The format was simple: the first half hour was informal, to allow people time to arrive and order. Next, we’d go around the table to do introductions, break for a few moments when dinner arrived to allow the server to distribute the meals, and then go around the table once more with a more introspective question everyone could answer, such as “What are you proudest of this year?” or “What are you looking forward to in the fall?” or “What’s the most surprising lesson you’ve learned in the past few years?”

I’ve now hosted more than sixty dinners with hundreds of attendees and over time have built a reputation as a connector in a city where I hardly knew anyone. During Covid-19, I shifted the format to virtual and began hosting them over Zoom with my friend Alisa Cohn (the executive coach/freestyle rapper from chapter 3), which enabled us to preserve the general format but with the added opportunity to invite guests from around the world.

Not everyone you invite will become your best friend. The truth is, many of the guests never followed up or said thank you. Some canceled at the last minute or even ghosted altogether. But some have become valued business connections. I began a collaboration with Newsweek, hosting a weekly video interview series, as a result of meeting an editor at a dinner gathering.

Other attendees have become close friends, people I really can invite over on a Friday or Saturday night. And, in line with one of my primary goals for the dinners, I’m not the only one who’s benefited. “I think about you every time I catch up with Evan,” one attendee wrote me. “He was instrumental in helping me raise my first round of capital [for my startup] and is now an adviser. I wouldn’t have known him were it not for you inviting me to one of your dinners.”

If Networking’s So Great, Why Don’t We Do More of It?

The benefits of networking are clear: you can meet interesting people, learn new things, discover trends, and—just maybe—land a new job or client or board seat that can transform your career. And yet many of us resist it, or endlessly put it off to another day.

Partly that’s because it seems like a lot of work. Sure, you can ask someone to coffee, but turning that into a real relationship? It’s an investment, and one that many adults haven’t consciously made since college, when potential friends lived next door in the dorm. As adult professionals, with job responsibilities and perhaps families to tend to, it’s trickier.

And it’s true that turning someone into a genuine friend takes a serious investment of time. Research by professor Jeffrey Hall at the University of Kansas shows that it takes about fifty hours of exposure to move someone from acquaintance to casual friend, another ninety hours to move them up to actual friend status, and more than two hundred hours to turn someone into a close friend.1 Who has time like that these days?

But even the relationships you form with casual acquaintances can be transformative (a principle discussed in the sociologist Mark Granovetter’s seminal 1973 paper “The Strength of Weak Ties”2). I met a woman back in 2015 when she was invited to a dinner by my cohosts. Since then, I’ve invited her to a couple additional dinners, and she’s hosted me on her podcast and interviewed me for her book—a pleasant but light connection. Meanwhile, she referred me to a business opportunity that has brought in more than $1.1 million over the past five years. You just never know.

But there’s another reason—even more salient than time—that stops many professionals from the relationship building that is so important for their careers: networking makes them feel dirty.

A study by Francesca Gino of Harvard Business School and her colleagues showed that many professionals felt ashamed and inauthentic when it came to networking.3 But it’s not just anxiety in the moment. Even contemplating networking can trigger “dirty” feelings. Gino and her colleagues had participants rate the desirability of various consumer products, from cleaning supplies like soaps and toothpastes to “neutral” items like Post-it notes. For participants who first read a story about professional networking, the cleaning products suddenly became far more compelling.

Of course, not everyone is triggered by networking in this way. But among the people who are, Gino and her colleagues discovered two important caveats that provide a path forward for those who just can’t bring themselves to network. First, transactional networking, in which you’re hoping to obtain a specific benefit (“I want to meet that venture capitalist so she can invest in my company”), feels much grimier than simply networking to make friends. And second, junior-level professionals often feel more conflicted about networking than senior professionals do. There are two possible explanations here. One is that the senior professionals rose through the ranks because they enjoyed, or at least didn’t mind, networking. The other is that the senior professionals don’t feel as stressed because they have the status and connections to help ensure the relationships they forge will be reciprocal (you might introduce me to a potential client, but I might be able to do the same for you).

Gino’s insights here are crucial: what stresses people out isn’t networking per se; it’s the idea of using people. In actuality, there are three types of networking: short term, long term, and infinite horizon. It’s short-term, transactional networking that gives the whole enterprise a bad name, and I’m going to suggest we avoid it whenever humanly possible. True networking isn’t about trying to get something as fast as you can. That’s a caricature of bad networking, yet people hold it up as an excuse for not engaging.

When we network for the long term or with an infinite horizon—that is, when we set out to make friends and build relationships, rather than simply get something—it feels entirely different. Like the junior people in Gino’s study, we need to take the time to understand how we can help others, so we’re not simply takers in this equation. It may seem complicated (“What would I ever have to offer him that he doesn’t already have?”), but there are strategies and ways to discover the hidden value you can bring.

So let’s talk about how to do this right.

Short-Term Networking

“So, there is a guy who reached out earlier this week and asked to do a Zoom call with me,” one of my coaching clients told me. They’re in a professional group together, so my client said yes. And then the sneak attack. “He’s a nice guy,” my client said, “but in just the first ten minutes of us going over our backgrounds, he asked me [for a big favor]. I was taken aback. I would never ask a stranger for something like that, even if we just happen to be in the same group. I don’t want to be a jerk, so I usually say I’ll help, but I feel pretty used afterward.”

We’ve all been there: the innocent meetup that turns into an ambush. My client certainly isn’t the only one. The next week, another friend reached out for my advice. He’d been getting to know a colleague over the past couple of months—a slower burn—and they’d had four video chats together. And then the new colleague made a significant ask, one that required a great deal of political capital. “It made me wonder,” my friend said, “was this his plan all along? Had he been pacing it out, pretending to be interested in getting to know me, and just waiting to make his ask?”

I can’t count the number of times a literal or virtual stranger has asked me for a personal introduction to magazine editors or celebrity colleagues. Sometimes, in the short term, aggressive maneuvers work: people fold and say yes in the moment. But in the long run, it never does. Because when people feel used, they’re never willing to help again.

We can’t avoid short-term networking completely. There are times when it’s necessary—maybe you’ve been laid off and desperately need a job. But desperation is never attractive, and you should never try to forge new relationships under those circumstances. Some professionals wildly misinterpret the adage that “it can’t hurt to ask.” Certainly, it’s important to ask for things we feel we deserve, like a raise, and if you’re polite with certain requests, like a hotel upgrade, you might get lucky. But that doesn’t mean you have carte blanche to ask anyone for anything.

In true moments of need, it’s perfectly appropriate to turn to your friends. They know you, your character, and your abilities, and they’re willing to expend their social capital on your behalf. They might be willing to connect you with strangers who can assist—for instance, if there’s a job opening at their company. But the connection request is viewed differently because it’s coming from your mutual friend, whom the other person already knows and trusts. If you’re reaching out cold when you’re in “I need” mode, you’re unlikely to get very far—and per Francesca Gino’s research, you’ll probably feel dirty while doing it.

The strategy I follow personally, and recommend to others, is no asks for a year. I learned it the hard way. Once I met a woman who was a bit of a rising star, a journalist with a well-received new book. She’d spoken at a major conference where I hoped to be invited. We’d enjoyed a group dinner together and traded a couple of emails back and forth when I decided to inquire. I took pains to be subtle: “Congratulations on your recent talk!” I wrote. “I loved the video. One of my goals is to speak there one day. Do you happen to have any advice about how one might break in?”

As far as things go, this wasn’t a bad email. Unlike my friend’s “favor assailant,” I certainly wasn’t asking her directly for an introduction or a nomination: I was only seeking general information. But in retrospect, I realized even that was too much, too soon. She had a high-enough profile that she was probably deluged with connection requests. Even though I felt worthy to be her peer, it was easy to see how all the entreaties from people she barely knew would begin to sound the same.

I could imagine how the script played out in her head: she would reply with helpful general advice, only to receive a perky follow-up note that said something like, “Thanks so much, that’s really helpful! By the way, would you mind introducing me to [person in charge]? Based on what you said, I think I’d be a perfect fit as a speaker.” To avoid having to say no—implicitly or explicitly—and risk her own political capital, she didn’t let the conversation get to that point. She knew, or at least thought she knew, what was coming.

I never heard back. I was stung by the realization that she probably viewed me as no different from the people who only wanted to be her friend because she could introduce them to her editor or get them on a particular stage. I vowed that I would never let anyone even get close to that assumption again. Therefore: no asks for a year.

Of course, that doesn’t mean you don’t invite people to events (the point of friendship is to get to know each other better) or ask minor questions where they can assist (say, what’s the name of the transcription service they use?). What I’m talking about is asks that require political capital, which very successful people fend off from others all the time. You never want to put yourself into that category. Waiting a year to ask for any favors prevents anyone from inferring that you have an agenda. And frankly, it stops you from having one, even subconsciously. It lets you step back and concentrate on building a genuine friendship.

Long-Term Relationship Building

A far better alternative to “I need something, so what can you give me?” is to focus on long-term networking. You don’t have a specific ask in mind: all you know is that this person, or this group, is worth getting to know.

That’s how I felt more than a decade ago when I started writing for Harvard Business Review. The authors who wrote for it were professors, consultants, and corporate leaders at the top of their game. I didn’t have any specific networking goals in mind, but I knew that good things would happen if I put myself in the right room. So I created a spreadsheet of the institutional affiliations of HBR contributors, determining which ones lived in Boston (where I resided at the time). Then I invited them for coffee, always offering to come to a convenient location of their choice.

The moment you identify a commonality with someone you’d like to meet, or a group you’d like to get more involved in, you can leverage that shared experience to connect more deeply. People are usually wary of lower-level aspirants who seem to be approaching them because they want something. But when you can approach someone as a peer (“I’m a fellow contributor to HBR” or “I’m also a member of XYZ group”), they’re often eager to connect and trade notes. I call this the press your advantage strategy.

I tried to add value where I could: if the contributors I met had a book coming out, I’d offer to interview them about it in another publication. Taking the initiative to reach out and be helpful in promoting their work positioned me as a valued colleague, and enabled me to break into the network quickly—all of which made it easier for me to connect with each subsequent contributor. Those early connections led to coauthoring opportunities, as well as an introduction to a top-ranked business school in France, where I taught for several years.

But what if there isn’t a group of peers or colleagues that you’d like to break into? What if no such thing exists? In that case, you can create one yourself.

“I had zero network, no contacts, no job, and no friends here,” Tanvi Gautam recalls. That’s what her life looked like in 2011, when she moved to Singapore from the US. Tanvi had joined Twitter around the same time and thought it might be a way to make connections—but the online conversation seemed to be very North America–centric. She’d have to roll up her sleeves to build a community. “I crowdsourced and curated a list of fifty women from Asia to follow [on Twitter] that got a tremendous audience,” she recalls. “I then started noticing all these tweetchats, but none was happening in Asia. So I launched one for HR professionals, and it became one of the first internationally trending Twitter chats to come out of Asia.”

She didn’t know exactly what the online community she built would lead to, but she knew these were the people she wanted to connect with. “We had CHROs, CEOs, authors, thought leaders, and more, all joining from all over the world,” she recalls. As a result of running the group, Tanvi, now a professor at Singapore Management University, has received prestigious speaking invitations, been featured in newspapers and magazines, and was lauded by the Society for Human Resource Management as a social media influencer for six years in a row.

Besides starting your own group, another possibility is to identify people, or groups of people, you’d like to get to know based on your long-term future goals. If you think you might like to move to Los Angeles in the next few years, you could deliberately start getting to know Californians, so you can determine what it’s really like to live there and have a network of friends in place when you move. Similarly, if you’re interested in doing adjunct teaching down the line, it’s not a bad idea to develop new contacts in academia who might advise you.

The point is to build connections with high-quality people. That’s what Jenny Fernandez did. Early in her career at a consumer packaged goods company, she built a strong relationship with her manager, who was promoted to become chief marketing officer for the China office. “With the distance and twelve-to-thirteen-hour time difference, it was challenging to keep in touch” in those pre–social media days, Jenny recalls. “But I always reached out, let her know how I was doing and about my career progress, and what was happening in the division.”

It would have been easy to lose touch over time. But Jenny’s commitment to staying connected paid off. “Four years later, she requested me to join her in China as she embarked in a new role as Asia Pacific region CMO.” She tapped Jenny to lead business strategy and marketing for a major product line in thirteen countries.

Too many professionals take an “out of sight, out of mind” approach to their networks. But playing the long game means staying focused on, and connected to, the great people you meet along the way. Some professionals, seeing an opportunity before them, pounce prematurely—the equivalent of asking for a favor ten minutes into an introductory phone call. But often you can get a more meaningful result, for both of you, by being patient and putting the other person’s interests first.

Marketing consultant Kris Marsh saw that principle come to life in her relationship with her longtime car dealer. “We had lunch to catch up one day,” she recalls, “and he mentioned the dealership was trying to connect with the next generation. I could have tried to sell him a contract.” But she didn’t. At the time, she was teaching an advertising class at Central Michigan University and suggested that her students could work with him to devise a campaign for his dealership. “It was a win-win,” she says. “My students got great experience and he got a great advertising campaign, which he implemented.”

The most powerful client relationships don’t come from you pushing an agenda or shoving a sales pitch down someone’s throat. They come from developing so much trust that the other person asks if you’ll consider working with them. Through their work together on the student project, the dealer got to know Kris on a far deeper level: he’d seen her in action. “He mentioned that he was so impressed with the leadership I demonstrated in my classroom that he wondered what I could do to develop his leadership team,” she says. “I’ve led several leadership development workshops for his team now, and he’s referred me to several other clients.”

It’s certainly possible that the car dealer could have accepted the free help from Kris’s class and then vanished. Perhaps her generosity might have cost her a contract. But someone only focused on cadging free help probably wouldn’t have been the best client, anyway. As Adam Grant, professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote in his acclaimed book Give and Take, you don’t want to be a sucker—don’t keep giving to people who never reciprocate. But if you begin your interactions from a place of generosity, the right people will notice and will be inspired to help you, too. As Kris says, “It’s business built on trust and a genuine interest to help each other.”

Long-term networking isn’t about getting a job next week or next year. Instead, it’s about cultivating connections with people you admire and want to spend more time with. We don’t know precisely what form it will take. But when you’re in the right rooms with the right people, it creates the conditions for opportunity.

Infinite Horizon Networking

Perhaps the most gratifying form of networking is what I call infinite horizon networking. It’s pure, no-agenda relationship building. Because when you have zero goals or expectations—only a fundamental interest in who the person is—you can enjoy the experience and let it unfold organically.

Quite logically, we optimize our networks based on who we are now, or what we imagine our future plans to be. But of course, we can’t predict the future. We spend years developing relationships in our industry—only to decide we want to switch fields. Or we cultivate deep community ties—only to move across the country because of a too-good-to-refuse job offer.

The answer is to embrace infinite horizon networking. The person you meet may have no professional relevance to you whatsoever: you’re a journalist and they’re an astronaut, or you’re an accountant and they’re a politician. But given enough time, career and life trajectories change, and you may veer much closer to each other. Even more profoundly, you can influence each other in unexpected ways—sparking a line of inquiry, awakening an old passion, or inspiring a creative solution. Your life looks different, and better, because of their presence.

That’s how it happened for Hayim Makabee, the founder of an influencer marketing startup called KashKlik. Born in Rio de Janeiro, Hayim immigrated to Israel nearly thirty years ago. Wanting to give back, he started volunteering for an immigrant aid organization. In the process, he befriended a staffer named Ricardo, and together they helped organize a number of meetups, lectures, and holiday celebrations.

Ricardo later took a job at a startup accelerator based at the Technion, Israel’s prestigious technical university—and he didn’t forget his connection to Hayim. “Ricardo invited me to pitch my startup to potential investors in an event organized by [the accelerator],” Hayim recalls. “Later, Ricardo also was responsible for receiving delegations of Brazilian entrepreneurs that came to visit the Technion. Several times, he invited me to present to these foreign delegations and tell them about my personal experience in the Israeli startup ecosystem.”

The benefit was substantial. “One of the entrepreneurs I met in these delegations later invited me to join the board of his startup company,” Hayim says. “Today I’m an executive board member and have equity in this Brazilian startup.” When he started volunteering for the immigrant aid nonprofit, Hayim never could have predicted that it would lead to him joining a company’s board of directors. He didn’t know he’d befriend Ricardo, much less that Ricardo would ever be in a position to help him professionally. But when you have no agenda whatsoever in your networking, except to meet interesting people, help others, and learn new things, anything can happen.

Making It Big

That’s what Laura Gassner Otting realized as she took it all in: her name in lights, emanating from Good Morning America’s Times Square studio, with a pumped-up audience cheering her on. With more than a million books published every single year, it’s almost impossible for a new author to get noticed. Laura’s first book, Limitless, wasn’t published by a major New York house, and she wasn’t a celebrity or a reality TV star. She was a mom and entrepreneur from suburban Boston whose book had only been out for a month when she got the invitation of a lifetime.

How did she pull it off? It starts with an infinite horizon.

So often, people want the “magic bullet” that will get them the speaking gig or the contract or the on-air appearance. But the magic bullet isn’t one thing. It’s everything.

For Laura, it started with her resource guide. For fifteen years, she’d run her own recruiting firm. Eventually she sold it to her employees, and after a TEDx talk she gave sparked some inquiries about speaking professionally, she started thinking about it. But where do you start? What do you charge?

To learn, she joined a Facebook group of professional speakers. “When I was first invited into that group,” she recalls, “I was so intimidated by all the people that were there. These are incredible people who are making $30,000 or $40,000 or $50,000 a talk, and I was like, ‘Well, I don’t belong here at all, and they’re going to figure that out pretty quickly.’” But instead of hiding in the background and keeping quiet, she had a different strategy: “I’m going to take and I’m going to learn, but every time I take and I learn, I’m going to also add that resource back in.”

Her first question was how to structure a speaking contract. The group had created a database where members could upload their contracts for others to view, but it was chaotic and disorganized—a huge amount of work to sift through. Laura decided to tackle the challenge. “I just went through them and I made notes to myself,” she says. “Like, this is what most people do about travel. This is what most people do about filming. This is what most people do about intellectual property. And then I shared it to the group.”

She created a clear, easily digestible guide that collected best practices and made the amorphous data useful to everyone. Before long, she says, “I became part of the cool kids in this group, because I kept giving back. I learned something about book publishing, I learned something about podcasts, and I would just share the resources over and over again. And all of us can do that.” Through her willingness to be helpful, she says, “I started creating these online friendships with people that I never met before, who I’d be totally scared to actually call in real life.”

One of them was Mitch Joel, a prominent Canadian author and digital marketing expert. One day, he posted in the group that he’d be in Boston for a conference—would anyone like to meet for lunch? Laura raised her hand, and an in-person friendship was born. But that’s only the beginning. Mitch and Laura kept in touch, and several months later, he sent her an unusual text message. As Laura recalls, “He’s like, ‘Hey, my company is actually sponsoring an event tomorrow and Joe Biden [then the former vice president] is the keynote speaker. And I know that you have a background in politics. What are you doing tomorrow?’”

To be clear, this was a thoughtful invitation, but not a convenient one. Laura lives in Boston, and Mitch’s event was in Montreal. She’d have to buy a plane ticket and change all her plans for the very next day. “I could have easily said, ‘No, no, no, I don’t want to do that. I shouldn’t spend the money. It seems like a boondoggle,’” Laura recalls. But she didn’t. She rescheduled her meetings and spent the day at the event with Mitch, including a meet-and-greet with Biden.

When you engage in infinite horizon networking, you never know what’s ultimately going to come of it. “If you do good things with good people, good stuff always seems to come,” Laura says. It turns out, one good thing was Mitch whispering in the ear of the conference organizer, Scott: “Hey, Laura has a book coming out in two months, and you should have her as one of your speakers.” Scott had a series of leadership conferences coming up—massive ones, with thousands of attendees and speakers like human rights advocate Malala Yousafzai. Laura understood her place in the pecking order: she wouldn’t get paid for speaking. “When you’re first starting out, that happens a lot,” she says. Scott was willing to bulk order her book, though, so she embarked on a speaking tour of Canada.

On the last stop, one of the speakers was Robin Roberts, a host of Good Morning America and a hero of Laura’s. Laura desperately wanted to meet her, but didn’t see how she could. She told the event’s emcee, whom she’d befriended over the course of the tour, about her disappointment. “So he literally takes my book from the pile and hands it to me. And he’s like, ‘Here, sign it, make it really good. And I’ll make sure she gets it.’” Laura did her part, writing a heartfelt message about how and why Robin inspired her. And the emcee did his, literally chasing Robin out to her car as she departed and putting Laura’s book in her hands. Robin read the book on her flight home, tweeted about it to her million-plus Twitter followers, and told her producer, “Book her.”

“Did I know, when I was helping put those contract notes together, that that would lead to my friendship with Mitch, which would lead to meeting Scott, which would lead to being on stage, which would lead to Robin Roberts, which would lead to this emcee helping me to get in front of her?” Laura asks. “No. But if you go into life with the idea that you’re serving others, that’s going to keep coming back to you in multitudes.”

When you connect to others with an infinite horizon—no agenda whatsoever other than being helpful and deepening your relationships with interesting people—that’s how opportunity happens. It’s also how I found myself onstage at the Grammys.

That Time I Helped Produce a Grammy-Winning Jazz Album

It was February 2017, and I was out of breath. I’d just sprinted to the front of the auditorium in my tuxedo; I had mere moments to reach the stage and help accept the Grammy Award for Best Large Jazz Ensemble Album. After all, they have to keep the show moving. I blinked through the klieg lights into the vast, darkened auditorium and smiled before they hustled us backstage for photos.

How on earth did I get there? After all, I wasn’t a jazz musician, or even a jazz connoisseur; I can’t tell Miles Davis from Dizzy Gillespie from Thelonious Monk. What led me to become an assistant producer on that jazz album was my skill in another arena: networking.

I’ll break down the process so you can get a sense of how it worked:

  1. When I first moved to New York City, I followed my outreach strategy and researched other Harvard Business Review authors in the area. I ended up having coffee with Daniel Gulati, a venture capitalist who lived in the city at the time. A few days later, Daniel was scheduled to speak on a panel at the New School for Social Research. Apparently they needed an extra speaker, and Daniel asked if I’d like to join.
  2. In the audience was Michael Roderick, a consultant and former Broadway producer who came up to me afterward and wanted to connect. We eventually decided to cohost networking dinners together.
  3. Several months later, Michael invited Selena Soo to one of them—an entrepreneur I went on to profile in my book Entrepreneurial You.
  4. A few months after that, a psychologist and executive coach named Ben Michaelis asked Selena to help him invite folks to a networking breakfast he was organizing, and she asked me to join.
  5. At the breakfast, finally, that’s where I met Kabir Sehgal. Kabir was a bit of a Renaissance man: a New York Times–bestselling author who also worked in finance and was a naval intelligence officer. His books ranged from a collection of poetry coauthored with Deepak Chopra to a study of the civil rights movement to a chronicle of the history of money. In short, a guy who knows how to optimize for interesting.

It turns out Kabir was a serious jazz musician and had produced a number of records. His next passion project, I learned, was writing the libretto for an opera. I immediately realized I could help him make some connections. This was before I joined the BMI Workshop, so I didn’t have a special “in” in the music world. But because I’d developed a variety of infinite horizon connections, I knew plenty of musicians, including opera singers and opera composers. Inspired by wanting to help Kabir, I decided to throw a party so they could all get to know one another. So one July evening, I invited more than a dozen musicians I knew to my rooftop.

At the event, Kabir connected with a collaborator, and they began working on an opera together. Months later, Kabir, who wanted to repay the favor, was working on another project and sent me this note: “Dorie, is it OK if I sneak you in as an assistant producer of an album I’m releasing this summer, Presidential Suite by Ted Nash?” He said he thought it had a good chance at the Grammys, and he wasn’t wrong. A few months later, the nominees were announced, and the Ted Nash Big Band was nominated for two. We won both.

I never thought I’d even attend the Grammys, much less walk the red carpet or help accept an award onstage. But open-ended networking, and reciprocal generosity, can allow incredible things to happen. So often, people get impatient about the networking process. They fume that it isn’t working when one coffee or two meetups doesn’t yield a new job or six-figure client. But my connection to Kabir—winding through connections from Daniel to Michael to Selena to Ben—is the rule rather than the exception.

The benefits of relationship building are far more powerful than we can imagine—largely because we can’t fathom the exponential chain of connections and collisions they unleash. You can’t predict what might arise from a given connection, which ones will bear fruit and which will go nowhere. That’s impossibly frustrating if we’re expecting a one-to-one correlation between input (a coffee date) and output (a new job offer). But when we’re playing the long game, there’s no rush: it’s all part of the process of getting to know fascinating people.

Bringing Value to the Exchange

Francesca Gino (the Harvard Business School professor) and her colleagues realized that when you’re unsure what you have to offer others, or suspect the answer is nothing, networking is a lot less pleasant. But if we look hard enough, everyone has something to offer. We may just have to get creative about it. It’s great when you can directly meet a need someone has: they need an employee and your friend has the right background, or they need a recommendation for an IP attorney and you know a great one. But perfect fits like that are rare. We need to learn to traffic in other types of currency.

One is, quite simply, friendship and shared experiences. When Hayim Makabee worked with Ricardo in Israel, he had no way of knowing Ricardo would one day be in a position to help him. He wasn’t “cultivating” him to help his company. But their time together on charitable projects built a strong bond. Similarly, Jenny Fernandez earned the respect of her former manager when they worked together, and she made a point of keeping up and checking in for years afterward, even though they were on opposite sides of the world. Peers love connecting with one another and trading notes on experiences. If you’re part of a group, whether it’s alumni of a particular school, contributors to a certain publication, or members of a given professional association, you can leverage that to reach out and forge connections.

You can also, where possible, contribute “sweat equity”—following the example of Heather Rothenberg, whom I profiled in my book Reinventing You. As a young graduate student, Heather built relationships with a slew of powerful leaders in her industry by volunteering to serve as the secretary of a professional group. It wasn’t glamorous: she took notes and set up conference calls. But she built deep and trusting relationships with key leaders who later fought to hire her.

Additionally, senior leaders often get caught up in an “echo chamber.” They want to hear different perspectives, but frequently don’t—so if you’re a frontline employee, or have a unique perspective based on the region where you work or the skills you’ve developed, your point of view may be very well received.

Another way to offer value is to help others make connections that will be interesting and valuable for them. The dinners I hosted in New York City enabled me to connect with attendees and catch up, but they also enabled other people to connect as well. My friend landing her startup adviser, or Kabir connecting with a panoply of opera professionals, never would have happened otherwise.

There’s something sexy about the idea of becoming a “connector.” It implies you’re popular—the kind of person who knows everyone and can make things happen. Perhaps because of that, and its lingering Malcolm Gladwell glow,4 many people pride themselves on being a connector without necessarily understanding the implicit rules. The first is that the connection should be consensual—meaning you’ve asked both parties if they’d like to meet. Way too often, I get emails like this one:

By way of this email, I wanted to introduce you to [person], who is [bio]. He is already a fan of yours and your writing. Knowing how busy you are, I thought I would connect the two of you—to sync your superpowers of networking and connection.

On one hand, it’s a lovely gesture—very complimentary, and clearly bringing together two people the introducer likes and respects. But flaws quickly emerge. If the author really knew how busy I was, he might have asked if I actually had time to meet his friend. And he seems to believe that “syncing our superpowers” is sufficient reason to connect, without explaining if there’s a specific reason I’d want to meet the person.

In fact, of course, there is none. I hadn’t expressed a desire to meet more people in X industry or with Y background. He and I had never discussed networking, or my openness to new connections, at all. Without that clarity, the connection he’s made very quickly becomes a form of homework. Though it’s not at all what he intended, he’s assigned me the thirty-minute task of having a conversation with his friend so I can attempt to understand what we have in common and why it might be beneficial to develop a relationship.

The introducer made a common mistake, which is to assume that everyone is open to introductions and shares the same set of criteria for potential connections. Unless we know for sure—because the person has directly told us, or they’re our best friend and we know everything about them—we have to ask.

Finally, you can break through and get noticed simply by being thoughtful and doing something different. The default networking request is “let’s have coffee” or “let’s have a video chat.” There’s nothing distinctive about that, so you risk blending in with all the other aspirants. Instead, think about what the other person might uniquely want or need. For instance, several weeks before I was scheduled to speak in Denmark, I received an email out of the blue from a woman named Sigrun Baldursdottir. “Copenhagen is known for being a city full of great clothing and interior design and decorations,” she wrote. “I am a fashion designer with a master’s degree in marketing and international business, and I have over fourteen years’ experience working as a stylist.”

She offered to take me on a shopping tour of Copenhagen at no charge, noting that “I have been watching your videos on your website, and I like your clothing style and I am very quick to find clothes you might like.” If I were speaking in the United States, the offer wouldn’t have been quite as enticing (“I can show you the best malls in Dallas!”). But she correctly surmised that the opportunity to tour the city with a local and shop for gifts (the holidays were approaching) was compelling. We ended up spending more than half a day together, and we’re still in touch. By identifying areas where your skills overlap with the other person’s needs, you can develop more-meaningful connections.

We all know that relationships with other people are crucial to our professional success, and to the quality of our lives. Yet many of us—catastrophizing about how networking will force us to become inauthentic users—neglect to develop the kind of genuine, transformative connections that any of us would want. Networking done right isn’t about what it can get you today or tomorrow. It’s about what kind of life you want to live and surrounding yourself with the kind of people you want coming along on that journey. Because when you’re playing the long game, there are times it can feel incredibly hard or frustrating. How can we persevere nonetheless?

That’s what we turn to next.

Remember:

  • There are three types of networking:

Short-term networking, when you need something fast, like a job or a client. This is the type most likely to fall into the trap of using people, so do it sparingly and only with people you already have close relationships with.

Long-term networking, where you develop relationships with interesting people whom you admire and enjoy. These people may be potentially helpful to you in the future, but in indeterminate ways.

Infinite horizon networking, in which you build relationships with fascinating people in diverse fields that, on the surface, probably can’t help you at all. You’re building the connection out of pure interest in them as a person—and over time, who knows? Your paths may converge in surprising ways.

  • No asks for a year. Avoid asking new connections for any kind of meaningful favor for at least a year, to take the pressure off the relationship and to ensure they’re clear that you’re not making friends just to take advantage of them.
  • When you join a group, go all in. Choose a handful of organizations where you can go deep, reaching out to fellow members and building connections. As your peers, they’re more likely to respond positively to your overtures.
  • Every relationship has to be reciprocal. If someone is more powerful or has more status than you, it might feel like you have nothing to offer. Get creative. It really is using someone when all you want is to take from them, so think hard about what you can offer in the relationship, and make it your job to keep digging until you can find it. (Hint: if they’re powerful in a certain field, most likely, the place where you can offer something of value is in a different area that’s of interest to them, such as tips about your city, or fitness strategies, or advice on starting a podcast if you’re a longtime host.)
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