Forming social relationships may be a crisis and a real problem facing some, but unfortunately it cannot be dispensed with because it is a necessity in our current society
Networking is painful, and I doubt anyone claiming to enjoy it. Unfortunately (for me), networking is essential: most good opportunities come from personal relationships.
Wherever you look, you'll see evidence of that fact:
Rich people are getting richer from their awareness of this, and this is the best evidence that something is true.
The conferences reserve cheap square space and rent - at exorbitant rates - to participants who want to meet other participants.
Stanford Business Schools offer you a valuable opportunity to meet many of the university's MBA holders.
The American Y Combinator accelerator model for starting a startup is based entirely on intrepid investors preferring live offers over cold emails .
It is clear that forming relationships, in the broadest sense, pays off. But not with bad people starting conversations with or near strangers, and I'm definitely one of those.
I consider myself to be somewhat an introvert (which should come as no surprise; introverts are overrepresented in only the written parts of the internet), and I am satisfyingly poor at recognizing faces. At first I thought I had poor eyesight, but after I got the glasses I heard about facial recognition blindness or Prosopagnosia, a two-part Greek word “prosopon” meaning face “agnosia” meaning blindness: if there is a word in Greek or Latin , It is probably real.
Introvertedness and a poor ability to recognize people makes networking a sure minefield: you will either have a - somewhat painful - conversation with someone you don't know, and touch some kind of common ground, or a more difficult conversation with someone you've already spoken to.
there is a solution!
Become famous and lose the ability to decide who you want to talk to, but at least everyone starts the conversation with a context; This means that you outsource extroversion with them. Fame is tough and has other costs. But there is another alternative: being microfamous. Likeness is the best kind of fame, as it combines an easier task (being popular with fewer people) with a better outcome (being popular with the right people).
If you are trying to figure out how difficult it is to achieve near-fame (miniature fame), focus on the word "mini" rather than "fame." Miniature fame simply means that your friends' friends never realize who you are, and yet have a conversation with you about something mutually interesting.
This happened to me at a party about (6) years ago. My wife and I had just run away from the party, and naturally I “celebrated” writing a long post on Facebook about how - in terms of overall Darwinian decency - the only person in the whole world who you can trust to act in your favor for his own reasons is your husband / wife!
A few days later, we were at a party, and a stranger introduced himself to us, congratulated us and then started talking about evolution and marriage. For an introvert, this is nirvana, in other words:
Not having to introduce yourself to anyone.
You don't have to search for a topic you are talking about.
Choose the other person in the conversation in advance and share your strange interests.
One of you might argue that this rule has a serious flaw: Part of the fun of meeting new people is learning things you weren't even aware of being interesting. But, in my view, it is the basis of the writer's work . I'll explain it to you: Many introverts form their social bonds based on a common interest, but most have multiple, vague interests.
So, Rabab, who loves functional programming and anarchist capitalism, gets to know Basem, who also loves functional programming, as well as science fiction and Marxism.
Rabab and Basem can use writing to reach other like-minded people on each other's friends' lists by writing something of public interest about their own hobby. [When you write Rabab something wonderful about opening the locks property without the original key Lock for Picking , which is shared on behalf of Twitter, it is likely to meet with some friends Rabab on behalf of those who care about the same subject]
There are two problems ..
This practice appears to have no downsides, to nullify social ties with people who do not share our strange and private interests. But there are two problems with this, one of which is that a lot of normal people do it too , just for the sake of broader interests: There is a difference in gender, not extent, between someone who wants to talk only about weather, sports, nationalism and politics on the one hand and someone who just wants to talk about biology Arithmetic, modern critical theory, and the reign of Louis IX on the other hand.
But one of the side effects of the strategy of writing as a way to network is that writing about your other interests piques the interest of others . You don't just impose a wall around your interests; Rather, you add more people to your "ghetto" isolation, your interests (if it will be true), and if more of your friends follow your example, you will be exposed to the same thoughts. For example, a long essay on a topic you might be interested in feels like a long conversation on the same topic, (except that it's not rude to leave / close the article page after thirty seconds when it feels boring).
Conclusion
When people write about “ content marketing ,” the focus is on having an arbitrarily large audience, but a narrow audience has its own merits. You can save a lot of money on conference tickets and business cards if you use two well-chosen articles as a way to get recommendations from the friends of friends you want to collaborate with.
A writing strategy for networking isn't for everyone . There are some people who really like the idea of stepping into a room full of strangers with a plethora of business cards and making a bunch of valuable professional But for those of us who fear not being so lucky, writing is the alternative. If you put in the effort, you could replace the worst parts of social media with time you spend alone with your computer. As it turns out, “cold emails” are just another of those jobs that AI is devouring.