Two people discuss how to network without the awkwardness. Skip trying to meet everyone. Pick a few people, ask real questions, and show up repeatedly to the same places. Genuine curiosity beats the pitch every time.
For board meetings, sometimes we invite customers and partners to come and you'll walk into a room and I still feel a slight, you know, double heartbeat or a slight hitch in my breath of, oh, a little bit of nervousness in approaching this room full of people that I don't know, that I'm, you know, then gonna have to pick somebody to go talk to and hope that they're fun to talk to, right? I don't think there are many people who would say they love that. But if you look at it as these are, let's say, 30 unknown human beings in this room, and I have the opportunity to pick 2 or 3 and get to know them for, you know, let's say a 10-15 minute period, and maybe there will be one that I have a connection with.
And isn't it true that the best networking actually is not one that is a short-term transaction, or it's not something that's going to necessarily reap fruits in, in the short term. And in fact, the most significant networking in your life is stuff where you are just meeting somebody for the sake of just meeting them and the sheer joy of that, and then it will bear fruit in unforeseen ways in 5 to— or, you know, in different ways down the road.
You almost can't do it for— with a specific intent in mind. That kind of defeats the purpose. Like, if you approach it from a kind of standpoint of genuine curiosity about people, right? Everybody has something to teach you regardless of who they are. They do have something to teach you. And if you are humble enough to realize, yes, every person has something to teach you, whether it's about life, about work, or what, right? Then when you sit down with them, what you're really trying to figure out is, oh, what does this person have to teach me? And What do I have to help them with? Like, what, what can I, based on my experience, help them with? And if it's done with that kind of open-mindedness, if you will, a lot of times you may, let's say you have 10 lunches, 8 out of 10, okay, that was a nice lunch, but you know, there's not gonna be a, a long-term relationship, but maybe 2 out of 10 there is. And if you are doing, let's say, 10 every quarter over a 10-year period, you have picked up a lot of really interesting people that you can depend on and ask various questions of.
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