Have you ever received a cold email on LinkedIn? Did you just ignore it? Or send a polite: “Thanks for your interest, but I don’t have time”? Those would both be appropriate responses. Most LinkedIn users aren’t interested in being contacted by distant strangers. These are the places where you can come into contact with a large number of new people and decide which of them you’d like to turn into friends. These are the four primary sources of new connections in adult life. Your sources of new social connections in adult life are effectively limited to four places: If you spend the majority of your life working with the same people, your opportunities for social churn are minimal. To find one person that you want to spend time with, you’ll have to meet at least 10. LinkedIn doesn’t really solve that problem – in that it doesn’t give you shared experience, face time, or schedule autonomy – but it does give you one important thing that makes it worth your time and energy: access to new people.īuilding friendships takes time, consistency, and perseverance. Without the shared experience of college or graduate school, without the large overlapping networks we traffic in as teenagers, and without the luxury of schedule autonomy and extensive free time to devote to budding friendships, building genuine new relationships is infinitely harder. If you consider yourself just barely an adult, you’ll soon understand what I mean. It’s much more empowering to engage in making genuine connections and nurturing meaningful friendships than to “network.” Friendship makes work more rewarding and enables us to fulfill our full potential. I write a lot about networking, but I call it “ Making Professional Friends.” The word “networking” sets up a transactional paradigm that – let’s face it – feels smarmy.
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