Get by with a little help from your friends
I recently caught up with an old friend of my nephew’s over coffee. He’s a junior in college and is looking to get in front of the career thing before he graduates (why didn’t I think of that?). Anyway, he’s out there getting the whole “networking thing” started. I was flattered that my name even came up as someone for him to contact and am doing my best to get him some good introductions.
Naturally, it made me look back to when I was most recently doing the “networking thing.” It was just over two years ago when I put 11 years of communications agency experience immediately behind me. I left a world where I was meeting people just by doing my job and into a world where I had to be proactive about it, which was both daunting and exciting (turns out those two feelings are always connected).
As far as personal networks go, being in St. Louis surely helps because this town is awesome like that (think Kevin Bacon but more like two degrees and not six), but a wise person once told me (ok, fine, it was my sister) that networking is not like headhunting, but instead, more like farming.
Meeting people is easy
For real. Super easy. The hard part is nurturing that acquaintance and developing it into a relationship of some degree. It’s a numbers game, for sure, but that’s not to say that it’s all up to chance.
For me, my interests have taken me across a wide spectrum of social “pockets” where I’ve always met great people. Musicians. Seasoned corporate executives. Entrepreneurs. Artists. The list goes on. Very different kinds of people doing very different things, but they all have drive, ambition, and a healthy sense of self-awareness that serves them well in their respective journeys.
Phew! That was close. Too close.
The moment I realized that my personal network was pretty diverse, was a bunch of years ago just before one of my band’s shows here in STL. About 30 minutes before we were about to go on, the guitarist for the other band on the bill – who was a super nice guy – approached me and asked if I knew of anyone looking to buy some weed. I told him I’d keep an ear out. We gave each other a sideways low five, then a fist bump, and that was that.
I turned around to walk over to the bar and before I even took a step, was immediately jumped on by my friend who told me that she just got her dream job yesterday. I congratulated her and asked her where she’d be working. Her answer: the local office of the Drug Enforcement Agency. She got her dream job working for the DEA.
You guys. I literally went from “let me know if you know anyone who wants to buy some weed” to “I got a job at the DEA!” in about five seconds flat. While standing in the same spot.
Aside from the 60 minutes pouring my heart out on stage playing songs, I spent the rest of the night making sure that those two people never ever met.
Which came first?
I am not sure if having a lot of interests forces you to meet a lot of people, or if meeting people leads to a lot of interests. Actually, now that I type that out loud (is typing out loud a thing?), I see that both are true.
Either way, I lean on my network a lot these days, both as an entrepreneur and a regular human being on this planet just trying to do his thing. These folks have been there for every step of my journey and have done what they can to help make me – and my business venture – not only be what they are, but also what they can eventually become.
It can be tough to ask for help, and there is a ton of value in trying to do new things on your own, but if you can surround yourself with people that not only want to help, but want to see you grow, then you should be all set for just about anything.
Easy to blog about. Hard to do in real life.
Take every meeting.
#bewhatyoumake
