I’ve got 31,000 people who follow me on LinkedIn and Substack.
Thirty-one thousand!!!
That’s bigger than the hometown where I grew up.
For years, I’ve been calling that my network.
Except I realized something recently.
It’s not my network. It’s 31,000 people who at some point in their life clicked a button.
And that’s it.
For most of them, our entire relationship consists of about an eighth of a second of effort on their part to click the button, and an automated email reply on my part.
And then I sit around wondering why more people aren’t reading my articles, commenting on my posts, or engaging with my newsletter.
We’re Rewarded for Collecting People
If you’re the same as me with this, let me tell you the same thing I told myself.
You’ve barely engaged with the people. So why the hell would you expect them to engage with you?
And that’s when I realized you and I have been thinking about networking completely wrong.
Think about all the networking advice you’ve heard over the years. Grow your network. Make more connections. Meet people. Collect business cards. Follow up on LinkedIn.
We’re literally rewarded for collecting people.
Until you get 500 connections, it’s not even mentioned.
5,000 connections is a little better.
But if you have 30,000 people following you, holy cow, you must be really well connected.
But that’s bullshit.
I mean, what are you connected to?
I can have 31,000 people in my contacts and still have absolutely nobody to call when I need help with something. Because having someone’s name in a database doesn’t mean I have a relationship with them.
It means I have their name in a database.
And somewhere along the way, we kind of started confusing the two of those things.
The Part I Love
Here’s what bothers me the most about this.
