Ever have a person reach out that hasn’t spoken to you in years but who suddenly wants to sell you Arbonne/Mary Kay/Some New Sports Enhancement Supplement? I don’t know about you, but that kind of interaction is my version of nails down a chalkboard.
My inner voice inevitably shouts, “WHY DON’T YOU ASK HOW I’M DOING FIRST?!”
Or, maybe a person approaches you and says something like, “Hi! It’s Joe! Remember me from your jazz dance class in Seattle five years ago?” No. No, Joe. I don’t remember you. There were 300 people in that class and I was hung over when I taught it. Nope. Nice to meet you, Joe.
Not to be snarky, but these are examples of the simple fact that human interaction is nuanced. We’ve all heard people say that networking is all about who you know. But it’s not really ALL about who you know. It’s about who knows YOU. And how long they’ve known you. And what they know about you.
Networking is implicitly socially dicey. One can never crawl inside another person’s noggin and check out what’s going on before starting up a conversation. Any human interaction could be tempered by anything else that has happened in either human’s day or week.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Pragmatic Productivity to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.