Transcription
When people who have common interests decide to get together and talk and listen and brainstorm, and I'm yet to do that in a, you know, with good people and not have something really incredible come out of it. Not necessarily that day.
TIM: Yeah.
But looking five years, looking back, five years later and just going, "God, that was really worthwhile."
TIM: Totally.
ANDREW: Yeah. Few thoughts in no particular order. I would say the first is, it depends, my recommendations depend a lot on where you are in the arc of your career and life. If you are in full growth hyper drive mode and you are trying to build both yourself and your capabilities in a very concentrated way where you're not necessarily focused on family, you maybe have fewer obligations, then if you're serious, I think many people should consider moving to an area of high density for a period of time. It could be three months, it could be six months, could be longer. But putting yourself in a New York or in LA or San Francisco or Chicago or as new places develop, I'll give you one you might not expect, say in Ottawa, Canada, where Shopify is based and the presence and growth of Shopify has spawned an entire ecosystem of startups. So there may be options outside of the usual cast of characters, Pittsburgh and Duolingo, similar effect. So there are more options than people might recognize. But taking a journey and placing yourself in a place where you can be in a very active pinball machine where you may interact serendipitously with many different people from many different worlds, I think is hard to overstate the value of and my drive and my filtering function, let's just say.
'Cause when I first got to the Bay Area, nobody cared about me. I was nobody. I was driving, my mom's used minivan hand-me-down that had the seats stolen out of the back. It looked terrible.
Were you in the, were you in the South Bay?
I was, I was working in San Jose, yeah. I mean, no disrespect to San Jose. I'm from the South Bay.
TIM: Yeah.
But there's a, there's a bleakness to the South Bay.
There is, there is a little bit of bleakness. And then I lived across the street in this tiny apartment, lived across the street from the Jack in the Box in Mountain View. So it's not like I was strolling onto the big stage and just blowing people away.
Oh, I grew up right near Mountain View. I'm very familiar. I probably skated the curves at that Jack in the Box.
You probably did. Did you train at the Gold's Gym in, off Rengstorff?
I did actually. Amazing.
TIM: Yeah. Yeah. That was a great gym.
TIM: That was a great gym. That was a great gym. I don't think it's still there. I would go there super late before my writing sessions. And it had the benefit of being open really, really late and wow Rengstorff, I haven't thought about that in a long time. So the point is, I also started where a lot of people are starting and what did I do? I put myself in a high density environment. Next, what did I do knowing no one? I started to volunteer at events where they had interesting speakers and interesting people coming to hear those speakers. So I put myself in Silicon Valley and then I began volunteering for groups like SVASE I don't know if it exists anymore. The Silicon Valley Association of Startup Entrepreneurs, I think it was. TiE the Indus Entrepreneur, which is a very sort of Indian or Indian American focused organization that does a lot in the realm of startups. And I would carry water, I would take out garbage, I would check name badges, I would check people in. Nothing was too low for me. And I'll give you guys a tip that will be obvious to some, but non-obvious to many, when you are volunteering, a lot of folks who volunteer do the absolute bare minimum because they're not getting paid. This is not going to get you noticed, but it sets a very low bar so that if you volunteer at these events and someone's dropping the ball or there's something happening that needs fixing and you just proactively do it, the producers of these events will notice you. And this is what happened over time, over a few months. And then I got invited to join in on meetings that were planning future events. And I eventually got to the point where I was recruiting speakers and able to set the agenda for an entire main event. And then that's how I got to know, say Jack Canfield, who is the co-creator of Chicken Soup for the Soul and many others who introduced me to my book agent many, many, many, many years later, Jack Canfield. But I was a nobody then. You have to play the long game. But you can be methodical in how you play that. And that is one approach, just as an example for how to build your network, which snowballs over time. Don't hump every VIP's leg within 10 minutes of meeting them. Play it cool, you know. And the gatherings where that person is, has a lot of demands on them, is the last place you want to do that, right?
Yeah, the way you're going to make yourself memorable...
ANDREW: No saliency to that. Yeah, the way you're going to make yourself memorable with people like that is to be very professional, always on time, predict what they're going to need or problems they'll run into beforehand and address them before they even think of them. And be easy to deal with. And people like that, high performers notice these things. They will make note of it.
Yeah, the being easy to work with is something that I used to tell my graduate students, postdocs, I mean it, because the opposite of that nobody wants.
TIM: Yeah. Right? Nobody wants that.
Yeah, especially in the beginning, like later, okay great. You're Steve Jobs, you want to be difficult here and there, or a lot, no problem.
ANDREW: Yeah. Right? But in the beginning, that can be a real liability. You can make up for that if you're the best in the world. But in the very beginning you probably won't be. So try to stack the deck in your favor. Volunteering is a shortcut. And that would be one way of doing it.
Another, now, especially given the virtual communities that exist, so you have subreddits, you have online communities, you have Twitter groups, you have Clubhouse, you've got a million different options, which can be overwhelming. Is Clubhouse still going? Maybe not, I have no idea.
Oh no, I don't know, I'm not saying it's gone. I just, I remember during the pandemic, there were some Clubhouse gatherings, I hopped on there and, but I've sort of forgotten to, to get on there. Maybe not, the platform Affinity is really fickle, which is why I think to the extent possible, if you want to build a world class, and I use that term very deliberately, network in record time, just to give you a nice headline, I would say focus on the uncrowded channel, which is in person, it's out of fashion, it's out of vogue. Going to a conference and actually interacting with humans in the hallway, approaching panelists. This is another thing that I did. I'll give it, I'll give another tip. So very early on I would go to conferences. Nobody cared who I was, nobody knew who I was. Fine. And I would study the panels. Let's say I'm going to a big event like South by Southwest. And I would, this is what I did in 2007, which was just prior to the first book coming out. And I would go to these various in-person events. I was focused mostly on events that had the, the thematic focus of blogs. We could come back to that. But blogs were what podcasts were a few years ago, right? They drove incredible traffic, but they were undervalued by mainstream media, undervalued by mainstream publishers, et cetera. Which meant there was an arbitrage opportunity, in a way. And I would pick say a handful of panels with topics I thought were super interesting. And then the panel would end and what would happen? The panelists would get rushed by various folks because many of 'em were well known. Who was not getting rushed? The moderator. I would go straight to the moderator and I would talk to the moderator. I'd thank them for the panel. I would be very genuine. None of it was made up and talk to 'em for a bit. They would generally ask why I was there, what I was interested in. I would mention whatever that happened to be. In this case it was, I'm finishing my first book or I had my first book coming out soon. I'm here to hopefully meet people who are involved with A, B, or C. And then if we hit it off, which was not true every time, but if it seemed to be going well, I would say, "I don't know anyone here. I'm really sort of orphaned here making my way through this entire event. Is there anyone else here you think I would get along with, who maybe I could buy a drink or a coffee?" And the vast majority of the time they'd be like, "Oh yeah, you should meet so and so." And then I get the introduction and then I would meet that person. I would have a genuine interaction with that person. And if it made sense, if things were going well, I'd do the same thing. "Is there anybody else here you think I should just say hi to? And that I'd get along with? Not who I can ask for something." And that wasn't deception. I was being honest, like someone I could actually vibe with. And if so, would you mind making the intro? "Yeah, sure, no problem." Many of those people are still my friends. And by being surgical in that way, not trying to gather business cards, to use a really antiquated metaphor at this point. People still hand 'em out.
Yeah, people still hand 'em out, I guess depends on where you are, especially like Boston. But if, rather than trying to collect people as Pokemon cards. Developing say five, three to five, deeper relationships through longer conversations at an event, that is what directly led ultimately to the hockey stick for the 4-Hour Workweek within tech within specifically San Francisco. So those would be a few approaches for, for building your network when you don't have the ability to just walk up to say a Kevin Kelly and have a conversation. That came over time.
Yeah, whether or not it's health practices, or nutritional practices, or at meetings, seems you're oriented toward the uncrowded, but very interesting people in spaces.
Mhmm. But the key word there I think is uncrowded. And of course the other key word is interesting, right? I mean it's not like you're standing in the parking lot talking to whoever happens to be there. Although that can be interesting, right? There's a serendipity there. And you know, there's always things to learn from people, but in terms of career advancement and, and building new ideas, and foraging for information, I'm just struck how you've done that over and over. And again, thank you for giving us some insight into the process.
I've got another one. Please. Alright, here's another one. So I think there's a tendency among people who want to develop their networks or their relationships to be starfuckers. Not to get too technical, but...
That's a technical term.
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And they want to tell other people they are friends with someone more than they want to develop skills or learn from someone. This puts you in a very disadvantaged position. Because then that means, alright, you want to become friends with Elon Musk, good luck. Or you want to become friends with this A-lister celebrity who everyone else wants to meet? Good luck. It's going to be a crowded, bloody path to get there. And by the way, they've also certainly developed really attuned defenses against people like you. So it's going to be hard on the other...
Yeah, they have staff to prevent that from happening.
Oh yeah, they have a phalanx of protectors to prevent you from ever getting to that person. On the other hand, if you're approaching it from the standpoint of developing skills, learning, and actually becoming potential friends with someone, I'll give you an example. You could go after, you want to become better at boxing. Let's just make that up. Alright. Maybe not the greatest example, skiing would be another one. But let's stick with boxing just because of the way I'll explain it. If you wanted to say, get personalized lessons from Floyd Mayweather, ain't going to happen. Okay, let's go then maybe a step down out of the pro ranks to gold medalist. Okay, if it's a brand new gold medalist, let's just say like Oscar De La Hoya, when he was really the golden boy and had just thrashed everyone, still going to be hard. What about the silver medalist who just had a bad day when he had that last about against Oscar De La Hoya? Potentially, right? From a technical perspective. From a personal, connection perspective, you may have more in common with that person or a bronze medalist and they can get you 70, 80, 90% of the way there. And by the way, you probably don't have the physical attributes to make it to a hundred percent anyway, if you're coming to it this late. And you could get, in many cases, one-on-one lessons, whether in person or virtually with someone who is of that caliber. They're in the same front of the pack as the names I just mentioned, maybe not as famous. A hundred bucks, 200 bucks per hour? For a lot of people that is within reach.
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