How to Network When You Hate Networking
Prep one question. Have one useful conversation. Then leave while you still like yourself.
[ journal ]
I last about forty minutes in a room that wants me to circulate. After that I start hovering near the snacks and resenting the lighting. One useful conversation is a full evening. I prep a single question so I have something to do besides performing interest.
The question is specific. What are you shipping this month. How did you solve X in that talk. Not “so what do you do,” which is a trap that produces job titles and nothing you can remember. I ask it, I listen, I do not scan the room over their shoulder. If the talk is real, I stay. If it is a pitch, I am allowed to get another water and go.
Leaving is part of the method. The people who work a room until close are practicing a sport I do not play. I came for one overlap: a person whose work I respect, or a problem I also have. When I have that, the night is complete. Staying to collect more names is how I get tired and strange.
I hate name tags and icebreakers and the word networking. I still go sometimes, because a meetup in a small Oceania scene is one of the few rooms where builders stand in the same air. I arrive after the talk starts so I skip the milling. I stand at the edge. I talk to the person next to me because they are next to me, not because they look like a prize.
This is not the follow-up problem. Follow-up is a note you send later. This is the hour in the room. If you cannot stand the hour, do not book three events in a week to punish yourself into a personality. One event. One question. One conversation you could describe the next morning without looking at LinkedIn.
Louisiana rooms can be loud and still kind. Auckland rooms can be quiet and still hard if you are tired. I leave before I need a drink to stay. The useful people will survive my exit. The ones who needed me to circulate were never going to be my people anyway.
— JV · Dark Heart Labs.