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Comment by drvdevd | Hacker News Reader

I think there is also of course the distinction of the known VS unknown person doing something worth connecting to. Lots of people who are doing things that probably are not worth much consideration are simply good at selling themselves as something greater and vice versa.

So if you believe you are doing something worth connecting to, you better be ready to sell yourself as well. Or risk drowning in the noise.

FULL DISCLOSURE: I'm neither well-connected nor currently doing much worth connecting to :)

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That's the point here.

There are a lot of people out there applying these principals who don't really do shit, but by god they are "well connected." You see them at all these entrepreneur events and all they do is waste everyone's time with their bullshit. In the end it doesn't matter how well connected they are because they have no vector and no capabilities. These are the guys who consistently tell you how they are incidentally connected to someone who has actually done something - why? because that's all they know how to do. Worthless.

On the flip side there are the brilliant people out there who have done something notable but haven't made anything of it or made any connections because they see the guy from the first paragraph and recoil in horror. That's who I think this article is probably for. Not sure how to reach those folks practically though.

> These are the guys who consistently tell you how they are incidentally connected to someone who has actually done something - why? because that's all they know how to do. Worthless.

On the whole I agree with you. However, that's not completely worthless. There is some amount of value in being able to connect people. However, you need to be able to make meaningful connections. And that's where people with no vector and no capabilities have trouble. You don't have to have done something worth connecting to. But you do need to understand enough about the details of what the people you're connected to have to done to be able to make a meaningful connection.

I don't know if you're a techie or a businessman but my feedback is almost the same either way. The people you describe are usually quiet / shy -- or simply don't throw themselves at people's faces, which is something very different.

I am the latter type; if you hit me with an interesting topic, I can talk with you for hours and will very rarely repeat myself (how valuable what I am saying for you is of course strongly dependent on your interests). But I won't come to you trying to catch a conversation about what I find interesting. I'd be much more likely approaching you with a generic opener and try and find what you do find worth talking about. Anyway, here's what I believe is a good approach to the people who do things in private but [almost] don't network (like myself):

- Don't assume quiet people are not interesting. EVER. My wife is easily the most intelligent human being I've ever met and I've had to work a lot during our first year in the relationship until she started openly sharing what she thinks about this or that. And then I found myself having my mind blown by very different perspectives, many times, consistently, to this day (we're about to have a third anniversary very soon). Some people are not amazing at striking a conversation but if you manage to engage them, you might discover a treasure.

- Show genuine interest in what the person is doing at the event you both find yourself meeting at. I'd be very honest with you and one good example of that honesty would be: "I believe I spent so much time perfecting my engineering skills, and now I simply want to listen what people need from technology; how do they want their lives improved by it". That would probably open a plethora of possible follow-up topics.

- Many of the people of my type find networking and investing in a portfolio / GitHub profile / LinkedIn profile / general reputation a low priority activity. That's of course horribly misguided since millions of years of social instincts can't be overriden but there you go; I am 37 and only now I started actually understanding the value of these, and started slowly working on them. That's the thing: I've been busy with far too many other things to even consider networking for so long. Food for thought IMO; strike a conversation accentuating what the person is thinking and doing now, not what he/she was doing all their life up to this point. The past can wait for a later convo.

- Finally, as the article suggested, do offer some value to the conversation even if you find yourself getting a lot of important information for free. I am a bad salesman of information and I'd tell you a lot of things we the programmers do without telling our bosses (one random example; another one would be some trade secrets) but if 15 minutes later I realize that you haven't offered a single interesting piece of info or a compelling question, I'll politely excuse myself and will go look for another person to chat with.

Hope that helps a bit.

They have to be somewhere to engage with though online or otherwise. I'm talking about the ones that never really go anywhere or talk to anyone.

I'm a techie turned business guy, and I used to be one of those that never went out there and talked about my stuff.

When I was a teenager I always thought the way that it would work is that someone was going to come to my door and say "we've been secretly watching you build this hacked together hardware for audio phase analysis and resonance tuning. Here's millions of dollars and congratulations you're going to meet the president."

That's the kind of people that I'm talking about being impossible to reach.

Yes, sadly I used to think like that as well. To an extent, I still do, but I am gradually going out of my shell.

To me it's almost impossibly hard to start treating networking like a healthy activity and NOT like yet another obligation. Once I overcome that, everything else will come much easier (at least I hope so).

What's this advice for? It's the object of your advice (the people, like you, who don't network), not the subject, who "needs" to become better-connected/more well-known/achieve higher social capital.

The parent commenter said:

> Not sure how to reach those folks practically though.

I offered my comment as an advice on how to talk to such people, at least as far as my exprience and confirmation bias go.

You apply the principles to the principals.

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