I wish I realized that before. I will just write some emails tonight. Tomorrow I will be successful.
I can't stand this guy's smug face. He was just lucky.
I'm a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it. - Thomas Jefferson
Success is simply a matter of luck. Ask any failure. - Earl Wilson
I don't say this to be bitter, but let's have a little empathy with the many, many people in the world who work hard and still do not catch that many breaks. For example, no one doubts the greatness of Thomas Jefferson, but it would have been different for one of his field slaves to profess industriousness.
I also agree that if you are selling garbage in the slums of India, no matter how hard you work, it's likely going to make very little difference in your overall life situation.
At the same time, if you take the average person living in a western society, working hard does make a difference. With it you have a chance, without it you are leaving it very much to luck and circumstance.
I also find that very few of us know what working hard really means. Working hard with a focus and a goal in mind will get results.
I'm probably biased on this though, because when I was 17, living in the middle of nowhere PA, I started up a website about a band I liked, and by 19, the guy behind the band flew me to New Orleans and was interviewing me for a job working on their web presence. I was very fortunate to have learned that lesson as early as I did, and I didn't even have the benefit of living in an urban environment nor going to a well-recognized college.
Not every interaction you seek will happen, but if you don't try or give up, your chances lessen even further.
Meeting people is easy - and you'll have an easier time making friends if you weren't snarking so hard.
The message is literally: reach out and try to make as many connections with other humans as you can and maybe even help them out if it's within your capacity. _That's_it_
Now have a good long think about how cynical of a person you'd have to be to complain about that message.
I too first skimmed it cynically, my natural reaction to any self-help/motivation post. A few of his lines, read alone, do sound ridiculous. "Simply contacting a stranger.." "Just like that, I was in." "All because I bought pizza for a stranger." "Soon after arriving in New York, ... opportunities were everywhere." But I read these lines as obvious hyperbole, used for dramatic effect.
Even though he glosses over a lot of subtleties (its a blog post), I found it rather honest. Yup, it is all about who you know, and it only takes one connection. But there's a more useful truth embedded in the premise, easily overlooked in all the self-glamorizing (again with the dramatic effect): "Create great stuff... [so they can] see something done."
The one good thing I think he says is that you can connect via the internet. I currently feel pretty socially isolated, even when online, and have for years. Emailing folks generally doesn't work for me (I mean me being the initiator tends to go down in flames). And I currently have a lot of baggage concerning feeling used and pissed on by quite a lot of people. In spite of all that, I do think the internet is a great way to make connections. I have had that experience in the past and I expect to again someday.
Edit: I will add that Sivers' story of buying pizza for an industry insider at an elite school reminds me of a story I read of a woman pulling a multi thousand dollar couch off the curb and reupholstering it to improve the decor of her mansion for next to nothing with a "you, too, can do this!" type message. I have reclaimed furniture from the curb and refurbished it. I assure you, none of it was originally worth scads of money. So, no, we cannot all do what Sivers did. He had a serious leg up on how to meet and greet influential people. It is pretty insulting to imply that if you don't have the kind of success he has, you just aren't trying. (I am sure he did not intend to imply that but he does, in fact, imply just that.)