I spent a good part of my thirties networking.
I went to dozens of conferences. I collected hundreds of contacts. I scheduled the follow-up calls. I had the coffees, made introductions, accepted invitations, stayed in touch with former colleagues, and learned how to walk into a room full of strangers and leave knowing people.
I believed in relationships.
I still do.
What changed was my belief that accumulating relationships and building relationships were the same thing.
There is a phrase repeated so often in professional circles that it has acquired the authority of fact:
Your network is your net worth.
There is enough truth in it to make it persuasive. Relationships matter. People introduce us to ideas, opportunities, industries, clients, jobs, communities, and other people we would not otherwise encounter. Research on weak ties has demonstrated for decades that people outside our closest circles can connect us to information and opportunities unavailable within them.
I have experienced this throughout my career. People I barely knew have opened doors for me. Someone has mentioned my name in a room I wasn’t in. A conversation at an event has become work. An introduction has become a client. A professional connection has become a genuine friendship.
Networking works.
The question is what happens when we take something true about human relationships and turn it into an instruction to accumulate them.
There was something I did not understand in my thirties.
Attention is finite.
Every new relationship requires some amount of it. There is the first conversation and then the follow-up. The coffee. The lunch. The check-in. The invitation. The introduction. The effort to remember and remain remembered.
None of this is inherently superficial. Much of it is simply how relationships begin.
But attention given somewhere is attention unavailable somewhere else.
I can see now that I sometimes gave urgency to relationships with possibility and patience to relationships with history.
A new professional connection required cultivation. If I didn’t follow up, the opportunity might disappear. If someone interesting invited me somewhere, I should go. If I met someone who might become important to my work, there was a reason to stay connected.
The people already close to me could wait.
They knew me. They understood. They would be there.
It is a strange inversion when I look at it now. The least established relationships sometimes received the greatest urgency precisely because they were uncertain. The strongest relationships could be postponed because they felt secure.
The new relationship was perishable.
The old one felt permanent.
Enough years pass and you learn that nothing involving human beings is permanent simply because you have become comfortable believing it is.
I think about former colleagues when I consider this.
There are people with whom I once spent more waking hours than I spent with almost anyone else in my life. We solved problems together. Ate together. Knew what was happening in one another’s families. Celebrated promotions and birthdays. Complained about the same meetings. Developed our own language for the absurdities of work.
Then somebody left.
Another job came. Another company. Another team. Another group of people with whom we spent most of our waking hours.
Eventually the calls became less frequent. Lunches stopped. The relationship faded.
This doesn’t mean it wasn’t real.
It means it was contextual.
Sometimes the workplace isn’t simply where a relationship happens. It is part of the infrastructure holding the relationship together. Remove the shared deadlines, meetings, problems, proximity, and reasons to speak every day, and you discover what the relationship becomes without them.
Sometimes it becomes friendship.
Often it becomes memory.
And everyone is doing the same thing. I wasn’t carefully tending relationships while everyone around me failed to appreciate them. They were building careers too. Meeting people too. Going to conferences too. Changing companies too. Following up with someone they had just met while assuming someone they had known for years would understand.
We were all cultivating one another.
Eventually, I began to recognize the transaction inside some of it.
Not transaction in the crude sense. Most professional networking doesn’t operate as an explicit exchange of I do this for you and you owe me that.
It is subtler.
You may matter to my future.
I may matter to yours.
Let’s stay connected.
There is nothing inherently wrong with this. Human beings have always exchanged knowledge, introductions, resources, support, opportunity, and access. Reciprocity is part of how communities work.
But reciprocity is not intimacy.
Access is not friendship.
Familiarity is not permanence.
And usefulness is not love.
What complicates this is that professional relationships often borrow the rituals of friendship.
We have dinner. We celebrate birthdays. We send gifts. We invite one another to weddings, parties, and gatherings. We ask about partners and children. We say we miss each other. We check in when something difficult happens.
None of those gestures is inherently transactional. Many are expressions of genuine affection.
That is precisely why the distinction can be difficult to see.
Humans are charming.
We genuinely enjoy one another. We laugh. We tell each other things. We care what happens to people we originally met through work. A professional relationship can contain tremendous warmth without ever becoming a friendship.
The transaction does not make the affection false.
The affection does not make the relationship a friendship.
It took me years to understand that both things could be true.
The rituals themselves don’t tell us very much. Dinner is still dinner. A text is still a text. An invitation is still an invitation. A gift can be sincere whether it comes from a friend, a colleague, a client, or someone we hope will remember us the next time an opportunity appears.
The difference is underneath.
The rituals can be identical. The organizing principle is not.
The phrase your network is your net worth collapses all of these relationships into one enormous category called a network.
A close friend is not a former colleague. A former colleague is not a client. A client is not a mentor. A mentor is not someone whose business card I collected after a panel fifteen years ago. A person who would recommend me for a job is not necessarily someone I would call from an emergency room.
I have watched people who knew everyone, and seemed loved by everyone, discover in hospital rooms and at the end of life that you can be known by hundreds of people, loved by many of them, and still have very few people show up.
When life becomes serious enough, the enormous circle often collapses to a partner, if you have chosen and tended that love well, hopefully your children, family if you are fortunate, and the couple of friends who actually come.
Choose the center of your life well.
These relationships can all matter.
They do not matter in the same way.
Perhaps one of the things networking culture teaches poorly is discernment.
We are taught how to expand a network. How to follow up. How to stay visible. How to add value. How to maintain weak ties. How to reconnect. How to make introductions before we need anything. How to be generous so relationships do not feel transactional.
We are rarely taught when we have enough.
There is always another person worth knowing.
And this is where networking can quietly merge with people-pleasing.
People-pleasing in professional life does not always look insecure. Sometimes it looks exceptionally competent.
It looks like responsiveness. Generosity. Remembering details. Making introductions. Taking the meeting. Accepting the invitation. Offering help. Making people comfortable. Remaining easy to work with. Knowing how to read a room and becoming very good at ensuring that important people leave interactions feeling good about us.
These can all be wonderful qualities.
They can also make it difficult to notice when relationship-building has become relationship-management.
A network is not simply a collection of relationships. It can become an architecture of incentives.
Every connection carries some possibility. An introduction. A referral. An opportunity. Information. Access to a room we may someday want to enter.
We do not have to consciously calculate these possibilities for them to influence us. The possibility itself can begin shaping behavior.
Maybe I should go.
I don’t want to close that door.
So we accept invitations we would rather decline. We soften disagreements. We keep relationships warm after genuine interest has faded. We remain useful. We stay visible. We hesitate to disappoint people because we cannot know which relationship might matter later.
Eventually, optionality becomes its own constraint.
The network that was supposed to expand our choices can begin quietly making choices for us.
That is when I began asking different questions.
Can I decline the invitation?
Can I disagree?
Can I stop being useful?
Can I stop being charming?
Can I disappoint you?
Can I change direction even if the new direction makes me less relevant to someone?
Can a relationship survive a season in which neither of us has anything particularly useful to offer the other?
Would I still make an effort to keep you in my life if you had nothing useful to offer me but your character?
What is this relationship actually showing me that it is?
There is also information in being an afterthought.
Not every missed invitation means something. Adults have full lives. Tables have limits. Friendships shift. People forget things. I have certainly forgotten things.
But patterns are information.
If I am consistently included at the edges of someone’s life while treating that person as central in mine, I eventually have to notice the asymmetry.
Being included is not the same as belonging.
This doesn’t require deciding that someone is a bad friend, or incapable of becoming a good one. Sometimes it simply means recognizing the relationship they are actually offering and deciding whether that is the relationship I want.
There have been people I genuinely liked and could imagine becoming close friends with, but networking seemed to occupy more of their relational lives than I wanted it to occupy in mine. I don’t think that means they lack the capacity for deep friendship. Many undoubtedly have extraordinary friendships.
I simply stopped wanting to fight for access to that part of them.
Over time, I also noticed something about the people I most enjoy. They tend to value depth too. Like me, they may have enormous professional networks and full social lives they can tap into. They may even know far more people than I do. This isn’t about introverts and extroverts, or small circles and large ones.
It is an orientation toward depth. Toward knowing people, rather than simply knowing a lot of people.
I am reminded of this by a friendship in my life now that started professionally. This person is incredibly accomplished, connected, the Head of Something Important Somewhere. I could probably look up their exact current title. I have not. I am, however, currently considering a ridiculous T-shirt for them because apparently, beneath all the professional accomplishments, we are twelve.
Our careers may intersect again. They may become incredibly useful to me. I may become useful to them.
I don’t particularly care.
I just want to see my friend.
Somewhere along the way, I stopped keeping track of their professional value to me. I kept track of them.
I just want to see my friend.
And maybe that’s the point.
Of course, none of those behaviors proves friendship. Good networkers can do all of them, sincerely. The distinction isn’t the behavior.
It is what is organizing the behavior.
At some point with a few people, I stop tracking the professional relationship altogether. Their career may become relevant to mine again someday. Mine may become relevant to theirs. I simply no longer experience that possibility as part of the reason I want them in my life.
The relationship has become its own reason to exist.
Those relationships are rare.
They are also the ones I want.
Not because usefulness contaminates friendship. Friends help each other all the time, sometimes enormously. Friendship can create introductions, opportunities, advice, money, work, shelter, access, and every other form of human assistance.
The distinction is not whether value gets exchanged.
It is whether the relationship still makes sense when you remove the exchange.
That has changed the way I think about relational wealth.
A former colleague can become someone I remember warmly and contact once every year.
An acquaintance can remain an acquaintance.
A client can be someone with whom I did meaningful work without needing to become a lifelong friend.
A conference connection can disappear entirely.
None of these outcomes represents failure.
And a few people can receive much more of me.
In my thirties, I sometimes treated relationships as though security meant they required less attention. The people who loved me, knew me, had history with me, or had already proven themselves could wait while I cultivated possibility elsewhere.
I understand the logic.
I also understand the cost.
The people closest to us should not perpetually receive whatever attention remains after we have finished investing in everyone who might matter to our future.
There is another reason I no longer believe my network is my net worth.
A network is something I have.
It is not what I am capable of.
Knowing extraordinary people does not make me extraordinary. Being invited into an important room does not mean I have built anything important. Having access to powerful people may create opportunity, but it does not tell me what I can create when nobody powerful is available to help.
Relationships are a form of capital.
So are judgment, skill, experience, credibility, courage, imagination, the ability to create something useful, and the capacity to build new relationships when the old ones no longer belong to the life we are living.
A network can amplify those things.
It cannot substitute for them.
When I look back at all those conferences now, I don’t regret going.
I met extraordinary people. I learned things. Opportunities emerged. Some relationships lasted. A few became much more than whatever professional reason first brought us together.
But I no longer count the hundreds of people I met as evidence of relational wealth.
I think about the few who remained.
I think about the people whose company I want without considering what either of us has to offer the other.
I think about the people I reach for without remembering to ask myself why.
I think about the relationships that survived the disappearance of the context that created them.
And I think about the people I once assumed would always be there, and whether I gave enough attention to what was already valuable while I was busy cultivating what might become valuable.
I didn’t lose faith in relationships.
I lost faith in accumulation.
Your network has value. Sometimes enormous value.
But your network is not your net worth.
Human beings are not assets on a personal balance sheet.
Some relationships matter because of what they make possible.
And then there are the rare people you would choose even if there were nothing left to gain from choosing one another.
