“It’s not about what you know— but WHO you know that counts.”
I am so sick of hearing this sentence.
I admittingly live and die by the power of networking. It has gotten me farther than any GPA ever could or will. It has helped me in conversation with people of all ages, titles and economic stature. It has gotten me out of trouble, into trouble and with a whole slew of people ready to pull me out when I can’t escape the ramifications of trouble myself.
But I’ve broken the boundaries. I’ve allowed the networking mantra to consume me. I have become addicted to networking, and no 12-step program may ever be able to save me.
I’d just network with everyone at my meeting.
“When we were in New York City this summer,” he said, “You pulled out your agenda and showed me every person you were meeting everyday your last week there. I couldn’t believe it, it was unbelievable to see.”
My friend told me this over the phone a few weeks ago, as I sobbed to him that I can’t seem to make time for myself. Hence, I break down from self-imposed stress and social committments.
We want to meet new people because new people teach us something about ourselves we didn’t know before. We like new people for their freshness and for their ability to inspire us. But networkers don’t see value in the beauty of a relatioship. Rather, we see opportunity. We see investment, opportunity and compensation for the time we put into that relationship.
The networking mantra has turned us into opportunity-seeking monsters. We have taken the meaning of relationships and mutated it into the meaning of selfishness. I feel as if I seek new people in my life to keep my social pool growing— because the old ones will inevitably drop out, thus contributing to my loss of opportunity cost.
But whether these people leave my circle of friends is not because we no longer have reason to share with one another. It is because I have begun to see greater value in opportunity reations. Their freshness is no longer availabe to me, and as I drift farther away, they do, too.
Whether it’s only calling my “best friend” every two weeks, or snapping at my mother when she calls to say hi: I fear that I have become programmed to this tunnel vision way of looking at my relationships.
But tunnels are tunnels for a reason-- to keep you in and everything else out.
Yet sometimes, I just wish the tunnel would break and the water would rush over me.
*posted by Sammy D
