How To Network If You Don't Know Anyone

You think networking means walking up to strangers and making small talk. It doesn’t. The best place to start is people you already know.

In this episode, I break down why your existing contacts are your real network, even if you’ve never thought of them that way. You’ll learn what a dormant tie is and why it beats your current coworkers for real advice. You’ll see the research behind it. And you’ll get two simple ways to build your own list of people worth reaching back out to.

Here’s the core idea: dormant ties are people you’ve worked with before but lost touch with. They already trust you. They already know your name. And because they’ve been off living a different professional life, they bring perspectives your daily coworkers can’t. An MIT Sloan study, cited in Adam Grant’s Give and Take, found that executives got more innovative and diverse advice from old contacts than from the people they talk to every single day. Distance creates fresh eyes.

I’ll walk you through two ways to build your dormant ties list: thinking back through your resume, and using LinkedIn’s Experience section to spot old connections. No cold outreach. No awkward stranger small talk. Just people who already know you.

This video is based on the newsletter issue that was originally published in The Introverted Networker on July 30, 2022:

TIN #001 - How To Network If You Don’t Know Anyone.

BTW: This advice works for extroverts, too!

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Always Be Connecting.