There’s a version of networking that only shows up when it needs something. A message after eighteen months of silence. A LinkedIn note that opens warm and closes with an ask. Everyone can feel it the moment it lands, because the timing gives it away.
The absence of contact is its own message. It tells people you think of them as a resource, not a relationship. And resources get used, not maintained.
I learned this from a woman named Priya, who ran a small but sharp comms shop and had somehow ended up as an informal advisor to half the founders in her city. I asked her once how she’d built that kind of standing. She said she didn’t build it, she just never let it go quiet.
