I have a contact list that embarrasses me a little.
Not because it’s small. Because it’s enormous, and most of it is dead weight.
Hundreds of names. People I met at conferences and swapped cards with. People I emailed once about something I’ve already forgotten. Former colleagues I haven’t spoken to in three years who still show up in my phone under “Mike - TPG??” because I never found a better label for them.
The list looks like abundance. It isn’t.
At some point in the last decade, we all got convinced that collecting connections was the same thing as building relationships. LinkedIn turned into a numbers game. Your follower count became a proxy for your influence. Someone invented the phrase “grow your network” like a network was a garden you could tend with a few clicks and a connection request.
But a network isn’t a garden. It’s a graveyard, mostly. And the connections that feel live are usually just the ones you haven’t checked on lately.
I want to talk about the difference. Because t…
