The event is on Thursday. You have been to this kind of thing before. You will stand near the edge holding a drink, have four conversations that go nowhere, collect some contact details you will never use, and leave feeling vaguely diminished.
Everyone says this is how careers are built. So either everyone is wrong, or there is something wrong with you.
Neither, as it turns out. What is wrong is the specific format, which was designed by and for people who find it energising, and which is a poor mechanism for the thing it claims to produce even for them.
Why does networking feel so bad?
Because the standard version asks you to perform interest in strangers in order to extract future benefit, and both halves of that are unpleasant.
You are simultaneously assessing whether someone is useful to you and aware that they are doing the same. Nobody is being straightforward. The conversation has an ulterior structure that both parties can feel, and the discomfort is an accurate perception of that structure rather than social anxiety.
There is also a mismatch of purpose. The event format is optimised for volume: many short exchanges, maximum contact details. But the thing that produces opportunity is not contact volume. It is a small number of people who know your work well enough to vouch for it. Those two goals are almost opposed, because the time spent on volume is time not spent on depth.
The discomfort is not a character flaw. You are noticing accurately that the format optimises for the wrong thing.
What is actually being built?
The goal is not a large network. It is a modest number of people who can accurately describe what you are good at.
That is the whole mechanism. When an opportunity appears, someone has to think of you and be able to say something specific. "I know someone who does that" is nearly useless. "I know someone who rebuilt exactly this and can tell you what went wrong the first time" is decisive.
Which reframes everything. You do not need to be known by many people. You need to be known accurately by some. And accuracy comes from someone having seen your work or heard you think, neither of which happens in a six-minute conversation at a drinks reception.
This is why the people with the most business cards frequently have the fewest opportunities, and why someone who has quietly helped a dozen people over three years has more career optionality than they realise.
Why weak ties do the heavy lifting
In 1973 the sociologist Mark Granovetter published a study on how people found jobs. The finding that made it famous: among those who found work through personal contacts, the majority heard about the opportunity through someone they saw only occasionally, rather than through close friends.
The explanation is information overlap. Your close contacts move in your circles, read what you read, and hear what you hear. They rarely know something you do not. Someone at the edge of your network moves in different circles entirely, so what reaches them is genuinely new.
Two practical consequences follow, and they are good news for anyone who dislikes events.
First, you do not need intense relationships. A weak tie is by definition someone you have a light connection with, and light connections are exactly what sustainable networking produces.
Second, breadth of context matters more than depth of intimacy. Knowing a few people in several different worlds beats knowing many people in one.
| Strong ties | Weak ties | |
|---|---|---|
| Who they are | Close colleagues, friends | Former colleagues, acquaintances, people you talk to occasionally |
| Information they carry | Mostly what you already know | Things from outside your circle |
| Effort to maintain | High | Low, a few exchanges a year |
| Role in opportunity | Support and honesty | Where new opportunities arrive |
How this is taught inside Astra Trainer
This is the core of the Networking direction in the Leadership, Career & Influence world, which at 36 courses is tied for the largest direction there. Its stated aim is building relationships that last, becoming someone people want to help, and reaching the opportunities that never get posted.
That middle phrase is the orientation of the whole direction, and it is why the material does not read like conventional networking advice. Becoming someone people want to help is a different project from becoming someone who has met many people, and it turns out to suit people who dislike events rather than penalising them. Lessons take about five minutes, a guide walks you through anything strange, and the discussion thread under each lesson is where people compare what has actually worked.
A worked example: two approaches over one year
Two people decide they need to build professional relationships. Both give it roughly two hours a month.
Person A attends one industry event monthly. Twelve events, perhaps sixty short conversations, forty contact details. They connect with everyone online afterwards. Of the forty, they have a further conversation with maybe three. At the end of the year they have a larger contact list and two people who would recognise their name.
Person B does something less obviously productive. Each month they do two things: they write one short, genuinely useful post about a problem in their field, and they have one proper conversation with someone whose work interests them, arranged directly rather than at an event.
Twelve posts. Twelve conversations.
The posts are read by a few hundred people, most of whom do nothing. But three of those people reach out over the year because the post was relevant to something they were working on. Two of the twelve conversations become ongoing occasional contact.
At the end of the year Person B has perhaps seventeen people who could describe their work accurately, because they have either read their thinking or spoken with them properly.
Person A has forty contacts and two people who know them. Person B has seventeen people who know them and no contact list to speak of.
When an opportunity appears eighteen months later, it arrives through one of Person B's occasional contacts, who mentioned them to someone else because they had read enough of their work to be confident recommending it.
Worth being fair to Person A: events do work for some people, particularly in fields where deals are done in person, and someone who genuinely enjoys them will get more from them than this example suggests. The argument is not that events are worthless. It is that if you hate them, there is a substitute that works at least as well.
Five methods that do not require a room full of strangers
Be useful in public. Write about problems in your field, answer questions properly in places where practitioners gather, publish something that helps people. This works asynchronously, requires no small talk, and is the highest-leverage option available. It also inverts the dynamic: people approach you, already knowing something about your work.
Reconnect rather than meet. Former colleagues are the most underused asset most people have. You already have a relationship, they have direct evidence of your work, and they have since dispersed into other organisations, which makes them ideal weak ties. A short message with no ask attached is enough.
One conversation, properly. Instead of an event, arrange a single conversation with one person whose work interests you. Most people say yes to a specific, time-bounded request from someone who has clearly read their work. One good conversation produces more than twenty introductions.
Collaborate on something real. Working with someone, even briefly, produces a stronger connection than any amount of conversation, because they have seen you work. Cross-team projects, joint writing, helping with something outside your remit.
Be the one who makes introductions. Connecting two people who should know each other costs you nothing, requires no self-promotion, and is remembered disproportionately. It also makes you a connector, which is a position of unusual usefulness.
The one rule that makes all of these work. No immediate ask. A message that reconnects and then requests something in the same breath is a transaction, and it reads as one. Reconnect, be useful, be interested, and let the relationship exist for a while before it is needed. This is slower and it is the entire difference between a network and a contact list.
How do you follow up without it being awkward?
Follow-up is where most connections quietly die, and it dies because people overthink it.
Three principles make it easy.
Make it about them, not about maintaining contact. "I saw this and thought of your point about X" is a natural message. "Just checking in" is a message with no content, and both parties know it.
Low frequency is fine. Weak ties survive on very little. Two or three exchanges a year is sufficient to keep a connection live. The idea that relationships require constant maintenance is imported from friendship and does not apply here.
Send the useful thing immediately. If someone mentioned a problem and you encounter something relevant, send it that day. Most people think of doing this and then decide it is too small to be worth a message. It is not. Small, specific usefulness is exactly what builds the impression that you are worth knowing.
The underlying idea: a relationship maintained by being occasionally useful requires almost no effort and no performance. A relationship maintained by scheduled check-ins requires both and produces less.
What if you have nothing to offer yet?
This is the objection most people raise, and it rests on a narrow view of what counts as useful.
You do not need seniority or expertise to be worth knowing. What you can offer at any stage:
Attention. Reading someone's work properly and responding with something specific is rare and disproportionately appreciated. Most people receive generic praise and almost no considered engagement.
Information from your corner. You know things about your immediate context that people outside it do not. That is genuinely valuable to them, and you probably discount it because it is ordinary to you.
Effort. Being willing to help with something unglamorous is worth more than expertise you do not have yet.
Connection. You know people. Introducing two of them requires no standing at all.
And the honest longer answer: early on, you will receive more than you give, and that is the normal shape of it. People who are further along were helped by others when they had nothing to offer either. The obligation is not to balance the ledger immediately, it is to do the same later, which almost everyone does.
Making it a habit rather than a project
Everything here is low-effort and slow-acting, which is precisely the combination people abandon. Nothing bad happens if you skip a month, so months get skipped, and then a year has passed.
The structure of the Leadership, Career & Influence world is aimed at that failure mode. Daily quests, points and a streak keep five-minute lessons running when there is no deadline forcing them, with a streak shield for the day that goes wrong. Quizzes follow each topic and each course ends with a ten-question final exam, and the daily Connections round and 10x10 crossword are built from this world's own lessons, so sponsor, mentor, connector and peer come back as practice rather than as a list you read once.
A Circle is worth particular mention here, because it gives you a small group with a shared weekly goal and live sessions, and that group is itself a set of weak ties forming around a common interest. Which is the thing this article is about, arriving as a side effect.
What to take from this
The discomfort is accurate. Transactional networking feels bad because both parties can sense the structure, and the format optimises for contact volume rather than for being known accurately.
What matters is a modest number of people who can describe your work specifically. That comes from having seen your work or heard you think, not from a brief exchange.
Weak ties carry the opportunities, which means light, occasional connections across several contexts beat intense connections in one.
Five methods work without events: be useful in public, reconnect with former colleagues, have one proper conversation, collaborate on something real, make introductions.
And the rule underneath all of them is no immediate ask. Be useful first, let it sit, and the relationship will exist when you need it.
Do I need to use social media for this?
You need somewhere your thinking is visible, and that can be a platform, a personal site, an industry publication, or a community where practitioners in your field gather. The requirement is discoverable evidence of how you think, not a particular channel.
How many people do I actually need?
Fewer than the advice implies. Fifteen to twenty people who can describe your work accurately is a functional professional network. What matters is that they are spread across different contexts rather than concentrated in one organisation.
Is it dishonest to network with an ulterior motive?
Wanting professional benefit from relationships is ordinary and everyone involved knows it. What makes an interaction feel dishonest is pretending otherwise, or being interested in someone only while they are useful. Being openly professional and genuinely interested is neither.
What if I am new and know nobody?
Start with people you already have a connection to, however slight: former classmates, previous colleagues, people whose work you have engaged with online. Building from an existing thread is far easier than starting from zero, and most people have more threads than they think.
Where can I learn this systematically?
The Networking direction inside the Leadership, Career & Influence world of Astra Trainer runs to 36 courses on building relationships that last and reaching opportunities that never get posted. Lessons take about five minutes and the first needs no card. You can see what is inside the world here.
