Why I Treat My Contact List More Like a Science Than an Art
When I was starting out, I assumed the people who seemed to know everyone had some kind of gift. They walked into a room and remembered names, asked after people’s families, and always seemed to be the first person others called. I put it down to personality, and I wasn’t sure I had it.
It took me longer than I’d like to admit to see that most of them were simply more disciplined than I was. They weren’t relying on memory or charm. They had a habit of paying attention to people and a way of keeping track of what they learned about them.
I see the same mistake in many of the young people I meet today. They work hard in their first jobs, collect hundreds of connections on LinkedIn and fill their phones with numbers, and then do very little with any of it. A few years later, when they need advice or an introduction, they find that most of those names belong to people who would struggle to remember them. The contacts were collected, but the relationships were never built.
What changed my thinking was realising that a relationship doesn’t keep itself going. If you meet someone you respect and then say nothing for three years, what you’re left with is a phone number rather than a relationship. The people who become important in your working life are usually the ones you stayed in touch with when there was no particular reason to.
That is where the science comes in, if you want to call it that. You can’t stay close to everyone, so you have to make choices. Some people will be part of your life for decades: mentors, old colleagues, the friend from your first job who now runs a company. Others you’ll speak to once or twice a year. Many more you’ll know only loosely, and that’s fine. The sociologist Mark Granovetter showed back in 1973 that loose acquaintances are often the ones who hear about opportunities first, because they move in different circles from you. Deciding who sits where, and giving each group a fair share of your time, is a judgement worth making deliberately rather than leaving to chance.
The other part is remembering. I’ve always found it useful to write a few lines after a good conversation: what the person was working on, what was worrying them, the name of a child who was about to sit exams. When we next speak, I can ask about those things. People notice when you remember, and it tells them the conversation mattered to you as much as it did to them.
None of this should feel calculating. The aim is to make sure that the people who have been kind to you, taught you something or taken a chance on you don’t drift away just because life got busy. Most relationships fade through neglect rather than disagreement, and neglect is very easy to fall into when you’re young and ambitious.
If I could give one piece of advice to someone at the start of their career, it would be to treat the people you meet with the same seriousness you give your work. Keep track of them, notice who you’ve lost touch with, and get in touch before you need something. Kept up steadily over twenty or thirty years, that habit will do more for your career than almost anything else you learn.