Social Capital: What Is It, And How To Build It.

The motivation for writing this blog is to shed some light on the learnings I have had in my own experiences over the past few years. Many of my closest friends have been asking me the method/structure to reaching out to people and creating positive relationships. Note that I am not at all stating that I am an expert at this, all of this information has been learned through reading books, listening to podcasts, and experimenting with many of the techniques below. My goal is to share these experiences with the hope to encourage you to get out there and start building your own social capital!

Why is networking important?

According to a study done by NPR and CNN, around 80% of jobs get filled informally. Only 20% of jobs get filled through people responding to job ads (the primary method of job seeking most people do)

So, how does the 80% of hiring that occurs in the informal job market happen? The way that people who build up their social capital do it, is by building up a professional relationship with people within the industry long before the hire is made.

Connections. Referrals. Friends. Knowing people who know people.

During my time in university, all of my jobs have come through the people I know, not through a formal job application process. Most of those roles did not come from the fact I am at a good school and sometimes not even with relevant work experiences! It came from building genuine relationships with people, understanding who they are, sharing your story, hearing theirs, sharing your motivations, and then asking for help.

Throughout this journey I’ve realized one common aspect that may sound unconventional; people are nice and they want to help! This is because almost certainly, these people have been helped in their past, and when they see an eager well-intentioned kid reaching out, more times than not, they will want to give back. Their hope is that I will hopefully pay it forward as well, which is why I’m writing this blog!

My hope over the next few weeks is to teach you what I’ve learned from reading books, listening to cool podcasts, and getting valuable advice from mentors. The way I’ll present this information will be to answer the common questions that I get from close friends of mine.

• Getting over the stigma of networking.
• How do I start?
• How do I find people to connect with?
• What do I say when I’m chatting with them?
• How do I not sound desperate or like I want something from them?
• How do I build and nurture the relationship?
• How do I ask for help?

My hope is that through answering these questions, it will give you an upper hand when it comes to many of our other peers who will not be open to trying this. Throughout, feel free to contact me personally with feedback or questions, but please don’t be mean/hurtful, I am pretty sensitive.

Let's go!

But Jay, networking is awkward…

Yes, it is. If you do it incorrectly. Think the first thing to do is just stop calling it networking. The word has such a bad rep, that even thinking about it musters up weird images of sleazy sales people or desperate job seekers. Instead of networking, I like to call it building your social capital. The goal of meeting people should not be to get anything from them, it is to create genuine relationships with professionals in your industry, learn from their experiences, and continue to follow up with them as peers. I’ll get into later how to prepare yourself for these conversations, but it's important to note that your motivation should be coming from a place of curiosity, and real care for the other person. Please reflect on this before going any further, because if your intentions aren’t genuine I’d stop reading…

It's scary meeting new people…

Yes it is, until you get over it… I’m kidding, but not really. In my experience, the biggest reason why people don’t like reaching out to meet new people is that of their fear of rejection. This is one of the most human characteristics that we have and is tough to overcome. Our ancestors come from close knit tribes, where building close ties to the ones closest to you were more important, and less dangerous, to meet new people. That comes from our biology, and in society, since we were kids we’ve heard terms like “stranger danger”. These are all things that we must get over before reaching out, but how?

One exercise that has helped me and many others is Tim Ferriss’s “Fear Setting Exercise”. To quickly sum up it's asking yourself “what is the worst that could possibly happen (I really mean the worst)? Things as bad as showing up, and realizing you left all of your clothes at home, but you still have to meet them, nude...

What about going there, being so nervous that you just end up puking all over them!? Play those things out in your head, then write them down, then work back from that so you can prepare for the worst possible situation. What you’ll realize by doing this exercise is that:

a.) you can get yourself out of even the worst possible situation,

b.) the worst probably won't happen.

Once our initial stigma of networking is dealt with, we can accomplish so much. These stigmas that both society and our literal biology have programmed in us are tough to overcome yet can be overcome. I hope that you’ve seen the importance of “networking” or as I like to call it, making genuine relationships :)

Ready to start building your social capital, but confused on where to start?

Stay tuned to next weeks post on “how do I start?”

See you next week, looking forward to your comments and feedback below!

Sources:

Tim Ferriss: https://tim.blog/2011/09/29/8-steps-to-getting-what-you-want-without-formal-credentials/

Keith Ferrazzi: https://www.asse.org/assets/1/7/hansen_wr_0312.pdf