If You Get A LinkedIn Message From Me, Here Is Why.

A few years ago Facebook created a campaign titled "More Together. " The campaign objective was to highlight the importance of creating in real life relationships vs just having people be a connection on your Facebook profile.

In today's digital-first world, there has been a massive shift in how people interact. This is both a beauty and a failure. The beauty is that people all around the world can get connected. The failure is that these connections often lack genuine human connection and are only surface-level relationships.

I will admit, I have failed at this. Either having authentic relationships from my past turn into more transactional relationships online or just accepting a connection online just because they seem to be a good person.

So on January 1, I made an odd New Year's Resolution.

I would make it a goal to take the connections I have on LinkedIn and convert them into real-life people that I know.

The first thing I did to try and make this conversion was DMing a lot of the people in my network to see if they had time to catch up. (If you're reading this, check your messages, you probably have a message from me.)

As expected a lot of people didn't bother responding because:

1. They don't check their messages all that often.
2. Messages tend to be more spammy or salesy (I am guilty of this, sorry to all those in the past who got those types of messages.)
3. Those people have the old mindset that I had of not needing to meet these connections they have in real life but instead prefer to keep them as surface-level acquaintances online.

Shockingly though, I had 70+ people in the month of January interested in having a quick 30-minute convo with me either via Zoom, by phone, or even in person.

The conversation had no real "agenda", but was focused on one thing...

Getting to know the other person.

It's that simple.

We would share our background, what we are working on currently, and anything that we think might be interesting for the other person.

And the results have been startling.

Roughly 80%-90% of these conversations have led to further conversations. Either with myself or that other person referring me to talk to another person in their network. Or in some cases even looking at new business ideas based on our shared interests of what we are doing.

What's amazing is that when you aren't trying to sell to someone, but genuinely trying to help them achieve their goals you can create a much more meaningful relationship.

The shift from a fixed mindset of "I need you to do this because it will benefit me in this way."

TO

A growth mindset of "I believe I can help you get to where you are going."

Has helped me unlock the hidden value of humanity within myself and within others.

This lesson is something I had been taught before, but we all know there is a difference between being taught it and experieincing it.

I remember my days at 宝洁 I was advised by my mentors about growing the pie instead of just trying to get a cut of my pie.

That is easier said than done.

It is far easier to take the low hanging fruit that will reap the results for ME now than trying to build out a mutually beneficial result that will build up both of us.

We are inherently selfish in nature, but the moment we can get away from me, me, me, the quicker we can actually get to the results we are looking to achieve ourselves.

If you are reading this and want to try and implement a similar 2024 resolution of making those online connections, real life connections then reach out to me and we can talk...

You never know what might come out of it.