I don’t think anyone would disagree that meeting and knowing the right people can often be the key to getting a lot of opportunities in various avenues. As a result there are even a ton of businesses that take advantage of this by creating some kind of solution to connect people. Whenever someone wants to connect with me I always treat it in a semi diligent way in the sense of if they were compelled to reach out to me then I want to find out what they are all about and how I can help them. Seems pretty basic right?
But what surprised me was how recently I met with a person and he had no real clue as to what I did along with my skill-sets. Keep in mind he was enthusiastic in meeting too. So that just got me wondering throughout why he even reached out to me if he didn’t really understand anything about me from a professional point of view. From the looks of it the mindset was essentially the seashell technique where you open say one hundred of them and hopefully one will have a pearl. In this case it was just meet as many people as possible.
While I can see the merit to that at the same time I think it’s better to do a little research on the people you are meeting. If anything I would treat meetings as a way to confirm things about the business or person that you researched about to see if there is a fit. Or would you rather treat business networking like a blind date in a sense?