You went. You stood near the food. You left.
You can hold a meeting for an hour. You cannot hold four minutes with a stranger, and you've decided that's just who you are.
“I'm a senior data analyst at a fintech.”
“I find out why the numbers a company reports and the numbers it actually has are different. Usually it's one spreadsheet somebody built in 2019.”
The first is a job title, which is where conversations go to die — there's nothing to ask about. The second hands them the follow-up question for free.
Then the part nobody talks about: the message you didn't send afterwards. The person you got on well with whose name you never followed up. That's where the value was, and it evaporated in the taxi.
Your network is the thing you neglected while you were busy being good at the job.
You don't need to become the loudest person in the room. You need one answer to one question that gives somebody something to say back.
Say it out loud. Get scored 0–100. Hear exactly what to fix — down to the word.
Scroll through. Count how many you recognise.
Usually the trigger is specific: a layoff, a move, a company that's gone quiet. You built a career on doing the work well and it turns out that was half of it.
One session a day. Not a warm-up — the deep end.
The room isn't the problem. The forty seconds is.
Live them here first, as often as you like.
Practise the opener — free