Aarthi Ramamurthy: belief

Transcript context

…be like, "Who else should I talk to?" You do this, you do two coffees a week and literally just ask me two hours a week, everyone has two hours a week, it'll start compounding over overtime and time. And then as the years go by, you keep in touch with the people you used to work with you, these folks will go to other places, five years, six years go by, you start in your mid-20s or late 20s and you know hundreds of people all over. And the important thing about this is that it is a resource in so many different places. For example, one, if you ever need help, you're trying to look for a new role or you're trying to be like, "Hey, I want to hire this person, who knows something about this person?" or, "I want a new role. Who's looking for something?" that network becomes your key resource. Now what I think a lot of people don't do, it's just simple things. Number one is often people just have a great meeting with a peer and then they will never ever follow up. I'm sure a lot of us have the amazing first introduction email they never followed up, don't do that. I try and make it a point to make sure I always meet them once a year, once every six months. I'll just leave a note, "Hey, what's up?" And the other key part is expecting nothing in return. And generally people are very good at reading other people and if you go and being like, "Hey, I just want to meet you because I want a job or I'm here to network," whatever that means, they don't want to meet you. Just go and be very curious about who they are and try and help them. And you'll be surprised wherever you start, within a year, two years, you'll know hundreds of people who you can tap into, so I think that is super powerful. That's just building relationships. The other part is brand building. Both Aarthi and I at different points in our career have gotten feedback in our job saying, "Oh, with Sriram and Aarthi, it's brand build too much, et cetera." I have learned that that is terrible feedback and to totally ignore that and if anybody hears anything like that, just totally ignore that. The things that work well for me and a lot of others is putting yourself out there and that can be anything. That can be like you make a presentation internally, you write tweets, you're prolific on GitHub, you make a YouTube video, it doesn't really matter, but put yourself out there because the internet rewards people being out there. And what happens when you put yourself out there? It's a Bat-Signal. It's telling people that, "Hey, I'm here, this is my body of work," and you know what the internet does? It'll send amazing people to you. You'd be amazed how often somebody just have a random great Twitter thread with no followers and somebody super interesting will email them and that leads to amazing things happening, it encourages serendipity. So over the years, I wish I had listened less to people who said I should not do this and listened more to the people who said I should do this more. I also think, Sriram keeps saying, "Expect nothing in return," I think the other way I see it is this is again an extension of optimism for us. Generally, we think people like to help each other out, that is just in their true nature. It's not meant to be transactional, it's not meant to be, "If I know them, they will somehow do something for me down the road," it's not that. Just the way we are all building communities and are a part of this broader community, the way we work is we all want to help each other and help them be successful. And if that is in your nature, it's hard to not feel like, "Yeah, of course I want to reach out to them. I want to see what I can do to help them. Maybe something good will happen, we'll collaborate on a project together," whatever. The core tenant being don't expect stuff in return, don't do it on a transactional basis, I think is really important. What this reminds me of is Naval has this tweet that proved to be so true, which is don't network, instead create amazing things, create value, do good work and then people will want to network with you. And that's really stuck with me and it saves you from going to network events. Instead just go work hard, do awesome stuff and people are going to want to meet you.…

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