Business Insight Zone

When a non-runner takes up jogging, everything feels bad. Lungs burn, legs get sore, feet hurt. There’s no way around it, really, and the best you can do is to ease into the running workload gradually, taking plenty of time and rest to recover from each run. (Steady doses of ibuprofen can help, too.)

Over time, it gets easier, but not uniformly. Within a few weeks, you may find that you’re not winded at all from the same three-mile course that killed you at first. So you get a little ambitious and try to up your distance . . . only to find that your legs won’t cooperate.

While healthy lungs can improve quickly, the muscles in your legs take time — several months, at least — to grow enough to accommodate a serious running workload. Along the way, they must form countless new capillaries. They need these vessels so that the muscles can take in oxygen and expel wastes more efficiently, which is crucial when the muscles are taxed over long distances. This tiny network of connections, invisible and ignored, is in fact vital to progress as a runner.

A year later, it’s a lot easier. You can go on longer runs without pain, and you can plot the future progress of your training much more predictably. The groundwork has been laid, and now you can build on it methodically.

I think the same thing applies to the “capillary growth” of our social and professional networks. It’s tempting to jump onto a social-media platform like Facebook and collect “friends” as fast as you can, just like it’s tempting to go to industry events and trade as many business cards as you can, even when you don’t learn anything substantial about the person with whom you’re making contact.

Building a real personal network takes more than an occasional burst of energy, though, just like training to finish a marathon in under three hours requires more than an occasional hard bout of training. It takes the steady application of effort, week in and week out, over the long haul. You have to get to know people, do things for them, keep in touch with them, and do it sincerely but unobtrusively.

After a year or two of this type of effort, it’s easy to use your network for all kinds of good things. Examples:

• finding new clients
• helping a friend find a new job
• helping yourself find a new job
• meeting new people who share your interests
• meeting “aspirational contacts” — top people in your field
• harvesting good advice from experts

But you have to build those capillaries first, and there’s no way to do it quickly.

If you haven’t started the process of capillary growth that is the foundation of a good professional network, now is the time to start.

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Further reading:

• Tahl Raz in Inc. Magazine: The 10 Secrets of a Master Networker

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(Photo by Duncan Rawlinson.)

Category: The working life