Writing is networking that scales

I hate networking events. The forced small talk, the business card exchange, the conversation you forget by the time you reach the parking lot.

But I've built a network that matters to me—people I actually want to talk to, who reach out about ideas rather than asks. Most of them I met through writing.

When I first started this blog, my first year it was resulted in a million impressions, back in 2010, that was something. I stopped as life and work got more demanding but I wish I didn't. Imagine how many more of you I would have met.

Here is a video from a popular Youtuber that linked to this blog on a post I wrote in 5 minutes and that was pre-AI. Your reach is farther than you think.

How?

The mechanism is simple: traditional networking is one-to-one. You meet someone, have a conversation, maybe follow up. Writing is one-to-many, running in the background. You publish once; it keeps meeting people on your behalf.

A post I wrote three years ago still generates emails from strangers who become collaborators. Conference invitations come from organizers who feel like they already know me. Job offers have landed in my inbox from people I'd never spoken to—but who'd read enough to trust how I think.

This isn't about reach or followers. It's about resonance. When someone reads your work and reaches out, they've already filtered themselves. They know what you care about. The conversation starts at a higher level.

The fundamental lesson here is that writing creates leverage on your attention. You can't be in every room, but your ideas can be. You can't meet every person worth knowing, but your thinking can introduce you.

There's a useful side effect to this framing: it takes the pressure off any single piece. You're not trying to go viral. You're trying to build a body of work that, over time, attracts the right people.

The best professional relationships I have started with someone reading something I wrote. Not a handshake. A paragraph.