It’s been a bit of a long week. I had Saturday off this week (but not really) but had to head to San Diego for work on Sunday…I’m looking forward to the weekend. I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not a fan of conferences and navigating social relationships. However, besides connections that will hopefully help build the company (which I actually care about), I found an amazing point of contact with my fellow attendees.
Business people work pretty hard, but they also play kind of hard as well. So, how do they play? Well, I met several people who just love beer. These weren’t the type of people that simply booze it up. These are people who told me the highlight of their year was this or that beer festival or a homebrew competition.
It’s funny when you think about it. Contacts that are affected are pretty transparent. Forced interactions can be painful. But conversations built on mutual loves are comfortable like a favorite recliner. So, when the rooms cleared and the shuffle of business cards stopped, I was able to simply talk about life and beer. These connections might be far more convincing than anything I could have said.
Perhaps networking isn’t so bad!
I always unwillingly enter into networking. Don’t much like it. But a much smarter person than me, (my wife) told me that there is probably somebody in the room who would like to know more about craft beer and there was probably somebody in that room who had something to teach me as well.
Darn if it doesn’t work. I start yawping about great beer and other people start talking about what they love.
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beer_scientist Reply:
October 13th, 2010 at 5:03 pm
Exactly, I found that people really just want to talk about good beer. The more I just listened to people and stopped pitching, the more they wanted to open up.
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