4 Mistakes And Life Lessons To Be Grateful For

Not Nurturing Your Real Network

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Another term for this is social climbing. It happens when you focus all of your social energy on making connections with people who you believe can help you – people who have something to offer you – instead of nurturing the people who are already there for you.

It’s common to make this mistake in the earlier years of one’s career. At every party, instead of chatting with your peers, you did everything you could to talk to those more successful than you. And what happened? They didn’t want to talk to you because they wanted to talk to their peers. And then your peers shut you out because you didn’t give them the time of day.

Your peers – the people in the same trenches as you – are the ones you’ll come up with. You’ll go through the same growing pains at the same time together and build bonds over that. Eventually, they’ll take you with them if they succeed – or vice versa. But that can’t happen if you didn’t form those bonds, because you were too busy social climbing.

Lesson: Building a real network is about forming bonds with people at your level. You’ll grow together, and help each other when you have a platform do to so.