One of my mentors at General Motors looked at me and said,
“Magdalena, your networking skills really suck.”
He said it plainly, then moved on to the next topic. I didn’t move on. Coming from someone I trusted with my career, that sentence rode along in my car to every event for years, and it got louder the second I walked into a room and heard the hum of a hundred conversations already in progress.
In September of 2025 I started a new job, and I decided to finally test it. For twelve months I said yes to every coffee, panel, and introduction that came my way, and by the end of the year I had met roughly 1,000 new people.
Four of them stayed. They’re still here, and we’re still putting in the hours.
A 2018 study on friendship showed me that four was close to what I should have expected all along.
The hypothesis
I’m an introvert, and I say so out loud. Give me one person and two hours and I’m happy. Put a name tag on my chest and a cup of lukewarm coffee in my hand, and some quiet part of me starts mapping the exits.
Before I wrote essays, coached or ran workshops, I studied psychology and worked in a research lab. I sat in the experimenter’s chair and ran participants myself, reading from a standardized script word for word, so the only thing that changed was the thing we were testing. That chair taught me a habit I still have: a hunch doesn’t count until you test it.
“You suck at networking” became my hypothesis. The experiment was simple. Say yes for a year and see if enough reps could turn me into one of those people who glide through a room and leave with forty new contacts and a smile that never gets tired.
What a thousand hellos cost
One introduction costs almost nothing.
A thousand of them add up like a tax…My cheeks ached from smiling. By the end of most evenings my voice was scratchy from talking over the noise. I’d come home after hours of perfectly good conversations with perfectly nice people and feel wrung out, like a phone at two percent. I kept going anyway. Depth was what I wanted, and for a whole year I chased the opposite as fast as I could.
The count
At the end the 12 months I did what you do at the end of any experiment. I looked at the data. A thousand people, give or take. Then I asked a harder question: who did I let past the surface? Who would I call on a bad day?
I wrote down four names, and I didn’t have to think about a single one.
The research that made it make sense
In 2018, a University of Kansas communication professor named Jeffrey Hall published a study in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships. Earlier research had shown that time together matters for connection. Hall’s university called his the first study of its kind, because he actually counted the hours.
His numbers: roughly 50 hours together to move from acquaintance to casual friend, 90 hours to reach plain friend, and more than 200 hours before someone becomes a close friend. He also found that hours spent working together don’t count as much.
Now do the math on my year. Turning a thousand people into close friends would take 200,000 hours. A year holds about 8,760 hours, sleep included. My experiment could never have produced a thousand real connections, and I’d been grading myself against a number no human could hit.
Even the four needed more than one year. By end of the 12 months I hadn’t come close to 200 hours with any of them. What the year gave me were the moments that told me these four were worth the hours. The friendships are still growing, and so is the count.
Research on friendship layers, built on anthropologist Robin Dunbar’s work, adds the second piece: most of us keep about five people in our closest circle.
Four sits right under that ceiling. I almost filed my result as a failure. It was ordinary human wiring.
My board of directors
I started calling those four people my board of directors. They get a vote in my life, and every one of them is still earning the seat, the same way I’m earning mine with them.
Maria is my mentor, which still makes me smile, considering this whole story started with a mentor telling me what I was bad at. With her I get the conversation I spent the entire year starving for. Our best talks happened on walks, or sitting out in the sunshine, telling each other we were just trying to get more vitamin D. Somewhere along the way we started comparing our life stories and found so much overlap that we could finish each other’s sentences about what happened when we each came to America. I’d start in on the fifty dollars and the paper dictionary, and she’d already be nodding before I got to the end. After a thousand introductions that stayed shallow on purpose, sitting in the sun with Maria felt like finally exhaling.
Robert is the person I told, out loud, that for me trust is earned - and that I just blindly can’t trust people. I was driving home, and I had just found out about major changes that shook up our whole team. I called him from the car. It’s a hard sentence for me to say, and I said it anyway. He didn’t take it personally, and he didn’t try to talk me out of it. Robert gave me permission to say it and the space to process the shock of everything that had just changed. Because he never pushed, the trust came anyway, slowly, the way real trust comes. He earned it.
Jennifer let me be vulnerable, and I can tell you the exact table where it happened…It was a small Italian place, the kind where the bread arrives before you’ve opened the menu and the whole room smells like garlic and warm tomato. We each ordered pasta and a glass of red wine. Steam was still curling off the plates when we started talking, and for the first half hour neither of us touched the wine because the words were coming too fast.
Both of us are working moms, and that night we compared notes. Her week sounded exactly like mine. She was the family Uber, driving from one activity to the next with a work call on speaker, and so was I. We were both the cook throwing dinner together at seven and the one folding laundry long after the kids were asleep. Under all of it sat the same quiet fear: missing the game, the recital, the moment our kids would remember we weren’t there for.
The day I understood John, it felt like 110 degrees outside, and the air was thick with black smoke drifting down from the Canadian wildfires. The sky had gone a dirty gray, and every breath tasted like a campfire. I needed to get to my son, and I had no way to get there on my own.
I asked John, and he said yes right away. He picked me up and drove me himself through all that heat and haze, and he got me there on time to meet my son.
What John offers is safety. Whatever I ask him, he shows up and comes through. I don’t have to wonder whether it’s too much, and that certainty is rarer than any business card I collected all year.
When I put the four of them side by side, I see one pattern. Each of them met me after the polished version wore off. Maria skipped the small talk, Robert let my distrust stand, Jennifer heard what I hadn’t told anyone, and John showed up without making me earn it first. None of them needed the networkable me.
The experiment worked. The premise was wrong.
I set out to fix myself because a mentor said I was bad at collecting people. Somewhere in the count I changed what I was measuring, from how many people I met to how many I let in, and that change was the real finding. The data pointed me to the 200-hour kind of connection, and that kind was always going to be rare. Every seat on my board holds the deep connection I knew I was built for before I walked into the first room.
I won’t pretend the year was easy. It was exhausting, and networking at that pace will probably always cost me more than it costs the people who love it. I’m still glad I did it, because those four people didn’t knock on my door. I found them by walking into rooms that scared me and saying yes long after I wanted to go home. Now I keep them by showing up for the hours.
How to find your board: a 20-minute pen exercise
Grab a pen and paper. Typing lets you skim past the truth; handwriting slows you down enough to see it.
Write down the sentence. Copy the exact words someone said about how you connect. On paper, a verdict turns into a hypothesis, and hypotheses can be tested.
Count differently. List the people you could call crying at eleven at night. Stop when you run out, and don’t pad the list.
Name what each one gives you. Write one specific thing per person. “Deep conversation” is a start. “He lets me admit I don’t trust people” is better.
Write the empty seat in present tense. If there’s something none of them gives you yet, write it as though it already happened: “I have someone who tells me the truth about my work before I publish it.” In my experience, once you describe the seat in detail, you start noticing who could fill it.
Invite one person for an hour. Pick the person you keep thinking about after the parking lot, and ask. Hall put it plainly: “You can’t make people spend time with you, but you can invite them.”
If someone told you that you suck at networking, count before you believe them. A small number might mean you’re built for depth.
It took me a thousand people to find four.
P.S. Tell me in the comments: how many seats are on your board, and what does one of those people give you that nobody else does?
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P.P.S. That networking year taught me to treat my own life like a lab: pick a hypothesis, run it honestly, read the data. The same loop works on a stuck draft, so I turned it into a protocol for writers. If you want to run your own experiment on the page, start with the Writing Lab here.