Tuesday Letter #23 - Being Nice, Virtual Networking and Life after COVID
Hey, Happy Tuesday!
33% percent of you haven’t seen any of these letters. While I was on a huuuge break we got 9 new subscribers which is a 37.5% increase. Thanks to all who joined our little group, I really hope you find it useful.
I’m not going to spend any time on excuses and will just continue as if everything is normal :D Hope you enjoy this week’s letter.
📜 Quote of the week
Remember what Abraham Lincoln said: “A drop of honey catches more flies than a gallon of gall.”
Just be nice. This will bring you much more happiness, business, and success.
🕸️ Virtual Networking
📖 Doist wrote an awesome guide on Networking in the age of Covid. This is something I have been looking for, as I’m am lacking this skill set. I found it difficult to network pre-Covid, and it’s not getting any easier nowadays. So, here are some interesting highlights and thoughts from this post.
🧠 The first rule of Online Networking is being prepared. Before reaching out, spend some time thinking about why you want to network. This rule makes sense pre or post-Covid. Thinking about your goals will help you and the people you are reaching out to.
taking a couple of hours at the start to get clear on why you’re networking and the value you can provide to the people you want to connect with will save you—and the people you’re reaching out to—a lot of time.
⏲️ Furthermore, thinking about your goals will help you filter out people who won’t help you or you won’t be able to help. This will save you an enormous amount of time.
without a filter for who you want to connect with and why you’ll end wasting a lot of time—yours and others.
💾 Keep a list of interesting people you might want to reach out in the future. Just keep a name and link of a person that captured your attention. This can be a simple text file or a google doc. The important thing is that you keep such a list.
Make it a habit to save interesting people, companies, and opportunities you come across to come back to later.
🧰 Get clear on the value you provide and get comfortable communicating it.
The first thing you want to think about is how you can help them, and only then how they can help you.
As you can see networking does take some thinking :) After you thought about your goals, think about the best way to position yourself in a sentence or two.
Be sure you can tell a simple story about who you are, what you do, and the value you can provide.
✉️ Choosing a good medium is very important. More personal ways of connecting, like email are better.
If the person has an email newsletter, replying to the newsletter is often a warmer approach than reaching out with no context at all.
😳 You probably know something about a person you are reaching out to. If this is the case, express your appreciation for their work. This is a good way of making the connection is a little warmer.
❓ When it comes to the actual letter, a part of your letter must be a request. If there is no request your letter will just be lost in the sea of emails.
📌 Don’t be afraid to follow up.
If you don’t hear back, follow up. It’s not rude or pushy to follow up! Give it two weeks to two months.
👍 Keep in touch. Derek Sivers wrote a great piece about keeping in touch. This will separate you from the regular group and help you stand out. I found MonicaHQ to be a wonderful tool that can help you with all your networking needs.
You won’t be able to maintain relationships with everyone you connect with, but be sure to reconnect periodically with the people you do want to stay in touch with.
😷 World After COVID
The short and sweet video from Tim Ferriss about recovering from COVID has a good suggestion for people.
Make plans. Make plans for the upcoming 6 months and 12 months. This will help you to stay active. Making plans will force you to think, ask questions. Finally, making plans will help you get excited about different things.
😁️ Person of the Week
Yasoob is an author of fantastic books, Practical Python Projects and Intermediate Python. His blog is full of useful posts on various programming topics, from Data Analysis to Web Development.
🐔 Tweet of the week
What’s the last 10/10 video game you played? Bonus points for PC games
It’s not like this tweet is about productivity or learning. But I want to highlight this tweet because it helped me find a strategic game called EU4. I’m a fan of games like Total War, but this strategy is just on another level. Maybe it will help you find something like this.