I don’t like networking meetups. They’re forced and boring. It’s a crowd of eager, wide-eyed neophytes seeking answers from people who have a few big names on their resumes, justifying their ability to charge $30 for an hour powerpoint presentation. People flock to these with an expectation that if they hear how someone else did it, they can just go and do the same and yield the same results–beginners relying on other people’s experience to tell them what to do to be successful. But has any exponentially successful professional ever come out of these cult-like gatherings? I can just see Elon Musk in his early days of entrepreneurship laughing at the idea of spending his precious time sitting on a foldable chair listening to a Stanford grad talk about the need to “build for users not for profit” or to “be religiously data-driven”. He was busy building a new payment system and, later, four companies that have drastically altered four different industries.
Relying on other people’s success to give you answers will not suffice if you want to be exponential. Doing will. Getting your own real-world experience will. The world's default state is change, and at a rate that has increased daily since the invention of the computer. Today is a different day than when that Stanford grad launched the startup that her powerpoint is presenting. And the only people who have shifted society’s paradigms and altered the direction of humanity for the better are ones that did completely novel things of their time, went against the grain, intentionally ignored conventional thinking and regulatory standards in order to reach a new level where no one’s been before.