Being social has always come natural to me. I enjoy meeting random people and hearing their stories — be they potential business partners, friends of friends, or my taxi driver of the moment for that matter. My parents like to tease me for striking up long conversations with the waiters at restaurants, which has, on more than one occasion, resulted in the swapping of contact information. 🙂
One of the more pleasant consequences of my extroversion is a fairly robust professional network — this was true even before I joined Microsoft, and is certainly more true today. Some people have noticed this and asked me what my “secret” is. I’m always tempted to say something snarky, but rather than be unkind let me attempt to take the question seriously for a moment. I’ve never really had a “method”, but after thinking about it for a little while I came up with the following self observations that might be useful to the network-challenged among you:
