I went to a community conference last week. I was happy to be there. Not politely happy. Actually happy. I had earned that room through a chain of connections I built one at a time over years. A mentor introduced me to someone. That person introduced me to someone else. A Substack connection became a real relationship. A neighbor turned out to be building something parallel. A Slack group I found through a coffee meeting I almost didn’t take. Every link in that chain came from the work I’ve been doing outside of work, the writing and the building and the showing up, and all of it converged on one conference on one afternoon in NYC and I walked in thinking: I made it here.
For a minute it was great. I sat at a table and started doing the thing you do. Introductions, backgrounds, the little ritual of figuring out who everyone is and where the overlaps might be. I was in it. I was energized. Then the room started to come into focus. Groups of people who already knew each other. Coworking space managers. Community industry people. The more conversations I had that day the more I realized this was a conference for the community manager. The person inside the company whose job title has the word community in it. I had stumbled into it thinking it was my room. It wasn’t. I was a founder building something from nothing and most of these people were building something inside of something else. Both are real. They’re not the same.
At some point in the afternoon the table cleared out and it was me and one other person I hadn’t connected with yet. I started making conversation. Then a guy walked over and just sat down. Didn’t ask to join. Just sat down. He was doing his rounds. He asked me what I did and I told him about my community and I could feel the judgment arrive before I finished the sentence. He didn’t get it. He didn’t try to get it. He told me about the six-figure community business he ran and I asked if he’d started it and he said no. I sat there thinking: you interrupted my conversation to big-league me with someone else’s company. I’ve met this guy a hundred times. The person who measures your thing against their thing in real time and needs you to know where you land. He’s not a bad person though.
The thing that saved the day was someone I almost didn’t talk to. A woman at my table building a leadership community for women in science. Ten years in. We had nothing in common on paper and everything in common underneath it. I asked her something I don’t usually ask people I’ve just met. I asked her how she knew she was on the right track. I wasn’t asking for advice. I was asking for something closer to permission.
She didn’t give me a framework. She didn’t give me a shortcut. She looked at me like she was looking at someone earlier on a journey she recognized, and she told me the truth, which is that the path goes in directions you can’t plan for and that the challenges I was facing weren’t signs that something was wrong. They were the work. She validated every step. Not with encouragement. With recognition. The kind that doesn’t tell you to keep going. The kind that says I see where you are.
She had ten years on me and nothing to gain from that conversation and she gave me twenty minutes of her full attention because something in my questions reminded her of something in her own beginning. That’s not networking. That’s not even mentorship. That’s someone who remembers what it felt like to be early and chooses to turn around.
I walked out of that conference with two things. A handful of real connections I’ll keep building on and a clear picture of who I want to be when I’ve been doing this for ten years. Not the guy who sits down uninvited and judges. Not the room full of people optimizing the same job. The woman at the table. The one who had every reason to look past me and chose to look at me instead.
I’m early. The world is smaller than it looks from the outside. The outside is closer to the inside than it feels.