The Best Networking Tool
The Best Networking Tool? Make Something Great
Let me tell you about two musicians.
One spends her days methodically messaging industry executives, sending carefully crafted emails to A&R representatives, and attending every networking event where someone important might appear. She has a perfect pitch deck of her music career and business cards with her SoundCloud link.
The other spends those same hours in a room writing songs that matter to her. Some days, the songs are terrible. Other days, they're just OK. Once in a while, they capture something true.
The first musician's networking strategy might work. The second musician isn't even trying to network. Yet it's almost always the second one who ends up on the big stage.
In 2023, singer-songwriter Gracie Abrams joined Taylor Swift's record-breaking Eras Tour as an opening act, performing in massive stadiums for crowds of 70,000+ fans night after night. It was a career-defining opportunity… The kind that launches people into new orbits. How did she land this coveted spot? She didn't. Not directly, at least.
Years earlier, Gracie was just writing songs in her bedroom, recording voice memos, and eventually releasing music that felt honest to her. She wasn't trying to impress Taylor Swift; she was trying to express something true. But Swift, it turns out, was listening. She became a fan of Gracie’s music, started promoting it, and eventually the two formed a genuine creative connection. They collaborated on a song for Abrams's debut album, with Swift as a co-writer. When the time came to select opening acts for the biggest tour in music history, Taylor chose someone whose work had already spoken for itself.
The networking happened, but it was entirely backwards from how we typically imagine it.
We tend to think of networking as something deliberate, an activity you schedule between 6 and 8 PM on a Thursday, name tag optional, wine glass mandatory. It's seen as a separate function from the actual work. But the most powerful networking rarely works this way.
The greatest networking opportunity in existence is to create something so good that people who could help your career can't ignore it. This is counterintuitive because it requires patience and offers no guarantees. There's no immediate feedback loop. You can't measure its effectiveness with business cards collected or LinkedIn connections added. It's networking by working in public view, creating things of value, and trusting that the right people will eventually notice. The power of this approach comes from three aspects that conventional networking can never replicate:
1. It filters for the right people.
When you create exceptional work, you naturally attract people who genuinely value what you do. Taylor Swift didn't notice Gracie Abrams because Abrams was good at networking; she noticed Abrams' music resonated with her on an artistic level. This self-selection process is incredibly valuable. Would you rather have one genuine connection with someone who deeply appreciates your work, or twenty superficial connections with people who took your business card to be polite?
2. It establishes relationship leverage.
In traditional networking, you're often the one asking for something… Attention, opportunity, mentorship. But when someone discovers your work and reaches out because it impressed them, the dynamic is reversed. They're coming to you because they see value in what you create. This shift in relationship leverage changes everything. The conversation starts from a place of mutual respect rather than one-sided need.
3. It scales in ways traditional networking cannot.
There are physical limits to how many networking events you can attend or cold emails you can send. But great work can reach anyone, anywhere, at any time, even while you sleep.
Gracie Abrams' music could be discovered by Taylor Swift whether Abrams was performing, sleeping, or writing her next song. The work itself became her networking agent, working 24/7 with perfect authenticity. The Eras Tour where Taylor and Gracie performed together, was a physical manifestation of this principle at an extraordinary scale. Swift herself spent years creating work that mattered, building a catalog so compelling that she could eventually mount a tour celebrating distinct creative periods of her career. The Eras Tour became a cultural phenomenon not because of clever marketing, but because the underlying work had already become essential to millions of people.
Each "era" represented a period of focused creation. The tour that became the hottest ticket in the world was built on decades of Swift making things that mattered. And on that stage stood Gracie Abrams, not because she had mastered the art of music industry networking, but because she had mastered her craft in a way that caught the attention of one of the most impactful artists in history.
This approach to connection through creation isn't limited to music. It works in every field.
Before Airbnb became a global phenomenon, Brian Chesky and his co-founders were struggling entrepreneurs. They created a simple website to rent air mattresses in their apartment during a design conference when hotels were sold out. This creative solution caught the attention of Y Combinator's Paul Graham, who initially wasn't interested but was impressed by their ingenuity and persistence. This connection provided them with crucial early funding and mentorship that helped transform their idea into a multibillion-dollar company.
Writers find publishers and audiences because they wrote something remarkable, not because they attended a publishing conference. Entrepreneurs secure funding because investors can't stop thinking about their product, not because they perfected an elevator pitch. Scientists collaborate with leaders in their field because their research opened new questions, not because they sent the perfect email.
The greatest networking happens when you stop trying to network and instead focus on creating work worthy of the people you want to connect with.
Of course, this isn't easy. It requires:
Patience. You might work in obscurity for years before the right people notice.
Vulnerability. You have to share work that might be rejected or ignored.
Trust. You must believe that exceptional work eventually finds its audience.
Persistence. You need to keep creating even when there's no immediate networking payoff.
But this path, though longer and less certain, leads to connections that are more meaningful, more valuable, and more lasting than any you could make through traditional networking alone.
The best introduction letter you'll ever have is doing excellent work and creating something of value to others.