Twenty Years In: What I Got Right About Human Inteaction (H.I.) and What I Didn’t See Coming
In March of 2005 I started a blog to go along with my first book, Some Assembly Required: How to Make, Grow and Keep Your Business Relationships. Back then, if you told a room full of executives that “networking” was a serious business skill, half of them rolled their eyes. It was considered soft. Fluffy. Something you did with a name tag and a warm glass of chardonnay if you had nothing better to do.
I disagreed then. I still disagree now. Twenty years and a few thousand blog posts later, I went back and read what I was writing in those first years, 2005 through 2010, to see how it holds up. Some of it I’m proud of. Some of it I’d say differently today. Here’s the honest accounting.
What I got right
Relationships create luck. In 2006 I wrote, “Don’t just wait to be lucky. Create your own luck by knowing the right people.” I believed then that opportunity flows through people, not around them. Two decades of watching careers rise and stall has only made me more certain. The person who gets the call, the referral, the second chance is almost never the most qualified stranger. It’s the known quantity. Reputation travels through relationships.
Networking is work, and it’s about giving first. I took some heat for this one. In a 2007 post I said flatly that “networking is work, not ‘fun'”, and that if you’re not expanding your circle, “you are leaving money on the table.” The engine underneath it was never “go collect business cards.” It was the opposite. A year earlier I’d written a whole post about asking people what they actually need so you can “discover ways to add value.” Give first. That was true in 2006 and it’s the only version of networking that has ever worked.
Invest before you need it. In February 2008, right as the economy was starting to crack, I wrote “Recession Proof Your Career”, arguing that a strong network is “an important part of securing your future,” and that the time to build it is before you’re standing on someone’s doorstep out of a job. Then 2008 happened. Then 2020 happened. Then the tech layoffs happened. I wish that post had aged into irrelevance. Instead it just keeps coming back around.
Do something noticeable. My very first year, in a post called Unique Events, I wrote: “To get noticed you have to do something noticeable.” The context was hosting memorable experiences instead of generic mixers. In a world now drowning in automated outreach, that line matters more than it did when I wrote it.
Digital would deepen human connection, not replace it. This is the one I’m most glad I called. When social media showed up, plenty of smart people predicted it would make face to face obsolete. In a 2008 post with the very-2008 title I > U …not in the on-line social media world!, I admitted I’d first worried these tools would let people avoid real connection, but concluded that used well, they “enhance networking,” and that online communities “do not stop at the computer, but instead bleed over into the physical world.” That’s exactly what happened. LinkedIn, communities, and now group chats are on ramps to real relationships, not substitutes for them.
What I didn’t fully see coming
I’m not going to pretend I nailed all of it. Reading back, a few things look naive, and a few things simply changed.
I was too optimistic about the tools. In those early posts, social media mostly “amazed and delighted” me. I saw the upside clearly and the downside barely. I didn’t anticipate how algorithmic feeds, performance, and outrage would corrode as much connection as they created. To my slight credit, by January 2009 I was already uneasy. I wrote that the flood of new communication channels meant “Today there are no rules,” and even wondered whether Facebook and Twitter would look “silly and outdated in 25 years.” But I underestimated how much noise was coming.
The bottleneck flipped. In 2007 I was practically begging people to just get on LinkedIn. The problem back then was access, getting people onto the platforms. Today everyone is on every platform, and the problem is the exact opposite: saturation. The scarce thing is no longer reach. It’s trust.
AI can now fake the personal touch. When I told people to write the thoughtful note and ask the good question, I assumed a human was doing it. Now a machine can generate a “personalized” message in half a second, and inboxes know it. This doesn’t kill my old advice. It sharpens it. When anyone can automate the appearance of caring, actually caring becomes the differentiator. Genuine attention is now a competitive advantage precisely because it can’t be scaled.
We lost the hallway. Remote and hybrid work quietly deleted a huge amount of the accidental connection that used to just happen: the hallway, the elevator, the walk to lunch. In 2005 I never had to argue that people would be in the same room. Now that’s the whole ballgame. Proximity has to be designed on purpose, because it no longer occurs by default.
Why this matters more now, not less
Here’s the throughline across twenty years: the tools changed constantly, and the fundamentals didn’t move an inch. People still do business with people they know, like, and trust. We still find our best opportunities through other human beings. We still remember who showed up for us before they needed anything.
If anything, the case is stronger today. In an economy where AI can write the email, generate the deck, and answer the question, the last truly scarce resource is authentic human connection, the kind that gets built face to face, over time, on purpose. That’s the work I’ve spent two decades on, and it’s the work I now get to do every day leading the Austin Technology Council: building a community where real people in a fast moving industry actually know each other.
I got a lot right in those early years. But the part I’m proudest of isn’t a prediction. It’s that I bet my career on something that only becomes more valuable the more the world tries to automate it.
Turns out human connection was never the fluffy part. It was the whole point.
Have a great day.
Thom Singer
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Thom Singer, CSP, is a keynote speaker who has been presenting to corporations, association, and law firms about human connections and networking for over twenty years. His first book on the subject was released in 2005. His keynote in 2026 is “Human Interaction (H.I.) in an AI-Driven World” and he looks at the trend towards people being “Efficient Strangers” vs real friends with people. The antidote to this epidemic of disconnection is to be a “Deliberate Human”. Thom can be hired to speak at meetings, conferences, partner retreats, etc….