Everything Is Contacts

Contacts. That’s what seven pages of Computer Arts boil down to when explaining how to open your own studio—whether you’re in web, design, illustration, or whatever. You need connections, favors owed, relationships accumulated over years of showing up to things you didn’t feel like attending. That’s the whole article.

It matters to me because I genuinely intend to do this someday, in London or Tokyo, which sounds like ambition or delusion depending on my mood. The reason to maintain a website, to post every passing thought on Twitter, to connect with people who seem completely useless—it’s all in service of this. Social capital. Vitamin B. Knowing someone who knows someone. Without it you can’t get near the door, let alone through it.

The prescription is essentially: go to the party that sounds terrible, talk to the people who seem boring, get their number, treat the whole social landscape as a chess game where any move might eventually matter. You reap what you sow.

I’m going to memorize the article, draft a twenty-year plan, and figure out where I want to be in five years. Probably drunk on someone’s couch—but that counts as networking too. The article says nothing about needing to speak the local language to run a business there, which means Japan is going to be easier to conquer than I thought. Banzai.