It’s Only Contacts

I was flipping through Computer Arts—they’ve got this whole series on starting your own creative studio, seven pages about design and web and illustration and how to do it right. Supposedly my plan at some point, London or Tokyo or whenever I finally pull the trigger. But you read through all that and what do you actually get? Contacts. Vitamin B. Connections. One word. That’s the whole thing.

Everything else is just the machinery built around that one fact. The website, the social media, showing up to every event, the constant low-level networking—it’s all in service of knowing the right people. So you go to the stupid parties and you work the room and you collect numbers and you’re always running that calculation underneath: useful or not useful, leverage or dead weight. You can’t unsee it once you realize that’s what everyone’s doing.

But I already knew that, I think. Somewhere deep down I knew that’s why I maintain a website and post things and show up to industry events and keep in touch with people I barely remember. It’s all calculated, even when it feels organic. Everyone’s playing the same game. You make a move, you see what sticks, you position yourself for what comes next. The whole thing’s grotesque once you look at it head-on.

So now I’m supposed to have a strategy. A five-year plan. Presumably I’ll be drunk on someone’s couch in five years, which technically counts as networking. And here’s what nobody puts in these articles—you don’t actually need to speak Japanese to start a business there. Which opens up a lot of possibilities.