A drawer full of business cards

A drawer full of business cards. That is what one version of ambition leaves behind — a thick stack of names, each attached to somebody who would not, if you telephoned tonight, quite remember why they had yours.

Catherine had built such a drawer, deliberately, over three years, by following one of the most repeated instructions in professional life.

She took it seriously. She joined the gym the wealthier people in her industry used. She accepted invitations to dinners she could barely afford. She bought a wardrobe that would let her fit in at events. She cultivated, with real effort, casual relationships with people whose careers were ten or fifteen years ahead of hers.

She read what they read. She knew the restaurants they liked. By the second year she could hold a competent five-minute conversation with any senior person in her field.

The advice is partly true

Network up. Surround yourself with people more successful than you. You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.

It is repeated so often, in so many books, that it has acquired the texture of obvious wisdom. And in important ways it is correct.

There are entire fields — medicine, law, academia, the arts, parts of finance — in which asymmetric relationships are how the work is actually learned, and where cultivating them deliberately is exactly right.

The version worth pushing back on is the one that mistakes those legitimate apprenticeships for friendship.

Catherine's career did advance, though she later concluded that networking was not the reason. It advanced because she was excellent at the work.

The networking, on the other hand, exhausted her in ways the work never did. At the end of three years she felt she no longer entirely knew who she was — that she had become a low-resolution copy of the people she had been spending time with.

The relationships had been transactional, which was tolerable while she felt useful and corrosive when she did not. Business cards multiplied. Birthday calls did not.

Two things wearing one name

The advice fails because it conflates two different kinds of human contact.

The first is learning — the slow absorption of how a more experienced person thinks, behaves and decides. This is real and valuable. It happens properly in mentorship, in teaching, in apprenticeship. The form is honest about what it is: there is no pretence of friendship, and there is a certain dignity in the acknowledged inequality.

The second is friendship — the mutual exchange of attention, support and perspective between two people roughly equal in what they bring.

This is also real and valuable, and it is hard to engineer upwards. Relationships built mainly around access can become one-sided — experienced by one party as a privilege and by the other as a small ongoing cost.

Network up tries to extract the benefits of the first by impersonating the second.

Why it does not work

Two structural reasons, and neither is about effort.

The first is simple economics of attention. People above you on any ladder have, by definition, more demands on their time than they can meet. Yours, if you bring nothing they need, is among the ones they will regretfully decline. You can engineer token contact — five minutes at an event, a polite reply — but the deeper attention that produces the deeper learning is not on offer, because it has not been earned.

The second is worse, and slower.

Patiently building relationships with people above you trains you, over time, into a posture of supplication. You become someone permanently slightly anxious about whether you are valued, whether you are included, whether you said the right thing.

That posture is invisible to you and entirely visible to everybody else.

It produces precisely the opposite of the intended effect. The people you hoped to be welcomed by sense the supplication and welcome you less. The people who were already your equals notice you have drifted and welcome you less.

You end up alone, inside a private cloud of effort.

What actually works

Network across.

The relationships that genuinely lift a career are almost never the ones above you on an imagined ladder. They are the ones where both parties are giving and receiving in roughly equal measure — regardless of where each sits in any ranking.

Relationships that are structurally unequal in flow are not relationships. They are temporary arrangements with an expiry date neither party has yet acknowledged.

Your peers today are the people who will be senior in fifteen years, and they will remember who was decent to them when nobody was watching. That is not a strategy — strategy is what ruins it. It is simply what happens when you spend your time among people you actually like and can actually help.

The honest version of the other thing

None of this argues against learning from people ahead of you. It argues for being straight about the form.

If you want a mentor, ask for a mentor. Say what you want to learn, propose something specific and bounded, and be prepared to be told no. That request is dignified, and it is answerable.

What is neither dignified nor answerable is three years of engineered proximity in the hope that access will eventually convert into relationship.

Catherine kept perhaps four of the names in that drawer. All four were people at roughly her own level whom she had met by accident, mostly through the work itself.

The rest she recycled. She said it took about ten minutes, which struck her as a poor return on three years.