[mkolodny]

I felt a lot more comfortable about the idea of "networking" once I started thinking of it as "making friends with people".

When I first tried networking, I thought that I was supposed to help other people, and then ask those people for favors. To me, that felt really unnatural. It felt like we were just using each other.

Now I see that my friends are the people who help me the most. They're people who I care about, and who care about me. So when people tell you to "network", I would just translate what they're saying as "go make friends".