My rich friend just popped a belief that everyone biblically swears by on LinkedIn

A rich friend told me last week that everyone who "networks" is broke.

I laughed when he said it but he wasn't joking.

His point was simple:

The moment you turn making friends into a corporate strategy, your network fills up with people who wouldn't pick up the phone for you if something went sideways.

You have contacts.

Nothing more than that.

The best deals of his life, he said, came from people he'd already helped with 0 expectation of anything in return.

None of those relationships started as a strategy.

They started because he genuinely gave a shit about someone else's problem.

The deals ended up being a byproduct of the relationship.

The more I sat with that, the more I realized it's a pattern that shows up across every serious thinker who has studied how status, trust, and opportunity actually move between people.

The French anthropologist Marcel Mauss spent his career in the 1920s studying tribal societies and how they exchanged value.

His central finding was that every functioning human community on earth from Pacific islanders to Roman aristocrats operated on what he called the gift economy.

People gave things freely → without invoices → without scorekeeping.

But the giving created an invisible thread of obligation that bound the community together.

The givers ended up at the center of power because everyone owed them something, and nobody could quite name when or how.

What Mauss figured out, and what most "networking strategists" still don't understand, is that overt transactions are weak.

They close the loop.

You did me a favor → I paid you → we're even → nothing carries forward.

Genuine generosity is strong precisely because it doesn't close the loop.

It leaves something open. And humans, across every culture in history, organize around open loops more powerfully than around closed ones.

I've watched my own business and myself follow this exact pattern, and I'll be honest, it took me years to trust it.

When I was younger I networked aggressively.

I went to events, I worked rooms, I followed up religiously with people I had no real interest in beyond what they could do for me.

None of it produced anything that lasted.

The people I forced into my orbit drifted out within months.

What built my business was the opposite.

I spent 5 years showing up in the same online spaces, engaging with the same founders, helping where I could without expecting much back.

1. I bought their courses.

2. I gave honest feedback.

3. I introduced people to each other when I saw a fit.

None of it looked like networking at the time.

Then somewhere around year 3 of that, the flywheel kicked in.

Founders I'd helped started referring me without me asking.

Some of those referrals turned into our biggest clients.

A 9-figure founder I'd been engaging with for two years invited me to speak at one of the biggest ecom events in the world.

I got introduced to a guy who sold a company for nearly $100 billion through someone I'd never strategized to know, who'd remembered me because I'd been useful to them 3 years earlier with no agenda.

Every meaningful opportunity in my business right now traces back to a relationship I built before I knew it was going to matter.

You can't sprint your way into a deep network.

You can't tactic your way into the kind of relationships that actually move the needle.

They're built quietly, over years, by being the kind of person who other people want to win with.

Stop thinking about "networking" entirely.

Delete the word from your vocabulary if you can. Instead, ask yourself a different question this week:

Who are the 10 people in your industry whose lives you'd be genuinely happy to invest in over the next 5 years?

Find a way to be useful to one of them this week. Something that costs you 30 minutes and provides them with disproportionate value.

Do that 10+ times this year, maybe once a month, with intention, with no follow-up agenda and you'll have built something most people can't construct in a lifetime of working rooms.

We're social creatures. Use that.

– Wiz

P.S. The fastest version of this flywheel for founders is having a personal brand that does the "being useful" at scale is posting the kind of content that helps the right 50 people in your industry whether they've met you or not. That's the engine we build for every founder inside Mogul. Book a call and I’ll show you how this will fit into your business