I met some executives from Axel Springer for breakfast a few years ago and as we sat down they handed out business cards. It had been a long time since that happened.

The practice of carrying and sharing business cards has faded since the launch of the iPhone.

Over the span of a three decade career in corporate, I collected and kept more than 1,200 business cards from people I interviewed and met at conferences, mostly between 1990 and 2010.

For fun I sorted the cards into three groups:

–900 cards were from people I could not for the life of me recall meeting. Some of the institutions rang a bell, but I couldn’t visualize the people at all.

–200 cards were people who I remember to some degree. I recognized their names or firms and have some recollection of when or where or why we met.

–100 cards were people who made a deeper impression. We did business or stayed in contact with or would like to meet them again.

That last group brought back amazing memories: There was lunch with the editor of the Washington Post and a visit to the Financial Times. There were equity traders, portfolio managers, journalists, quants and geeks. Some went on to do big things. A few had died.

It’s a good life lesson that you need 1,200 meetings to get to 100 people who matter.

And you can’t really know in advance who those people might be.

My view on how to network has changed in two big ways since 2022 when I left my corporate job and started my own agency ghostwriting for executives.

I previously focused on building relationships within the firm or targeting specific individuals outside who I thought had information or relationships that would be useful.

Now, I believe both of those approaches were mistaken.

It left me with a network that was too narrowly focused and overly concentrated. Most of the people were either uninclined or poorly positioned to help me when I changed careers.

My approach in the past three years has been to cast a much wider net and leverage social media to meet with people I think are doing interesting things.

The focus is on connecting first, sharing insights and looking for ways to help one another grow. There is rarely a specific goal to an initial meeting.

It’s a shotgun, not a rifle shot approach which has led to more meetings, deeper relationships and a greater understanding of the business landscape.

While the majority of the meetings don’t immediately lead to deals, they plant deep roots which often result in valuable connections.

It’s a slower, more organic approach better suited to a world where we change jobs often, often in unpredictable ways and at unpredictable times.

It’s also an acknowledgement that it’s better to trust in serendipity to discover people and build relationships than to try to predict who they may be.