What Surprised Me Going Through 4 Months of Contacts

TL;DR

• Lot of alpha in speedily going through all your contacts every so often
• If you had plans with someone but it fell through, reach out to them again. They will be receptive. I pinky promise.
• If there is someone you haven't talked to in a while, send them a message saying that you were thinking about them and haven't talked in a while, maybe ask a good question, and re-kindle your relationship!

Intro

Over the past 4 months here in the Bay Area, I have met a lot of people. A small set of those people, I find cool and ask for their contact information at the event. Unlike what LinkedIn implies, a connection is more than a little number in their database, and the work of "building" a connection with someone only just starts with having their contact information.

Therefore, upon this reflection, I realized there are probably oodles of people I have recently met where we never went above the activation energy required to actually hang out. My goal during two afternoon sessions was to go through everyone on my LinkedIn, Messages, WhatsApp, Signal, and Telegram and put their soul into my second brain.

Thankfully for me, Beeper has an MCP server, so with a command to my servant, a script was born to significantly speed up the process.

==================================================
Unmapped Chat: [Name of Person] (Network: WhatsApp)
Recent Messages:
  [Me]: my name is matt handzel, cool meeting you at Mox yesterday!
  [Person]: hey matt! super great to meet you! would love to chat sometime if youre interested
  [Me]: lets go dancing together sometime, i know a great place

Similar people in your Vault:
  1. Lucas Camillo (-> lucas-camillo) [Score: 72]
  2. lucas-camillo (-> lucas-camillo) [Score: 72]
  3. Annie Gillen (-> annie-gillen) [Score: 65]
  4. annie-gillen (-> annie-gillen) [Score: 65]
  5. Niall O'Dowd, PhD (-> niall-odowd-phd) [Score: 60]

[Enter]=skip  [1-5]=map to match  [full name]=create new  [b]=blocklist  [q]=quit [n]=new person

This script would allow me to quickly go through all my messages everywhere, add them to my vault, map them onto an existing person if their username is different than their real name (ahem, Discord), or block them if I don't want them in my vault (ahem, LinkedIn cold messages).

Thoughts

After going through so many messages, here are some reflections:

Forgetting to respond

I feel bad when I forget to respond to someone. A goblin in my mind paints an image of this person waiting for my message, getting progressively more frustrated with my lack of response, until they utterly hate and condemn me.

However.

Going through my chats, there were ~10 people who had forgotten to reach back out to me.

This makes me feel so much better. I felt only a tinge of negative valence towards those people, and even that goes neutral when I'm reminded the silence is no reflection of myself¹.

Plans that fell through

Going back to the original motivation, there were 4 people where we had planned to hang out in our text messages, but the plans fell through.

The relationship wasn't solid enough for us to think about each other and have the energy to reach out.

To my surprise, every one of them was super receptive when I reached back out. I had dinner with one of them and was reminded of why I wanted to be friends with this guy in the first place.

Having a beginner-friendly hobby is an over-powered strategy

My hobby in the Bay Area is dance. Line dancing, contra, and country swing are my go-tos. Two of them are beginner friendly, the fun scales with the number of people you bring, and they happen very regularly. Whenever I meet someone I want to spend more time with, I throw out an invite to one of those hobbies.

I believe dancing may be close to the optimal social activity², but you can choose any hobby or other regular social event you know about, like the SF rationalist's Taco Tuesdays.

LinkedIn is super annoying but the most useful platform

The vast majority of the spam in my messages was from LinkedIn. Either the ads about going to Boulder University for my M.B.S. or a recruiter advertising to me.

However, LinkedIn is the most data-rich platform. There were 2 people where I had completely forgotten their name or the context in which we met. If we had connected on LinkedIn instead of my preferred WhatsApp, I would have had their full name, face, and some background about them on tap.

Additionally, as someone who strives to be a superconnector³, it makes it easy to connect people I know with each other if I have more context of what they've done!

Memories

Something fun about this: I got to re-experience a lot of the last 4 months in the Bay Area, meeting different groups of people during different periods of my life.

How I'm making this repeatable

I think this is something worthwhile and I should repeat again. I'm thinking no more frequent than once a month, and no less frequent than once a quarter. To make this easier, the next time I do this, I imagine I can have Claude process the people in my vault, and based on our text messages and other context in my vault, it can surface people I haven't spoken to in a while or those with plans I made that fell through.

Footnotes

1. Thanks CBT. Specifically, "Feeling Good" by David D. Burns, M.D. has been a game changer for me in terms of understanding how my thoughts create my feelings. ↩

2. Write-up pending ↩

3. My go-to book recommendation is "Never Eat Alone" by Keith Ferrazzi. This book has definitely changed my life and perspective about how to make connections professional and friendly alike. ↩