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At a recent conference I went to, the venue was filled with people who casually mention working with Bear Grylls or designing habitats for Mars. In short, some of the most objectively brilliant people on the planet.
And yet, at one point, I was so bored by a conversation with an AI founder, when he was explaining the architecture of his models to me, that I was contemplating pulling the fire alarm just so I could escape it.
It wasn’t that he was boring. His work was objectively fascinating, and he was explaining it well. But despite that, my brain was shutting down. The “what do you do?” exchange had turned what was supposed to be a conversation into a mini lecture. So I decided to interrupt it.
In a desperate attempt to preserve my sanity, I hijacked the conversation. I brought up the city’s nightlife, which then led to a conversation about dating apps. That's when he casually confessed being permanently banned from Tinder.
Boom. It was like someone had used a defibrillator on our conversation. Suddenly, we were laughing and trading chaotic stories, and I was having the best time I’d had the entire night.
Unfortunately in most cases, especially in a networking context, the conversation never reaches the Tinder ban. People spend hours locked in sterile conversations, waiting for a spark that never comes.
We have this collective delusion that chemistry between humans - whether personal, professional, or intellectual - is basically magic. We think humans work like magnets, that if we wander around a room long enough, we’ll eventually bump into someone with exactly the right polarity, and we’ll magically snap together. Click.
But this “click” or “spark” isn't magic. You aren't a magnet waiting to be pulled. This kind of chemistry is a very specific, mechanical, cognitive event. And until you understand how it works, you will keep missing the connections that might have been life-changing.
We talk about “building connections” all the time. But many of the ones we build are based on nothing more than politeness and resumes. To understand why we default to sterile pitches when we’re supposedly trying to “connect”, you have to look at what has happened to our culture.
The crisis was perfectly diagnosed by a comedian at the same conference: we have lost nearly all of our shared context in the modern social world. If you sit down at a bar in a major city, within 20 seconds you’ll realize you and the stranger next to you live in alternate dimensions.
One person is navigating polyamory and collecting vintage bonnets; the person next to them is tracking crypto markets and eating raw meat. You may live next door to them, but they’re not watching the same shows, reading the same news, or even eating the same foods as you.
So, we panic. When we’re in a room full of strangers, we default to the only thing we assume every adult has in common: work.
But work is a terrible bridge for connection. When you explain your highly specific job to an outsider, you are just giving them data. You’re laying down a copper wire between two nodes in the hope that you've made a connection.
Technically, you have. But if there’s no power source plugged into the circuit, that wire is fundamentally useless. It’s a dead wire - just a piece of metal taking up space.
Electricity requires a power source. For people, that power comes from a shared reality.
True connection happens the exact millisecond you are able to accurately visualize the other person’s life in your mind’s eye and understand it. When the AI guy was describing his models to me, his words bounced off my forehead because I had no mental framework for his daily reality. But when he talked about getting banned from Tinder, I didn't just hear a fact. I saw it. I could picture the chaotic texts and the sheer messiness of it all.
The same thing happened again later that week. I sat next to a woman who was doing incredible, world-changing work in expanding healthcare access for women in rural Africa. But I have never dealt with government grants nor worked in healthcare in any capacity. So despite how impressive her mission was, when she was reciting the logistics of her non-profit, the conversation felt flat.
But then I asked about her story and how she grew up. In the next 5 minutes, I learned more about her as a person than in the previous half hour. She told me about the loud, chaotic day-to-day of her life and work in Nairobi, and she talked about how calm she felt raising her two teenage daughters in contrast.
The bridge was built immediately. Because I know what teenage daughters are like. I used to be one myself. And I have a four-year-old who acts like one. In that moment, despite coming from completely different worlds, our realities overlapped, and we saw each other.
This dynamic doesn't just apply to networking events with strangers. A friend of mine recently realized it was affecting her catch-ups with old friends, too.
She always used to ask her friends about work, because she thought it was an important part of their lives she should check in about. But she noticed that she dreaded answering the question herself. Explaining her job to a friend felt like having to give a presentation during her time off, like an unexpected pop quiz. Worse, this polite back-and-forth exchange ate up so much of the clock that they rarely had time for the weirder, more interesting topics to develop.
So she ran an experiment: she stopped asking about work entirely.
Instead, she asked her friends about the most unusual thing that happened to them that week. She asked about interesting strangers they saw, or what was taking up the most space in their brains lately.
The conversations instantly lit up. And the irony was, if something at work was actually worth sharing, it came up naturally anyway. Not as a bullet point or a presentation - but a disaster to laugh at, a win to celebrate, or a problem to solve together.
The takeaway is simple: whether you’re meeting a CEO or catching up with a college roommate, don't wait for the universe to magically align your magnets.
You don't need to have the same background, the same job, or the same hobbies to click with someone. You just need to give them a window into your world that they can actually see through.
So the best piece of advice I've given myself this week is to stop trying to lay down wires of "connection", and to start looking for a human story instead.
That is how you turn the power on.
Rooting for the real you,
Hanna from Pulse
