Everyone tells you to network.
Go to the events. Connect on LinkedIn. Follow up with a thank-you email. Build your network.
It's not bad advice. But it's incomplete — and I think the obsession with networking as a tactic misses the mechanism that actually changes outcomes.
The thing that has moved the needle most in my career isn't the number of connections I've made. It's the environments I've deliberately put myself inside.
That's proximity. And it operates differently than networking.
Networking is transactional. Proximity is transformational.
Networking, done the way most people do it, is a series of individual exchanges. You meet someone, you add them on LinkedIn, you hope an opportunity materializes eventually. The relationship is thin because the contact is brief.
Proximity is something else. It's what happens when you consistently show up in environments where the people around you are operating at a level above where you currently are.
When I started working alongside founders and executives — not interviewing them, not emailing them, but actually working with them on real problems — my thinking changed. Not because they sat me down and gave me advice. Because I watched how they made decisions, how they handled pressure, how they talked about risk and opportunity. That transfer doesn't happen in a networking conversation. It happens through sustained exposure.
You absorb standards before you can articulate them.
The environment sets the ceiling.
There's a version of college where you spend four years around people who are optimizing for the minimum — the lowest effort path to graduation, the safest internship, the most familiar career. That environment has a ceiling. And it's low.
I've been deliberate about not staying inside it.
Joining the Ole Miss Business Club early wasn't a résumé move. It put me in rooms with people who were thinking seriously about their careers, connecting with professionals, building things. Eventually leading it — as VP and President-Elect for an organization of 600+ students — meant the proximity compounded. The people I was around got more ambitious, more accomplished, more connected.
That's not a coincidence. Proximity compounds the same way interest does. The return accelerates because the base keeps growing.
Opportunities don't come from connection. They come from consistency.
The most valuable professional relationships I have didn't start with a cold email or a career fair conversation. They started because I kept showing up — in a role, in a room, in a project — until the relationship had enough depth to generate something real.
When you're consistently present in the right environment, opportunities surface naturally. Not because you asked for them. Because the people around you know how you work, how you think, and what you're capable of. That only comes from time and proximity.
The email that gets you the opportunity is almost never the first touchpoint. It's the fifth or the tenth. Relationships compound. The earlier you start building them in environments worth being in, the more that compounding works in your favor.
The practical version of this.
If you're in college, here's what this actually looks like:
Get inside organizations and rooms where the standard is higher than your current default. Not comfortable — higher. Take the internship where you're the least experienced person in the building. Join the club where the leaders are doing things you don't fully understand yet. Find the professor, executive, or mentor who will raise your expectations of yourself just by being around them.
Then show up consistently. Do the work. Pay attention to how the people above you think — not just what they do, but why.
The biggest career shift I've made hasn't come from a single conversation or a perfectly timed email. It's come from deliberately choosing environments where the people around me were operating at a level I hadn't reached yet.
Proximity changes your perspective before it changes your circumstances.
And perspective is where everything starts.
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