Your Prompt
Looking at my current goals, what conversations am I one relationship away from having?
Help me identify:
Conferences
Industry groups
Local associations
Peer groups
Volunteer opportunities
where those conversations are most likely to happen.
Suggest one specific conversation starter that would help me stand out from someone simply collecting business cards.
Focus on environments where people gather repeatedly, not one-time networking events.
Against The Grain
When I started my career, information was expensive. Paywalled.
If you wanted to learn something, you bought a book, paid for continuing education, or subscribed to research binders that would send you updated pages each year that you'd swap out one by one.
Today, information is everywhere.
Need an explanation? Ask ChatGPT.
Need a tutorial? YouTube probably has ten.
Need another opinion? Between Slack, Discord servers, Circle, Reddit, LinkedIn… there's an online community arguing about it right now.
For the first time in history, access to information - available in a comprehensive, conversational way - isn't really the constraint.
Which creates an interesting question: if information is becoming abundant, what becomes scarce?
I think the answer is mentorship.
Not because mentors know more facts. Most of the technical information I learned over the past twenty years is easier to access today than ever before. The value of a mentor was never really their information.
I love conferences and industry events, but not for the same reason I did early in my career. Over these two decades, I've stopped attending based on the keynote speakers or agenda, and started to make the call based on who else might be there. Today I'm mostly chasing conversations.
I can remember specific conversations from the hallways during events long after the knowledge gained in the class left my brain.
One of the most important relationships in my career started that way.
My partner Sam and I met through continuing education and local industry events years before we ever worked together. We'd run into each other at conferences, catch up between sessions or over dinner, comparing notes on software, clients, the future of accounting, and whatever challenge we were each trying to solve. That relationship developed over six years before I ever came to work with her.
No search engine creates that. No AI tool replaces it.
Because mentorship isn't really about sharing information. It's about judgment, context, trust, and confidence. It's someone explaining not just what a tax return says, but why it matters to the business owner sitting across the table. It's talking someone through the hard call of firing their first client, or commiserating when a teammember resigns after they've invested years into training them.
That's why I think true leaders are invested in what's happening with the next generation.
They're growing up with tools we still find remarkable, but they've never known a world without them. They're not amazed over access to information. They're looking for access to people.
People who care enough to show them how they think. People who challenge their assumptions. People who help them develop judgment before experience has the chance to do the job itself.
AI is an incredible tool, but tools don't invest in people. They don't notice potential, build confidence, or create belonging.
You do.
Maybe that's why one of my working principles has become: work is done remotely, connection is done in person.
Not because the work matters less. Because relationships are worth traveling for.
The more information becomes free, the more valuable the people become who help us understand what to do with it.
