Personal networks are like infrastructure

A decade ago, I spent a meaningful part of my work time writing code. In part because doing it myself saved money, and in part because I really love the work. If you’ve ever done a sort of creative work that requires tooling, you know that the environment (i.e., the set tools you have at your fingertips) is critical. I consider the environment to be infrastructure. These days I rarely write code. Without my development environment it’d take too much initial effort for most use cases. I lack the infrastructure. This week I was able to tap my personal network of contacts to address an acute business need. I realized that network is just like infrastructure, in that without it a lot of problems require too much initial effort. But with strong infrastructure, we are better prepared to move quickly to get things done. Knowing who to call can be a superpower just like having the right keyboard shortcuts mapped.