Start the thing
Whoever starts the recurring dinner becomes the person everyone else connects through. You don't have to be the most interesting person in the room. You have to be the one who sends the message.
Most people arrive somewhere new and wait to be included.
That's the slow path. The fast one is to start something yourself.
Start the recurring dinner. Start the group chat. Start the weekly training session. Whoever does that becomes the person everyone else relates to each other through. It's a position, and it's usually vacant.
The reason this works is that almost nobody wants the admin. Plenty of people want the dinner. Very few want to pick the date, book the table and send the reminder. Do that small unglamorous job and you become central by default.
You don't have to be charismatic. You have to be consistent.
That's the same rule that runs through everything else out here. Consistency beats intensity. A good night out is worth less than a mediocre thing that happens every week.
There's a bigger version of this too. Posting publicly is the same move at scale. Just showing where you are and what you're working on pulls people towards you. Work, partners, friends. Things surface that you never engineered.
I started that far too late as well. Same mistake, same fix.
- The thing I under-invested inIsolation isn't a mood, it's an unhedged risk. 5,000 cold emails returned nothing. One afternoon in a room beat all of them.
- Presence as a system, not a moodDecide your social week in advance and stop consulting your mood. Three rules that made meeting people reliable instead of occasional.
- The week that actually built a social lifeThree fixed things a week plus a co-working base. The actual Chiang Mai schedule, including the part I got wrong.