The Festival-Card Audit

Careers are excellent at manufacturing contacts and terrible at maintaining friendships. Many professionals arrive at fifty with nine hundred connections, forty 'close contacts' who are really colleagues of circumstance — and two actual phone-at-midnight friends, both from before the career.

The next chapter runs on the real column. Builders need people who ask how it's going and mean it, celebrate small wins without scorekeeping, and tell you the website is confusing because they actually looked. Circumstance-colleagues evaporate with the designation; the real ones were never about the designation.

So audit like a CFO: who would you call at midnight? Who energises rather than performs? Who has known you across chapters? That short list gets deliberate investment now — the un-agenda'd lunch, the actual phone call, the visit. Relationship compounding, like the financial kind, rewards early deposits and punishes decades of neglect.

The venture will have hard months. On those days, the balance in this account matters more than the bank's.