Call Your Mom
Stop Keeping Score
Somewhere in your head there's a ledger. Column A: favors done. Column B: favors owed. And if you're not careful, that little accountant starts running your relationships — I introduced him to two clients and he didn't even like my post?
Delete the ledger. It was never balancing anyway.
The core argument of Keith Ferrazzi's Never Eat Alone is that real networking runs on generosity, not reciprocity. Success comes from making sure the people you care about get what they want — not from collecting IOUs like arcade tickets you'll trade in later for a slightly better job.
Why scorekeeping fails on the math alone
Forget ethics for a second and be a pure capitalist about it. A favor traded one-for-one settles to zero. A favor given freely does something different: it makes you the person people describe to other people. "Talk to her, she's incredibly helpful" is marketing you cannot buy, running on word-of-mouth in rooms you're not in.
Scorekeepers get repaid once. Generous people get reputations. Reputations scale.
What generosity actually looks like
It's rarely grand. Nobody needs you to donate a kidney (usually). The everyday inventory:
- Introductions. You know two people who should know each other. Twenty seconds of typing; occasionally it changes someone's whole career.
- Attention. Read their thing. Actually read it. Reply with a specific sentence, not "Great stuff!" — which is what people say when they have not read the thing.
- Remembering. Their kid's name. The surgery. The thing they were terrified about last month. Following up on someone's fear is a hundred times more intimate than liking their promotion.
The fine print
Generosity without boundaries is just being a doormat with a newsletter. The goal isn't saying yes to everything — it's that when you do give, you give clean, with no invoice stapled to the back. People can tell the difference. They can always tell.
Give first. Give often. Let the accountant in your head take early retirement.
Full disclosure: I built Call Your Mom because my own follow-up game was inconsistently consistent — two great weeks, then radio silence until someone's birthday shamed me. It watches for the right moment — a birthday, a promise coming due, a relationship going quiet — and hands you the nudge with the message already drafted. The warmth is still on you. The remembering is on us.