Why I've Gotten Very Little Out of My 12,000 LinkedIn Connections

Having 12,000 connections on LinkedIn felt like a flex. But to be honest, I barely know most of them.

Back in 2007, after grad school, I started building my professional profile on LinkedIn. Back then it was the cool thing to do. Every job, every conference, every meetup, anyone I came in contact with in the industry: connect, connect, connect. Twenty years of my professional life, all in one list.

A handful of them, old colleagues and a few real friendships, know the actual me. The rest are just connections collecting dust.

I think that's a clue. If someone who has spent two decades building a network can look at 12,000 people and recognize only a few, then maybe the number was never the point. Maybe we've all been quietly measuring the wrong thing.

So let's ask the real question: what happened to us in the last two decades?

You, me, and all of us became connection hoarders

Here's what I think actually happened, and I'll start with myself, because I'm guilty of it.

I'm a connection hoarder. For 20 years I accumulated people the way a hoarder accumulates things. Not because I used those connections, not because they meant something, but because more always felt better than less. Every "connect" was one more thing on the pile. A conference, a new job, a cold message: tap, tap, tap. I told myself I was building a network. Really, I was just collecting.

And like any hoard, mine gives the illusion of wealth while making it harder to find what actually matters. Somewhere in my 12,000 are maybe ten people who'd really show up for me. But I've buried them under eleven thousand I'll never speak to again.

So why did I do it? Because it was easy. Building a real relationship takes inertia, the slow, hard push of time and energy. Showing up. Remembering things. Following up. Showing up again. Clicking "connect" took me a second and asked nothing of me. So I traded the investment for the click. I outsourced my relationships to a tool, and the tool only knew how to do the easy part. One tap, "connected," and I'd forget the person existed.

And here's what fooled me for years: the click felt like progress. Every new connection felt like I was building something. I wasn't. I was accumulating. The tool gave me the feeling of building relationships without any of the actual building. A click is zero hours. I'd replaced a 200-hour process with a one-second one, and then wondered why, out of 12,000 people, so few of them really know me.

The data backs this up

In 1990, just 3% of Americans said they had no close friends. By 2024, nearly one in five did. Between 2014 and 2019, time spent with friends fell 37%. More than half of Americans say they at least sometimes feel no one knows them well. And the U.S. Surgeon General warned that social disconnection carries a health risk comparable to smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day.

But the number I can't stop thinking about is this one: researchers at the University of Kansas found it takes about 50 hours together to turn an acquaintance into a casual friend, and more than 200 to become close. And hours spent working together barely count. That's 20 years of my LinkedIn network explained in one sentence.

That's the whole thing, isn't it? Connection has a price, and the price is time and energy. There's no follow button for that.

So what do we do?

I don't think the answer is to log off and disappear. I think the answer is smaller and harder: fewer people, more depth, on purpose. Choosing a handful and actually investing the hours. That's not a hack. It's the opposite of a hack.

That's the question I'm investigating now, and it's why I'm building MakeContact. Not an app for collecting more people, but one for the people worth 200 hours.

That's where I'll leave this note. I don't have it all figured out. But I'd rather be honest about the question than pretend I have the answer.