How to Find People
Most outreach advice focuses on finding companies: make a list of targets, research them, pitch them. It rarely works because companies don’t hire you; people do. And people don’t respond to pitches; they respond to signals. If your outreach isn’t producing anything, the problem usually isn’t volume. It’s that you’re broadcasting what you think the market wants to hear into networks that already know what to expect from you.
Here’s a different way to think about it.
Confuse your networks
All networks calcify over time; patterns cement. You already exist between several networks, but your communication habits flatten that position into a single, predictable channel — a false sense of limited optionality. Your network has categorized you: they know what you do, what you’d say, what to send your way. Which means they’ve stopped paying attention.
Confusing your own habits is the first step to reopening the pathways of meaning; show up somewhere unexpected, share a living idea which is still forming, break the pattern. What moves through those reopened pathways is creativity, not utility: energy traveling from where you actually think–the back of the house–out to others. This isn’t about finding new people so much as energizing the connections you already have. Most of them are dormant, waiting to be woken up.
Confusion, in this sense, is not noise. It’s the signal that something is becoming. People respond to movement.
Find people before companies
Companies, as collections of people, necessarily lean into efficiency, of communication, of doing. It’s an overlooked fact that the more people there are in a room, the more mechanistic and clear things need to be, and the less creative things get. Coordination has a cost, and it’s paid in exactly the ambiguity, opinion, and strangeness that make your signal worth receiving.
Which is why outreach aimed at companies fails: you’re broadcasting creativity into a machine built to filter it out. A person, though, can still be confused in the productive sense: surprised, moved, made curious. So look for the person, whose work you hold an actual opinion about, someone already moving through the same contexts you are. If they left the company tomorrow, would you still want the conversation? If the answer is no, you were never looking for a person.
Lean into your opinions
Be more yourself, rather than what the market expects of you. Sanding your edges down to fit a job description makes you interchangeable, and interchangeable people compete on price and availability. Your opinions are the only part of your signal that nobody else can broadcast.
Lean into the ways you think, rather than the things you make. Deliverables are comparable; a way of thinking isn’t. Broadcast the specificity of your aesthetics, not the general utility anyone else can produce. Specificity compounds. It yields results over time and sometimes converts to short-term gains too. Generality does neither.
Why this works
You are a system of information, broadcasting into and receiving signals from the world. All systems do what they’re designed to do, so if you keep sending the same signals to the same networks, you’ll keep getting the same results. Introducing confusion invites change, and once we open communication channels, we create optionality.
It is only from optionality that new work comes, not the other way around. You don’t get a larger set of possibilities by landing work; you simply unearthed one in the same menu you’re holding, so you will inevitably be in the same spot once this project is done.
To-do
Break one habit your network has you filed under. Don’t be beholden to platforms; if something resonates in one place, move it to a better channel. This alone will wake up dormant connections
Lean into an opinion that feels exciting rather than immediately commercial
Pick three people (not companies) who inspire you, and get in touch directly
Never share something you made without the way you think about it
Measure outreach not by responses (objective) but by energy and optionality (subjective)
When you’re done, begin again.