I Built My Austin Network by Investing in Two People

Last updated: 2026-09-17

When I moved to Austin, I didn’t try to meet everyone. I focused on two people.

Two connectors. Social butterflies who already had the network I wanted. I invested time in those two, and through them I got access to their entire circle.

If you’re relocating, pivoting careers, or walking into a new industry, this is the play. Identify 2-3 people who already know everyone you want to know. Put your energy there. Random networking spreads you thin. Connectors concentrate the effort.

Your hours are limited. So are your energy and your attention. The people around you either help those three or they tax them.

Time, Energy, Attention

I evaluate my social circle through the T-Framework: Time, Energy, and Attention.

Time. Are you spending your limited discretionary hours with people who affirm your ambitions?

Energy. Do they leave you uplifted or drained?

Attention. Do they distract you from your focus? Needy friends. Constant pings. Someone else’s crisis landing in the middle of your afternoon.

Optimize all three. A friend can be fun and still wreck your week if they own your attention. Someone can feel “high energy” in the room and still steal hours you needed for the actual goal.

Does this sound familiar? You protect the work calendar, then give the rest of the week away to whoever asks first.

The sigh before you pick up

Your body reacts to people before your brain does.

When a name appears on your phone, notice what happens. A physical sigh. A little anxiety. Dread. That’s a data point. Excitement or calm? That’s a data point too.

Use those micro-reactions to sort energy givers from energy takers. Don’t talk yourself out of what you already felt.

Journal your last 5 phone calls. Rate your energy before and after each one. You’ll have a cleaner picture of your circle than another year of hoping it sorts itself out.

Start, Keep, Stop

Then do a People Audit.

List everyone you interacted with in the past year. Sort them:

1. Who should I spend MORE time with?
2. Who should I KEEP spending the same amount of time with?
3. Who should I spend LESS time with?

You’re allocating a scarce resource, the same way you’d allocate hours on a project. Stop doesn’t always mean zero contact. It means reduced frequency.

That framing matters. People freeze because they think a boundary means walking away. Most of the time it just means less time.

You can’t hold a boundary you don’t believe in

Saying no is easy when you have absolute clarity on your Why.

If you’re half-committed to a goal, you’ll accept the distractions. Cookies. Calls. Meetings. The cost of saying no feels higher than the benefit of protecting the goal. When that goal is locked in, emotionally and logically, rejecting low-value interactions gets effortless. Less guilt, too.

Write down your top 1 goal and your Why. If the Why is weak, other people’s priorities are going to keep winning.

Keep Sunday football. Skip the wings.

You don’t have to cut off friends to pursue a goal.

Participate in the social part of the habit. Modify the behavior. Keep the Sunday football watch with friends. Skip the beer and wings if you’re trying to lose weight. The relationship stays. The health goal stays too.

Fear of social rejection is what keeps people stuck in habits they’ve already outgrown. You can stay in the group and still change the move.

Identify one social habit that conflicts with a goal. Design the modification before the next time that group gets together.

Five minutes, on the calendar

You don’t need hours to maintain a relationship.

A scheduled, recurring 5-minute call, or even a text, is enough to keep a connection alive. I keep a recurring check-in on the calendar for a key relationship. If I left it to “when I have a minute,” busyness would win and the relationship would fade. Putting it on the calendar turned a vague intention into a system.

System over willpower.

Schedule one recurring 15-minute block for a key relationship. Treat it like a meeting you wouldn’t cancel.

Pay to sit with serious people

Free masterminds often have no qualification filter, so you get mixed-quality groups. Paid masterminds, even expensive ones, act as a self-selecting mechanism. The financial commitment filters for people who are serious and aligned in ambition.

I found that a high-cost mastermind gave me a higher density of high-performing peers than the free alternatives.

Look at your current peer groups. Are the people in them actually serious, or are you hoping they will be?

You can hang out with the dead

You don’t need to meet living experts to be influenced by them.

Spend time with historical figures and authors through their books, biographies, and audio. If you listen to a productivity podcast or read a biography weekly, you’re surrounding yourself with efficient, successful minds without the social energy cost of another in-person meeting. Useful if rooms drain you. You still get the influence.

Do this today

Grab a piece of paper. List the people you’ve actually spent time with over the past year. Audit your top 5 against Time, Energy, and Attention. Mark Start, Keep, or Stop.

That’s the job this week. One audit. Then go find your two connectors.