How to be useful to someone you just met
The standard advice is to be interesting. This is hard on demand, and it puts the work on you to perform.
Being useful is a lower bar and a better one. It also has the side effect of making you memorable, which is the thing you were failing to do directly.
Find the thing they are stuck on
Most people, if asked properly, will tell you within two minutes. The question that works is not "what do you do", it is some version of:
What is the annoying bit at the moment?
People answer that honestly because it is an invitation to complain, and complaining is easy. What comes back is usually specific and usually something you can act on.
The four ways to be useful
In order of how often they are available:
- An introduction to someone who has had that exact problem. This is the most useful thing you can offer and it costs you one email.
- A reference: a tool, a piece of writing, somebody worth reading. Small, and it proves you were listening.
- An answer, but only when you have one. A confident answer outside your competence does more harm than saying nothing.
- A question they had not asked themselves. "Have you checked whether they actually read it?" is sometimes the entire contribution.
Do it within a day, or do not claim you will
The failure mode is the warm nod: "I know someone you should talk to." Then nothing happens, because you got home and the evening blurred.
Either send it the next morning or do not mention it. An unkept small promise costs more than never offering, because now you are a person who says things.
Do not keep score
The useful thing is not a deposit you expect back. Some of these go nowhere, most of them go nowhere, and the ones that come back do so eighteen months later from a direction you did not predict.
If you find yourself tracking who owes you, you have turned the thing that works into the thing that does not.
Make yourself easy to be useful to
The reciprocal skill, and the rarer one. When somebody asks what you are stuck on, have an actual answer ready that is specific enough to act on. "Growth" is not one. "I need to find ten people who run paid dinners in London" is, and that is a thing a stranger can genuinely solve for you at a party.