I recently realized something: if you optimize for proximity, you compound proximity; if you optimize for progress, you compound progress. The two can look remarkably similar from the outside. You attend exclusive fellowships, founder dinners, and networking events. You meet VCs and successful founders. You spend time in beautiful hotels and highly curated communities. All of this creates a powerful feeling: I’m getting closer. But being close to successful people is not the same as getting closer to success. Going to Nobu every week doesn’t increase your earning power. Knowing ten VCs doesn’t give you investment judgment. Attending twenty founder dinners doesn’t teach you how to build a product people want. Sometimes proximity simply gives us the feeling of progress without changing our reality.
I think this is precisely why proximity can be so seductive. Real progress is slow, difficult, and often deeply unglamorous. Learning an industry takes time. Building expertise takes time. Getting your first hundred users takes time. Increasing your income, developing good judgment, or building a reputation can take years. For long stretches, there may be very little external evidence that you are moving forward. Proximity offers an immediate substitute. Walk into a beautiful room filled with founders, investors, and impressive titles, and suddenly you feel close to the life you want. Our brains quietly turn “I’m close to successful people” into “I’m close to success.” But when the night ends, what has actually changed?
That leads me to a more uncomfortable realization: sometimes an obsession with proximity is a symptom of insufficient progress. When we don’t have enough evidence of our own forward motion, we become more dependent on symbols of it—exclusive invitations, impressive venues, prestigious communities, important titles, and recognizable names. They reassure us that we are “on our way.” The problem is that if you keep pursuing that reassurance, you can become extremely good at accessing environments associated with success without becoming much better at producing successful outcomes yourself. You accumulate more invitations, more connections, more impressive rooms, and more proximity. But your actual capabilities may remain almost exactly where they were.
Real progress changes that relationship. When your product is growing, your income is increasing, your work is getting better, your judgment is sharpening, or people are actively seeking out what you create, you have your own scoreboard. You no longer need a room full of impressive people to tell you that you are moving. Reality is already giving you that feedback. And this is where the paradox appears: proximity does not necessarily create progress, but progress often creates proximity. Build a product people genuinely want, and investors eventually want to meet you. Produce important research, and conferences invite you to speak. Develop exceptional investment judgment, and good founders start introducing you to other good founders. Build an audience, and brands begin inviting you into rooms you once tried to enter. Eventually, the question changes from “How do I get into that room?” to “Which rooms are actually worth my time?” That is leverage.
None of this means networking is useless. Networking can absolutely be part of progress when it helps you find a customer, investor, cofounder, expert, collaborator, or piece of information you genuinely need. The distinction is whether you are using proximity as a tool or pursuing proximity as an end in itself. One question makes this surprisingly easy to evaluate: When I leave the room, what remains? If what remains is a photograph, a few LinkedIn connections, and the temporary feeling that I belong to a more successful world, then perhaps what I bought was an experience. There is nothing wrong with that. Beautiful hotels, exclusive dinners, and interesting social environments can be wonderful forms of consumption. But consumption should not automatically be recorded in our minds as career investment. If I leave the room with better judgment, a real relationship, a customer, a product insight, a new skill, or something else that can continue compounding after the event is over, then I have made progress.
And perhaps this points to an even larger problem with how we think about ambition. Our goal should not be to keep placing ourselves in environments designed to make us feel behind. There will always be a richer room, a more exclusive dinner, a more prestigious fellowship, a more successful founder, a younger billionaire, and another level of society that we have not yet entered. If our primary source of motivation is constantly finding people and environments that make us feel inadequate, then there is no finish line. We can spend our entire lives becoming more sophisticated at feeling behind.
A much better scoreboard is our own trajectory. Am I learning? Am I building? Am I earning more? Is my judgment improving? Am I creating something that did not exist before? Am I becoming more capable of producing the outcomes I want? These questions may be less glamorous than asking who invited us somewhere, but they measure something much more important: whether our lives are actually moving.The goal is not to keep making ourselves feel behind. The goal is to keep giving ourselves evidence that we are making progress. And when enough real progress accumulates, something interesting happens: many of the rooms we once worked so hard to enter begin appearing naturally along the way. At that point, proximity becomes what it should have been all along—not the objective, not proof of success, and certainly not a substitute for progress, but simply one of its byproducts.
If you optimize for proximity, you compound proximity. If you optimize for progress, you compound progress. Proximity should be an output of progress, not a substitute for it.
Siqi, Etc. 