One piece of advice from my mom completely changed my life and career

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"Go back inside. You never know who you’ll meet."

Those were the words of my mother. She was referring to a cocktail party at a townhouse in New York’s West Village. I’d gone in, but was too shy to initiate conversation, and booze wasn’t doing the trick.

I decided that it wasn’t for me and left. On the way home, I called my mom for a chat. She somehow convinced me to go back to the party before I managed to get very far.

This was September of 2008. I’d just come back from London, where I’d spent the last of my rations. I hadn’t worked all summer, and it was about to catch up with me — you can do New York on $20 a day, but you can’t do it on $0 a day. In a tradition I’d fashioned for my mid-20s, I had no plan for what was coming next.

Back at the cocktail party, I met so many interesting people with all sorts of backgrounds — authors, executives, retirees, and folks between one gig and the next.

When you meet someone in New York, one of the first questions is usually a very direct "What do you do?" Given the nature of my work — software development — I usually just replied with "computer stuff." If the other person is truly curious, they ask me more questions.

In one case that evening, someone asked me more.

"Programming," I replied. "Really, it’s boring!"

She pressed me further.

"I make websites," I said. "Anything in a scripting language — Perl, JavaScript, PHP …"

"Do you know ColdFusion?"

"Sure."

That wasn’t quite true. I had never actually seen much ColdFusion (which is now essentially extinct), but I knew I could buy a book and sort it out over the weekend.

She mentioned she was the head of digital at NYC & Co. and asked if I was free Monday morning. They’d just had redesigned their website and needed help. I think I played it cool, but I remember saying, "Yes!"

What started as a freelance web developer position turned into a full time job. I was gainfully employed and back to participating in society. Through that job I met the lovely people of Huge, the digital agency where I eventually worked. Huge led me to the MoMA and eventually to Twitter in San Francisco. What was meant to be a few weeks in S.F. lasted almost three years. I took a full time position with Twitter — before the IPO — and let that run its course.

That fortuitous timing allowed me to leave with a cushion and start my current journey, which is a startup financial company called lemon.

For shy people or those of us for whom small talk doesn’t exactly come naturally (does it really for anyone?), parties can feel like the gulag. Add in the stresses of living in a big city like New York, where going somewhere after a long day at the office or a lengthy commute — let alone somewhere where you know you’re not going to know a single person — and "networking" can all feel like a herculean effort.

But it’s never as bad as it seems, and if I hadn’t powered through and gone back to that party, I wouldn’t have ended up where I am now. And I really like where I am now.

As they say, always listen to your mother.

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