The 100 Connections Challenge: how to change your life in 2026

One message can transform everything

Ever feel like you’re mooching through life, doing okay and feeling pretty fine, but not thriving? You’re likely languishing. Popularised by Adam Grant in The New York Times in 2021, the term refers to “a sense of stagnation and emptiness. It feels as if you’re muddling through your days, looking at your life through a foggy windshield.” For me, this feeling arises when I’m not working towards my goals actively enough, and because I work for myself, I need some kind of focus to guide me and to keep things interesting.

Enter The 100 Connections Challenge — beyond 75 Hard and anything David Goggins recommends, it’s potentially one of the quickest ways to change your life. Luckily, The 100 Connections Challenge doesn’t require you to be an ultra-endurance athlete: all you need is a phone and a desire to meet new people and shake up your life a little bit. This is a long read, so buckle up and enjoy.

I’ve done the challenge myself multiple times, and it’s always led to exciting work projects, unexpected opportunities, and some amazing new friends. It’s something I’d recommend doing once a year or so, or whenever you feel like you need a burst of fresh energy. If you’re a freelancer or run your own business, it’s particularly important to keep your pipeline bubbling along so you don’t suddenly find yourself without income or warm leads. If done right, the challenge can help you find projects for the whole year.

If I had a sexy 70s conversation pit I’d never stop networking… Photo via Sean Davidson

The Challenge at a glance

The Challenge borrows from the principles of a startup sprint, essentially a quick way of getting things done. In a nutshell, all you need to do is list your goals, figure out who could help you get there, and then set about contacting them. By the time you’ve spoken to 100 people, you’ll be well on your way to achieving those goals, with a ton of unexpected good things happening along the way.

The Challenge is highly adaptable, and unlike the Insta-popular fitness challenges, you’re allowed to cheat your way to the top. If 100 people feels like a stretch, I’ll go to a dinner and count those 10 people around the table towards my goal, so there’s zero stress involved. And as with most things in life, you get out what you put in.

Step 1: Pick your goals

Arguably the most difficult part of this whole thing is narrowing down your goals. I find it works to best to come up with some combination of:

• 3 short-term goals you’d like to achieve in the next 12 months

• At least 1 medium-term goal (think 1-3 years ahead)

• At least 1 long-term goal (3+ years ahead)

You don’t need to be too married to these goals, because I’m a firm believer that any connection you make is a win (unless the person happens to be an asshole), and you never know how you’ll be able to help each other in the future. That said, if you’re going for some very specific goals, like working for a particular company or getting your product in front of a particular person, you’ll obviously need to get clear on that.

Example goals:

• Write a book (Penguin, if you’re reading this give me a call)

• Speak at a TEDx talk

• Start a business

• Go freelance

• Give a guest lecture

• Move to New York

Step 2: Map your network

This is where the research comes in. In this step, you’ll figure out who you need to talk to in order to get you closer to your goals. Think both broad and narrow here — you’ve got 100 people to talk to after all.

These are the categories you’re going to focus on:

• Your three short-term goals (10 people per goal)

• Your medium-term goal (10 people)

• Your long-term goal (10 people)

• Mentor figures (10 people)

• Friends of friends (10 people)
  For this one, you’ll ask your friends and interesting people you’re speaking to in the other categories to recommend other people you should chat to. This ensures you’re meeting new people outside of your immediate network.

• Dig into the archive (10 people)
  For this category, you’ll come up with 10 people you know from your past, whether that’s people you studied with, people you interned with, or someone you once worked with.

• Wildcards (20 people)

  This is the most fun category — it could be people who have nothing to do with your goals or industry but who you find interesting, it could be very long shots, or it could be famous people. The point is to keep it fun, and to get used to sending messages even when there’s a 1% chance they’ll reply, because you just never know.

You can do this by hand in a notebook, in Notion, or on an Excel — whatever works best for you. Here is an example of my very unaesthetic Google Sheet that gets the job done.

Step 3: Send your outreach messages

This is the kind of task you can do from a café whilst channelling dark academia, or at the airport waiting for a flight. It’s a tick box task that I always find pretty exciting, because you don’t know what’s going to come from each message. See this edition of Social Currency for a range of real cold messages that got replies, and tweak as needed. Keep your message short and sweet, make it easy for the other person to say yes, and it never hurts to throw in a compliment. Excuse the flex, but this is a great example: a message I received a couple of weeks ago, and I said yes right away, despite being pretty busy.

Equally, the occasional person says no when I reach out, whether that’s because they’re too important, or don’t think I’m interesting enough to chat to. Either way, you can’t win them all, so keep sending the messages out and focus on the ones who do reply.

Step 4: Have your 100 conversations

Keep track of who you’re talking to. Come up with your own system, whether that’s writing notes in your spreadsheet, creating a custom Notion page, or trying out one of the many tools out there. Don’t forget to follow up (especially if you say you’re going to send something over), and keep in touch! Again, I keep things ultra simple with an extra column in my Google Sheet tracking where I’m at with each person. Bookmark your chosen system for the duration of the Challenge, and make sure you’re checking in with it regularly.

The timeline in which you have your conversations will depend on your goal. If you’ve got the time (if you’re in between projects or jobs, for example), the quicker you complete the Challenge, the quicker you’ll see results. My record was in early 2023, when a big project I was working on ended without warning, leaving me with an empty pipeline and even emptier bank account. Given I didn’t have a whole lot to do, I planned my 100 conversations into about a month, admittedly with a couple of dinners and events thrown in there which helped me make up the numbers.

Within 3 weeks, I’d found some great new projects, one with a client I ended up spending 2.5 years with, and am still friends with many of the people I reached out to during that time. I’ve also been able to pay it forward since then, and have also put those friends forward for lots of great opportunities, which is of course as important as asking for favours yourself (probably more so).

Tip: a drink often helps you with networking

Step 5: Find ways to enjoy the process

The most important rule? Enjoy the process. As someone who is allergic to doing things I don’t want to do, I’m good at making most things fun in life, and networking is no different. There’s no rulebook — go for a coffee with someone and find something in common with them, even if that’s your cat, or White Lotus, or how much you hate Taylor Swift’s new album (I actually quite like it, and also… it’s not that deep guys). Introduce your connections to each other, get a few different people together and go for a drink, or do a sport together. It really doesn’t matter. The only thing that counts is expanding your network strategically so that you’re inching towards your goals, and getting a little closer each day. Enjoy!

---

On the Social Currency Substack, we unpack the art (and science) of connection: from who to meet and how to meet them, to building your own ecosystem and creating those right-place-right-time moments that spark opportunity, whatever your goals in work of life. Expect interviews with people who do it best, practical hacks you can put to work immediately, and recommendations on tools, events, and strategies to grow your own network. You can find Phoebe at the imaginatively named phoebedodds.com.