My advice (which I don’t necessarily take all the time) would be “Be a joiner.” I think a lot of us spend time trying to figure out how to go it alone, pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, learn by doing — but a lot of the time, there’s no reason to reinvent the wheel. I don’t need to build an audience of 30,000 if I can use an existing platform’s audience of 30,000. I don’t need to figure out genetic sequencing from the ground up; I can stand on the shoulders of giants. I don’t always have to be my own boss! And when I negotiate for my salary and benefits, my fellow employees are facing the same problems; and maybe we could work out a collective bargaining agreement.

Unionizing is the way we solved the unstable employment and dangerous working conditions of the last industrial revolution. There’s an illusion that things are different now, because we’re alone in our homes behind screens, but really? Almost every valuable connection or mentor I’ve made in my life hasn’t been because a friend or relative introduced me. It’s because I showed up for some kind of club or event and started talking to a stranger. Some of it was “networking,” stuff in my field. Some of it was just random hobbies. My congressional representative knows me not because I came up with some brilliant lobbying campaign but because I showed up at a few town council meetings out of curiosity and she dropped by, and I happened to be reading a book she was interested in. And almost every time I’ve been well-paid, it’s been because someone met and liked me and felt bad about the idea of not sharing the wealth with an equal.

In other words, yeah, sure, do good work, and be nice to people. That’s important. But so is remembering sometimes what matters isn’t being the best. It’s being on the inside. There’s a reason even super wealthy people want to go to the good college and join the secret societies. One-on-one connections pale in comparison to organized in-groups. Which means (1) join some groups, any groups, and (2) I side-eye the idea that having a rich and supportive family is something I do for myself by being good at social media.

The people who want me to go it alone are the people who want to make me buy my own individual set of everything. And then they want me to tell all my friends and relatives they need to do that too.