The Hardest Thing in 2026
One of the hardest things to do right now is to get people to show up physically. Gas is expensive. Everyone has Zoom fatigue. There are a million reasons to stay home. It is so easy to just get on a call.
Which is exactly why getting people in a room is a total power move. When influential people who could be doing anything else in the world choose to spend an evening with you, that says something. It says you have heartshare. It says people trust you. It says whatever you are building is worth their most scarce resource: their physical presence.
Why Events Are Infrastructure
Events are not just social gatherings. They are infrastructure for everything else you are building.
They give you credibility. When people see a room full of sharp, influential people who showed up for you, they make an inference: this person has influence and love. That credibility opens doors that cold emails never will.
They save you enormous time. Instead of catching people up one-on-one, having the same conversation twelve times, you say it once to everyone in the room. Then everyone is caught up, and everyone knows that everyone else is caught up. The baseline sophistication of every subsequent conversation jumps.
They upskill the room. If you are smart about it, an event is a literacy upgrade. You are raising the floor on what everyone in the room understands about what you are building and what comes next. The Applied AI Society events work this way: people walk in at different levels of understanding and walk out sharing a common vocabulary and a common excitement.
They cultivate consent and momentum. A well-run event does not just inform people. It connects dots for them. They see the vision. They see the people involved. They experience what it feels like to be in the room. That lived experience creates a kind of excitement and buy-in that no slide deck or email can manufacture. It makes working with you feel inevitable.
The Truth Test
Here is the part that separates genuine community builders from manipulators.
There are people who keep their networks siloed on purpose. They tell different truths to different people. They give each person a different version of reality to keep them playing a role in a game they do not fully understand. If two people in their network compared notes, the stories would not line up. That is why these people never put everyone in the same room.
If you are in truth, the opposite is true. You want everyone talking to each other. When someone asks your friend "What is your experience with Gary?" and someone else asks a different friend the same question, the stories line up. The vision is the same. The character is consistent. That is heartshare at work: trust built through consistency across every relationship.
If you are the kind of person where everyone in your network talking to each other is a good thing, you should be hosting events constantly. Every event is a trust multiplier. Every conversation between attendees reinforces the signal.
If you are not that kind of person, events will expose you. Choose wisely.
The Trap
The one risk: getting stuck as "the events guy." Events are a tool, not an identity. You want to be the person who can make anything happen. Events are one way to demonstrate that, to facilitate partnerships, to prime a room. But the events serve the mission. The mission does not serve the events.
Use events to build the relationships and the literacy that let you do the real work. Then do the real work.
If you are living in truth, you may not realize how much time you are wasting by not hosting events. Get people in the room. Say what you need to say once. Let them talk to each other. The stories will line up. The momentum will compound. The events are not the product. The trust is.