Be Seen Doing Good Work
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 7
- Confidence
- —
Kaelyn Grace Apple's approach to landing a job inside a company she admired treats networking as long-horizon visibility rather than a transaction. Instead of asking people for jobs, she deliberately places herself inside the ecosystem of people doing work she finds interesting — paid communities, live meetups, physical spaces where decision-makers pass through — and makes sure that every time she is seen, she is seen doing credible work: asking a specific question she genuinely needs answered, publishing her own content, being normal and chill in person. The mechanism is name recognition plus credibility accumulating over months, so that when an opportunity finally appears, the hiring side already has a formed impression of her. She then closes the loop by making the application itself echo the work they have already seen.
Origin
Extracted from Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal
How to run it
- 1
Pick ecosystems, not targets
Decide which communities, cities, and rooms contain people doing work you genuinely find interesting, and get into them — a paid academy, a meetup, a department lounge. Do not start by picking a person to extract a job from.
Pro tip Choose ecosystems you would happily be part of even if no job ever came out of them; the interest has to be real or the visibility reads as hustle.
- 2
Show up in person and be normal
Attend the live events. The bar at this stage is low and social, not professional: be friendly, be chill, be someone the team can picture in a room. That alone separates you from most attendees.
Watch out Fan-behaviour and CV-pushing at meetups is remembered as a negative, not a positive.
- 3
Ask one thoughtful question
In each interaction, ask something specific you actually want the answer to — a real operational problem you are facing. The content of the question is the demonstration of your seriousness, even if the person forgets the interaction itself.
Pro tip Naming the specific piece of their work that changed something for you makes the interaction memorable to them without flattery.
- 4
Build a public display of your work
Run a channel, podcast, newsletter, or blog — however small the audience. It converts private competence into something a stranger can verify at any time, and it is what people go and look at after they meet you.
Pro tip Audience size is not the signal; the signal is that you shipped it on the side while doing something else.
- 5
Engineer a third space
Position yourself physically or digitally where the people you want to learn from repeatedly pass by — the shared lounge instead of the library, the community forum instead of lurking — so incidental contact happens without you engineering each encounter.
Watch out Presence without visible work only builds recognition, not credibility.
- 6
Let the timeline run
Accept that this is probabilistic and serendipitous. You cannot predict which opportunity will surface or when, so keep the groundwork going over months or years rather than expecting a specific interaction to convert.
Watch out Expecting one conversation to produce a job is the failure mode that makes people quit the whole approach.
- 7
Make the application echo what they've already seen
When the right opportunity finally appears, submit work that visually and stylistically matches the public work they may already have encountered, so the application triggers recognition rather than starting from zero.
Pro tip Keep branding, titles, and pacing consistent with your existing content so the connection is made instantly.
In the wild
Kaelyn joined the Part-Time YouTuber Academy while planning a move to London, then attended a meetup where she asked Ali a specific question about delegation and finding an editor. When the productivity lab community manager role opened, the application required a video — so she deliberately built it in the same branding style, titles, and flow as her own YouTube content, so the reviewers would recognise her. Ali only sees the final two or three candidates; when her name reached him, he already associated it with a meetup attendee who had a viral PhD video and was 'broadly chill'.
→ Hired as community manager for the productivity lab, with prior recognition putting her, in Ali's words, well above other candidates.
While at Oxford, Kaelyn ran into a creator she admired on the street. Rather than saying she was a fan, she named the specific video that had made a difference to her and that partly drove her decision to apply to Oxford. Months later the creator had followed her on Instagram, remembered the interaction, and had been seeing her content about PhD admissions. A year after that, she was invited to speak at the creator's conference.
→ An unplanned 30-second street interaction converted into a paid-stage speaking invitation roughly a year later.
Before joining Ali's team, one hire took a train an hour and a half to a Cambridge meetup, was normal and friendly, and mentioned she ran a tiny podcast on the side of a corporate job she did not enjoy. She asked Ali to come on it; he agreed, and she asked good questions. Later, when the team was choosing mentors for the YouTuber Academy, she was already known to them as someone who shipped work on the side.
→ Became employee number four or five, selected on the strength of visible side work rather than audience size.
Common mistakes
Treating networking as A plus B equals C
The common first version of networking is a direct conversation or informational interview where you immediately try to get a job out of the person. Kaelyn's point is that networking is relationships and long-term connection — the recognition has to already exist before the opportunity appears, which means the interaction and the outcome are usually months or years apart and cannot be traced one-to-one.
Crossing from palatable to unpalatable hustle
Ali describes meetup attendees who are overly fanboy or fangirly and pushy — handing over a CV and saying they would love to work there. There is a level of hustle that reads as ambition and a level that reads as pressure; the second actively damages the recognition you were trying to build, because what gets remembered is the discomfort.
Being seen without being seen doing work
Showing up to many things builds recognition without credibility. The mechanism only works when each sighting carries evidence — a good question, published content, visible team-player behaviour — so the association formed is 'someone who does good work', not just 'someone who is always here'.
From the transcript
“if you can be seen and you can be seen doing good work then you are more likely to get your foot in the door…”
“the way I thought about networking was let me just find ways to be in the general ecosphere of people that are doing things that…”
“networking is about relationships and long-term connection”
From the episode
How to Land your Dream Job - Chats with my Team ( @KaelynGraceApple )