What No Algorithm Can Build For You: Part 3 🎓🤜🤛
What the best relationship builders would tell young people just starting out.
Part 3 of this 3-part series on relationship building explores the skills young people should be investing in, as they start their career journeys. If you haven’t checked out Part 1 and Part 2, I invite you to read those first.
“Girls only want boyfriends who have great skills. You know, like nunchuck skills, bow hunting skills, computer hacking skills.”
- Napoleon, Napoleon Dynamite, 2004
Teenagers have always faced uncertainty about what skills they should be investing in, to help their future selves and relationships. But in 2026, that uncertainty and anxiety about the future seems to be at an all-time high. While many are blaming AI for this, the increase in teen anxiety and depression had been on a sharp rise for years. Research from Zach Rausch and Jonathan Haidt (author of The Anxious Generation) tracking college students and teens found that anxiety rates leaped from roughly 10% in 2010 to over 24% prior in 2023, while depression rates doubled from around 9.7% to 20%. Most researchers associate these trends to the huge rise in screen time, social media use, and subsequent decline in in-person time with social connections.
As with most societal statistics, spending time in-person with teenagers reveals that the reality on the ground is much more nuanced. More young people than ever are aware of how harmful social media is to their mental health, even if limiting their usage is a big challenge. And while AI usage among teens is significantly higher than adults, Common Sense Media research highlights that over 50% of teenagers have little to no trust in the advice or information from AI companions. An 18-year-old I interviewed for my alma mater recently told me that she and a group of her friends had started to keep their phones in grayscale mode (making it far less appealing to scroll and swipe for hours) and spend more in person time together outside.
What Should Young Budding Professionals Prioritize?
With so much uncertainty on the horizon, and the ever-present pull of numbing online content and tools, how should rising graduates think about what relationship-building skills they should be investing in?
I asked a set of current and former business leaders at Google, The Atlantic, Disney, PayJoy, Paramount, Samsung, ServiceNow, and Amazon to share the guidance they would share with teenagers looking to invest in professional relationships. Below are the key themes that emerged.
#1: Know Yourself And Start With Value
While knowing what you bring to the table is a lifelong pursuit, cultivating this skill at a young age is key. Purnima Kochikar, VP of partnerships at Google, invites teenagers to: “[i]dentify what matters to them, what unique value they bring to the table -- and use that as the basis short listing a few people they could add value to. This provides a good starting point for building a relationship.”
Mary Liz McCurdy, SVP of Partnerships at The Atlantic, goes a step further: “Give what you are uniquely good at. Teenagers and young people have a ton of value– they are observant, expressive, fresh eyed (not yet jaded and burned like us :)), have a next-gen perspective– try to cultivate and leverage that authentic POV with someone you are keen to get to know, and offer up that view to that person. Maybe it will resonate and there will be a connection that turns into something real.”
#1: Lead With Curiosity (Beware Of Outsourcing It)
So much of our education system rewards students who have the best answers. This often results in many aspiring young job seekers to focus less on having very good questions. Take the time to be curious.
Raj Ajrawat, Head of Games GTM at Google and author of Dadpreneurial, shares: “The teenagers who become trusted adults are the ones who can ask a real follow-up question. You’ll also notice that the people everyone wants to talk to at a party are the ones who can ask that follow up question and are curious about what the other person is sharing with them, even if you don’t know what they are talking about at all. AI will write the thank-you note. It will not notice that someone seemed deflated in a meeting and check in the next day. That noticing muscle is the entire game.”
Robert Teed, Leadership Coach and former VP at ServiceNow, adds:“Be curious and listen. I tend to like the ‘offer and ask’ approach. The ‘offer’, in this case, is teen’s curiosity. Their ‘ask’ is gaining access to a mentor’s experience and knowledge.”
While asking great questions is highly contextual, here are some evergreen picks teens can pose to a potential mentor they want to learn more about:
What is your favorite part of your job right now? Least favorite?
How do you keep learning and growing in your role?
What has surprised you the most about this industry?
What is the best / worst advice you received when you were at my stage of career?
#1: Play The Long Game
Jalil Chikhi, Managing Director of partnerships at Google EMEA, puts it clearly: “Listen to learn, connect deeply, built for decades not quarters.” The best relationships are the ones where your face lights up when you see their name pop up on your device. And these often take years to cultivate.
Tim Palmer, SVP of Partnerships at Paramount, and former partnerships leader at Google and Disney, builds on this: “Target building friendships, not just professional relationships. Be intentional, but find a way for it to feel natural. Figure out what you can bring to the relationship, whether that's knowledge, connections, experience, or perspective.”
Raj offers practical guidance on how AI can help the next generation “Build a system to remember. This is the one most adults don’t tell teenagers, and it’s the one I think matters most in an AI-driven future. Your network isn’t your contact list. It’s the texture of what you remember about people. Where they’re trying to go. What they’re worried about. Who they care about. The people who do this well aren’t supernaturally gifted. They have a system, a notebook, a doc, a CRM, whatever, that lets them show up with context every time. AI is going to make this easier than ever. Use it as memory infrastructure, not as a ghostwriter. The relationship still has to come from you….The relationships paying off for me now were started ten years ago with no agenda. That compounding is the whole mechanism.”
It’s Not All Bleak
In a world that is warning us of impending doom and rising uncertainty, approximately every 0.34 seconds, it can feel as if investing in professional relationships is yet another source of stress. A common lament I hear from clients I coach is “I know I need to be networking more, but I’m struggling to push myself to do it.” Networking, a word that inspires dry-heaving for most of us, feels transactional. And it often is.
But the lessons from business leaders in this series highlight that building strong professional relationships can bring us joy, self-discovery, and deeper human connection. Reframe your mindset from making it a chore, to making it a discovery game. Investing in building regular connection habits that lead with curiosity, honesty, and understanding can energize you. And you will be rewarded with compound gains, over the coming years.
If you know a young person who is just getting started in the workforce, consider sharing this series with them and encourage them to try out these suggestions in their next outreach. At best, it might bring them opportunity. And at worst, it will bring them the joy of human connection.
Huge thank you to Raj Ajrawat, Jalil Chikhi, Purnima Kochikar, Mary Liz McCurdy, Jaideep Mirchandani, Tim Palmer, Robert Teed, and anonymous senior leaders for sharing your insights with The Wake Up by Anbara’s Substack’s readers!
The Wake Up Top 5
What we’ve been loving this week
Wow: A 3D Reconstruction of 1518 Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Aztec empire (current day, Mexico City, which was built on top of the ruins).
Spam: Scammers are abusing an internal Microsoft account to send spam links. Spam is at an all time high. As a small business owner, this is a daily PITA.
Eat: The 50 Best Restaurants in North America. Kudos to Canada: 20% of the list is up north.
AI: 10 Hacks Every Google Gemini User Should Know. Excited to try scheduled actions for weather clothing recommendations.
Clean: Shift, an training data startup, is offering to clean NYC homes for free, to help train cleaning robots. In other news, “free” is a word used a bit too lightly.
If you’ve made it this far, know that I’m so grateful you spent your time reading The Wake Up when you could be scrolling on TikTok, YouTube, Instagram or doing 100 other things as a busy, wonderful person. Thank you 💛 and please consider sharing The Wake Up with a friend.