At a recent winter nonprofit fundraiser, several friends and I were chatting about the opportunities for connecting that seem to happen when we get out and network with others. We all agreed that networking for business happens just about anywhere we find people we know — people who can connect us to other people we want to know.

We also agreed that successful networking includes doing your share to help others create those links. You can’t keep score when networking. In fact, you may often end up doing much more for your connection than gets done in return, but as the old saying goes, “what goes around comes around.” You just have to trust that your help will be reciprocated down the line. The very heart of networking is people caring about and helping other people, keeping in mind that everyone wants to be treated as more than just a connection to other contacts.

As we welcome in the New Year, some business friends and I have been talking about the need to simplify things in our personal and our professional lives. At a recent breakfast get together, we discussed ways to simplify our lives by identifying what’s most important to ourselves and then eliminating or downsizing everything else. One friend suggested we could each create a simplicity statement along with a vision board, so we would be able to see at a glance what we want our lives to look like in the coming year.

Many people use a vision board to illustrate what really matters most. Vision boards help us envision ways to achieve goals, while keeping them top of mind. Keeping this vision board where you can see it every day helps in the march toward achievement by creating a customized roadmap for simplifying your personal and professional life. Creating a vision board is also simple. Here a few tips for getting started: