THE RELIANTS PROJECT

This is the third article in a series. If you’re not yet convinced that It’s not only who you know, it’s who they know, you may want to check out that article first. Also, I try to avoid using technical terms in these articles. At the end of this one I provide a list of commonly used technical words.

Now that you know how important “who they know” is to your life, don’t you want to see what shape your community makes? Mapping the people we spend time with can help answer questions we have about our experience as social animals and surface hidden patterns that may not be obvious such as:

• From whom am I most likely to get new information, opportunities, and ideas?
• Which group(s) of people influence my habits and behaviours?
• How resilient is my support network of advice and practical help?

Instead of making maps of our neighbourhood with buildings and roads, we’ll make maps of our community with people and connections. That way we can better understand who we know and who they know. 

This 3-step guide will help us make a map of our own. Making a map doesn’t need to take a lot of time and doesn’t require any fancy tools. We can make one with paper and a pen, or use whatever software tool we usually use to make presentations or diagrams. This map took me 30 minutes to make using Keynote. The names have been changed to protect their privacy.

These types of maps only have two parts:

1. People: circles that represent each of the people in the map
2. Connections: lines that show who in the map is connected to whom and gives the map it’s shape 

Maps are only useful if they can help us explore something we’re curious about or answer a question we’ve asked. A map of New York can’t help us if we’re lost in London, regardless of how detailed it is. One map might help us get from one museum to another, but it won’t tell us what exhibits we can see on each floor in one of those museums.

For our map, we’ll use this guiding question:
If I am the sum of the people I spend time with, who am I the sum of?

It’s important to remember that there’s no such thing as a perfect map, just like there’s no such thing as a perfect community. We are always balancing tradeoffs between size, interconnectedness, and diversity. We’ll discuss more about this when I explain how to read the map in the next article.

Step 1: choosing people to include in the map
When someone makes a map, they make a decision about what to include and what to leave out. If they are making a map of a country, they might choose to include cities based on a minimum size. If they are making a map explaining how to get to their favourite neighbourhood restaurant, they might include only a handful of landmarks along the way.

It’s not realistic to make a complete map of all the people we have ever known and all their connections. Focusing on only who we’ve spoken with in the last two weeks helps us simplify the map. It’s not a judgement about who is important and who is not, it’s just a snapshot of a moment in time. We can also change, shorten, or lengthen the time window to add or remove people from the map. If the last two weeks weren’t very typical (e.g. a holiday), we can choose another two week time window in the recent past. Our life stage and profession are among many attributes that can have a huge impact on the number of people we speak with in a given day. 

In the last 2 weeks:

• Who did I speak with in person?
• Who did I speak with on video chat?
• Who did I speak with on the phone?
• Who did I exchange text messages with?

As we go through each question and reflect on the two weeks, we’ll come up with a list of names. We’ll add each of their first names or initials into circles on the map, all connected to us at the centre.

This is not a memory test. We can look at our phone or calendar to help us remember. However, there are some people that might not be obvious, like our favourite barista, one of our friend’s children, or a person we engage with on social media but haven’t met in person. Think carefully about who might be missing.

It doesn’t matter how many people the map has, though I’d recommend a minimum of 5 and a maximum of 50 based on Robin Dunbar’s work on social groups.

Step 2: connecting people that know each other in the map
If we were taking a road trip, we’d be interested in a map that includes highways we plan to take. If we were exploring a city for the first time, a map of the public transit system might be helpful. If we were taking a walking tour, a map of the sidewalks and footpaths might be enough. In each of these situations, we are using different types of connections between locations on a map.

After we figure out which people to include in the map, we can consider how they are connected to each other. They might be family members, classmates, or colleagues. For our purposes, these distinctions aren’t very important. We’re just interested in whether the people in the map know each other. 

For every possible pair of people in the map, ask yourself, “Do these two people know each other?”

If we want to make the question a little more selective, we could ask ourselves, “Would these two people spend time together without me?” This helps if two sides of the family met at a wedding several years ago, but haven’t spoken to each other since.

For each pair of people that know each other, we should draw a line between the circles in the map. We’ve already made a social map!

Step 3: understanding what attributes they share
When I visited Penang, I was delighted by the local tourist map. Instead of showing where all the restaurants were, the map had pictures of each of the famous Penang dishes and where to eat them. They focused on the attribute of each place that was most important, the famous dish they serve.

Attributes are ways to categorise people based on how they are similar. We can use almost anything: gender, industry, or favourite dessert. Which attribute we choose to highlight depends on what we’re trying to learn. Are we interested in the diversity of the people we spend time with? Or, are we interested in their habits? We can write a question for the attribute(s) we’d like to include. We don’t have to write it as multiple-choice question, but it’s often helpful to think of it in that way. We should be able to answer the question for most of the people included in the map.

Here are some example attribute questions that we can use:

1. Which option best describes this person’s gender? a) same as mine, b) different than mine, c) don’t know
2. How old is this person? a) more than 10 years younger, b) within 10 years of my age, c) more than 10 years older, d) don’t know
3. What continent does this person live on? a) Africa, b) Asia, c) Australia, d) Europe, e) North America, f) South America, g) don’t know

We can make the circles different colours based on their attribute. Choose an attribute you’d like to map. On the left, I’ve mapped attribute question 2 focused on age. The yellow circles represent people that are 10+ years younger than me. Orange represents people my age. Pink circles represent people that are at least 10 years older than me.

That’s all there is to it. If we’re curious about how representative the map is, we can choose another two-week window and make another map for comparison. We can also make a new map with different guiding questions, such as:

• Who supports my freelance business through advice, collaboration, and referrals?
• How diverse is the information I get from my network (e.g. news, opinions, ideas, books, events, products, services, even gossip)?

In the next article, we’ll learn how to read our map.

A note on language

In my experience, the language used to describe this type of visualisation varies by discipline. Data scientists, physicists, and sociologists don’t use the same terminology and the words are often opaque. My hope is to make this type of exercise accessible to a wider audience.

• Map – most of the time this is called a graph, but if they are displaying the network around one individual they can sometimes be referred to as a sociogram or egonet
• People/Circle – most commonly referred to as a node or vertex and can represent people, organisations, or even pieces of information
• Connection/Line – can be called an edge or tie and represents a relationship between two nodes
• Shape – often described as the structure of the graph with reference to it’s density and how the nodes are clustered

Photo by Juan Cruz Mountford on Unsplash

This is part 2 in a series. If you’re not yet convinced that “it’s not only who we know, it’s who they know”, you may want to check out part 1 first. Also, I try to avoid using technical terms in these articles. At the end of this one I provide a list of commonly used words if you’re interested in “going down the rabbit hole”.

Once we internalise the fact that who we know matters, we can start to imagine that who they know also matters. We are shaped by all the connections that the people we know (and don’t know) have with each other, not just our individual connections.

These connections are what gives a community its shape. Without them, everyone’s would look the same, where we are at the centre and all of the people we interact with sit around us. However, we know that these people have independent relationships with each other. All those connections, not just our individual connections, influence outcomes for the people and communities we care about.

Who they know influences our health

Nicholas Christakis is a professor at Yale University and Director of the Human Nature Lab. In Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives, he summarises how who-knows-who influences our thoughts, feelings, and behaviours. In one study, they were able to show that if a person’s friend’s friend’s friend was obese, it increased the likelihood that person was also obese. That means that we are influenced by many people we have never met and may never meet.

Imagine you’re at the centre of this community above and know 8 people. Not only are you influenced by the 8 people you know and the 8 people they know, but you are also influenced by the 11 people that those people know (highlighted in yellow). The habits and behaviours of those 27 people will each have some influence over what you do.

Amar Dhand is a neurologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and a social scientist at Harvard Medical School. In “Social Networks and Risk of Delayed Hospital Arrival After Acute Stroke“, he describes how the connections between people they know directly impact their health. He found that the shape of the group could significantly delay a patient’s arrival at the hospital after experiencing stroke symptoms. This is important because there are treatments that are only effective within certain time windows and 70% of stroke patients don’t arrive in time to take advantage of them.

He found that people in small, strong, tight-knit groups consistently arrived late to the hospital, therefore missing this window for valuable stroke treatments. On the other hand, people with weaker ties and less interconnected groups were more likely to arrive in time. Friends and family of patients in small, strong, tight-knit groups were more likely to discuss the situation at length, debate options, and often decided to adopt a ‘watch and wait’ approach. This unhelpful behaviour delayed a trip to the hospital and access to timely treatment.

Who they know influences our success

You’ve probably heard me talk about Janice McCabe’s work because the insights are so clear and powerful. She is an associate professor of sociology at Dartmouth College and author of Connecting in College: How Friendship Networks Matter for Academic and Social Success. When Dr. McCabe drew the friend groups of a student from their perspective, she identified three different shapes. These drawings show a group from the point of view of the individual at the centre. She studied students at a large, US university and found that one shape could significantly help or hurt students’ academic success. She also found that this shape was more common among specific groups of students.

These are the three shapes she identified. Tight-knitters look like a ball of yarn, where most of the people in the group know each other. Compartmentalizers look like a bow tie, where there are two or more groups of friends, but those groups don’t know each other. Samplers look like a daisy, where the person has several one-to-one friendships, but most of those people don’t know each other. Isn’t it interesting how the tight-knit ball of yarn and the bow tie-shaped compartments show up in both Dhand and McCabe’s work?

Tight-knit groups drove significantly better outcomes when friends supported each other academically. However, if friends discouraged or undermined the academic efforts of the student, it resulted in worse academic outcomes. In her study, only 77% of tight-knitters graduated, compared with 91% of compartmentalizers and 92% of samplers. Unfortunately, students from underrepresented ethnicities were significantly more likely to have tight-knitter friend groups. The qualitative interviews uncovered two reasons for this. First, there were far fewer people on campus with the same ethnic background, so they tended to band together. Second, they reported that their close-knit friend groups helped them deal with the inequality and structural racism they experienced.

In school, I didn’t have one tight-knit group of friends that I always hung out with. I had a handful of very close friends, each of whom was part of a different social group. It was great for trying on different identities. It was bad for securing Friday night plans. As an adult, I have cultivated intellectually-stimulating connections with people all over the world. My personal network is an information and idea gathering machine, where I connect infrequently with many people who don’t know each other. Each would introduce me to something new and provide a unique perspective. It’s invaluable for my career and personal growth, but less helpful for my habit of locking myself out.

These ideas also apply in professional contexts. The tagline of this Harvard Business Review article says it all: “Measure who they know, not just who they are”. Paul Leonardi, Noshir Contractor, and their collaborators have identified signature shapes that correlate with important business activities in an organisation such as ideation, influence, efficiency, and innovation.

Again, we see the daisy and ball of yarn shapes. It’s not surprising that a person “sampling” from the organisation would be more likely to generate new ideas. They are a hub between many different groups and can spot patterns that other people may not be able to see. It’s also reasonable to expect that a tight-knit group would be more efficient. They are continuously improving how they work together. The challenge is that it is hard to be both at the same time, which is an example of the classic trade-off between exploration and exploitation.

Who they know influences how information and behaviour spreads

First, let’s think about the difference between spreading information and behaviour. In the case of information, a person only needs to hear from someone once about a job opportunity in order to spread that information further. In the case of behaviour, people often need to see two or more others adopting a behaviour before they are willing to adopt it themselves.

Damon Centola is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and author of How Behavior Spreads: The Science of Complex Contagions. He has studied the spread of information and behaviour within networks and found that the shape impacted how successfully behaviours spread, if at all.

In a set of experiments, Centola took three different hypothetical shapes and timed how long it took for information or behaviour to spread to every member of that community. The first one had all wide bridges, meaning that people in the group always had mutual connections. The second one had a mix of wide and narrow bridges. The third one had almost all narrow bridges, meaning that the people in the group didn’t have mutual connections.

Information took fourteen days to spread in a wide-bridge group and only three days to spread in a narrow-bridge group. In contrast, behaviour took 26 days to spread in a wide-bridge group and 35 days to spread in a mixed-bridge group. Behaviour was unable to spread even after 100 days in a narrow-bridge group.

He concluded that new behaviours spread most effectively over wide bridges because individuals need social reinforcement to adopt them. While one weak relationship between two tight-knit groups is often sufficient to spread information or disease, behaviour struggles to travel across such a narrow bridge. The key insight here is that a community that is very effective at spreading disease may not be as successful at spreading the behaviours necessary to mitigate the impact.

Map your community

Now that we understand why who they know matters, we can actually do something about it. Ready to reflect on the community surrounding you? In the next article, explain how to Map Your Community in Minutes. It doesn’t take a lot of time or require any fancy tools. While there’s no such thing as perfect, it will provide some insights about how the people we spend time with influence our lives.

A note on language

In my experience, the language used to describe this type of visualisation varies by discipline. Data scientists, physicists, and sociologists don’t use the same terminology and the words are often opaque. My hope is to make this type of research accessible to a wider audience.

• Map – most of the time this is called a graph, but if they are displaying the network around one individual they can sometimes be referred to as a sociogram or egonet
• People/Circle – most commonly referred to as a node or vertex and can represent people, organisations, or even pieces of information
• Connection/Line – can be called an edge or tie and represents a relationship between two nodes
• Shape – often described as the structure of the graph with reference to it’s density and how the nodes are clustered

Photo by Park Troopers on Unsplash

We’ve all probably heard a coach, mentor, or teacher say “it’s not only what we know, it’s who we know” at some point in our lives. Some of us already believe it, though few of us really understand what it actually means. Many of us limit this way of thinking to our careers or a narrowly-defined version of success. We don’t appreciate how influential who we know is to all aspects of our lives. Nor do we appreciate that who they know can be just as influential. Who we know and who they know together influence what we know, what we do, and our success.

Who we are influences who we know

The first sentence of the often-cited paper “Birds of a Feather: Homophily in Social Networks” reads “similarity breeds connection.” Homophily is defined as “the tendency for people to seek out or be attracted to those who are similar to themselves”. They go on to say,

“Homophily limits people’s social worlds in a way that has powerful implications for the information they receive, the attitudes they form, and the interactions they experience. Homophily in race and ethnicity creates the strongest divides in our personal environments, with age, religion, education, occupation, and gender following in roughly that order.”

After a few years in London, I proudly announced that I wanted to make more “old” friends. I didn’t mean friends that I’d know for a long time, I meant friends that were at least 20 years older than me. Between my industry, living environment, and hobbies, I just wasn’t meeting enough people in that life stage. As a result, the diversity of perspectives I had to draw from was limited.

You are a network explores the idea that we have many attributes that we identify with above and beyond typical demographics. All of those attributes have relationships to each other (e.g. our family role is related to our gender). This can insulate us within a community high in homophily, but it can also create bridges to people that share identities that transcend typical boundaries (e.g. mothers and fathers).

“Seeing ourselves as a network is a fertile way to understand our complexity. Perhaps it could even help break the rigid and reductive stereotyping that dominates current cultural and political discourse, and cultivate more productive communication. We might not understand ourselves or others perfectly, but we often have overlapping identities and perspectives. Rather than seeing our multiple identities as separating us from one another, we should see them as bases for communication and understanding, even if partial.”

I remember the very first night I was in Hong Kong on business. My host took me to a cramped cafe just off Temple Street Night Market and ordered two bowls of sweet red bean soup. Never in my life had I seen beans sweetened with sugar and served as a dessert. It absolutely blew my mind and quickly became a favourite. Growing up in New York, I could have easily come across it given the large Cantonese population, let alone the countless other Asian cuisines where this is common. Whether foods are sweetened or not is rarely controversial (marshmallow-topped sweet potato casserole comes to mind), but who we know influences what we think is right or wrong, good or bad, and normal or not normal.

Paul Gompers and his colleagues’ study of the venture capital industry surfaces both the widespread homophily and the financial benefit of diversity. They looked at almost 3 decades of investment and performance data and found that if two people had the same ethnic background, it increased their chances of investing together by almost 23%. Similarly, if two people went to the same university, the likelihood of them investing together increased by more than 20%.

Unfortunately, co-investment between people that had these similarities resulted in worse investment outcomes. People with degrees from the same university who invested together had 22% lower chance of investment success. Investing alongside people with the same ethnic background reduced the probability of success by 25%. The researchers believe these results stem from ‘group think’, poor decision making by a group of very similar investors after making the investment.

We rarely reflect on just how impactful this is. We are much more likely to surround ourselves, intentionally or not, with people that are very similar to us. The people we know are likely to do the same. This impacts our beliefs and values, which influence the choices we make throughout life.

Who we know influences what we know

“Chance favors the connected mind” is a popular quote from the author Steven Johnson. In his book, Where Good Ideas Come From, he weaves together several concepts to highlight the role community plays in supporting innovation. He talks about the role of English coffeehouses in bringing the Age of Enlightenment and Parisian salons in the rise of Modernism.

Another famous example is the Solvay Conference for chemistry and physics, which started in 1911 and encourages discussion over presentation. Incredibly, 17 of the 29 attendees from 1927 have won Nobel prizes including Marie Curie, Albert Einstein, and Werner Heisenberg. Similarly, the Harlem Renaissance is considered a golden age for arts and culture in the US, attracting creators as diverse as Aaron Douglas, W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston. A more recent example is the PayPal Mafia, a group of almost 2 dozen people who all worked at PayPal. Since then, they have founded some of the world’s most successful companies such as Affirm, Kiva, LinkedIn, Palantir, SpaceX, Yelp, and YouTube.

One of the key concepts Johnson includes is called the “adjacent possible”, a theory by Stuart Kauffman from the University of Pennsylvania. The theory describes how what’s possible emerges from interactions between what currently exists. Since then, Vittorio Loreto and fellow researchers have created models to explain how this happens, sometimes creating something easy to imagine, other times creating something completely unexpected.

Of course, we and the people we care about are not always worried about coming up with truly new ideas. Interestingly, the adjacent possible also applies to ideas and information that aren’t new to the world, but are new to us individually. After resigning from a C-level role with a startup in 2014, many friends asked me what I wanted to do next. I told them I wanted to be a producer for startups, like producers develop boy bands. After a quick chuckle they’d say, “Well, since that job doesn’t exist, what are you actually going to do?” At that point, the first venture studio idealab was already 16 years old and the first talent investor Entrepreneur First was going on 3 years. These organisations, and many others like them, produce founding teams to start companies. Me and the people I knew just didn’t know about them yet.

Who we are connected to influences every aspect of our lives: what solutions to problems we can find, what career paths we are aware of, and even what treatment options are available to us. Basically, who we know impacts what we know to be possible.

Who we know influences what we do

Kristina Lerman and her colleagues studied many real-world communities and identified a phenomenon they describe as the “majority illusion“. Since some people have many more connections than others, they show up more frequently in groups. We might see a habit, opinion or even a product being used by most of our group, even if it is not common overall.

Of course, the subject is not always so benign. Lerman and her collaborators found this illusion in political communities as well as groups of teenagers using drugs and alcohol. Any time we perceive a habit or opinion to be common, keep in mind that our perception might be distorted based on who we know.

Conformity is a popular topic of psychological studies. Some of the most infamous were conducted in the 1950s by Solomon Asch from Swathmore College. In “A Minority of One Against A Unanimous Majority“, he shared the results of a series of studies highlighting the power of these social pressures. He would ask a group of people to answer a question that had an obvious correct answer. He found that almost a third of the time, people would say the wrong answer to the question if 3 or more people publicly and unanimously said the wrong answer before them.

In follow up studies, he found that 2 other people saying the wrong answer out loud first resulted in conformity 13% of the time and that 4 or more people doing the same thing didn’t increase conformity above 32%. Thankfully, having just one ally reduces our chances of conformity in this scenario. Also, being able to share our answer in private reduces our pressure to conform. Regardless, the answer to “if everyone you know jumped off a cliff, would you?” is yes, more often than we might think.

Who we knows influences our success

Mark Granovetter’s paper, “The Strength of Weak Ties”, is the classic example. The prevailing belief then, which still persists today, is that strong connections or ties between people are all that matter. A weak tie is how we might describe a connection between two people who are acquaintances. In his work, Mark used the example of finding a new job to demonstrate that strong ties often had access to basically the same information. As a result, they weren’t able to help each other identify new job opportunities.

In A Thank You Note to My Weak Ties, I mention just a handful of ways that weak ties have had an impact on my life. They have certainly unlocked career opportunities, but they have also exposed me to magical experiences and helped me forge lasting friendships. It’s also interesting to reflect on the chains of introductions (who introduced who). I have one chain that is 8 people long and counting. The number of opportunities that chain has produced alone is staggering.

In The Formula, Albert-Laszlo Barabasi lays out a set of laws about success, backed by work he and a team of researchers completed at the Network Science Institute of Northeastern University. One of the laws states, “Performance drives success, but when performance can’t be measured, networks drive success”. His team demonstrated this law was by studying the success of artists based on prices paid for their work at auction. Since the performance of artists and the quality of their art can’t be measured objectively like an athlete, it’s a fantastic example of where who we know drives outcomes.

First, they made a map of galleries and museums based on whether they ever displayed the same piece of art. Then they mapped where both successful and unsuccessful artists displayed their work over time to understand their career path. They found that artists that displayed their work at well-respected galleries and museums early in their career significantly increased the chances they could continue to do so. They were also more likely to fetch high prices at auction. If the artist started their career displaying art in places that were not as well-respected, they were more likely to drop out and stop making art at all.

For better or worse, it doesn’t end there. Not only does who we know matter, but who those people know influences us as well. In part 2, we’ll focus on how who each person knows changes the shape of the communities we are a part of. We’ll also learn how those different shapes drive outcomes for us and the people we care about.

There are very few things in life more important than our relationships and the networks of people we surround ourselves with, but we spend very little time consciously thinking about them. Many people go through life with a set of unconscious beliefs and biases about networks and relationships that don’t drive the outcomes they really want. You can think about them like arbitrary lines in the sand.

These unconscious beliefs drive behaviours that have a huge impact on our wellbeing, relationships and community. The decision whether to reach out to an old friend, go to a party where you don’t know anyone or to open up to an acquaintance when you’re afraid of being judged can be life-changing.

In this article, I examine ten unhelpful assumptions about relationships that I’ve come across in my own research and experience. Then I provide an alternative perspective for each which will help you live a more successful, connected and fulfilled life.

1 | Making Effort with your Network is Self-Serving
There’s an inherent belief in our society that relationships, whether they’re business, friendly or romantic in nature, should just ‘happen’ organically. Any attempt to be intentional is often viewed in a negative light, which explains why ‘networking’ is viewed by so many as a dirty word.

If you think of the word ‘network’ as a noun instead of a verb, notice how negative connotations you have around it disappear. As I’ve explored here, building a relationship doesn’t have to exist on a linear scale from effortless, organic connection to selfish, calculating value extraction. If we add the dimension of intention, this opens up the possibility of proactively cultivating relationships with the intention to make them mutually-beneficial, rather than purely self-serving.

2 | Cultivating a Network is for Extroverts Only
Many assume that there are certain types of extroverted, charismatic people that have an easy time meeting new people and others who are more shy and introverted that will never be good at it. While some people do have an affinity for relating to people and others find it more challenging, you don’t have to be the most outgoing person in the room to make meaningful connections.

If you’re more of an introvert and don’t like big groups of people, seek out situations that allow you to connect more easily one-on-one. A great way to do this is by asking for direct introductions from friends or colleagues, which will create a greater degree of comfort and trust in the interaction from the start. Another way is to use online communities and matching services like the ones I discuss here.

3 | If You’re Good at What You Do, You Don’t Need a Network
It’s not uncommon for people to think that if they’re good at what they do, their work will speak for itself. The problem with this ‘build it and they will come’ mindset is that it flies in the face of what we know about the way networks operate and how they influence success.

There are some situations where your performance isn’t as easily measured, like creative or other knowledge work. Networks drive success in these cases because the inability to judge your work objectively makes awareness and social proof far more important. I discussed this on the podcast with Alexander Gates here.

The truth is that even if you’re good at what you do and your outcomes can be measured, your network still matters because a single relationship can be the difference between getting access to a new opportunity or not. Finally, cultivating a diverse network also gives you access to new ideas, insights and alternative perspectives that have been shown to improve performance, which you simply wouldn’t be able to access without a network.

4 | Strong Ties are the Most Valuable
For a long time, we’ve believed that the most important relationships in our lives are strong ties with the people closest to us: our family, close friends and partners or spouses. This relates to a false assumption that shows up in many parts of our lives: quantity over quality. Of course, on one level, this makes perfect sense—why wouldn’t these relationships with people we spend lots of time with be more important than the weak ties we have with colleagues, acquaintances or friends of friends?

But weak ties can be incredibly valuable for a number of reasons as I’ve discussed here. First, they confront us with our assumptions and encourage us to reach beyond what we’re familiar with, leading to new insights and opportunities. This can be extremely valuable for our careers, our creative output and our understanding of the world around us.

Weak ties are also a valuable outlet for coping with loss, failure and stress as discussed by Mario Small in his book Someone to Talk To. Contrary to popular belief, people often avoid discussing sensitive topics with their strong ties like spouses or family members because those relationships are complex and fraught with expectations. Instead, they often confide in acquaintances or relative strangers.

5 | If You Haven’t Spoken in a While, You’re Out of Touch
Whether it’s an old friend, a former colleague or an estranged family member, chances are there are several people in your life with whom you’d love to reconnect but feel you can’t. When we’ve had frequent contact with someone in the past and suddenly stop doing so, we arbitrarily classify them as people we’re ‘out of touch’ with. Unfortunately, this belief often prevents us from reaching out, since we feel it’s no longer appropriate to contact someone who we haven’t connected with recently.

The truth is it’s impossible to regularly keep in contact with every person we’ve befriended in our lives. As we get older, we take on more responsibilities at work and at home, which makes it hard for us to actively maintain even a handful of close relationships on a continuous basis. We also relocate more often, which puts physical distance between us and the people we’ve grown close to. Classifying people as ‘out of touch’ massively shrinks the true size of your network and prevents connections that both you and the other person would value.

The major benefit of setting aside this belief is it reduces the friction to reaching out – I’ve taken the opportunity during the pandemic to reconnect with a number of people I hadn’t spoken with for a long time as I discussed here. Whenever I’m passing through a city where I know someone, I’ll also reach out regardless of whether we’ve been in contact recently and it’s almost always a wonderful experience. The lesson here is not to put people in the ‘out of touch’ box too soon because you’d be surprised how keen they actually are to hear from you.

6 | You Should Compartmentalise Life & Work
For a long time, our culture has encouraged us to compartmentalise life and work and the idea is surprisingly resilient. The desire to avoid ‘mixing’ the two together is based on the fear of one network spilling over into the other with negative consequences. What if your spouse or child says something that upsets your boss? What if your friend reveals what you were really doing last Friday afternoon to an enquiring colleague?

While some boundaries are necessary, these fears are mostly unfounded. In fact, compartmentalising life and work creates a lot of problems and that’s why I’ve never really subscribed to it. It makes you less likely to make genuine friendships at work, which makes you less happy and less productive. It increases the cognitive load of switching between work and home-related tasks. And it makes your network less resilient and leads to more fragile, context-dependent relationships. So the healthier way to view these two parts of your life is as part of one integrated whole, where your home and work are both parts of your life.

7 | Meeting Friends Online is Weird
The idea of online dating used to be taboo, but over the past decade the proportion of couples finding love through apps has tripled according to research by matchmaking site eHarmony. This has resulted in more diversity in our intimate relationships, while marriages made up of people who met online often have lower divorce rates than those made up of people who didn’t.

So if this taboo has been transcended, then why is the idea of meeting friends online still seen as strange? Well, as social animals born into an environment, an inability to make friends in our ‘natural habitat’ invites the question ‘Why can’t you just meet people naturally by yourself?’ So if you’ve made it to adulthood and don’t have an established circle of friends, the thinking goes, there must be something wrong with you. There may also be eyebrows raised if you’re in a relationship and looking to meet new friends online, because of the pressure we put on intimate relationships to meet all of our needs.

The problem is we don’t live in a world where we live our entire lives in one community any more, as I discussed in the opening episode of the podcast. It’s increasingly common for people to live in different cities and continents far away from where they grew up. Take me for example – I’ve made four big moves in my life, two of them international and have lived on 3 different continents. The truth is that making friends as an adult is challenging so joining online communities and apps can be a great way to make the habit of meeting new people easy and accessible, from the comfort of your own home.

8 | You Own Most of Your Network
If you work for an organisation, you build up a number of relationships on behalf of the business. This is especially true for external-facing roles like sales, business development and account management but it holds true to some degree for most job types. Since those relationships are often between two individuals, a common assumption is that if you were to leave, that person would ‘follow you’ to your next organisation, or that the tie would remain strong – but that’s not necessarily the case, as I explored in a podcast with Michelle Rogan here.

While you may build a connection with people through your organisation, you may not necessarily be able to provide them with the same value if you move to a different business. That’s why, if you want to retain your ‘organisational ties’ in the long run, you need to move them towards becoming ‘personal ties’ by bringing value to those relationships above and beyond what your organisation provides. This creation of multiplex ties, which I discussed with Janice McCabe here, will make your relationships more resilient because they exist in more than one context.

On a personal level, a parallel could be drawn with the breakup of an intimate relationship. The friends who have a stronger relationship with one partner will be more likely to ‘choose their side’. The key insight here is that you may not own as much of your network as you think, which means you’ll need to put more work in to make sure those relationships are resilient in the long run.

9 | If You Keep Track, You Lose the Magic
Most people believe that tracking and managing your relationships digitally destroys the magic and serendipity of human connections. These same people often also believe that it’s possible to keep track of everyone in their heads.

But the truth is it’s very hard to keep track of everyone in your head, especially on top of all our other responsibilities. Just consider how hard it is to see a good friend, who lives in the same city as you, more than ten times in a calendar year. It doesn’t sound like much at first, but it’s surprisingly tough and the difficulty of this increases considerably if you have a long term partner or children. We also fall prey to various cognitive biases, where we only think about the people we’ve spoken to recently or keep a consistent habit of meeting with someone long after the relationship has stopped serving us.

When it comes to magic the thinking goes that if you use a personal CRM or spreadsheet, you can’t possibly make meaningful connections that last. My experience runs counter to that. I’ve been keeping track of my relationships for some time and can safely say it hasn’t killed the magic – it’s enhanced it. Being proactive about nurturing relationships with the people in my life has helped me link up co-founders who went on to build a business together, connect others who became close friends and even introduce people who ended up marrying each other. I’ve invested heavily in social capital and the returns have been well worth it. All of this because I’m the kind of person who keeps people in a spreadsheet.

10 | Focus on Your Own Problems to be Happy
If you want to be happy, you should identify the problems in your life and solve them, right? We live in a self-help society where many of us are constantly seeking different frameworks and strategies to help us achieve our goals, be it in our health, our careers or our relationships. Inherent to this approach is the belief that by focusing on our own problems, we will solve them and become happier.

While these approaches can work, they are often counterproductive. The more we meditate on our own shortcomings, the more self-involved we become and the less we think about others. The great irony is that being other-oriented helps us in all the ways we seek to improve: research suggests that those who provide support to others live longer and embracing community was found to be a critical component of living a happy and healthy life by the renowned Harvard Longitudinal Study. Adam Grant’s book Give and Take also highlights how this other-oriented approach can help us achieve the success we so desperately crave in our careers. In sum, all of this suggests turning our gaze outwards a little more towards others may be one of the best things we can do for ourselves.