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Your Life is Driven by Network Effects
Marriage/Life Partner
Choosing a life partner is one of the most important decisions one makes and can be one's joy or suffering. When we are marrying we are adding a whole new network to our existing network, and it affects not only us but our future generations.
Extremely close friends are poor network nodes for marriage due to a network overlap effect, making your weaker ties more vital. Acquaintances become a bridge between two network clusters, exposing people to new ideas, beliefs, and lifestyles.
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Key Ideas
Network Effects
Network effects are the unseen forces that are guiding our destiny and exerting a powerful intervention on our lives, creating energy that escorts us down a path that is not always fully our intention.
90 percent of these network forces are established in 7 major life events or crossroads, which compound over time: Our Family, High School Network, College Network, First Job, Marriage, Our City, Reassessments.
Zipf's Law
Zipf's law is a mathematical probability that states that in a given set, the most frequently used data value (or word) is used twice as often as the next most common value. This is true in various statistical sets like income distribution in companies, internet traffic, phone calls received, and language.
One of the implications of this law is there are unconscious network forces and mathematical patterns governing our lives, with human beings just being nodes exchanging information.
Dinner Party Mathematics
When six to eight people are conversing at a dinner party, it is easy to focus on one conversation, but if the number is higher (say 15), then two-way conversations are more likely.
When groups get larger, the change is exponential, not linear, affecting one's social experience.
Six Degrees Of Separation
The Six Degrees Of Separation theory states that there are a maximum of six degrees (or layers) of separation between any two people in the world. This is now verified by social media connections (like Facebook).
Five conditions of Network Forming
We all are interacting with our layers of connections, and five conditions (catalysts) contribute to forming our network:
- Frequent and repeated interactions withing new groups of people
- A high degree of overlapping of relationships in new groups
- When people are changing and evolving their identity
- A high density of people (Network Proximity)
- Handling a difficult challenge or situation together
Network Levels
There are three major Network Levels:
- Physical Network: Our core network.
- The People Network: Our school, college, company, and social get-together network.
- The Digital People Network: LinkedIn, Facebook
Dunbar's Law, which is based on the brains 'node' structure, states that humans tend to interact most with 5 family members, 15 intimates, 50 acquaintances, and 150 total familiar people that we see on a regular basis.
Family
We don't get to choose this fundamental layer of our network topology.
Families and extended families are uniquely influential in shaping our networks, and we tend to adopt our cosmological views, dietary preferences, religious, linguistic dialect, and worldview from them.
High School
Our high school isn't usually one's choice, and are the first peer network that one has to deal with.
High Schools work on popularity and status, and a constant game of winning and losing is played among teenagers, shaping their future life. Certain other factors like school size, locality, diversity, and the level of academic success determine our network.
College
Your college network can have an exponential impact on your life and opens up ideas, relationships, jobs, aspirations, attitudes, and resources, setting a virtuous circle in motion.
College also influences where you live, and who you end up dating (or marrying). The four years spend with people your age, result in repeated interactions forming lasting bonds.
The First Job
Our professional relationships during our first years of work are the seed of our professional network, influencing the arc of our career.
Normally we pick the highest paying job, but if we think of networks as a form of wealth, our first job should be with people whose career path we want to follow. As high achievement is communicable through word of mouth in the network, and innovation is contagious, it pays to be with the right people.
Where We Live
Cities and our neighborhood are our most readily available, fully functioning networks, both physically and socially. Everything flows out of our city: our job, spouse, income, friends, and new opportunities.
Cities naturally have a higher rate of social interactions, and human networks within the city are formed using offline 'clubs' and social events and also online tools that facilitate offline networking.
Reassessments
At any point in time, one can forcibly make a change. Changing one's surroundings and the resulting network has a big effect on one's self-transformation and lives.
Our networks, build of people we care about and those who care for us, are our most valuable resource, making us express our lives.
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Key Ideas
Network diversity
Our networks are usually formed around shared experiences and they influence the way we see the work, how we think and the opportunities we give and receive.
So a lack of diversity inside ...
Professional networks
They usually comprise the colleagues we work with (team members or project collaborators). It may not seem like it, but we do have a lot of influence over the broader makeup of these networks.
We choose the people we spend time with (at lunch or coffee), the people we mentor or the people we seek advice from. Being intentional about the diversity of that network will result in better decision making for us and our companies.
Social networks
They have an influence over the way we think and ultimately, over our work outputs.
To diversify our social networks, we can start by following and connecting with people that hold different identities and viewpoints.
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Key Ideas
Social Narrowing
Social Narrowing is a subconscious process in which we are spending time with people who are similar to us.
This phenomenon can be a problem when we need new resources, ideas or a new ...
Change Your Filters
- When we meet people, we look at them and subconsciously make a decision in our heads about their importance, relevancy or their being of any interest to us.
- The challenge is to fight these filters and invite people in your life who are of the least interest to you.
- Identify and connect with people whom you wouldn't normally connect with, adding diversity to your social universe.
People We Don't Reach Out To
The lower your socioeconomic status is, the less diverse are your social networks, as we choose to reach inwards for advice, instead of outwards.
The tweak to apply here is to reach out and ask for advice with the network of people whom you normally will not connect with. Remind yourself of your strengths and values, if you feel intimidated by wanting to take advice out of your comfort zone.
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Key Ideas
Homo Narrativus
We, humans, seek stories.
We are essentially ‘story finders’ looking for meaning, narrative and shape in everything around us. We tend to not believe in improbable...
Bias Towards The Individual
Stories built around individuals provide relatability and a sense of being in the shoes of the people involved, living in the narrative.
Our tendency to give a ‘face’ and a story to a group or collection of people made us invent a dominant leader of the group, like the President, or the Team Captain, or the Monarch.
How Fame Alters Our Perceptions
- The popularity or fame of an individual or a piece of art (like a painting, song or a movie) alters how we perceive it.
- The characteristics and behaviour of the people among whom fame spreads matters more than the actual merit or quality.
- A study showed that more people liked the songs that were topping the charts, copying the behaviour of other listeners, and if the same songs were arranged randomly, they were not chosen or liked that much.
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