This is a post that we published that's been getting a lot of attention. We wrote it because in working with 100 of companies that are focused on building network effects into their startups, we couldn't help but notice how the same math and the same mechanics and the same principles were affecting our lives and how our lives have turned out and and we're turning out. And so in those of offline discussions we were having as a team, we started keeping track of a lot of these ideas.
And so we put it together in this post, and, today we're gonna read it to you. Your life and network effects. So what city you live in, who you date or marry, which job you choose, what clothes you wear, we all think we make these choices ourselves.
Certainly feels we're in full control, but it turns out that our choices, both in our startups and in our lives, are more constrained than we think The unseen hand in the mall is the networks that surround our 100 plus companies makes it impossible not to notice how the same mechanisms in math to create near destiny for companies also create near destiny for us as individuals. It's mind blowing once you see it. These constraints are highly determinative of how your life will turn out.
Guiding us inexorably down one path or another in ways that are both quite predictable, yet these forces are typically unnoticed. This article outlines how we see network effects impacting nearly every aspect of your life. With that lens, it lays out a perspective on how to make the 7 most important decisions of your life. It will hopefully help you make decisions that are more true to the kind of life you wanna lead. Section number 1, the network force, or the unseen hand.
M Smith published the wealth of nations in 17 76, in it, he envisioned markets with thousands of individuals pursuing their own independent self interest, as creating an invisible hand that unintentionally promoted the good of society. This free market model, as he called it, allowed him to point out the math and the mechanisms behind the emergence of large scale social order. Pete, in this post, we wanna do the reverse.
To use a network model to characterize the large scale human social orders and then explain how they impact each of us with an often unseen hand. In short, the networks of human connections in your life create a force that guides you down a path not always fully of your intention, through the mechanism of 100 of small interactions. Further, this network force compounds over time the longer your relationships, clicks, and communities persist, the more they shape your destiny.
Sociologists regard the evolution of our lives is resulting from observing our own lives, of course, and watching as that hundreds of founders move through their own journeys, we would go even further in the belief that its network forces that influence the majority of how our lives turn out. And 90% of those network forces are established in just seven crossroads or pivotal life events.
Given the power of network forces on your life, they should be the primary consideration when making decisions at these crossroads. Although it may feel like a complex decision at the moment, these decisions become simplified when seen primarily through the lens of joining and forming new network and changing the network topology of your life. The world seems chaotic, but it's not. Underlying all this apparent complexity we live in is some wonderfully simple math.
Follow the math to your destination. Understanding the primacy of networks will give you a superpower to see what others do not and navigate life's big decisions more effectively. Section 2, seeing the math at work in your life. So math underlies elements of the social sphere in ways we don't always see in spooky ways. Here are a few exam should guide your decision making in the 7 crossroads of your life. Underlying it all is math, always back to the math.
Did you know the frequency of the words you use are determined by an underlying mathematical pattern? What's stranger is that some mathematical pattern seems to determine the sizes of cities with country, income distributions of people within an economy, income distribution among companies, how much traffic goes through different websites, on the internet, how often last names are used in society, the number of phone calls people receive, the number of people who die in wars, etcetera.
This mathematical pattern is a power law known as Ziff's law, who was first noticed as a principle of language, About a 100 years ago, physicists and linguists discovered that the 2nd most commonly used word in English is used 1 half as much as the most used word. The 3rd most used word is used one third as much as the most used word, and so forth, down through all the words in a given language.
This law turns out to hold, not just in language but in many other James, the world looks complex or chaotic on the surface, particularly in social matters, and perhaps in your own life. But underlying what we see are simple rules of math. The underlying mechanism for Ziff's law is not yet agreed on. But the main hypothesis currently is that it's an outgrowth of the principle of least effort. In short, systems that survive and operate steady state optimized for efficiency.
When they do, things tend to look like Ziff distributions. Related to your own life and even a stranger implication of Zip's law is that unconscious network forces will act on anyone or any company that gets to be an outlier in 1 or more of these Ziff distributions, bringing you back in Flint, or bringing another person company back in line to make room for your new numbers will happen without any conscious or intentional force at play.
This is a bit spooky, means that the number of inhabitants in New York City constrains and influences the number of inhabitants of LA, Seattle, Chattanooga, and all American cities in some unseen way because they are all part of the network of US Cities. Even though we are each making what feel like independent decisions about where to live, It seems that we are part of this network unconsciously influencing people to keep American cities on the Zip distribution line.
I am one of those people being pushed around, and so are you. That also implies that my income is somehow influenced by other incomes that surround me as my income fits into a zip law Currier, and my country's GDP is influenced by the other country's GDPs. If math is underlying all this, What else in my life is being affected by the larger social order? Your body and cities have predictable mathematical patterns.
Systematic efficiency also drives other mathematical laws that govern how our lives look. Another example is the 3 4th scaling law that shows up everywhere in the world as pointed out by Jeffrey West and his 2017 book Scale. The cells and energy systems of living things like humans and James, scale up in predictable patterns. A mammal that is 200 percent the size of another will only consume 150 percent of the energy, This is the 3 quarter scaling law.
That's because our cells and capillaries have evolved to be the most efficient fractal network transport system for conveying energy and nutrients to a three d body. Those same underlying mechanisms drive the math of when you'll die and why you start growing taller. This biological fractal network is very similar to the fractal network of a city that has evolved to provide energy and transportation to keep the city alive. The empirically measured numbers for cities are 17 to 20 scaling.
Still pretty remarkable energy gains for the city based on its network effect and still consistent across nearly all cities in the world. It's remarkable to think that city planners could actively try to violate the 17 20 scaling rule for cities, and the network would actively work against them in unseen ways to pull the city back towards 17 to 20 scaling factor. How do nodes on a human network work nodes, which in this case are Pete, exchange a host of things.
Sometimes, consciously, if I pay you from my bank account, sometimes unconsciously, like when you overhear me at dinner Beller someone about how I coach founders during my walks and you decide to try it with your employees. The things that these nodes exchange are, well, nearly everything. The most important ones for our discussions here are ideas, capital, connections, jobs, status, aspirations, language, requests, standards, expectations, affirmation, criticism, belonging, and physical space.
The nodes exchange more of these things when the friction is low due to physical proximity, interaction frequency, tribal trust, similarity, etcetera. The nodes also exchange more when the benefit is high due to resources gain, status gain, tribal trust gain, etcetera. In networks, the rich nodes get richer. Most things that happen in society are Pete turn and repetitive. These are called preferential attachment processes.
Which happen when something, such as money, status James, punishment, is distributed based on how much is already possessed. Most social processes are preferential attachment. For example, if 2 founders each tweet out the same great idea at the same time, the one with more status will be given credit for the idea Currier increasing their status. What's fascinating is that this is because of math.
Nodes that are ahead get picked more often by the other nodes because they are ahead and thus offer the nodes choosing them less friction and more benefit. When this gets repeated many times, it systematically directs more resources to the nodes that already have relatively more. This pattern has been so prevalent for so long, has been so annoying to the majority of people who, by definition, are not in the lead, that it's mentioned in one form or another, at least five times in the Beller.
Most famously in Matthew, quote, for to everyone who has will more be given. This is now called the Matthew effect. If you wanna have one conversation at a dinner table, six people is about the right number. Maybe 8, max. While that seems like a social decision you made yourself, the reasons behind it are mathematical. That number is similar for all of us. We all choose 6 or 8 because it's based on how many possible two way conversations links can exist between people, nodes in a group.
The formula is n James n -1, all divided by 2. Where n is the number of people. If you have a group of 6 people, that's 6 times 5 divided by 2, it equals 15 potential 2 way conversations. Which means that to focus on one conversation, you have to suppress 14 others. That's possible without being too rude, but if you add just one more person of the group, the formula becomes 7 times 6 divided by 2 equals 21. That's an additional 6 conversations to suppress.
That starts to stretch our social skills to control. The larger point here is that when groups get larger, it's an exponential change, not a linear one, and that affects social experience you have, how you interact, and ultimately, how you feel. Whether it's a dinner party, the size of your extended family, school, college, workplace, or city, with networks the math behind them puts impactful forces on how we all behave. How networks form?
In theory, the people who inhabit each layer of your life's network map could be anyone. All humanity is after all connected. As Stanley Milgram famously showed as far back as 1967, there are a maximum of 6 degrees of separation between you and any other person in the US. With the advent of the internet and global social networks like Facebook, that number may be even lower as low as three and a half degrees according to a study conducted by Facebook in 2016.
But in practice, relationships don't form at random. 5 conditions contribute to the depth and speed at which they form. 1, a context for frequent Pete interaction with a new group of people. Example, a new school, a job, a church, a club, a dorm, a living situation, and etcetera. Number 2, a high degree of overlap between relationships in that new group. Number 3, a transition period where people are open to changing or evolving their identity.
Number 4, a high density of people in geographic and network proximity. Number 5, going through something hard and perhaps fear inducing together. If you look at this list of 5, you can see why high school, college, and your first job are such important life stages. All five of the conditions are present at those different stages. What does your network want from you? You are not just the recipient of value from your network.
The people and nodes in your network want and expect and exchange from you too. They want you to validate them and support them. You are in a dialogue with the network force. As Obi wan says about the force in the original Star Wars movie, a Jedi can feel the force flowing through him. And Luke says, you mean it controls your actions, and Kenobi says partially, but it also obeys your commands. The network force is similar. You don't always see it. But it is exerting itself on you.
It wants something from you. Your network force proactively guides you down a Pete. So be careful which subnetworks and people you add into your network. When you start to see that dialogue between you and your network, the push pull, you see it everywhere. The chaos of the world diminishes a bit and becomes more understandable and predictable. And you understand more why things are the way they are and why they stay that way.
Hopefully, it will also give you insights as to where you can push to change things that should be changed. Not just about you, but about your company, your city, and your world. Your life's crossroads. Let's look with new network force eyes at the crossroads Each of us face this list of crossroads is intuitive, but few of us explicitly understand the math that guides our choices and the gravitational force our networks exert on our lives.
Further, like asteroids colliding in space to form larger asteroids, At each crossroads, we pick up greater network mass, increasing our network gravity and exponentially heightening the energy costs of changing course. The conclusion is that the compounding nonlinear math of networks means that they should be primary considerations in our big life decisions. The network topology of your life. There are 3 levels of networks you are a part of.
Within the people network, you are a member of many networks. Your family, your high school classmates, college alumni, college company alumni, the people from an activity you do, like a soccer team or volunteering, the people who work in your building, the people who live in the people at the gym you go to. The intensity of each of the links between you and the other nodes of your networks, it turns out, will follow Dunbar's law.
Which appears to be based on the fundamental structure of your brain. We each tend to have five people who are like family, 15 intimates, 50 acquaintances and 150 total familiars that we can interact with on a regular basis. Beyond these approximate limits, humans don't do so well. You are a node in each of the networks to which you belong. The other nodes, people give you your ideas your words and phrases, your assumptions, your desires, your fears, and your Beller.
They give you your belonging, your affection, your shame, your fear, and your hopes To make an analogy, imagine that the things that these nodes all give you show up on your life dashboard as you navigate life. They appear with a lot of numbers, probabilities, rewards, costs, frictions. You make your decisions reading this dashboard and what the network presents to you there. You have agency and free will in making your decisions.
You look at the math of each decision and make the best decision you can at every point. The mathematically obvious path will feel like the right decision, but note that what even shows up on your life dashboard is put there by your network. And the math associated with each option, the rewards and frictions and probabilities are determined by your unique network, and your network is the result of the network decisions you made during the few crossroads moments in your life.
What that means is that the little decisions you make daily, the ones you fret over, are orders of magnitude less important than the crossroads decisions you make. This is true because those decisions have been placed in front of by your network and are mostly a function of your network, and they don't typically bridge you into whole new networks and new ideas and new options. Crossroad number 1, what family you're born into. You don't get to choose this 1.
For better or worse, your family is the fundamental layer of your network topology, seeing your family through the lens of the network forces model, can reveal the hidden depth of that influence. Network clusters influence us in proportion to how frequently we interact with them, how early we adopt them, strong and reciprocal our ties are with the other members, how much they are reinforced by overlapping shared connections, and how long we expect those connections to last.
In all of these measures, few of our other networks in life can rival the family network. First, since you usually live in the same house with your family for a large part of your life, geographical proximity makes frequency of interaction extremely high and friction to interact very low. Number 2, your individual relation with one family member, usually a strong tie, is reinforced by all the other family members you share in common.
3rd, We expect family relationships to persist through our entire lives and expectation formalized in most human cultures as a deeply embedded social norm. There's a long shadow of the future with our family members. We know they'll always be there, so we're willing to invest and sacrifice for our family relationships more than for non family. 4th, family ties have higher bandwidth than others because we see labels like mother or son as identity defining.
Family relationships straddle the line between who you know and who you are. 5th, future relationships outside the family network Example, friends or James, will be impacted and reinforced by your family. The closer you get to someone, the more they interact with your family, and the more likely it becomes that they develop their own ties with your family members.
6th, all of the powerful factors above are superimposed by and reinforce with our biological drive to connect with others who share our genes. Now that we can see how families are uniquely influential relative to other networks, It's clear why we so often adopt our cosmological religious views, linguistic dialect, political leanings, dietary preferences, and world views from them, despite such things not being genetically heritable. You go through life thinking such things are innately you.
But you didn't adopt your identity in a vacuum. Had you been raised by a different family? You would likely be a very different you. Our family network impacts what networks we are exposed to and which ones we are constrained from. Family nodes have preferences and push links to other networks on us in the form of introductions to schools, places to live, jobs and spouses. There are also prohibitions on fraternizing with the wrong nodes in certain networks.
Your family is a low friction high impact network because of that underlying math when making life decisions, most people choose the options that most align with their core family network. Be aware of this as you be aware of this if you want to be more conscious in directing where your life path will lead. Your family network is the one you don't get to choose. And in that sense, it's not fair, but it's not destiny. Think of it as another network force, albeit a very powerful one.
That puts data on your dashboard. Crossroad number 2, your high school network. High school networks are especially important because they're influential when we are forming our identities and worldviews as young adults. High school networks are also correlated with academic achievement, work habits, and even college admission, defining access to future networks and building a vibrant life of your choosing. Like family, where you go to high school isn't usually a choice.
But if you do have this option still ahead of you or if you have children and can choose for them, don't underestimate its importance. High schools are typically the 1st peer networks we join that are large enough to have a diverse array of subgroups, better known as high school clicks. As such, they present us with our first significant network based decision. Who to associate with in high school.
The Morgan, high schoolers place on popularity, their status in the social hierarchy of their peers, show that we intuitively understand the importance of networks, even in early age. In seeking status or popularity, we are in part looking to maximize our options in terms of which clicks we can elect to join or form. For most teenagers, that optionality matters deeply. How does status work, Why does status give you options? Because status lights up the network.
It's a pure shot of preferential attachment we mentioned earlier. Sure. Nodes on the network with money attract more money. Nodes with more access attract more access. Nodes with more attention attract more attention, but nodes with status attract all of the above. Nodes of all types want to associate with high status nodes because it will improve their own status. Winning status becomes the singular folk of life for many teens, and not a few adults persist in that goal.
Adult parents of a high school teen may see it as melodramatic or irrational how much their kids care about their status, reputation, and friends at this stage in life, especially compared with the more important things like academic accomplishment. But from the vantage point of a teenager, social obsession is quite rational. And though it's easy to dismiss teenage behavior as a rational and or Morgan driven, there are serious consequences to the networks we join early in life.
For example, academic achievement in high school has been shown to be directly influenced by friends. Quote, high achieving students strive for high achieving friends. Low achievers strive for low achieving friends. And the differences in achievement between the high and low achievers will be exacerbated by the friends they make. According to one 2011 Harvard study, all kinds of traits from body weight to happiness are heavily influenced by network clusters.
Throughout your life, your click helps define you. The same study also found that the presence of friends in class has a positive and significant effect on test scores. Moreover, as your first Pete based network, you form after you've come of age, your high school friends have a particular influence on your lifelong identity, your taste in music, your work ethic, your fashion sense and your life aspirations, which is only rivaled by family, and in some cases, even surpasses it.
It's not just during high school, that high school networks matter. Those who go to college and build a career in the same cosmopolitan areas their high school are likely to retain some parts of their teenage throughout their lifetime, usually forming a core part of the network. All this network force taken into account, which high school you go to matters a lot. Imagine the impact of moving a kid from, for instance, Taiwan or Spain to the US or vice versa for high school.
How much of a difference would that make to the trajectory of a person? The networks presented to them, the ideas, the sports, the foods, the language, the friends. Imagine moving from Arkansas to, for instance, Phillips Secretary Academy in New Hampshire for high school. Intuitively, we know this will make a difference, but we see the mechanics of that difference more clearly when we see it through the lens of network forces.
When navigating the question of which high school to attend or if you don't have a choice, who to make friends with as a high school student, or which kinds of people to encourage your kids to befriend if you're a parent, although good luck with getting them to listen. Ask yourself the following questions. First, how big is the high school? The bigger the high school, the bigger the alumni network, which may influence your ability to choose future networks like college, spouse, and jobs.
How diverse is the school so you can find nodes and subnetworks that fit you best. With more options, there's a higher probability. You can find a high achieving subnetwork in an area you can be ambitious and high achieving. Number 3, How strong is the affinity of school graduates? Higher affinity indicates stronger network links between nodes and the network that the network is more valuable to the graduates. How much do they brag that they went to that high school?
How often do they come back for unions? How passionate are they about the brand of the school? Do they use it as a strong identity pay? Or are they indifferent? Those would indicate stronger network links between nodes in the network. And 4th, how important is academic success to high status students in this high school?
The more that popularity or status positively correlates with academic success, the more that short term social incentives will be aligned with achievements that will serve you or your kids in the long term.
Parents and ambitious teams often mistake high school for a competition to get into a good college, either through academic achievement or sports, but focusing on the sound and fury of competing grades and spots on the Varsity team, they missed the higher importance of the network dynamics at stake. In high school, putting yourself in a position to form a large number of strong relationships The right network nodes can make all the difference.
Not to get ahead, but to create a vibrant, amazing life of your choosing. Crossroad number 3, college network. You should choose your college based on its network of students and the geographic network they inhabit more than the course of study or sports teams. If you choose the right people to be around in college, they will open up ideas, relationships, jobs, aspirations, attitudes, and resources that fit with you and a virtuous cycle will be set in motion.
Your network will ask you to be your best self and live your best life like a trainer at the gym. In this way, your college network will have an exponential impact on your College networks have many characteristics that make them powerful. 1st, geographic density creates frequent interactions between the nodes, giving network bonds a chance to form and strengthen. 2nd, there's a long duration of network formation. 4 years is a long time. A lot happens in 4 years.
Number 3, it's a closed selective network. This is powerful for 3 reasons. First, your reputation matters. People are more likely to have heard about you via a third party and treat you differently according to your reputation. Second, if you meet another student, the chances of them knowing someone you know is much higher than someone you make outside the closed network. There's a between you and other students.
And as network theory predicts, shared connections between Pete people vastly heighten the chances of them forming a strong bond. And third, the likelihood of repeat interaction between students is very high. The 4th reason that college networks have characteristics that make them powerful is that like with family, these networks cross from who you know who you are. Identity formation takes place at this age, and thus connections are likely to last longer.
5th, when you choose a college, you are also choosing a geography people tend to end up working and living in the same geographical proximity as their college, keeping them close to their college friends. 6th, people tend to end up working in the same industries as the people in their college network. 7th, it's considered a social norm that you should build and value your network in college. So others are more receptive to building new and strong bonds.
8, given your biological age, it's a good time to look for a partner. The network upshot of this is that many people will find their spouse at college or at least find someone who they think likely to be their spouse in the future, which impacts big life decisions, big crossroads decisions, such as where to live after college. As we'll see, this is actually a huge decision and letting your dating life dictate where you live isn't usually a wise choice.
Number 9, college teaches you the idea that you will know these people the rest of your life. Like family, there's a powerful shadow of the future that makes the bond stronger and more numerous. And number 10, all of the above elements reinforce each to see what this means in practice, consider the following scenario. As a freshman, you meet someone in class. Let's call that person Sally. You and Sally have something in Morgan, and you get along fine.
If you were asked to rate your Flint Sally, it would be a 6 out of 10. Since you share a class together, you'll see each other maybe twice a week for at least 6 months. You'll interact regularly and frequently. And even after the semester, there's a high likelihood that you'll see Sally around campus, share friends with her who might invite you both to the same parties or get together, participate in the same extracurricular activities.
All of this is the result of you being members of the same closed network and sharing the same geographical and institutional circumstances. Now suppose that, the same day when you first met Sally, after class, you go to a party off campus where you meet Bob. Bob doesn't go to your school.
Doesn't have any shared connection with you and doesn't live near you, but he does have a lot in common with you, and you spend all night at the party hanging out because you share so many interests and have so much chemistry. If you were asked to rate your affinity with Bob, it would be a 10 out of 10. 4 years later when you graduate, which friendship is most likely to have survived. How much does the math of network formation matter compared to your own preferences and agency?
Mutual affinity isn't the only thing that matters in choosing friends. It's not even the biggest factor. Network force swamps other factors. Taking network force into account, the model for relationship development doesn't just include mutual affinity. Instead, it looks more like this.
Likelihood of forming a relationship equals mutual affinity times frequency of interaction times duration of interaction, times geographical proximity, times network proximity, times number of shared connections, etcetera. Bob might be a 10 in that first factor of mutual Flint. But in all the others, he's a 1. Sally on the other hand may be a 6 out of 10 in terms of personal affinity, but she's a 10 out of 10 in all the other ways.
Each of which serves as a multiplier on the likelihood of you interacting and developing a lasting relationship with her. Another way of looking at it is that the friction of hanging out with Sally is so much lower than hanging out bog. It takes ten times less effort to hang out with Sally. So over time, the math of inhabiting a shared network, the network gravity, at hundreds of times Morgan likely to become lasting friends with her than with Bob.
This is a rough illustration of the mathematical power of networks and shaping behavior. As we see, networks impose real constraints on how you make decisions, not only in who you are likely to end up befriending, but the career opportunities dating choices Beller and information that you end up sticking with. Network's proximity James some options more appealing than they would be in a vacuum, while network distance can impose a high friction on other options.
Like being friends with Bob or choosing to adopt a belief system or a fashion sense Morgan industry job too different from those of the other people in your proximal network. If you are choosing between colleges or know someone who is, consider the following questions. Where do most of the alumni of this college end up living? When you choose a college, you're also choosing a regional network.
If you go to school in California, for example, your friends and job offers will end up being mostly in that region. I don't recruit at my Alma mater Princeton anymore because it's so low probability to pull a Princeton grad out of the NYCDC, DC, Boston, Morgan. I tried for 4 years, and each of the people I was recruiting did the math on their own life dashboards, saw the numbers put there by their networks, felt the network gravity, and each made the rational decision to stay on the East Coast.
One candidate stated New York City to move into an apartment with our college friends and work at Goldman Sachs who recruited heavily on campus 1 hour from their office in Manhattan. There's of course low friction due to the geographic network. Another moved back to Boston to be near to their girlfriend who was finishing up at Brown, and their parents were in the suburbs. They each really wanted, quote unquote, to join a startup. But network gravity and network math too much.
Now, think about how the math continues to cascade through the network. Princeton hopes that I continue to be an active recruiting node on the network providing the students with great employment options, but my cost reward math doesn't work for me. The denominator is 0, so Princeton lost a recruiter node in their network for now. Further, now those student nodes back on campus don't hear from me.
I and people like me don't add our numbers to their life dashboard saying, work for a startup in San Francisco. So the math for other ideas like Goldman Sachs and McKinsey Pete stronger over the years. The strong gets stronger. Again, preferential attachment in the network. Students look at the network math of their life dashboards and they choose the mathematically correct choice. Question number 2, what kind of career or industry do alumni of this college typically work in?
Here's an example of how this works. My twenty three year old nephew went to Trinity College in Connecticut. Most of the students from that college end up working in finance in New York City or Boston. Guess what my nephew now does. He works in finance in Boston. He followed the least resistance Pete, leading him to the highest paying highest status outcomes similar to his network. Is his choice of job about his own unique abilities and interests? No. It's the math of the networks.
He made the correct choice based on the options presented on his life dashboard by his networks. Question number 3, do you relate to the other students naturally? Will they relate to you? Do the students represent the type of aspirations, lifestyle, and interests you want for yourself? There's no point in joining a network where you won't actually bond with the other nodes, no matter how prestigious that network is. Question number 4, how big is the college?
The bigger the college, the bigger the alumni network. The bigger the alumni network, the more weak ties you have, which are great for career, marriage, and a host of other life attributes. Harvard Business School has figured this out. And has classes of 900 compared to Stanford and MIT Sloan of about 400. Question number 5, how strong is the affinity between graduates? Like with high school, how much do alumni brag they went to that college? How much do they come back for reunions?
How passionate are they about the brand of the school? Do they use it as a strong identity marker, or are they indifferent? Question number 6, is it clear what it says about the graduates that you went to that college? A clear strong brand lights up other networks because external nodes know what to expect from you if you remember. In addition, those 6 questions, and I suspect this will be controversial.
You should probably de emphasize questions like where does the college rank in US News And World Report College Prestige Flint dates back to 1981, or are the classes amazing, or is there a sports team I'm keen to play on, or is there a particular professor I wanna work with, or a particular major I want to pursue, only 27% of college grads end up with a job closely related to their major. You see college is possibly best seen as a place for network formation.
And creating the network topology you want in life. The network you join will lead you to a geography, a type of work, certain ideas about life, and a group of dating and marriage options that will all have a big influence on your life. All that network force will be pushing on you to then take the mathematically obvious path from there. One which will feel like the, quote, right decision. Crossroad number 4, your first job.
The professional relationships you formed during your first job are the seed of your professional network, which influences the arc of your whole career, from how you think about work, to how you're known, to the geography where you have advantaged job access for a long time. In working life, you see your coworkers every day of the week for 8 or more hours per day. The frequency of interaction with coworkers at this stage in life maybe even higher than what you had with your family.
Pravailing wisdom says you should pick your first job based on the highest income or the one that you're most passionate about or the skills you'll learn. Or where the day to day will be the most energizing for you. All of this is flat wrong.
In your first job, you'll work with people whose career path you wanna emulate, optimize for the network, The early professional relationships you form will have a bigger influence on your skill set, your lifetime earning potential, and the mastery of your craft, than the particulars of your job is of the income, the company perks, or the brand name on your resume.
In almost every field from theoretical physics to growth marketing, top performers were mentored, influenced by or otherwise connected to top performers. There are a couple reasons for this. First, as we saw in the high school section, high achievement is communicable. Surround yourself with high achievers and probabilities on your side. You will become like them. 2nd, innovation is contagious.
If your first job is at a place that's a breeding ground of innovation, the chances are a lot higher that you'll come across some really good ideas, especially if you wanna start a company one day. The PayPal mafia is no coincidence. Network clusters are capable of producing multiple future billionaires.
There's no upper price in terms of effort, difference in income, or even cost of living that can even become close to comparing the upside of being part of a network of high achievers in your first or second or third job. So in making a decision about where you wanna work, instead of asking, will this give me the work I wanna do daily? Is this the best offer I got in terms of income? Does this company look good on my resume? Does this company let me take as much vacation as I want?
Have free catered lunches in a fancy office? Do yourself a favor and ignore all of that. Focus on these questions instead. 1, is this job in the right city, the city I wanna live in the long term? 2, will I like and respect my coworkers? Will they like and respect me? 3, do I wanna be like my bosses someday? 4, do my coworkers career aspirations match mine? 5, am I going to be working with the best? 6, is there a strong culture in camaraderie?
7, will I have opportunities to prove myself to others at my company to build my network bonds? 8, are employees proud of their company and their brand? Do they enthusiastically recruit? Do they seek each other out when outside of work? This indicates strong network bonds are forming. Number 9, are there politics in the office that could threaten the building of strong network bonds?
Number 10, lastly, because top performers tend to congregate in rising company, If it's a startup, ask if it has strong potential defense ability against competitors, especially network effects, and whether it has the 9 habits of world class startups. Crossroad number 5, marriage, choosing a life partner. Marriage or choosing a life partner is one of the most important decisions you make in life.
It could be the source of your greatest joy, and or your greatest suffering at a very personal level. In terms of the network model, it's powerful because you are choosing someone else's full network to add to yours. This person will also share the very center Not only will parenthood be a focus in a lot of your life energies, but in addition, your children's full networks will be added to yours for the rest of your life. Children are shaped by how you nurture them as parents.
As we've seen earlier in the discussion of family, they are shaped by the networks brought to them by their parents. Your children are brought into and partially inherit the networks of both parents, including the one you choose to marry. For 60% of people, how you meet their significant other is determined mostly by who you know and who you get introduced to.
Although that's changing with the digital people network layer that's beginning to break down geographic networks and other closed networks. You know, the matchmaking sites. In 2017, 39 percent of all US marriages originated by meeting online. It is one of the most profound changes in life in the US.
And the best example of what we've been hoping the internet might do for a long time, which is moving from unchosen network forces, constraining options, to a global digital network empowering your own preferences and agency. I ran the largest self assessment testing and matchmaking company in the world. Had a 150,000,000 users and tens of personality tests written by my staff of 5 PhDs to help people connect better.
We also ran a matchmaking site with 30,000,000 users that took advantage of those test to match people. What my team told me at the time is that the most successful marriages were ones where 1, the two people were the most similar, and 2, they had shared network connections. What this means is that when you're dating someone, you're not just dating them, you're dating their networks, their friends, family, and colleagues, and vice versa. Their dating viewers.
Competibility between two people in terms of their individual characteristics is sometimes much less important than the compatibility between their network. This is one possible reason why there is a surprisingly low divorce rate amongst arranged marriages made solely on the basis of compatibility between kin networks in places like India. Although online dating is gaining ground, meeting through friends is still the most common way to meet someone.
Further, what the statistics don't yet show is how many of the 39% of Pete online had strong affinity networks already in place before meeting online, but just needed to shortcut the longer in person process with the tech layer to find each other. So how do you find a spouse? This is where Mark Granoviter's famous work on the strength of weak ties becomes relevant. Quote, the stronger the tie between 2 individuals, the larger the proportion of individuals to whom they will both be tied.
Given this, everyone in your quote, inner circle probably already knows each other. The closest friendships you have because of the structure of social network clusters will have close to a 100% degree of network overlap with you. So what this means is that your closest friends are usually very poor nodes in your network to pursue romantic interests. There are 2 possibilities if you go this route. More likely, your closest friends won't be able to introduce you to anyone new.
Number 2, more likely, your close friends introduce you to a close friend of theirs that you didn't previously know. You end up dating, and in the high percentage of cases where things don't work out, the blowback from the ruined relation ship wrecks havoc in your network cluster, forcing your friends to choose between you.
That's not to say it's impossible for people to come friends and then later become romantically involved, but for the purposes of meeting someone new, friends of the inner circle of your network map are not the best place to start. This is where your acquaintance is.
The weak ties at the outer layer of your network map become vital as we know from the work of Duncan Watts and Steven Storegats acquaintances serve as vital bridges between tightly knit network clusters for people looking to be exposed to new dating prospect job leads, ideas, beliefs, or lifestyles that differ from what they're used to. There's no better way to do it than through an acquaintance. Smart questions to ask yourself when you're single and looking to meet someone.
Number 1, which acquaintance is most likely to know a lot of people that you're compatible with. Not all people have equally large networks, and some people you know may be hubs that have a large number of connections. If you can find someone like this, they're usually quite helpful in meeting new people. Hubs frequently have weak ties to a lot of different clicks groups and subnetworks. They're usually happy to make introductions. Number 2, do you get along with their friends?
Do your friends get along with them? If you're serious about the relationship, consider whether you'd be willing to bring those people into your life. If so, it's a lot more likely that your relationship will last in the long haul. Number 3, do Pete along with their family. The importance of in laws isn't to be underestimated. It's easy to dismiss this in a culture that preaches the true love is all you need, but network theory tells us differently.
You're in laws of the core network of the person you'll be closest within life. What may seem like minor issues at first can grow into powerful problems over the long course of a lifetime. Number 4, are you in the same geographic network? When a couple is geographically challenged, it puts a real strain on their relationship. Number 5, could there be blowback if it doesn't work out?
Everyone knows why it's a bad idea to date a coworker or someone else you might on a regular basis if you break up network forces or why. The same applies if you share a lot of mutual friends, especially if you ever get divorced. You put your friends in a position where they have to choose. And you risk losing some of the relationships you've built up over a lifetime. Don't underestimate this risk. Crossroad number 6, where you live.
Where you live powerfully impacts the relationships and directions of your life in ways you may not even realize. When coming out of college, this is even more important to your life than your choice of job. As mentioned previously, physical proximity is predictive of network formation. Cities from a network perspective are like scaled up colleges. Network density, frequency, similarity, and status accumulation all drive urban network formation.
Cities do a great job of helping us form our networks because they are networks themselves, both physical and social. Where you live largely determines who you know, who you know largely determines the riches of your life and your access to information and wealth. Your network, of course, is a form of wealth. It brings your friends, career opportunities, or a spouse. Committing to a geography and developing a network increases your access to all the experiences and resources you might want.
As the great SARuer, partner at CRV, an investor in DoorDash, ClassPass, Pete, Bird, and many other well known companies said to me recently, staying in the SF Bay area after business school was the most impactful decision I've ever made. Everything else was noise. It's certainly the most common life advice I give Pete. Pick your city first. Everything flows from that. Your job, spouse, friends, income, and other opportunities flow from that core choice. The reason is network forces.
It's important to note that your choice of city may be greatly influenced by the network force from the earlier networks you've accumulated. Take note of that. And steal yourself to have the courage to make what sociologists call a, quote, major move. If you decide that move makes sense, Flint, it most likely does. Making a clean break to move to the place that would facilitate your best life is hard. Network forces keep you on your path. The network wants something from you.
Your boyfriend, a parent, high school friends, college friends, your weekend sports team, your roommate, your comfortable job. This is true for those of us lucky enough to have a lot of resource isn't equally true for those with far fewer resources.
In this article in the New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell reported on research done by sociologist, Karina Giref, on people at the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum who were forced to undertake a major move out of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina, to growing cities like Houston. Interestingly, their standard of living ended up rising significantly just as a consequence of the move, even though they were forced to do it by disastrous circumstance.
It turned out to be a positive move for most of them, but they would never have undertaken it if they hadn't been forced to by a natural disaster, as Gladwell points out, it gave them, quote, a chance to rethink what they do. But more importantly, it gave them a new network geographic context, new network forces. New resources, new ideas, jobs, and commonly accepted standards.
It could be that this dependence on location based networks is changing, thanks the internet and telecommunications in general since it's now easier to maintain and form networks in spite of geographical distance, but we're just 25 years into the digital world. And that process will take 50 to 75 more years to play out.
In the startup industry, digital tools like Signal and the company brief open up access to knowledge and communication formally only available to people living in Silicon Valley for many years. Some people are able to use the internet to find, Beller and maintain human network, usually around a niche or an interest like gaming or cars or fashion. For most, however, the internet simply reinforces or superimposes upon the networks they built in real life.
For everyone who doesn't do most of their network online, physical location matters. The network math of cities underlies their attractiveness and Beller explain why the planet is rapidly urbanizing. In short, because of a city's network properties, as it gets bigger, it gives its citizens 15% more of what they want in terms of income ideas, speed, and stimulation, and it costs 15% less to give it to them. In the form of roads, electricity, water, gas lines, gas stations, and safety services.
That 30% gap is significant and is driven by a city's network effects. The higher rate of social interactions in a city has important consequences for your ongoing network topology. Larger cities mean more access to network cluster. Leading to a great diversity of talent ideas and backgrounds versus smaller cities. It also means meeting new people be easier, but forging strong bonds could possibly be harder.
With all this in mind, when deciding where to live, here are some questions to ask yourself. Number 1, are the people in this city like me? Each city has a vibe that may or may not fit with you. Each city calls ambitious people to improve in some area. New York City calls you to earn more money. Seattle and Portland call you to recreate more. DC calls you to be more connected. San Francisco calls you to create more, invent more.
It's the garage where the crazy uncle is inventing crazy inventions. If you can find a city that drives you in the way you want to be driven, then you're in luck, and you should settle down and build your network and your life with your people. If one city doesn't call you, find a subnetwork of people that call to you in a city that you don't mind. Number 2, how long can you see yourself staying here? The networks you build when living somewhere atrophy when you move somewhere else.
Your networks are a form of Beller, and every time you move, you're resetting your bank account. Number 3, how important is your career to you? Because GDP scales non linearly with population size and cities, your career earnings will grow faster in a city than elsewhere. More importantly, the opportunity to build out your professional network and meet top talent in your industry will be higher in bigger cities. Number 4, how much do you enjoy a fast pace of life?
In a big city, everything moves faster. People walk faster, opportunities arise more that you meet new people and encounter new ideas more often, it's all an inevitable consequence of greater network size and density. Number 5, how much do you enjoy or value meeting new people? If you're looking to build out the middle and outer layers of your network hierarchy, cities are a great place to do it. Number 6, Are the core parts of your network topology filled in?
Do you have close relationships that you're happy with and can rely on? If not, a smaller city might be a better place for you than a big one. Crossroads number 7, reassessments. At any point, you can choose to reassess the course you're on. The network gravity has been building up since your birth and gets stronger over time. Each network adding and integrating with the others, changing the math on your dashboard until it's near Destiny.
But you can decide to ignore that network math and forcibly make a change. This actually gets easier for older people who are done with their shoulds When they've raised their kids, built their careers, earned some money, that's why you see midlife crises. The network force has been guiding someone for their whole lives And then it stops exerting so much pressure, and the person can consider their own innate interests and agency.
The most lasting and effective way to change your life is to change who you're surrounded by. Since networks so powerfully shape who we are and what we do, the best way to change ourselves is to change our networks. Not seeing the network is a big limitation in the way we look self development and self transformation. We think we can just roll out of bed one day, make a few New Year's resolutions, and become a new person.
But this approach ignores the biggest part in the equation of who you are and what defines your life, the network force. This isn't to absolve us of responsibility for our actions and to shift the blame to others, rather it's to underline the fact that we are powerfully strained by our network contexts.
So the smartest use of energy for those of us looking to make a change can often be to carefully reassess the networks we're part of, and find ways to join new ones that are better suited to the life path we wanna be on. On the flip side, if life is going well and you're happy, understand how important networks are. Double down on your relationships. Cherish the people in your life and be aware of the value of their relationships and the networks you're part of.
Our networks are our most valuable resource. They are the way that our lives express themselves. Those networks are made up of all the people you care about, the people you inspire, move, and help to live their best lives. This is James Currier, and that was your life in network effects. Find the full essay at nfx.com/essays and subscribe there to get an email newsletter in your mailbox with articles like this on an ongoing basis.