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by
Reid Hoffman
Read between
January 20 - March 4, 2019
Think of it as IWe. An individual’s power is raised exponentially with the help of a team (a network).
Mark Pincus
Out of an estimated one billion professionals in the world, well over 100 million of them are on LinkedIn, with more than two new members joining every second.
Here’s where the caveat to the Six Degrees of Separation theory comes in. Academically, the theory is correct, but when it comes to meeting people who can help you professionally, three degrees of separation is what matters. Three degrees is the magic number because
when you’re introduced to a second- or third-degree connection, at least one person in an introduction chain personally knows the origin or target person.
If you look at a LinkedIn user’s “Network Statistics” page, which shows the size of a member’s professional network
to the third degree and accounts for any redundancy, you’ll see it’s still a big number (see chart on this page). A person with 170 connections on LinkedIn is actually at the center of a professional network that’s more than two million people strong. Now you know why one of LinkedIn’s early marketing taglines was: YOUR NETWORK IS BIGGER THAN YOU THINK. It is!
Better, as
the introduction appears to benefit both parties. When you reach out to someone, be clear about how you intend to help the person to whom you’re being introduced—or at least how you’ll ensure it’s not a waste of that person’s time.
If you spend thirty minutes researching a person in your extended network (LinkedIn is a great place to start), and tailor your request for an introduction to something you’ve learned, your request will stand out.
If you are not receiving or making at least one introduction a month, you are probably not fully engaging your extended professional network.
By now you should see why there’s a big difference between being the most connected person and being the best connected person.
The value and strength of your network are not represented in the number of contacts in your address book. What matters are your alliances, the strength and diversity of your trust connections, the freshness of the information flowing through your network, the breadth of your weak ties, and the ease with which you can reach your second- or third-degree connections.
Helping someone out means acknowledging that you are capable of helping.
Everyone is capable of offering helpful support or constructive feedback.
A person’s status depends on the circumstances and on who’s around.
But you can develop habits of behavior and habits of thinking that increase the likelihood that you find yourself in the right place at the right time. You can, in other words, deliberately increase the quality and quantity of career opportunities—even if you don’t know what and where
they are just yet.
To cultivate, identify, and generate an opportunity takes ongoing investment.
the more you try, the more you strengthen your intuitive sense of how, where, and why opportunities enter your career.
LinkedIn surfaces job recommendations automatically based on your profile content, location, and attributes of people like you—and it will display these jobs to you even if you haven’t indicated you are looking for a job. It was functionality inspired by a recruiter who said, “Everyone’s looking for an opportunity, even if they don’t know it.”
The key, then, is to raise the likelihood that you stumble upon something valuable—namely, by courting good randomness and seeing the opportunities that reveal themselves.
You won’t encounter accidental good fortune—you won’t stumble upon opportunities
that rocket your career forward—if you’re lying in bed.
When you do something, you stir the pot and introduce the possibility that seemingly random ideas, people, and places will collide and form new combinations and opportunities.3 By being in motion, you are spinning a web as wide and as tall as possible ...
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It’s easy to say you should be in motion—but move whe...
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As entrepreneur Bo Peabody says, “The best way to ensure that lucky things happen is to make sure a lot of things happen.”4 Make things happen, and in
the long run, you’ll design your own serendipity, and make your own opportunities.
For example, one idea that emerged from the Junto was the need for a liberal arts higher education that would blend study of the classics with practical knowledge. Franklin teamed up with fellow Junto member William Coleman and several others to start what is now the University of Pennsylvania. It was the first multidisciplinary university in America.
They called their group Rotary because the location of their weekly meeting rotated among the members.
As the club grew in size, to maintain informality, they fined members who addressed other members by anything but their first name. No surnames or titles or “Mister” allowed.7 Today, there are more than 1.2 million remarkably engaged members in 30,000 Rotary clubs around the world.
Scott Heiferman, Meetup’s CEO,
Steven Johnson says, “Chance favors the connected mind.” Connect your mind to as many networks as did Benjamin Franklin, Joseph Priestley, J. P. Morgan, and others, and you’ll be one step closer to spotting and seizing those game-changing opportunities that great careers are made of.
No matter where you are in your career, there will be moments when you feel like your back is against the wall. When you feel like you’re going nowhere. When you may be short on funds or allies or both. When no one is knocking at your door inviting you to stuff. These situations call for the most entrepreneurial
“Air Bed and Breakfast”
Tim Westergren
He was inspired to start Internet radio business Pandora back in 1999 after hearing that Geffen Music dropped singer Aimee Mann from their label because she didn’t have enough paying fans.
Five months later, with still no job opportunities in sight, he posted an ad to Facebook targeted to other users employed at five companies: Microsoft, Apple, Netflix, YouTube, and IDEO (a design and innovation consultancy based in Palo Alto). The ad featured his picture and title and read as follows: “Hi, my name is Eric and my dream is to work for Microsoft. I’m a MBA/MFA with a strong media background. Can you help me? Please click!”
The lesson is that great opportunities almost never fit your schedule.
And in addition to being inconvenient,
the opportunity you generate or find will likely be shrouded in ambiguity and uncertainty. Frequently, it won’t be completely clear that it’s better than another opportunity. You may be tempted to “keep your options open” and continue to mull things over, as opposed to committing to the breakout you think you’ve identified or generated. That would be a mistake.
To move forward in your career, you have to commit to specific opportunities as part of an iterative plan,
despite doubt and despite inconvenience. If not now, when?
So we are all risk takers. But we are not all equally intelligent about how we do it.
Neuropsychologist Rick Hanson puts it this way: “To
keep our ancestors alive, Mother Nature evolved a brain that routinely tricked them into making three mistakes: overestimating threats, underestimating opportunities, and underestimating resources (for dealing with threats and fulfilling opportunities).”
Anxiety about how your boss will react to an unconventional proposal will overpower feelings of optimism that he’ll be impressed by your work.
The first step is to remind yourself that the downside of a given situation is probably not as bad, or as likely, as it seems.
Instead, most simply tried to get a handle on a single yes-or-no question: Could they tolerate the outcome if the worst-case scenario happened?
