Your Friends Are Not That Important Compared To Weak Ties
It's not your closest friends the ones that have the greatest impact on you. Not by a long shot.
From the schoolyard to the boardroom, people are more likely to form close relationships with those most like themselves.
As a result, a cluster of strong ties—such as the urban tribe—is typically an incestuous, homogeneous group.
This is a problem because, while the urban tribe may be the most supportive figures in our twenties, they are not the most transformative.
The urban tribe may bring us soup when we are sick, but it is the people we hardly know—those who never make it into our tribe—who will swiftly and dramatically change our lives for the better.
I was surprised when I read it too.
The people that can influence our life the most are not our friends. Whaaat? Let’s keep reading.
He surveyed workers in a Boston suburb who had recently changed jobs. How, he wanted to know, had they found their new positions?
What Granovetter discovered was that it wasn’t close friends and family who were the most valuable during the job hunt. Rather, more than three-quarters of new jobs had come from leads from contacts who were seen only “occasionally” or “rarely.”
This led Granovetter to write a groundbreaking paper titled “The Strength of Weak Ties” about the unique value of people we do not know well.
Weak ties are people we have met—or are connected to somehow—but do not currently know well.
They are the coworkers we rarely talk with. The neighbor we only say hello to. The acquaintances we keep meaning to go out with. The friends we lost touch with years ago. They are our former employers. Our former professors.
Weak ties are anyone we have ever had contact with, as well as everyone those people have ever had contact with. Weak ties are anyone and everyone who is not, currently, a strong tie.
Weak Ties are the way we learn about new things and opportunities. Sounds reasonable.
This happens because:
Here we get to what another sociologist, Rose Coser, called the “weakness of strong ties,” or how this incestuous, homogeneous group holds us back.
Our strong ties feel comfortable and familiar, but, other than support, they may have little to offer. They are usually too similar—even too similarly stuck—to provide more than sympathy.
They often don’t know any more about jobs or relationships than we do. And whatever it is they do know we have likely heard by now.
Weak ties, on the other hand, feel too different from us—or literally too far away from us—to be close friends. But that’s the point. That’s their strength.
Because they’re not just figures in an already ingrown cluster, weak ties give us access to something fresh. New jobs, new information, new apartments, new opportunities, new ideas, and even new people to date almost always come from outside the inner circle.
That’s because weak ties know things and people that we don’t know. They have perspectives we may not have considered.
Weak ties are like bridges you cannot see all the way across, so there is no telling where conversations with them might lead.
Let’s run through an example.
In the book there is a guy named Cole:
He eyed a posting for a good tech job at a high-profile start-up, but he felt his résumé was now too shabby to apply.
As luck would have it—and it is often luck—Cole remembered that an old friend from high school, someone he bumped into about once every year or two, worked at the start-up.
He got in touch, and this friend put in a good word to HR. After a handful of interviews with different people in the company, Cole was offered the position.
The hiring manager told Cole he had been chosen for three reasons:
His engineering degree suggested he knew how to work hard on technical projects,
His personality seemed like a good fit for the team, and
The twentysomething who vouched for him was well liked in the company.
The rest, the manager said, Cole could learn on the job.
A guy who was a distant friend from college changed his life. Damn.
But wait, is this mmm… ethical?
When I encourage twentysomethings to draw on the strength of weak ties, there is often a fair amount of resistance: “I hate networking” or “I want to get a job on my own” or “That’s not my style” are common reactions.
I get it, but let me be clear: The strength of weak ties isn’t nepotism.
Nepotism is when someone receives something they don’t deserve because of their connections—usually their close connections.
The strength of weak ties is the science of how information spreads. It is about how people who do deserve chances or opportunities let other people help them find those chances or opportunities.
If you prefer, think of the strength of weak ties as a kind of crowdsourcing or as a way of using the wisdom of the crowd.
That sounds fine to me. Looks like that’s how the world works:
I work in one of the top three companies in my industry, and literally, I know only one person who actually got a job here without knowing someone.
Everyone got it because they knew somebody who knew somebody.
There was a hospital where I wanted to work, and I kept looking for them to post some job openings, but they never did.
I finally called a friend of mine who worked there. I’d put that off because I wasn’t sure if that was wrong or if I’d be putting her in a bad spot.
But right away she gave me the name of someone to call at the hospital. When I did call, they were about to post a job. I got it before they even posted. Everything can change in a day. Especially if you put yourself out there.
Alumni networks from college and high schools can be really helpful, and if there’s not an official network, go through the Facebook group or LinkedIn group for your school.
Look through and see where people work. If there is someone who does something you want to do, call or email them for an informational interview. That is what everybody ultimately does.
Most twentysomethings yearn for a feeling of community, and they cling to their strong ties to feel more connected.
Ironically, being enmeshed with a group can actually enhance feelings of alienation, because we—and our tribe—become insular and detached.
Over time, our initial feeling of being part of a group becomes a sense of disconnection with the larger world.
Close friends are imperative to our health. There is lots of research about that. But I never considered the opposite.
The people we don’t know that well can change our lives dramatically.
Such a powerful concept. Weak Ties change our lives. So cool.
That is all for today. If you want to read the book I took the quotes from, the link is at the end of the post. Trigger warning: a lot of people love it but there are a couple who hate it with all their hearts. You can see the reviews for yourself.
See you next time! Have a wondrous day.
Links
All the quotes are taken from:
The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter And How to Make the Most of Them