Your Life Is Driven by Network Effects

Do yourself a favor and ignore all of it. Focus on these questions instead:Is this job in the right city? The city I want to live in long term?Will I like and respect my co-workers? Will they like and respect me?Do I want to be like my bosses someday?Do my co-workers career aspirations match mine?Am I going to be working with the best?Is there a st... See more

The underlying mechanism for Zipf’s law is not yet agreed on but the main hypothesis is that it’s an outgrowth of the Principle of Least Effort. In short, systems that survive and operate at steady state optimize for efficiency. When they do, things tend to look like Zipf distributions.

What kind of career or industry do alumni of this college typically work in? Here’s an example of how this works. My 23-year-old nephew went to Trinity College in Connecticut. Most of the students from that college end up working in finance in NYC or Boston. Guess what my nephew now does? He works in finance in Boston. He followed the least resista... See more

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 want to lead.

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 400.How strong is the affinity... See more

This mathematical pattern is a power law known as Zipf’s Law.

Nodes, which in this case are people, exchange a host of things. Sometimes consciously if I pay you from my bank account, sometimes unconsciously like when you overhear me at dinner telling someone about how I coach founders during walks and you decide to try it with your employees. The nodes exchange more of these things when the friction is low d... See more

The world seems chaotic. But it’s not. Underlying all this apparent complexity 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.

Where do most of the alumni of this college end up living? When you choose a college you are 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 gra... See more