Your Life Is Driven by Network Effects

Where does the college rank in US News & World Report college prestige list that dates back to 1981Are the classes amazing?Is there a sports team I’m keen to play on?Is there a particular professor I want to 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.

Smart questions to ask yourself when you’re single and looking to meet someone:

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

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

Crossroad #5 – Marriage/Choosing a Life PartnerMarriage, 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... See more

Relationships don’t form at random. 5 conditions contribute to the depth and speed at which they form:A context for frequent, repeated interaction with a new group of people (e.g. a new school, job, church, club, dorm, living situation, etc.).A high degree of overlap between relationships in the new group.A transition period where people are open t... See more

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

Did you know the frequency of the words you use are determined by an underlying mathematical pattern?What’s stranger is that same mathematical pattern seems to determine the sizes of cities within a country, income distributions of people within an economy, income distribution among companies, how much traffic goes to different websites on the Inte... See more

Where you live largely determines who you know. Who you know largely determines the richness of your life and your access to wealth and information. Your network is a form of wealth. It brings you friends, career opportunities, or a spouse. Committing to a geography and developing a network increases your access to all the experiences and resources... See more