Crossroad #6 – Where You LiveWhere to live powerfully impacts the relationships and direction 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. 

In addition to that, and I suspect this will be controversial, you should probably de-emphasize questions like:

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 beliefs. They give you your belonging, your affection, your shame, your fear, and your hopes.

Observing our own lives, and watching as 100s of founders move through their own journeys, we would go even further in the belief that it’s network forces that influence the majority of how our lives turn out. And 90% of those network forces are established in just 7 crossroads or pivotal life events.

Crossroad #1 – What Family You’re Born IntoYou don’t get to choose this one. 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.

So, when making a decision about where you want to work, instead of asking:

We all think we make these choices ourselves. But it turns out that our choices are more constrained than we think. The unseen hand in them all is the networks that surround us & the powerful math they exert on us.

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

Will this give me the work I want to 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, and a fancy office?