First We Shape Our Social Graph; Then It Shapes Us

The instinct to fit ourselves to our milieu is tricky. It often leads us astray. If not deliberate, we end up internalizing behaviors and values that do not serve us. But it can also, in this way, be a strength: by actively curating your “audience”, as well as what you let into your senses, you can leverage the instinct to conform in your favor. Yo... See more

Let me phrase what I’ve been saying in this essay in a slightly different way. What you want to create is a distributed apprenticeship in the art of being you. You want to assemble a set of influences you can observe and imitate, and peers and mentors that can give you feedback on how well you converge with that model of yourself.

Curating our milieu is something we all do these days, if not always consciously. Our milieus are no longer determined by where we were born, but by our choices of friends and careers, and, increasingly, by how we train the algorithms that feed us content. Most of us have not yet developed the know-how to fully leverage this.

How do you summon an interesting set of friends to bounce your ideas off? Where do you look to find good influences? Which types of output should you produce if you want people to route useful ideas your way? But here I want to give a high-level view of why it makes sense to think about the world in this manner—as a graph you can restructure to cha... See more