Your Life Is Driven by Network Effects

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.

With all this in mind, when deciding where to live, here are some questions to ask yourself:

Now think about how the math continues to cascade through the network. Princeton hopes that I continue to be an active recruiting node on the network, providing the students with great employment options. But my cost/reward math doesn’t work. The denominator is zero. So Princeton lost a recruiter node in their network for now. Further, now those 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.

Are the people in this city like me? Each city has a vibe that may or may not fit with you. Each city calls ambitious people to improve in some area. NYC calls you to earn more money. Seattle and Portland call you to recreate more. DC calls you to be more connected. SF calls you to create more, invent more. It’s the garage where the crazy uncle is ... See more

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.

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

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.

The mathematically obvious path will feel like “the right decision.” But note that what even shows up on your life dashboard is put there by your network. And the math associated with each option — the rewards and frictions and probabilities — are determined by your unique network. And your network is the result of the network decisions you made du... See more