Your Life Is Driven by Network Effects

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.

Most things that happen in society are multi-turn and repetitive. These are called preferential attachment processes which happen when something (such as money, status, fame, punishment) is distributed based on how much is already possessed. Most social processes are preferential attachment. For example, if two Founders each tweet out the same grea... See more

Crossroad #2 – High School NetworkHigh school networks are especially important because they are influential when we are forming our identities and worldviews as young adults. High school networks are also correlated with academic achievement, work habits, and even college admission — defining access to future networks and building a vibrant life o... See more

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

The most lasting and effective way to change your life is to change who you’re surrounded by. Since networks so powerfully shape who we are and what we do, the best way to change ourselves is to change our networks.This is a big limitation at the way we look at self-development and self-transformation. We think we can just roll out of bed one day, ... See more

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

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.

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

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