“Your network is your net worth” – Porter Gale
“You’re the sum of the five people you spend the most time with” – Jim Rohn
Last year, I gave a talk for one of Pam Walaski, CSP, FASSP’s amazing groups on networking. For fun, I took some networking tropes and dug into them to see if there was any substance there.
Digging into Porter Gale’s catchy quote and book of the same title reveals that your network and how it grows and changes tells a lot about what YOU are becoming as a person. This puts you in the driver’s seat to shape your network towards your short and long term goals.
Rohn’s quote was smashed by David Burkus’ book, Friend of a Friend, which explored different ways of looking at our network including asking “who knows who?” and how to tend to that community depending on your purpose in the moment or long term. Burkus also wrote about social capital, something Fay Feeney is keenly aware of and reminds her network to do the same. It is important to build social capital (much like what Cal Newport wrote about in So Good They Can’t Ignore You) but more importantly look at your network for who you can “spend” your social capital on and where you can provide for others which increases your social capital.
Burkus’ book gets into some monocultural themes that I found boring, but the image and what I’ve called out in this post are the highlights of the book. The best part, to me, was about dormant ties. This refers to reactivating connections you may have lost touch with. These are the people, when activated, are most likely to think of you for interesting opportunities and make introductions for you.
For those of you job searching, check out these two books or at least check out http://www.davidburkus.com/resources for the tools from Friend of a Friend. Use these networking and social capital concepts to your advantage, it makes the job search fun by reconnecting with people and using the power of your network to put opportunities on your radar that you would never think of on your own.
Please reach out if I can make a connection for you!