The Most Important Decision You Need To Make When Building A Network

Lane Wood was about to turn 30, and he was in a full-on identity crisis. He had recently left charity: water where he worked directly with the founder, Scott Harrison, and A-list celebrities to bring clean drinking water across the planet.

It had been an amazing, life-changing experience; especially for a former pastor from rural Oklahoma.

However, on a winter night in 2011 at a Union Square cafe in New York City, he confided in a close friend and nervously wondered, “What happens when my email doesn’t end in charitywater.org? Have I built real relationships or have I just increased my social media follower number?”

He reflects on his feelings in a recent Medium article titled The Curse Of The Connector that went viral:

We organize dinner parties and concerts and raves and adventures and launches and pop-ups and on and on and on. It’s an extraordinary world where we talk about things that matter, build innovative companies and create amazing experiences.

[...]

I realize how fortunate I am to live this life. There’s a Gatsby-like wonder to the revelry and adventure. My world is dizzying and exhilarating.

But every once in a while, I’m concerned that this always-on way of connecting with people is numbing a reality that should be dealt with:

It’s easy to never be alone and yet very lonely.

The challenge of breadth vs. depth is a tension that we can all relate to. However, its resolution is not easy, especially given our common limitation of time.

Without continued investment of time and self, important relationships descend into friendliness instead of friendship.

Tools help us become more efficient, but ultimately they just delay the inevitable decision:

Which relationships do we deepen, and which ones do we let fizzle or never form?

The Breakpoint

For Jeff Stibel, a 40-year-old brain scientist, the Chairman and CEO of Dun & Bradstreet Credibility Corp., and the author of Breakpoint, the answer lies in other types of networks that share similar properties.

In Jeff’s words, “The goods news is that we can look to biology and biological networks such as ants, bees, and even termites to tell us what happens in networks as a whole. We can see that there are very consistent, predictable cycles. Those cycles drive not just biological networks but business networks, economic networks, and social networks.”

The beauty of these patterns is that they help shed light on how we can best build our personal networks.

My burning question for Jeff is, “What do we do after we hit breakpoint?”

He responds quickly and confidently, “The mistake that most people and organizations make is that they keep on focusing on growth past the breakpoint. They fight the constraints of the environment. They say, ‘I have to have more relationships! I have to get more business.’ The reality is that when you force the growth, everything just implodes.”

For example, Jeff’s research shows that every environment has a ‘carrying capacity’. This is the ability of the environment to handle growth. In the physical world, the carrying capacity is the natural environment. Easter Island is an example of what happens when you try to grow past the environment’s capacity. Once a bustling island paradise and society, the island became a barren wasteland and the society descended into chaos and even cannibalism; all as a result of overproduction.

The carrying capacity of the brain is limited by energy in the body. The brain is just 3 lbs, but takes up 20% of the body’s energy. If the brain were bigger, our body would need to be completely redesigned.

When it comes to our networks, our carrying capacity is our time. We all have 24 hours in a day.

What To Do After Breakpoint

Jeff’s answer to what to do after breakpoint is counterintuitive, “Over the last 20,000 years, our brains have been shrinking, not growing. That tells us a couple of things. It doesn’t tell us that we’re getting dumber. Paradoxically, we’re actually getting smarter. What’s happening is that our networks are gaining in intelligence and wisdom; just not in size...Size isn’t the measure. Size isn’t what matters. Bigger doesn’t mean better.”

“It’s not just that our brains have been shrinking as a species. If you look at my 6-year-old daughter, her brain has ten times as many connections as mine. I love my daughter. Don’t get me wrong, but I happen to think that adults have the advantage. What naturally happens when our brains shrink is that the really good connections are reinforced and the other ones die out.”

To understand this, let’s think of the network of roads in Los Angeles, one of the most traffic prone cities in the US; traffic that I’ve been stuck in many times.

To increase the efficiency of this network, would we add many little roads that aren’t connected to the congested highways or give bandwidth to those main highways by widening them?

The answer is obvious.

The same principle applies to our personal networks. The value of our network grows when we reinforce the most important connections.

The question then becomes, “How do we identify our most and least important relationships so we can transfer our time from the least important to the most important?

To Attract The Right People, We Must First Know Ourselves

Porter Gale, a former Vice President of Marketing at airline, Virgin America, and the author of Your Network Is Your Networth, became sober over 17 years ago.

Starting when she was underage, drinking had become a core part of her social life, both at work and with friends. It had even become part of her time at home when she was by herself.

Porter’s challenge was that alcohol impacted her more than others. She could easily go from first drink to slurring her words in just 30 minutes.

A turning point came on a Halloween evening in the Upper West Side of New York City, where she was living at the time. She went to a party where she was going to meet her two-year boyfriend. He was late, and by the time he arrived, Porter was already drunk. A huge fight ensued.

When Porter awoke in the morning, she had only a hazy memory of the party and the argument. More vivid was the gripping unpleasantness of the hangover and the disappointment she had in herself. That’s when she committed to permanent change. That was her bottom.

Porter went to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and became sober soon after.

The Halloween party marks the turning point in both Porter’s personal life and the quality of her network. Many of the relationships that she had built with drinking buddies fizzled as their basis was removed. On the other hand, with more clarity in her values and purpose, she has built one of the world’s top networks.

Relationship Building Is An Inside Game

What changed Porter’s social network was not a new networking strategy or event. It was a personal transformation.

Porter consciously transformed herself by confronting personal barriers and by becoming clear on her passions and purpose through the funnel test; a process she created and shares in her book.

Without breaking down the personal barriers within ourselves, we keep up barriers to the people who could take our life to the next level. Art Aron, a professor of psychology at Stony Brook University, put it much more tersely in an interview I had with him, “If you have your own anxiety, depression, or insecurity, it’s harder to have a good relationship.”

The Power Of Mutually Supportive, Lifelong Relationships

In most areas of our lives, relationships do not transcend the initial context in which they were formed.

A client does not turn into a friend. A one-night stand does not turn into a marriage. The relationship with the neighbor or merchant doesn’t continue when we move. We grow away from the large majority of our high school and college classmates.

When a relationship is created based on shared values and purpose, it is more likely to transcend its initial context. The value of these lifelong, deep relationships can be astounding over time.

Take the well-known examples from the technology worlds of Oracle, Netscape, Fairchild, and PayPal (follow links to see relationship charts).

Employees from these companies have gone on to fund, co-found, work for, and support each other in the building of other game-changing companies such as SpaceX, Kiva, Youtube, LinkedIn, Yelp.

While these companies are prominent examples, this phenomenon is everywhere where long-term, values-based, deeply supportive relationships exist. More importantly, the effect goes beyond business success. Our kindred spirits form the cornerstone of our personal growth and happiness.

The Kindred Spirit Test

Many individuals over-focus on individuals who are most transactionally important in the current context, but with whom they may not resonate on a deeper level. If you find yourself in this situation, you’ll likely feel like you’re constantly trying to fit in rather than naturally being yourself or living your greatest strengths in passions. This may fill your bank account, but it will not help you release your greatest gifts to the world.

From this paradigm, it is critical that you do three things:

• Surround ourselves with kindred spirits.

• Remove individuals who are not aligned on values and purpose.

• Fully live your values so you attract those who are aligned.

Fabian Pfortmüller, the co-founder of Holstee and a master relationship builder, summarizes the kindred spirits philosophy, “If I can’t turn a relationship into a friendship, then it’s ultimately not that valuable. If our kids can’t hang out together...then the whole relationship building is not worth it."

Ultimately, hitting your breakpoint doesn’t mean the beginning of the end. It is a not a reminder of your limitations. It is a call for you to connect deeper with yourself so you can connect more deeply with kindred spirits. It is an invitation to move away from relationships based on glamour to ones based on resonance.

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