The Strength of Weak Ties
Jobs, deals and opportunities arrive mostly from acquaintances, not from close friends.
- Evidence
- proven
- Topic
- People
- Things to do
- 3
- Read
- 1 min
provenHow strong is the evidence?
Tested again and again, by different people, and it keeps coming out the same. You can lean on this.
- Granovetter, AJS, 1973
- confirmed by Rajkumar et al., Science, 2022 — LinkedIn experiment, 20 million people
Why it works
Your close circle knows what you know. Weak ties bridge to information that isn't already in your network — and the 2022 experiment showed moderately weak ties are the most useful of all.
What to do about it
- Keep a list of dormant ties and reactivate a few each month with a specific, non-transactional message.
- Say what you're working on, in public and in plain words. Weak ties can only help if they know.
- Go to the thing where you'll know two people out of thirty, not the one where you'll know twenty-eight.
Where people go wrong
Only ever contacting weak ties when you need something. The reactivation has to run before the need.
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