David R. MacIver's Blog

Making connections

This post was originally published at https://drmaciver.substack.com/p/making-connections.

I sometimes think I only have two moves in writing: “These two things you thought were different are actually the same thing” and “These two things you thought were the same are actually different”. This isn’t quite true, e.g. there’s also “Look at this thing, isn’t it neat!”, but they’re fairly major parts of what I write.

Anyway, this is a “these two things are actually the same thing” post.

One evening recently, I was visiting two friends of mine and we were talking about memory. I said that I don’t have a very good memory for facts, but I have a very good associative memory. I remember patterns, and how things fit together, and can often recall relevant information and methods that I’ve seen before that are appropriate to the situation.

My two friends agreed that their memory was also similar, and one of them said (paraphrasing from memory) “I think maybe being able to make that sort of connection is just what intelligence looks like”.

That stuck with me, because I think it’s very right, and it points to one of the biggest comparative differences in what you are good at when you are smarter than the others around you. If you are smart, you are good at making connections between things. That’s a large part of what being smart means.

I’m aware it’s gauche to self-describe as smart, but I don’t think saying “I’m good at [things that are classically associated with intelligence]” is any better even if it avoids saying the word, and I’m on the record as thinking it’s important to acknowledge and talk about intelligence.

You’re probably smart too. I say this not to flatter you, but because I think my stuff is primarily interesting to people who have the same sorts of problems I do, which means that my target demographic is mostly my fellow smart nerds who are somehow still not very good at life. (Sorry. I say it with love). As a result, you’re probably good at this too, and it’s worth knowing how to use it well.

Anyway, I recently introduced two… let’s say friendly acquaintances, in that I know and like them but don’t know or interact with them enough for the label “friend” to really apply, to each other. I was catching up with one of them about what he was doing, and when described it, the way he described it made me think of this other person I knew, and her research into a very similar area. I mentioned this, he was interested, and now I’ve introduced the two of them.

I don’t know if anything will come of it - I’d give like… maybe 2% it results in an interesting collaboration, and say 0.1% that it results in a really important project for one or both of them, and most of the rest of the time they just have an interesting conversation and never talk again, or maybe casually stay in touch.

Which is to say… it probably won’t achieve anything, but for the amount of effort required from everyone involved, this is a ridiculously good deal. It required almost no effort from me, the cost to them is one conversation that they’ll probably enjoy, and although the probability of anything major resulting from it is pretty low, it’s not that low, and the upside is pretty huge if it pays off.

I have some abandoned writing on luck that I never finished off, but one of the results from Richard Wiseman’s study on luck, and what makes people lucky, is that the biggest difference is whether you notice and take opportunities.

The sort of opportunity that, in my opinion, matters the most is these sorts of relatively low effort things that there’s negligible cost to trying and a reasonable choice of it resulting in something big. My post about looking for new projects last year was an example of this - relatively easy to do, and it resulted in some much more interesting work than I’d have found if I went looking for contracts and projects directly. I’ve previously used tweets as another example of this - it was, once upon a time, an incredibly low effort way of creating potential opportunities.

But anyway, this isn’t a post about how to be lucky, this is a post about how to make the people around you luckier: Make connections between them.

A classic sociology (which may even be true! Certainly it feels true) result is the strength of weak ties: The social connections that are most useful to you are the ones that aren’t that close, because if you know someone super well then you probably already have access to many of the same connections and opportunities as they do. I’m not sure if this is part of the original observation, but there are also just more of them.

As a result, these sorts of opportunities for introductions tend to come up with people you know less well. You’re more likely to get a job opportunity via someone you’ve not talked to in a few years, you’re more likely to meet potential partners at a party hosted by someone you’re not that close to than you are via your best friend.

Actively navigating these connections for people and making introductions along those weak ties is, thus, a huge favour you can do for the people around you to make their lives better.

This may seem like I’ve taken two unrelated senses of the phrase “making connections” and talked about them independently but, well, you see, these two things are the same thing.

The difficulty with proactively making these connections between people (as opposed to doing it in response to requests, or creating opportunities for it to happen naturally) is that you’ve got to actually figure out which people to introduce. If you just introduce two random acquaintances to each other, probably nothing very interesting will happen. Sure, they both know you and have that in common, but thinking that is enough is Geek Social Fallacy #4: Friendship is transitive.

But if you’re good at making connections between ideas, at the sort of associative pattern matching that lets you encounter something and go “Ah, that reminds me of…” and pull in some seemingly completely unrelated topic, then you can also easily be good at figuring out who should talk to whom: When you’re talking to someone, if that happens and what they say reminds you of something that relates to someone else you know, that’s an opportunity for an introduction right there.

It’s especially valuable if they’re likely to be useful to each other in some way, but that’s not even required really. If you have interesting and compatible conversations with two people about similar subjects, maybe they’d like to have those conversations with each other.

Either way, if you’re talking to someone and they remind you of someone else, ask them if they’d like an introduction. It can’t hurt to ask, and there’s a reasonable chance that doing so will pay off massively.