Book Review: Connected

I heard about Connected from a show on NPR (Yes, I listen to NPR, why do people keep saying that?). It was right after another segment talking about how positivity affects your mood and your ability to think and act in a clear fashion. I’ve long been a believer in the ability of your network to impact you, but I really didn’t think about it beyond that. Hearing about the book Connected changed my thinking, so I ran out (meaning, connected to Amazon) and got a copy.

The premise of the book is pretty simple. You have close friends and acquaintances. Your close friends and acquaintances also have friends and acquaintances, that may or may not over lap with yours. Those people also have another set of friends and acquaintances. And here’s the kicker, that third layer, not your friend, or your friend’s friend, but your friends friends friend can affect your daily mood, the amount of exercise you do, whether or not you smoke, your involvement in crime, all sorts of things. The book sets out to prove it. Along the way you also learn about things like why you probably only have somewhere between 3-8 close friends. Why you probably don’t have more than about 100 people that you communicate with regularly (uh, but what about my 7,000+ Twitter followers?). How these are to a degree biological factors hardwired into you. Most interesting of all is how the ripples just fade away at the third layer, over and over again throughout their studies and their testing.

The book was just filled with highly interesting facts about how your network influences you. Also, how you can influence your network. It also matters the type of network that you have. Are you connected to lots of people that aren’t connected to each other, weak ties, or are you connected to lots of people that are all connected to one another, strong ties. Each of these types of networks influences you differently. Your behavior within a network is probably following one of three paths; cooperator, you’re willing to help others, free rider, you’re letting others do the heavy lifting, enforcer, you’re making sure everyone follows the rules. Your behavior is also likely to shift between those roles depending on who you’re interacting with and when.

In short, a fascinating book. I do have a nit to pick with it though. At the end of it all, I have a great set of information about what a strong network would look like. I get a good sense of why I would want to have a strong network. Nothing about how to really get a strong network other than making sure my friends are connected with my friends and that my friends, and as much as possible their friends and their friends, are all on a positive path. Right. I’m sure that’s easy to work out. Guidance around this network thing would have been nice.

My own takeaway, be positive, act positive, strive, earn my Trident every day, and, at least according to Connected, that should go out into my network like ripples in a pond. Further, I should see those same ripples coming back, reinforcing my own approaches.

I have no idea how to measure this. Ha!