You must have come across people who say something like

“There are amazing opportunities everywhere, you just have to keep your eyes open.”

Or especially if you are a college student or a young professional, you must have heard the elders saying

“Your generation has access to so many better opportunities than what we had.”

 It’s true. You agree to both the above statements.

But you are thinking to yourself

“Where the heck do I find these opportunities? How do I prepare myself for getting all these better opportunities that everyone keeps mentioning?”

While we can always rely on serendipity and good fortune and believe that “If it’s gonna happen, it will happen”, there are a few things we can do intentionally.

It doesn’t take grand gestures or sweeping changes of lifestyle to access better opportunities. All it requires is little changes and we will see how these little changes can help us make a big difference.

Can we use these little changes to find better opportunities at work? Can entrepreneurs and business owners use these simple things to find better opportunities for their start-up or business ventures?

In my research to answer these questions, I came across multiple interesting ideas from established studies, a few TED Talks and some books.

This post is a culmination of all of the above, an attempt to connect different ideas from different fields. The ultimate aim is to figure out an approach to discover better opportunities for ourselves.

Our Social Universe

It would be safe to assume that any sort of opportunity in our lives would involve having an interaction with another person or a group of people.

Hence it makes sense to start the discussion by talking about people.

Now there might be some jargon coming your way, but bear with me, as you will see that we need the necessary vocabulary to learn and explore how better opportunities can be discovered.

At any point of time in our lives, we occupy a social universe, which is nothing but a collection of different people we know. Our social universe consists of our immediate family, our relatives, our friends,our co-workers and a lot of other people which we put under a general term called acquaintances. 

Mark Granovetter, an American sociologist and professor at Stanford University, explores this idea of a social universe further. In his research paper titled “The Strength of Weak Ties”, he gives us a definition for the people in our social universe. 

He categorizes them as our Strong Ties and our Weak Ties.

Granovetter defines a tie (and its strength) as, “a combination of the amount of time, the emotional intensity, the intimacy (mutual confiding), and the reciprocal services which characterize the tie.”

Our strong ties are people who we know really well. We might not talk to them everyday or know everything about them, but we know enough. Typically, our family and our close friends are included in this category.

On the other hand, our weak ties are typically our acquaintances – office colleagues, some distant cousin and such. We might talk to them once a while or maybe give them a quick Hello when they pass by, but we don’t know much else about their life.

Now most of us carry a healthy mix of strong ties and weak ties in our social universe.

Normally, we might be inclined to believe that our strong ties – our family and friends, are the people that matter the most when it comes to finding new opportunities. After all, these are the people who know us better than anyone else and know what we are looking for and know what is good for us.

But let me tell you something. We couldn’t be more wrong.

Why Strong Ties are weak and Weak Ties are strong?

“Innovation Happens Elsewhere” is a book about open source software development. While the contents of this book are irrelevant to our discussion, what is interesting is the title of the book and the thought behind it.

“Innovation happens everywhere, but there is simply more elsewhere than here. Silly as it sounds, this is the brutal truth: Regardless of how smart, creative, and innovative you believe your organization is, there are more smart, creative, and innovative people outside your organization than inside.”

Let me try and relate this to our discussion of strong and weak ties.

Think about the strong ties in your network.

Chances are that your activities and your sources of information are quite similar. If you are at your home, you meet the same people as your parents do and you probably have access to the same information as they do.

Think about your friends. You know each other quite well and know what each of you are upto regularly and probably discuss about familiar topics and interests. How much, then, would they know, that you wouldn’t know?

Because of this mighty overlap of information, there is a significantly less chance of you discovering something new.

Suppose you and your friend are coffee lovers and every chance you get you hang out at different coffee places and try out new flavors. This will definitely increase your depth of knowledge on coffee but there is very less chance of you learning about a new tea variety from that discussion or meeting.

And that’s where weak ties come into the picture.

A distinguishing feature of your weak ties is that those people inhabit a completely different social universe. These weak ties are maybe at the edge of your network but they are quite at the center of a completely different social network that you are not aware of.

Weak ties enable the flow of crucial information from a distant, unrelated and disconnected source to the periphery of your network. In this way, they become an instrumental bridge in the diffusion and dissemination of new information, including new opportunities.

In fact, in his study of “The Strength of Weak Ties”, Granovetter found empirical evidence to prove that the best leads for job opportunities are more likely to come from your more distant acquaintances (weak ties) rather than your close friends (strong ties).

Malcolm Gladwell, in his book The Tipping Point, talks about Connectors – people who have the special gift of bringing the world together.

“Connectors are the people who have enormous social connections, a long list of weak ties and a strong foot in multiple worlds and subcultures.

We rely on them to give us access to opportunities and the worlds to which we don’t belong.”

– Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point

Our weak ties and our connectors are our tickets to a completely different social universe.

Is there a way we can become a little more intentional in traveling these different social universes of our weak ties?

How accidental bumps create new opportunities?

One of the primary characteristics of any MBA or a Business school is that they are known for their networking opportunities. Elaborate and intentional activities such as group assignments, committees and alumni networks are designed to ensure that each student can get the opportunity to interact with more and more students.

The idea is to create a strong network of acquaintances (weak ties), which can prove beneficial in the future. However, even with such deliberate mechanisms in place, it is quite often observed that people tend to form groups and stay with those similar set of people for the major part of the two-year course.

Now if this ends up happening in a B-school where creating weak ties is deliberately encouraged, think about how hard it might be in other places like your office. Here, it’s a choice that’s solely dependent on you.

Organizational psychologist Tanya Menon, in her TED Talk, addresses the disadvantages of being socially narrow – limiting yourself to your strong ties only.

While talking about finding ways to build up new weak ties, she suggests an interesting strategy of creating an imperfect social search engine.

“What I mean by social searches is how you are finding and filtering your friends. Our networks tend to become so fundamentally predictable because we are creatures of habit. We have the same routines every day.

What I want to encourage you to do instead is to fight your filters and sense of natural choice. Make your system a bit inefficient. Create more accidental bumps.”

These accidental bumps are important. They are responsible for injecting our routine lives with a dose of randomness, which helps us find new people and make new acquaintances, which in turn are our tickets to new and better opportunities.

And this is not just limited to our personal lives, personal opportunities and our personal moments of inspiration. It affects even business opportunities, product development and office workspaces too.   

The power of accidental bumps and the opportunities that it might create is so enormous that it has influenced the design and the construction of Apple Park, the new headquarters of Apple.

In an interview with David Rubenstein for Bloomberg, the Apple CEO Tim Cook talks about Steve Jobs and his vision for a working place.

“Steve had the vision that the workplace should facilitate common areas that people could work together and run into each other without planning on doing it.

The level of ideas and creativity and innovation that would come out of that would be phenomenal.”

Can we create our own luck?

Many people argue that some people just get lucky with opportunities. It’s just that they are at the right place at the right time.

Well, it might be so but what if I told you that we can take steps to create our own luck?

Stanford Professor Teena Selig, in her TED Talk, talks about different ways we can use to create our own luck to increase our ability to see and seize more opportunities.

She says that luck is created by taking small risks.

We don’t have to make any drastic changes or even take any big actions, but we just need to take little risks. This might mean taking a step out of our comfort zone but it’s a little risk which has can give high returns.

“The first thing you want to do is to change your relationship with yourself. Be willing to take small risks that get you out of your comfort zone.

Take an intellectual risk and try to tackle a problem you haven’t tried before; or a social risk, by talking to someone sitting next to you on the train; or an emotional risk, maybe telling someone you really care about how you feel.”

This is how you get lucky. This is how you create a new acquaintance. This is how you get to travel the social universe of your weak ties. And this is how you increase your chances of getting a great opportunity.

What does it all mean for me?

Phew.

A research study, two ted talks, a book and an interview later, we are here.

A simple idea we can all take away from here is that we need to get more intentional with our efforts to expand our social universe. We need to do inject some randomness and inefficiencies in the way we meet people so that we can include more weak ties in our network. We need to get out of our comfort zones and take little risks with ourselves.

With these sails in place, we are putting ourselves in the best position to capture the winds of opportunity.