A short YouTube talk by Nataliey Bitature about leveraging and curating your social network. The speaker explains how modern connectivity (degrees of separation reduced to ~4) makes virtually anyone reachable, highlights LinkedIn as a useful tool when profiles and follows are curated, and stresses that networking must be genuine and value-adding rather than merely collecting contacts. The talk also advises consciously choosing the people you spend the most time with—"you are the sum of the five people"—because social ties influence behavior and outcomes, and recommends distancing from negative or unsupportive influences.
Chapters
So the power of your social network, this is a really important area because everyone has a social network, but you have to be able to leverage it and use it in the right way to make sure that it's also advantageous to you, yet still authentic and Sincere. So about 30 years ago now, they said human beings were all within 7 degrees of separation, which basically means you know someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows someone. And within seven someones, you know anyone in the world. So you could contact anyone in the world. But now with the Internet and globalization, they've said that has gone down to four. So technically all of us are within four steps of Obama. Like that's just the reality of today. Within four people you can get a way to contact anyone in the world. And this is a great thing for networks and socializing because it means you are within the reach of anyone who can help you and your purpose and your career and your dreams. Anyone who can teach you, anyone you can learn from. There's so much information out there. If you take a few minutes and spend time on LinkedIn, if you have an accurate LinkedIn profile that you've made with the exactly what describes you and you've taken time to curate and see who you follow and what kind of videos you get, what kind of organizations, individuals, you can learn so much, you can interact with so many people. So it's about how you leverage your social network. This, I think is a secondary part of networking. There's no point in just networking to just have thousands and thousands of friends. We all know that person on Facebook who has 5,000 friends who they don't actually know. There's no use in that. What you need to do is to cultivate the relationships. So in the first networking video I was talking about making a genuine connection so that one on one relationship is there. But now you also need to see, once you've got that skill, who do you want that one on one relationship with? It's not insincere to seek someone out and say, I admire you. I think what you've done is great, I would like to get to know you better. But you also have to add value, see what is in it for them, make sure you have some common ground. It's usually easy if the person is in your sector as well, because you might attend the same conferences, read the same books, be interested in the same things, so it's easy to make that connection. But you have to do this in a proactive way. Also be thinking about what you want. It's not helpful to send someone an email. Hello, I would like you to be my mentor. That is not useful to anybody. But it's also not useful to just have the friends you've grown up with all your life and you're not learning and benefiting from each other or you're using LinkedIn just to add as many people as possible. You need to be more proactive in cultivating and curating your network so that it's also not just thousands of people that are not helpful to you and you're not helpful to them. You don't get points for that as an adult. It's also important the people you spend your time with, you are the sum of the five people you spend the most time with. That is just how human beings are. We are community based organisms. We spend so much time with each other, we absorb from each other. There's studies that show if your friends start gaining weight, you will start to gain weight. If your friends are smokers, you are most likely a smoker. There are certain things that we just morph around into each other because that's how human beings relate. So you also have to be careful about who you spend the most time with. Is it your colleagues? Is it your parents? Is it your friends? Is it your cousins? Who are you spending time with? What are you learning from each other? Are you honest with each other? Are you pushing each other? Are you growing together? Do you have same levels of ambition? Do you have the same values? Are you going through the same phase of life? It's also important that you don't just hold on to things because I've known the person since I was five, but now your lives are in completely different directions. Sure, they're still your friend, but they don't need to be the person you spend the most time with. Just by default. You have to think about these things because you are an individual and an adult and you need to think about where you're also going. You need a community not only to learn from, but also for social benefits, for fun and for laughter and for joy. But you need to think about these things and not spend time with people who take you in a backwards direction. People who are negative, who are unsupportive, who don't believe in what you're doing or what you're saying, who don't make you feel good about yourself, people who are taking you in a dangerous direction that you can see and sense that I might end up in trouble with such things and such people. It's okay to make some distance These are hard decisions, but you have to be comfortable with the uncomfortable if you're going to grow.
