Brian Uzzi's research shows people form stronger friendships when they meet through shared activities rather than cold networking. Volunteering, running groups, jiu-jitsu, and pickleball work better than speed-dating-style events because they attract diverse people with common interests.
How do you just meet people you've never met? And here there's a really interesting line of research from, um, Brian Uzzi at Northwestern and a few others on what's called the shared activities principle. Hmm. It's very similar to uncommon commonalities. People usually don't feel connected to each other by just staring blankly at each other. Uh, trying to just pit cold pitch random people on a coffee chat or going to that weird networking hour. There's nothing to do or to— no, find activities that you'll enjoy that actually draw diverse groups of people together and you're much more likely to build a connection to cool cool people that you've never anticipated doing that activity. Could be volunteering for a charity, could be planning, uh, or joining a running group, could be, um, could be jiu-jitsu, could be pickleball, which is what my wife is huge into, right? And we meet so many new people through that world, right? Um, you can actually— pickleball's a great one these days because you can drop into any city, show up at a club, and you'll meet new best friends who want to take you to dinner and what have you. But it happens around the activity first. So you don't need to go to the little mixers and all the open-ended hours. You just need to find something cool to do. The trick is something cool to do that you enjoy doing that draws a diverse group of people together, not just people like you, but a diverse group of people together. You're almost always more likely to build meaningful connections from scratch if you're engaged in that shared activity than if you're just cold pitching people to try and connect to them.
I also would say I've noticed that it's more of a trend now where if you follow someone that you admire and you get together in real life, you're going to meet similar people. Like Brian Johnson is like a health influencer, the guy who's famous for not dying. And I've noticed that he's doing like, like get-togethers, like meetups, and people are even doing meetups without him. So like he has like meetups in Miami where he is not. That's perfect because if you go to that health meetup, it's actually a side— it's not the work, it's a side activity. You're all into health. Then you can be like, so like, you know, what are you working on? Anything exciting these days? And they're like, oh, actually I'm a, you know, and then they tell you their career and you're like, oh my gosh, there's alignment there. So like, are there people that you admire who are having meetups themselves or even without them in other cities? I think that's like actually the key to finding, uh, really interesting people is even like Kevin Hart has like run clubs. And I think that people who follow Kevin, you're gonna be a certain kind of person. You're gonna have a certain kind of humor. And so maybe those are your people.
And if you want more on that research, it's called the shared activities principle. But it's just a, a good thing to remember is don't go out and try and just meet people. That's like speed dating. It's super awkward unless Vanessa Van Edwards is in your ear telling you what to do. Instead, just go get involved in an activity and odds are you're going to find somebody worth connecting to.
