The third network element consists of hubs. We can visualise a hub as the junction of many weak and strong links. Human hubs comprise groups of people collaborating for some common purpose, including families, businesses, social circles, schools, churches, clubs and nations. We can think of life as an adventure where some of the most important decisions we make are which hubs to join or start. With whom should we collaborate for important purposes in our life, even if the objective is sometimes just to have fun?
With one important exception–the family we inherit of parents, siblings and others–we can choose which groups to cultivate and influence. For most of us, the mark we make in life and our degree of fulfilment depend to a large extent on the hubs we select and how adept we are at changing from one to another. Unlike Chaplin’s picture of life as something that happens to us, unlike the vast majority of people in history, those of us alive today and fortunate enough to live in wealthy countries will participate in many hubs during our lives; and, unlike most of our forebears, we have the privilege of being able to chop and change hubs, or start new ones of our own.
Yet few of us pick our hubs and the roles we play in them with much care; and few of us understand the strange and sometimes sinister ways in which hubs behave. Groups, whether large or small, are far more than the sum of the people in them; they have lives and characters of their own, and they follow peculiar scientific laws. If we want to get the most out of our hubs and therefore our time on earth, we have to treat hubs as experimental stages in our lives. We must progressively learn, by trial and error, which type of hub is best for us and for which type we are best. And we must be willing to move from one hub to the next before we really want to.
One final question in this chapter, which brings us back to Marlon Brando and James Dean: do you believe that, by and large, you determine your own success?
That was our view until recently. People who attain a degree of success nearly always believe it is due to their innate ability. But is this right? Do you have a niggling feeling that luck or some kind of sixth sense makes some people ultra-successful? What is so special about the rich and famous?
F. Scott Fitzgerald got it exactly right. ‘The rich’, he wrote, ‘are different. They have more money.’ That is the only difference. Wealthy or famous people are not more intelligent than a lot of other people who aren’t so lucky. Some high achievers might be highly determined and work very hard–but lots of other people who never get there are too.
In 2000, two physicists at the University of Paris, Jean-Philippe Bouchard and Marc Mézard, constructed a set of equations for a network of a thousand people and ran a whole series of simulations. Each person in their model was allocated a random amount of money within a narrow range at the start, and everyone was endowed with equal money-making skills so that differences would arise randomly, from luck rather than skill. Surely, in this egalitarian world, big differences in wealth would not arise? Wrong! Whenever the model was left to run for a long time, a small proportion of people ended up with most of the wealth, precisely in line with the 80/20 principle, which says that around 80 per cent of results (in this case, wealth) will end up with 20 per cent of the participants (in this case, people).1 Now, the physicists’ results were almost identical to the unequal patterns of wealth we observe in real life throughout the world. Their work suggested that the rich could benefit from a non-meritocratic process. We’ll see later that this is consistent with the tendency of networks to concentrate around only a few hubs–as scientists have observed in all manner of social and economic networks, and to reward those who are already ahead of the game.
In a curious way, then, the process contains a lot of luck for individuals, and there’s a great deal of randomness, yet predictable patterns also emerge.
Come back to the question. Why them–the rich, the successful–and not you? If it’s not intelligence, or dedication, or rare skills, what exactly is it? It could be pure luck, but it isn’t–which is just as well, for that wouldn’t be a very helpful conclusion, as it wouldn’t allow us to do anything differently. To jump ahead, it turns out that the very high performers in life, whether they excel in making money or in more difficult and useful pursuits, have a few tricks up their sleeves that are all related to networks. They achieve by instinct, without thinking about the network effects that are driving them forward. Yet those instincts follow a common pattern, which has everything to do with networks. If we understand how networks work, we stand a much better chance of achieving their sort of results.
Besides the healthy desire to get ahead, there are other reasons for exploring the hidden forces ruling our lives–it’s interesting, it’s fun, and it puts us in the charmed position of understanding more about what’s going on in our lives and why. In Chapter Two, we begin by looking at how easy or hard it is for us to connect with any other person or group in the world.
CHAPTER TWO
DO YOU LIVE IN A SMALL WORLD?
The small world–reality or urban myth?
Everything is linked together…beings are connected with each other by a chain of which…some parts are continuous, though in the greater number of points the continuity escapes us…the art of the philosopher consists in adding new links to the separated parts, in order to reduce the distance between them as much as possible.
Denis Diderot (1713–84) in the
Encyclopédie
To demonstrate that people on Earth are much closer than ever, a member of the group suggested a test. He bet that we could name any person amongst Earth’s one and a half billion inhabitants, and through at most five acquaintances, one of whom he knew personally, he could link to the target person.
Frigyes Karinthy (1887–1938)
Have you heard of ‘six degrees of separation’? In 1990 the idea burst on to the public stage, quite literally, with John Guare’s eponymous play, which three years later transmuted into a Hollywood movie. The idea had originated in a short story called ‘Chain Links’, written in 1929 by Frigyes Karinthy, now largely forgotten but then an acclaimed novelist (at least in Hungary). You’ll see from the epigraph above the basic idea–anyone can reach anyone else in the world through a short chain of acquaintances, five or six hops from the start of the chain: A to B, whom A knows, to C, whom B knows, and so on to the target F or G.
Somehow Karinthy’s idea reached Jane Jacobs, the great chronicler of American cities,2 who tells that when she first moved to New York, in the early 1930s, she and her sister played a similar game called Messages:
The idea was to pick two wildly dissimilar individuals–say a head hunter in the Solomon Islands and a cobbler in Rock Island, Illinois–and assume that one had to get a message to the other by word of mouth…The one who could make the shortest plausible chain of messengers won. The head hunter would speak to the head man of the village, who would speak to the trader who came to buy copra, who would speak to the Australian patrol officer when he came through…Down at the other end, the cobbler would hear from his priest, who got it from the mayor, who got it from a state senator…We soon had these close-to-home messengers down to a routine for almost everybody we could dream up.
Do you think six degrees of separation is roughly right? Or just wishful thinking?
It’s quite an important question. Another way of putting it is: do you live in a small world or a big world? A small world in this case means one where you can easily connect to anyone you desire. It doesn’t mean that your world is provincial or limited; quite the opposite. A big world implies one where communication falters or dies, a world of separate groups, defeated by distance or social barriers. If you believe there are only six degrees of separation between very different people in different countries, you vote for the small world. A small world would be comforting–the idea that we are all linked intimately to everyone else.