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Weak Ties

[Those] deeply enmeshed in [a close-knit group] may never become aware of the fact that their lives do not actually depend on what happens within the group but on forces far beyond their perception.

—Rose Coser, sociologist

Yes is how you get your first job, and your next job, and your spouse, and even your kids. Even if it’s a bit edgy, a bit out of your comfort zone, saying yes means you will do something new, meet someone new, and make a difference.

—Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google

A few summers ago, a big box showed up at my house. The return address on the label was a major publishing house in New York City. The box was addressed to me.

I was prepping two courses for the fall and had ordered some textbooks to look over but, when I opened the box, I found not textbooks but about a hundred paperback books—some fiction, some nonfiction, some academic, some popular. The invoice inside listed the name of an editor. I put the box of books in the middle of my dining-room table and friends who came to the house would ask about it: How did I find time to do so much reading? Had I lost my mind? No one found my explanation of “it came in the mail and I don’t know why” very satisfying.

After some time, I made an attempt to follow up. I e-mailed the editor on the invoice to let her know I might have a box intended for her. She discovered the books were sent to me in error but said to enjoy them. I thanked her, and we exchanged a couple of e-mails about choosing textbooks. Some months later, she asked if I would be interested in writing an instructor’s guide for a book she was editing; I said sure. At the next barbecue at my home, the big box of books was still on the dining-room table. I told friends to please take home whatever titles looked appealing. It made a good story.

About a year after the box of books arrived, I started to want to write a book of my own. My private practice and classes were filled with twentysomethings who sincerely wanted, and needed, help moving forward. I envisioned a book that pulled together what I knew about the twenties from teaching and research and clinical work, a book twentysomethings anywhere could read.

I borrowed a sample book proposal from a distant colleague, and I went to work on the project in my spare hours. When I finished the proposal, I asked the editor whose books I had accidentally received if she would give me her impressions. She read it and quickly introduced me to interested parties. Soon, the book had a publisher. I had never met the editor with the box of books or the publisher who ultimately acquired my book. I had only once met the colleague whose proposal I used as a model. No one had any reason to give me preferential treatment and, business is business, so no one did. This book, like most things in adulthood, came to be because of what is called the strength of weak ties.

The Strength of Weak Ties

The urban tribe is overrated. For the past decade or so, there has been much talk about the urban tribe, or the makeshift family that has come to the fore as twentysomethings spend more years on their own. Sitcoms and movies tout the value of the tribe, the fun of having a place to go with that store-bought pumpkin pie when we can’t make it “home-home” for Thanksgiving, how nice it feels to have a group to call our own.

Without a doubt, these friends play a crucial, supportive role for many twentysomethings, and they provide lots of good times. Essentially the college buddies of the twentysomething years, the urban tribe, are the people we meet up with on the weekend. They give us rides to the airport. We vent about bad dates and breakups over burritos and beer.

With all the attention paid to the urban tribe, however, many twentysomethings have limited themselves to huddling together with like-minded peers. Some are in almost constant contact with the same few people. But while the urban tribe helps us survive, it does not help us thrive. The urban tribe may bring us soup when we are sick, but it is the people we hardly know—those who never make it into our tribe—who will swiftly and dramatically change our lives for the better.

In work that predates Facebook by more than twenty-five years, sociologist and Stanford professor Mark Granovetter conducted one of the first and most famous studies of social networks. Granovetter was curious about how networks foster social mobility, about how the people in our lives lead to new opportunities. Surveying workers in a Boston suburb who had recently changed jobs, Granovetter found it wasn’t close friends and family—presumably those most invested in helping—who were the most valuable during the job hunt. Rather, more than three-quarters of new jobs had come from leads from contacts who were seen only “occasionally” or “rarely.” This finding led Granovetter to write a ground-breaking paper titled “The Strength of Weak Ties” about the unique value of people we do not know well.

According to Granovetter, not all relationships—or ties—are created equal. Some are weak and some are strong, and the strength of a tie increases with time and experience. The more we have been around someone, the stronger the tie because, likely, we have shared experiences and confidences. In childhood, strong ties are family and best friends. In the twentysomething years, strong ties grow to include the urban tribe, roommates, partners, and other close friends.

Weak ties are the people we have met, or are connected to somehow, but do not currently know well. Maybe they are the coworkers we rarely talk with or the neighbor we only say hello to. We all have acquaintances we keep meaning to go out with but never do, and friends we lost touch with years ago. Weak ties are also our former employers or professors and any other associations who have not been promoted to close friends.

But why are some people promoted while others are not? A century of research in sociology—and thousands of years of Western thought—show that “similarity breeds connection.” Birds of a feather flock together because of homophily, or “love of the same.” From the schoolyard to the boardroom, people are more likely to form close relationships with those most like themselves. As a result, a cluster of strong ties—such as the urban tribe or even an online social network—is typically an incestuous group. A homogeneous clique.

Here we get to what another sociologist, Rose Coser, called the “weakness of strong ties,” or how our close friends hold us back. Our strong ties feel comfortable and familiar but, other than support, they may have little to offer. They are usually too similar—even too similarly stuck—to provide more than sympathy. They often don’t know any more about jobs or relationships than we do.

Weak ties feel too different or, in some cases, literally too far away to be close friends. But that’s the point. Because they’re not just figures in an already ingrown cluster, weak ties give us access to something fresh. They know things and people that we don’t know. Information and opportunity spread farther and faster through weak ties than through close friends because weak ties have fewer overlapping contacts. Weak ties are like bridges you cannot see all the way across, so there is no telling where they might lead.

It’s not just who and what our ties know that matters. It is how we communicate with them as well. Because close-knit groups of strong ties are usually so similar, they tend to use a simple, encoded way of communicating known as restricted speech. Economical but incomplete, restricted speech relies on in-crowd colloquialisms and shortcuts to say more with less. Texters all know that FTW means “for the win” just as businesspeople know that JIT stands for “just in time.”

But in-group members share more than slang and vocabulary. They share assumptions about one another and the world. They may have gone to the same schools or have the same ideas about love. Our strong ties probably all watch Glenn Beck or Rachel Maddow or Stephen Colbert—or they decidedly do not. Whatever the particular sources of sameness, hanging out with them can limit who and what we know, how we talk, and ultimately how we think.

Weak ties, on the other hand, force us to communicate from a place of difference, to use what is called elaborated speech. Unlike restricted speech, which presupposes similarities between the speaker and the listener, elaborated speech does not presume that the listener thinks in the same way or knows the same information. We need to be more thorough when we talk to weak ties, and this requires more organization and reflection. There are fewer tags, such as “ya know,” and sentences are less likely to trail off at the end. Whether we are talking about career ideas or our thoughts on love, we have to make our case more fully. In this way, weak ties promote, and sometimes even force, thoughtful growth and change.

Meet Cole and Betsy.

Cole burst out of college toward his twentysomething years like a middle schooler runs toward summer on the last day of school. As an engineering major, he’d spent his undergraduate years solving equations while it seemed everyone else was having fun. His twenties were Cole’s chance to have a good time. He took a low-key job within a firm of surveyors, preferring to clock in and clock out without thinking much about work. He moved into an apartment with a group of guys he met, some of whom had not gone to college at all. Over some years, this became Cole’s urban tribe:

We’d sit around and drink and talk about how much we hated work or how the job market sucked. We were anti doing anything. We were all just preaching to the choir. None of those guys was thinking about a real career, so I wasn’t either. I was part of the cool club, I guess you could say. I wasn’t thinking about anything except the next basketball game I was going to or whatever. That’s what I thought everybody else was doing too because that’s what everyone I saw was doing.

Then sometimes I’d hear about somebody I knew from college who had made bank starting some business or who had some awesome job at Google or something. And I’d think, “That guy? That’s not fair. I was busting my ass in college while he was majoring in anthropology.” It was like the fact that he’d been doing something with his twenties while I’d been screwing around didn’t mean anything. I didn’t want to admit it, but after a while I wanted to be one of those guys who was doing something with his life. I just didn’t know how.

Cole’s sister dragged him to her roommate’s thirtieth birthday party. Uncomfortably surrounded by people who were older and more successful, Cole passed the time talking to a young sculptor he met, a client of mine named Betsy.

Betsy was tired of dating the same kind of person. It seemed like the moment she broke up with one boyfriend who “didn’t have his shit together,” she started dating another guy who didn’t either. Eventually, Betsy came to therapy to examine why she was drawn to this sort of man again and again. But having more insight about it did not change the fact that she kept meeting the same fun and unambitious guys. “I can’t get a decent date,” she said.

Betsy didn’t want to be at the party any more than Cole did. She’d met the birthday girl in a spin class a couple of years earlier and had been declining her Evites ever since. In an effort to meet new people, this time Betsy replied “Yes.” She took a cab to the party, wondering why she was subjecting herself to this.

When Betsy met Cole there was a spark, but she was ambivalent. Cole was clearly smart and well educated, but he didn’t seem to be doing much about it. They had some nice dinner dates, which seemed promising. Then, after sleeping over one night and watching Cole wake up at eleven a.m. and grab his skateboard, Betsy felt less bullish.

What she didn’t know was that ever since he’d started spending time with Betsy, Cole had regained some of his old drive. He saw the way she wanted to work on her sculptures even on the weekend, how she and her friends loved to get together to talk about their projects and their plans. He eyed a posting on Craigslist for a challenging tech job at a high-profile start-up, but he felt his résumé was too shabby to apply.

Cole remembered that an old high school friend, someone he saw about once a year around town, worked at the start-up. He got in touch, and this friend put in a good word about Cole. After a handful of interviews with different people in the company, he was offered the position. The hiring manager told Cole he had been chosen for three reasons: his engineering degree suggested he knew how to work hard on technical projects, his personality seemed like a good fit for the group, and the twentysomething who vouched for him was well liked in the company. The rest, the manager said, he could learn on the job.

This radically altered Cole’s career path. He learned software development at a dot-com on the leading edge. A few years later, Cole moved over and up as a director of development at another start-up because, by then, the capital he’d gained at the dot-com could speak for itself.

Nearly ten years later, Cole and Betsy are married. She runs a gallery co-op. He’s a CIO. They have a happy life and gladly give much of the credit to Cole’s friend from high school and to the woman with the Evites. Weak ties changed their lives.

When I encourage twentysomethings to draw on the strength of weak ties, there is often a fair amount of resistance: “I hate networking” or “I want to get a job on my own” or “That’s not my style” are common reactions. I get it, but that doesn’t change the fact that, as we look for jobs or relationships or opportunities of any kind, it is the people we know the least well who will be the most transformative. New things almost always come from outside your inner circle. And twentysomethings who won’t use their weak ties fall behind twentysomethings like these, who have this to say:

Networking, using contacts, whatever, is not a bad thing. I never really was overly worried about it, but I have some friends who always were so stressed about working somewhere where a family member helped them get the job. I work in one of the top three companies in my industry, and literally I know only one person who actually got a job there without knowing someone. Everyone got it because they know somebody.

I hate randomly calling people I don’t know. Hate, hate, hate it. But my dad met someone at a holiday party who used to work at the company where I am now and he told him I was interested in the fashion industry. I finally called this person just to get some information, and he passed along my résumé. That is how I got the interview.

There was a hospital where I wanted to work, and I kept looking for them to post some job openings, but they never did. I finally called a friend of mine who worked there. I’d put that off because I wasn’t sure if that was wrong or if I’d be putting her in a bad spot. But right away she gave me the name of someone to call at the hospital. When I did call, they were about to post a job. I got it before they even posted. Everything can change in a day. Especially if you put yourself out there.

I think sometimes people think, “I don’t know anyone and everyone else does,” but people would be surprised at the untapped resources they have. Alumni networks from college and high schools can be really helpful, and if there’s not an official network, go through the Facebook group or LinkedIn group for your school. Look through and see where people work. If there is someone who does something you want to do, call or e-mail them for an “informational interview.” That is what everybody ultimately does.

Most twentysomethings yearn for a feeling of community, and they cling to their strong ties to feel more connected. Ironically, being enmeshed with a group can actually enhance feelings of alienation, because we—and our tribe—become insular and detached. Over time, our initial feeling of being part of a group becomes a sense of disconnection with the larger world.

True interconnectedness rests not on texting best friends at one a.m., but on reaching out to weak ties that make a difference in our lives even though they don’t have to. When weak ties help, the communities around us—even the adult community that twentysomethings are warily in the process of entering—seem less impersonal and impenetrable. Suddenly, the world seems smaller and easier to navigate. The more we know about the way things work, the more we feel a part of things.

Favors are how things begin. Take Benjamin Franklin, for instance.

The Ben Franklin Effect

In the late 1700s, Benjamin Franklin was a state-level politician in Pennsylvania. He wanted to win over a fellow legislator and described the following in his autobiography:

I did not . . . aim at gaining his favour by paying any servile respect to him but, after some time, took this other method. Having heard that he had in his library a very certain scarce and curious book I wrote a note to him expressing my desire of perusing that book and requesting he would do me the favour of lending it to me for a few days. He sent it immediately and I returned it in about a week with another note expressing strongly my sense of favour. When we next met in the House he spoke to me (which he had never done before), and with great civility; and ever after he manifested a readiness to serve me on all occasions, so that we became great friends and our friendship continued to his death. This is another instance of the truth of an old maxim I had learned, which says, “He that hath once done you a kindness will be more ready to do you another than he whom you yourself have obliged.”

We imagine that if people like us, then they do us favors because this is how it works in the urban tribe. But the Ben Franklin effect, and subsequent empirical studies, show it works the other way around with people we know less well.

If weak ties do favors for us, they start to like us. Then they become even more likely to grant us additional favors in the future. Franklin decided that if he wanted to get someone on his side, he ought to ask for a favor. And he did.

The Ben Franklin effect shows that, while attitudes influence behavior, behavior can also shape attitudes. If we do a favor for someone, we come to believe we like that person. This liking leads back to another favor, and so on. A close variant of what is called the foot-in-the-door technique, or the strategy of making small requests before larger ones, the Ben Franklin effect tells us that one favor begets more favors and, over time, small favors beget larger ones.

What often isn’t discussed about the Ben Franklin effect is a question twentysomethings wonder about a lot: Why would a person—especially maybe an older or more successful person—help in the first place? How did Franklin get his foot in the door with that first favor?

It’s simple. It’s good to be good. There is a “helper’s high” that comes from being generous. In numerous studies, altruism has been linked to happiness, health, and longevity— as long as the help we give is not a burden. Most people remember starting out themselves, being helped by those who were further along. Because of this, there is a reserve of goodwill toward twentysomethings. Part of aging well is helping others, and twentysomethings who turn to weak ties for help give them a chance to do good and feel good—unless what they ask for is overwhelming.

So let’s talk about that.

Sometimes twentysomethings reach out to weak ties with amorphous career aspirations, hoping other professionals can help them make up their minds about what to do with their lives. These sorts of favors may not overwhelm the capabilities of successful others, but they can overwhelm their calendars or their roles. It simply takes too much time to type a multiparagraph reply to an e-mail about which graduate degree someone should pursue. And it’s really not for a weak tie to say whether you should be a social worker or a folk singer.

As a human resources professional said to me, “I have people make appointments to learn about future open positions at our company, and they come in and do this . . .” She sat back in her chair and folded her hands in her lap. Then she continued, “I think to myself, ‘You called this meeting. Have some good questions. Don’t just ask how long I’ve been at the company to make conversation until I can tell you what to do with your life.’ ”

Let’s look more closely at the favor Franklin requested. He didn’t have a messenger deliver to the legislator a scroll that read “Peanut soup at the tavern???”—perhaps the eighteenth-century equivalent of an e-mail with the subject heading “Coffee???” or “A quick chat???” Franklin knew this sort of overture would seem dangerously vague to a busy professional. He was more intentional—and strategic—than that.

Franklin did research on his target and found out the legislator’s areas of expertise. He presented himself as a serious person with a need that matched. He made himself interesting. He made himself relevant. And he asked for a clearly defined favor: the use of a book.

I would advise the same approach today as you ask your own weak ties for letters of recommendation, suggestions or introductions, or well-planned informational interviews: Make yourself interesting. Make yourself relevant. Do your homework so you know precisely what you want or need. Then, respectfully, ask for it. Some weak ties will say no. More than you think will say yes. The fastest route to something new is one phone call, one e-mail, one box of books, one favor, one thirtieth birthday party.

I once had a fortune cookie that read A WISE MAN MAKES HIS OWN LUCK. Perhaps the single best thing we can do to make our own luck in our twenties is say yes to our weak ties or give them a reason to say yes to us. Research shows that our social networks narrow across adulthood, as careers and families become busier and more defined. So—even and especially as we job-hop and move cross-country and change roommates and spend our weekends about town—this is the time to be connecting, not just with the same people having the same conversations about how work is lame or how there are no good men out there, but with those who might see things a little differently. Weak ties are the people who will better your life right now—and again and again in the years to come—if you have the courage to know what you want.