Reveal the invisible power that guides your life.
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Editor’s note: Reading, working, settling, choosing a spouse … A person’s life will always face some key intersections. Should I go left or right? Your decision will often have a decisive impact on the rest of your life. You thought that those choices were determined by your free will, but in fact there is a dark force that can greatly affect your decision. Only by correctly understanding the power of this power can you make the choice that suits you best. NFX’s managing partner James Currier used a long article to analyze the impact of network effects on life choices and guiding principles. I believe that you will have a new perspective on life choices. The original article was published on NFX under the title: Your Life is Driven by Network Effects. In view of the length, we have published it in five parts, this is the third part.
Related reading:
Use network effects to guide the seven choices of life and let you live the life you want (1) < / p>
Use network effects to guide the seven choices of life and let you live the life you want (2)
Crossroad junction # 3——University Network
How should I choose a university? Is it based on the course or sports team you are studying or is it based on the student network and the geographic network in which the network resides? (Editor’s note: To be straightforward, choose a university to see a major or a place?) The answer should be the latter. If you choose the right people around the university, they will open to you ideas, relationships, jobs, ambitions, attitudes, and resources that match yours, and promote a virtuous circle. Your network will ask you to be your best self and live your best life, just like a gym coach treats you. As a result, your college network will have an exponential impact on your life.
The university network has many features that make it powerful:
Geographic density creates frequent interactions between nodes, giving network connections the opportunity to form and strengthen.
It takes a long time to form a network. 4 years is a long time. A lot will happen in 4 years.
This is a closed, selective network. There are three reasons why this network is powerful. A) Your reputation is important. People are more likely to hear about you through a third party and will treat them differently based on your reputation. B) If you meet another student, their chance of knowing someone you know is much higher than the chance of someone you meet outside the closed network who just happens to know someone you know. That is, there is a high degree of network overlap between you and other students, and as network theory predicts, the shared connection between the two will greatly increase their chances of forming a strong bond. C) The possibility of repeated interaction between students is high.
Like families, these networks span from who you know to who you are. Identity formation occurs at this age, so it may last longer.
When you choose a university, you are also choosing a place. People may end up working and living in college, keeping them close to college friends.
Everyone works in the same industry as people in their university network.
Establishing and valuing relationships in college is considered a social norm, so others are more willing to build new strong relationships in college.
In terms of age, college is a good time to find a partner. The net result of this is that many people will find their spouse at the university stage, or at least find the person who they think may become their spouse in the future. This is a major life choice, such as affecting university Where to go after life. As we will see, this is actually an important decision-letting love decide where you live is usually not a wise choice.
The university will teach you the idea that you will know these people for the rest of your life, so they are like a family with a strong shadow of the future, so that the relationship between them is stronger and wider.
All the above elements will reinforce each other.
If you want to know what this actually means, consider the following:
You are a freshman and you met someone in class. Let’s call it Sally. You have something in common with Sally, and you get along well. in caseIf you want to score Sally’s intimacy (out of 10), the score may be 6. Since you are in the same class, you may meet twice a week for at least six months.
You will interact regularly and frequently-even after the end of this semester, you will most likely meet Sally on campus. You may have friends in common, who may invite you to the same party. Or get together, or participate in the same extracurricular activities. All of this is the result of you being a member of the same closed network and having the same geographic and institutional environment.
Suppose now that the same day you first meet Sally, you will meet Bob at a party off campus after class. Bob doesn’t attend your school and has nothing in common with you. He doesn’t live very close to you. But he did have a lot in common with you. You talked to him about everything. That night, everyone stayed together for a night, and your common interests caused you a lot of chemical reactions. If you were to rate your intimate relationship with Bob, you might score 10 points.
4 years later, when you graduate, which friendship is most likely to survive? How important is the mathematics of the network compared to your own preferences?
Attracting one another is not the only thing that matters when choosing friends, and it’s not even the biggest consideration. The power of the network overwhelms other factors. With this in mind, the model used to build the development relationship should not only attract each other. Instead, the model looks more like this:
Possibility of establishing a relationship = mutual attraction * interaction frequency * interaction duration * geographical proximity * network proximity * number of shared connections * others …
Bob may score 10 on mutual attraction, but in all other respects he scores 1.
In turn, Sally’s mutual attraction may be 6 points, but in all other aspects it is 10 points. For the possibility of interacting with you and establishing a lasting relationship, every other factor is a multiplier.
Or if we look at it in a different way, the resistance to stay with Sally is much lower than the resistance to stay with Bob-the energy spent with Sally will be reduced by 10 times. So, as time goes by, the mathematical principles (gravity of the network) that inhabit the same network make her the chance of becoming a golden stone with her hundreds of times higher than with Bob.
This is a brief description of the mathematical power that the Internet has in shaping behavior. As we have seen, the Internet places real constraints on how you make decisions that not only include who you end up with as friends, but also the career opportunities, dating choices, ideas, and information you end up with.
The proximity of the network makes some choices more than those made in a vacuumAttractive, and the network distance will bring great resistance to other options-for example, become friends with Bob, or choose to accept a belief system, fashion concept that is very different from those selected by people near you. Or industry.
So when you or someone you know is choosing a school, be sure to consider the following questions:
Where did most of the alumni of this university end up living? When you choose a university, you also choose a regional network. For example, if you go to school in California, most of your friends and jobs will end up in this area. I no longer go to my alma mater, Princeton University, because it is very unlikely that Princeton University graduates will be removed from the New York City-Washington DC circle. I have tried it for four years. Everyone I recruited will come up with their own life dashboard to calculate. When they look at the numbers placed on the network, they can feel the great gravity of the network, and eventually everyone does Out of a rational decision to stay on the East Coast. One of the interviewers finally stayed in New York, moved into an apartment with college friends, and then went to work at Goldman Sachs. At the Goldman Sachs headquarters in Manhattan for an hour (the resistance is very small due to the same geographic network), they went to the school to dig a lot of people. Another returned to Boston to get closer to his girlfriend and parents. Each of them “sincerely wants” to join a startup, but the gravity of the network and the mathematical power of the network are too powerful.
Now let’s think about how mathematics can cascade through the network. Princeton University hopes that I will continue to be an active recruitment node on this network and provide a large number of employment options for students. But my cost / return formula doesn’t work. Because the denominator is zero. As a result, Princeton’s current network has lost an employer node. Moreover, the student nodes who return to the campus are not receiving any news from me. Me and people like me don’t add numbers like “working for a startup in San Francisco” to their life dashboard. As a result, year-to-year calculations for employers such as Goldman Sachs and McKinsey will score higher and higher. The strong become stronger. Second, preferences are attached to this network. Those students look at the mathematics of their life dashboards, perform network calculations, and then make mathematically correct choices.
What kind of profession or industry do alumni of this university usually work in? Let me illustrate how this works. My 23-year-old nephew went to Trinity College in Connecticut. Most students at that university end up in finance in New York or Boston. Guess what my nephew does now? He works in finance in Boston. He followed the path of least resistance, which allowed him to get the highest salary and highest position similar to his network. Does he make work choices based on his unique abilities and interests? No, this is the netNetwork of mathematical principles. He made the right choice based on the options his network puts into the life dashboard.
Do you have a natural connection with other students? Will they get along with you? Do those students represent your own aspirations, lifestyles, and types of interests? No matter how prominent the network is, if you can’t form an intimate bond with other nodes, joining such a network is actually meaningless.
How big is that university? The larger the scale, the larger the alumni network. The larger the alumni network, the weaker your connection, which is important for careers, marriage, and many other life attributes. Harvard Business School is well aware of this, so they offer 900 courses, while Stanford University and MIT Sloan School of Business only have 400 courses.
How strong is the affinity among graduates? Just like in high school, do alumni often brag about their college? How often will they return to their alma mater? How passionate are they about their school brand? Do they see it as a strong identity tag or are they indifferent?
Are they clear enough to the graduates of that university? A clear and powerful brand will illuminate other networks, because if you are part of it, external nodes can know what to expect from you.
Besides this (I suspect this will be controversial), you probably shouldn’t stress the following issues:
How are universities ranked in education in U.S. News and World Report dating back to 1981
Are their classes great?
Are there any sports teams I like?
Is there a professor I want to collaborate with or a particular profession I want to pursue? Only 27% of college graduates eventually find professional counterparts.
It is best to think of universities as the place where networks form and then create the network topology you want. The network you join will lead you to a place, accept a certain type of work, certain ideas about life, and a range of dating / marriage options, all of which can have a significant impact on your life. All these cyber powers will take you on a mathematically obvious path, a path that feels like “the right decision.”
Translator: boxi