Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon

Re-reading the part of Malcom Gladwell's book, Tipping Point, on connectors.  Connectors are those people that (1) know tons of people and (2) know people in different 'worlds'.  He tells about the experiment where 160 people in Omaha were given a package and told to send it to some guy in Boston - they didn't know the man.  Most all the packages got to him, but the interesting this was that half the packages went through three people with no connection to the original senders.
Remember the six degrees of Kevin Bacon?  This is where the idea comes from.  In this case it's where every actor in Hollywood is 'related' to Bacon by 6 movies.  Turns out that it's actually 2.6!
People that are connectors are powerful in the flow of ideas and communications.


While there's a natural talent that connectors have, the ability to create relationships with people, the interesting thing is that I think anyone can be a connector to some degree.  The keys seem to be:

• It takes some effort to systematically meet and reach out to people.  While this comes naturally to some folks, it's not to others, but they can still do it.  Maybe we think that it's easy for that person over there, but not us, then don't make the effort.
• We need to connect to people in different 'worlds' or contexts.  Just connecting with people in our work environment, while important, isn't enough - we need variety.  Twitter seems to be good for this, where as Facebook seems to emphasize people we already know.
• The connections with others don't need to be deep.  Obviously the more deep relationships we have, the more we're overloaded.  Sometimes we think we need to have these deeper relationships to be meaningful.  Granted if you don't have many of these things, that's not healthy - but that's usually not the problem.  We don't need to be able to go out to dinner with everyone we know, just need to know enough to be intelligent about the other person.

If we do this 10% better, we'll have a healthier set of relationships that we can use to more effectively help other people with and increase our ability to communicate.