On being well-connected
How opportunities fall out of the sky
When I was interning at BCG Seattle this past summer, I began this fun tradition where each Friday afternoon, I sent out an email to everyone on my team sharing the highlights of the week.
At first, the only people on the recipient list were my managers, teammates, fellow interns, and some mentors I had chatted with a few times.
But then an interesting thing started happening — I started getting emails that looked like this:
"Hi Dennis — Heard about your EOW emails from my team, I’m out of SF but would love to join the email list for the last couple. Seems very entertaining!”
Later that same week, I got this Slack message from another person I didn’t know:
“Hey Dennis! Could you add me to your EoW email list? I have heard great things 😂” (the emoji was real)
Somehow, these people I didn’t know had heard about the weekly emails and decided that they were so interested, they would reach out to me directly to be added to the future ones.
How could this be? How could something like this have happened?
It turns out that this was a prime example of the importance of being well-connected.
One of the pieces of advice my dad gave me before I left for college was that at an amazing university like UCLA, opportunities would simply fall out of the sky.
The key thing was to recognize when these opportunities had fallen, and capitalize upon them immediately when they came.
At the start of my UCLA experience, this looked like getting a bunch of free things on BruinWalk (the main walkway from the dorms to the central campus at UCLA), meeting some really cool people in my classes and in the dining halls, attending random but exciting events that I’d heard about whenever I could, and wandering through the different buildings at UCLA to discover what was inside of them.
And it was during this process of exploring the different buildings at UCLA that I met an extremely smart UCLA sociology professor who introduced me to the concept of human networks.
He described to me a study where a Harvard researcher, curious as to how many degrees of connections away people were from each other, sent a bunch of postcards to random people in Iowa with the goal of delivering the postcard to the researcher’s friend in Boston. If those random Iowans knew the Boston friend, they were to send the postcard to him; if not, they were to send the postcard instead to someone who they thought knew the Boston person themselves.
And surprisingly, a solid percentage (at least half) made it back to the Boston friend, averaging only 6 steps along the way (hence the idea of the “six degrees of separation”). But the most curious part of that experiment was that for the postcards that did make it to the Boston friend, most of them were delivered by the same final person — the mailman.
The professor subsequently explained to me that in any human network, there is always someone who is unusually interwoven among many social groups and is the one who joins many different people together.
It was from this conversation that I finally pieced together something that I had been observing for quite some time — there were some people at UCLA who seemed extraordinarily well-connected, and these people had a lot going for them. I’d speak with them, and it was an interaction unlike anything I had ever experienced before.
They seemed to personally know someone in every department and club I could think of, had a funny anecdote about every place on campus, and it seemed that any person on campus was just a few calls or connections away.
And it was through these interactions that I learned that well-connected people are just another one of those things my dad had told me to look out for — opportunities that fall from the sky.
Being extraordinarily well-connected is a goldmine of opportunity, and I have been mining that gold ever since.
Well-connected people are like the center of wagon wheels — many spokes lead to them, all branching out in many different directions. And the great part is that opportunities can come from any one of those spokes, and being at the center of them all, you are in a prime position for many golden opportunities.
In a professional setting, I’ve found that being well-connected (and fun) leads to people cheering for you and supporting your growth. During my summer internship at Kraft Heinz, I’d crack a bunch of jokes, ask smart questions, and make an effort to chat around with folks from different departments. By the end of the summer, full-time colleagues when approaching my intern desk, asking to meet with the now-famous intern. At BCG, this took the form of colleagues I didn’t know asking to join my weekly emailing lists.
Professional connectedness is great for your growth and learning, too. I’ve gotten job referrals, interview help, and many on-the-job training opportunities from being curious. The importance of a strong network, especially in the business world, cannot be overstated.
In personal settings, being well-connected means being invited to fun trips, cool events, or just getting the privilege of chilling with awesome people. During my second year, I met this awesome guy, Ariv (now one of my closest friends), and through him, I got free tickets to be in the audience of America’s Got Talent:
This weekend, I’m super excited to go camping with a lot of friends up in Yosemite, all because my amazing girlfriend has a family cabin up there and is organizing a trip for us. Today, I spoke at a consulting panel for underclassmen at UCLA where I shared my recruiting experiences (and was inspired to write this article), all because of some LinkedIn posts I wrote a while back.
It’s crazy stuff!
“So, Dennis”, you may now be thinking. “This is great and all, but what do I do with this information?”
Excellent question, dear reader!
For our practical considerations, there is one big lesson to take away from this — meet and befriend well-connected, interesting people, or become one yourself. Curiously, one of these follows the other — in the process of befriending a well-connected person, you become one yourself. This had certainly been the case for me.
I shared a few examples of how this works above, but let’s look at a more recent example: my roommate Finlay.
Finlay is on exchange at UCLA (from Scotland) for the year, and we were random roommates. Awesome!
Together, we live in the UCLA cooperative (or “co-op), which many international students call home because of its cheap prices and quarter-long contracts. Amazing stuff!
Very quickly, Finlay befriended many people in the co-op and became the person that when you mention their name, you go, “Oh, of course I know/have heard of him!” Now when I meet people in the co-op, I have become “Finlay’s roommate” — a tremendous blessing. Being one connection away from Finlay gives me access to his wonderful network and all the great benefits that come from being at the intersection of new ideas.
For example, I met someone in the co-op, Das, who was instantly friendly to me when I was revealed to be Finlay’s roommate. He asked what I was doing this weekend, I mentioned we were all going to the Getty Villa, and he said, “Whoa, you should totally wear a toga to the Getty Villa!”
I thought this was a genius idea, so wrapped in a bedsheet (for my toga), I arrived at the Getty Villa on Saturday.
And then something crazy happened. There was a professional photographer at the Villa, looking to expand his Instagram portfolio. I, dressed in a toga at the Getty Villa, was his prime subject.
And that, dear reader, is how this picture came into existence:
You can see that so many things came together for this magical thing to occur, but it was the connection with Finlay that initially got the ball rolling. That made the magic begin.
The connection with Finlay was the opportunity that fell from the sky.
Now, you may be thinking, “Dennis, how do I become well-connected?”
ANOTHER excellent question, dear reader!
Here are a few ways that have worked great for me:
Meet extremely well-connected people and become genuine friends with them. Their network adds to your own and you are both better off because of it. Do not be transactional in this friendship or ask for favors — let them be offered to you. These well-connected people are usually awesome, that’s why so many people know them! Prime example: one of my best friends from my study abroad in Paris, Joe, invited me to his best friend’s 21st birthday party in London, and it was one of the best weekends ever!
Begin establishing your online presence. This has been a HUGE plus for me (and everyone else I met who started creating online), and I’ve met so many interesting people through writing my blogs, articles, and not-so-funny LinkedIn posts. It’s so easy to get started, and if you’re reading this, you’re already ready to start yourself. Whenever you learn something, write about what you learned, and post it online. That can be on LinkedIn, Substack (for free!), YouTube, you name it. Eventually, someone will catch on (like my 150 subscribers to Interosity now ❤️)!
Put yourself in environments where there are many people in many different networks. I unintentionally did this when I became a UCLA tour guide — I initially just wanted to give tours, but by doing so, was placed right in the middle of a group of 100 students from all corners and departments at UCLA. Through the networks of my fellow tour guides, I attended an awesome ballet performance; got a private, pre-premier screening of the Spiderman: Across the Spiderverse movie 5 months before it was released in theaters; attended the Indonesian culture night play; and countless other amazing events.
Be legitimately interested in the people you are speaking with. Oftentimes, when we “listen”, we are simply waiting for the other person to finish talking so that we can talk ourselves. By really listening to others and being interested in what they’re saying, we become interesting ourselves. Become interesting by being interested.
Ask amazing questions, especially regarding the stories and experiences of whomever you’re talking to. Everyone likes talking about themselves, and when you speak with someone and they talk about themselves with you, they subconsciously associate positive emotions with you. We all have something in common with someone else, and finding that quickly makes the rest of the conversation so much better. This has been a huge life hack for me, especially during interviews!
And so, we make it to the end of another Interosity article! Thanks so much for sticking around, and see y’all soon.
Best,
Dennis :)
Dennis’s Picks:
The book Red Rising (and the following trilogy) —> this book was so good, I kinda fell off the face of the Earth so I could read it over 2 days
This great Jack Raines article about the case for traveling more
The quote, “Once a cucumber turns into a pickle, it’ll never be a pickle again” (not sure why I find that so funny lol)
This is such great advice, Dennis. How do you deal with the fear of failure or something not being received well? You seem to have so much confidence in sending an unsolicited (at the start) weekly email to many of your colleagues, and I think that I would fear a negative reception too much to go through with doing something like that. Do you face those hurdles, and how do you deal with them? Many thanks again!