by David Burkus
Sociologists have picked up on this theme as well. In fact, this biblical saying was initially applied by the sociologist Robert Merton to fame, social status, and eventually capital.10 But in studying social network relationships, Barabási and Albert found that the Matthew effect applies to making new contacts as well.
Recall from the previous chapter that Barabási and Albert were studying the emergence of power laws in networks. They had noticed that, in many networks, the number of connections an individual node (or person) has varies wildly. Instead of there being a well-defined average with only minor deviation, networks tend to follow a power law, they discovered, whereby a few nodes hold massive numbers of connections and the count declines rapidly.
Having found these power laws, Barabási and Albert wanted to know why they occurred. What was it about the mysterious nature of networks that allowed for the more connected (“the rich”) to grow even more connected? It’s hard to see in hindsight, but discovering the presence of power laws in network science had been a disruption of the norm. Before Barabási and Albert’s work, most models of networks assigned to a fixed number of nodes connections made at random—or seemingly at random.
In trying to find an explanation for power laws, Barabási and Albert introduced two new concepts to the realm of network science.11 The first was growth. Most models of networks were static, fixed in time and never changing. But real-world networks, particularly networks of humans, evolve. They change often, and the most common change is the entry of new people into a network. Over time networks have to grow—and new people have to connect somewhere.
The second concept was what they labeled preferential attachment. If growth is assumed, and if growth always means that new people have to connect somewhere, then given a choice between two nodes with which to connect, new nodes are more likely to connect to the more-connected node. If a node is twice as connected as another, then it should also be twice as likely to make a connection to new nodes. When new people enter a network, preferential attachment assumes that they are more likely to meet highly connected individuals than those off on the fringes.
Think about your own experiences. Not only do super-connectors tend to offer the most potential introductions to others in the network, but others in the network are more likely to introduce you to other people who are already super-connectors. Enter a new community and pick any random person; if that person is already more likely to be connected to the well connected, then eventually you will be too. Barabási and Albert saw this as a real-world phenomenon and argued that any realistic model of networks needed to take preferential attachment into account.
Having made their propositions about network growth and preferential attachment, Barabási and Albert next had to provide proof. To do this, they wanted to use well-known, well-respected data sets.12 If you guessed that they chose the network of film actors from the “six degrees of Kevin Bacon” study, you’re right. They also examined the network of scientific citations and the world wide web (a massive and ever-evolving network).
At first blush, a network of websites linking to other websites might seem like an odd focus of study. After all, what implications can we draw from computers that link to other computers? But Barabási and Albert were studying the world wide web in the late 1990s, a time when the majority of links and connections between websites were still made manually—by humans—and as such would be representative of a human network. In each situation, preferential attachment held true. As new nodes entered the network, they were more likely to connect to the already well connected. As a result, small initial differences in the number of connections held by an actor, scientist, or website increased as the network grew. “Preferential attachment induces a rich-get-richer phenomenon that helps the more connected nodes grab a disproportionately large number of links at the expense of the latecomers,” Barabási explained.13
Shortly after Barabási and Albert published their results in the prestigious journal Science, Mark Newman, a professor of physics at the University of Michigan and faculty member of the Santa Fe Institute, examined the influence of preferential attachment on a grander scale.14 Newman collected six years of publication data from two large databases of scientific research, one in physics and one in biology and medicine. Taken together, they represented around 1.7 million people. He used that data to construct two large-scale network models (one for physics and one for biology/medicine). In particular, he looked at the number of scientists’ previous collaborations and the number of collaborators they’d had. Sure enough, he found strong evidence of preferential attachment. Those with a high number of previous collaborators were more likely to enter into new collaborations. And this preferential attachment was indeed the most likely source of the power law seen when graphing the number of connections. In other words, the more connected were becoming even more connected because when new people enter a network, they are more likely to connect with those who are already highly connected.
Interestingly, preferential attachment appears to affect more than just individuals’ connections. A similar phenomenon can be seen in the way individuals develop preferences and tastes and in how they make decisions. What is already popular seems to grow even more so when new people enter the system and have to decide what to prefer—as robustly demonstrated in a study conducted by Matthew Salganik, Peter Dodds, and Duncan Watts.15 The trio designed an experiment to investigate how preferences grow and compound over time and whether a phenomenon like preferential attachment applies to popularity as well. To do this, they first built a website where participants could log in, listen to forty-eight different songs, and then download them for free. More than 14,000 people logged in to the site. But in actuality, 14,000-plus people logged in to one of nine “worlds” that appeared to be mirror images of each other. In the first world, users would log in and see a list with the name of the song and the band or artist. (All of the options, it’s worth noting, were unknown songs performed by unknown bands.) In the other eight worlds, users would see the same information, plus how many times previous users had downloaded the song.
In setting up these different worlds, Salganik and his colleagues were able to observe whether initial differences in downloads affected the overall popularity of songs by the time the experiment concluded. Theoretically, if the quality of a song alone determined its popularity, then all eight worlds where the download count was available to users should have roughly matched the one world where download count wasn’t displayed. Better-quality songs should have been more popular, and lesser-quality ones less so. Except that’s not what happened.
Despite all of the songs starting at zero, later users took their cue from early users who had listened to and downloaded songs and were more likely to sample those songs too. Small differences in popularity turned into big differences over time, and the songs that benefited from that small difference also varied between worlds. In one world, one song in particular was number one by the end of the experiment, but in a different world it was fortieth out of the forty-eight. In every world, the most downloaded song early on became even more downloaded. The rich got even richer.
Just as we are more likely to be introduced to, or seek out introductions to, already well-connected individuals, we are more likely to take cues from those around us about what to listen to or what to like. These findings call into question a lot of what we know about breakout hit songs, blockbuster movies, best-selling books, and famous celebrities. The quality of the given work or performance may not be all that affects its acclaim. Instead, its growing popularity might be simply a result of who you know—or more specifically, how many friends and friends of friends you know—who already enjoy that work. Salganik and his colleagues demonstrated this clearly inside the lab. But a close look at history reveals that we are likely more affected by preferential attachment and social influence than we know.
The Most Famous Smile in the World . . . Because It’s the Most Famous Smile in the World
; The most famous female face in the world is arguably that of Lisa Gherardini.16 Her husband was a wealthy silk merchant who had commissioned a portrait of his wife. The portrait took some time, and neither Gherardini nor her husband ever saw the finished product. Hopefully, they never had to pay for it either. When it was finally finished, sixteen years after it was commissioned, it was sold to France’s King François I. The seller was the Italian artist and inventor Leonardo da Vinci, and the painting was the Mona Lisa. It is now perhaps the most famous painting in the world, though a few others by Leonardo himself might rival its fame. It hangs in Paris’s Musée du Louvre behind a climate-controlled, entirely bulletproof case. Six million people visit the painting in person every year. Hundreds of millions more see reproductions of it on everything from posters to coffee cups, tote bags, and T-shirts. It has been photographed, parodied, forged, and far worse (as we’ll see).
But perhaps the most curious thing about the painting wasn’t how long it took Leonardo to finish it, but how long it took to become famous. Though it was completed in 1519, it spent its first 300 years as little more than a hallway decoration for European royalty. It wasn’t considered terrible—just ordinary. When it was eventually moved to the Louvre around the turn of the nineteenth century, it didn’t garner much attention: Leonardo wasn’t really considered a spectacular painter until the mid-1800s. And the Mona Lisa likely would have remained hanging in obscurity in the halls of the Louvre, appreciated only by art critics and historians, had it not been for an audacious act of patriotism—and theft.
On August 21, 1911, a group of men led by Vincenzo Peruggia stole the Mona Lisa.17 Peruggia was Italian, and some accounts say he was upset that a painting by the Italian legend Leonardo was stuck in a French museum.18 The four men snuck into the museum the night before; Peruggia arranged for their entry, as he was working on the museum’s renovation at the time.19 They spent the night sleeping hidden in a storeroom. The following morning, a national holiday, they awoke, seized the painting off the wall, and hurried out a side entrance. No one saw them, and if they had, they would have assumed they were merely workmen. No one noticed that the painting was gone until twenty-six hours later—partly because of the holiday and partly because the painting was not very popular.
Then something funny happened. Peruggia and his crew had indeed stolen an unpopular painting—but the theft of the Mona Lisa propelled it to extreme popularity. Within forty-eight hours, news of the theft had spread around the world. People began hanging wanted posters around Paris and crowds gathered at police stations. Rumors and conspiracy theories sprang up. Some argued that the whole thing was a hoax. Others claimed it was the work of an international ring of art thieves and black-market collectors. In a desperate attempt to chase down every lead, police even interrogated Pablo Picasso, one of many painters they assumed might know how to track down the painting’s whereabouts. To their credit, they also interrogated Peruggia himself. However, he was able to talk his way out of it, claiming that, on the morning in question, he was hungover from the night before.
All the while, the painting sat hidden under a false bottom in a wooden trunk inside of Peruggia’s room in a Parisian boardinghouse. It would stay there for two years until Peruggia eventually took a train to Florence, Italy, in order to meet with an art dealer who would find a way to sell the painting and have it displayed in the famous Uffizi Gallery.20 But after meeting Peruggia in his hotel room to view the painting, the art dealer promptly called the police.
Peruggia was arrested, and the painting was eventually returned to the Louvre. It was visited by more than 100,000 people in the first two days of being returned to display.21 Within a few years, the painting began to draw the attention of prominent artists of the era. In 1919, the French painter Marcel Duchamp created a parody of the painting, adding a goatee and mustache—along with a crude caption.22 Spanish painter Salvador Dalí created a portrait of himself as the Mona Lisa, complete with a mustache similar to Duchamp’s. American artist Andy Warhol chose the Mona Lisa as an influence for many works using his silk-screen technique. Since then, the painting has been parodied hundreds of times, including the Mona Lisa with a unibrow, the Mona Lisa as an astronaut, the Mona Lisa as Batman, and even the Mona Lisa as a LEGO mini-figure. It has also been a target of more crime—not theft but, on two occasions, vandalism. Despite the parodies, attacks, and inspired replications, the Mona Lisa’s popularity only seems to rise.
While today’s art critics and historians debate the merits of the painting—what with its exceptional demonstration of Leonardo’s technique and his influential role in Renaissance painting—it cannot be forgotten or ignored how uninfluential the painting was until Peruggia’s theft. Instead, just as with preferential attachment, the painting lay in obscurity for hundreds of years before an inciting event skyrocketed it into popularity. And with every successive generation, new people are introduced to the Mona Lisa as the world’s most famous painting—like new participants viewing the download counts of songs in Salganik’s experiment, or new entrants into a network being told they “have to meet” the already well-connected members.
Preferential attachment influences our decisions more than most of us realize. And that is both bad news and good news. The bad news is that building a network, or building awareness for your new brand, product, or company, is an uphill battle. The good news is that it gets easier over time. In addition, as the next chapter will uncover, it’s possible to leverage preferential attachment inside even a small-scale network to become (or at least appear) extremely well connected. The scientific evidence and examples as diverse as entrepreneurship networks and famous art suggest that eventually that hill is crested and the journey gets easier. It might take a lot of initial hustle, but that hustle can slow down as early investments in building relationships begin to pay dividends by bringing relationships to you.
From Science to Practice
As Jayson Gaignard learned, dinners and other large events can be a great way to scale your network of contacts faster. Unlike grabbing a quick coffee with just one or two people, sharing a meal allows you to connect to a dozen or more people at once for several hours, building more and deeper connections. In addition, depending on the structure of the dinner, it can be a way to leverage preferential attachment no matter how small your network is.
You can host dinners (or lunches) in your own city or your own home, or you can regularly plan to host a dinner when you are traveling to connect with old contacts (and make new ones) in each city you visit. To make sure your event is a success, there are a few things you have to consider:
The size: At a minimum, invite six people. A gathering any smaller than that can make new people feel left out as old friends reconnect. At a maximum, make it no more than twelve people. Any more than that and not everyone will get a chance to interact with every other guest.
The guests: Ideally, you want a good mix of old friends and new contacts. You can do that by reaching out cold to people you want to invite or asking for an introduction through a friend. If you don’t know such a person, then ask your guests to bring a plus-one—not in the romantic sense but a person that the entire group would benefit from knowing.
The location: Your home is a great choice, as it’s personal and comfortable enough to encourage people to linger. If you are traveling or need to host the event in a restaurant, make sure you coordinate with the manager ahead of time to ensure that you get a large table in a quiet area (and to make sure everyone is clear on how the bill will be settled).
The frequency: If it’s your first event ever, don’t worry so much about this one. However, once you try it and it works, you need to think about how frequently (weekly, twice a month, monthly, quarterly) you would like to hold events. Just one time is not enough to leverage preferential attachment.
Practicing Online
If you are traveling to another city and decide to host an event, your existing social media presence can be a big help. Most social n
etwork services allow you to search for connections by city, and the ease of communication can make it a great medium to plan an event. Manage invitations this way, and even start meeting new invitees.
For a downloadable template to use when completing this exercise, go to http://davidburkus.com/resources/ and look for networking resources.
—8—
Create the Illusion of Majority
Or Why No One Is as Popular as They Seem
If we want to be known within a community of people, we often think we need to meet every single person in it or use an outreach medium that gets everyone in touch all at once. However, research into social networks reveals that it’s the most connected individuals who tend to guide the perceptions of the overall group. This means that we can have the appearance of being everywhere and in demand—by only focusing on a few of the right connections.
BEFORE WRITING HIS FIRST BOOK, Tim Ferriss was basically a vitamin salesman. Granted, he was also a kickboxing champion, a world record–holding tango dancer, an investor, and an adviser to big-name start-up companies. But he himself wasn’t a big name. Ferriss had started an online company marketing a vitamin formula designed to enhance brain function that was aimed at athletes. He had adjusted the business to run mostly on autopilot and chronicled his process in a book he titled “Drug Dealing for Fun and Profit.”1 On the advice of his publisher, the title was changed to The Four-Hour Workweek. Now Ferriss had a real challenge. He was new to bookselling, so none of his past success would be any help to him in marketing this new product.
