(This post is part of a bigger list of rules that I have found helpful for thinking about a career, and beyond. See this post for an explainer).
To get the job of your dreams, you need two things:
- Have the right skills
- Be at the right place, at the right time.
Most people know what is needed to meet the first criterion: education & talent. That one's easy to agree on.
What's harder is to agree on is how much the second point matters, and how you achieve that goal. Even die-hard fans of the idea that "I got here because I'm awesome and hard-working" are coming around to the idea that that's not the entire story. There are always people who are working harder, and are smarter than you, so other factors must be at play, too.
How to be at the right place, at the right time? Luck is one of the things that makes that happen. The problem with luck, of course, is that you can't do anything about it, by definition. "Just be lucky" isn't great advice.
Better advice can be found by thinking about social networks. The small-world phenomenon - the observation that you are connected to everyone on the planet by just a few hops - is now well understood and described. In other words, there is always the "I know someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows about this fantastic opportunity" situation. But in order to take advantage of this situation, you can improve your position in the network, to be closer than others to such opportunities.
This is what people usually mean when they say you should network. Honestly, I never understood exactly what they meant. "To network" seems like a verb, but it makes little sense. We are all part of the big human social network, so what exactly does it mean "to network"?
In my experience, to network productively means to try and get closer to interesting opportunities, and to interesting people (because interesting opportunities tend to cluster around interesting people). For that to happen, you need more connections to those people. One advice could therefore be to talk to as many people as possible. But that alone won't cut it - if you spend all your time socializing, and talking to new people, what will you tell them? That you are spending 100% of your time on socializing? Clearly, there is a trade-off between doing novel, interesting things, and talking to others about it.
Importantly, the other extreme - doing 100% interesting work and 0% networking - is not a good idea either. Unfortunately, it remains some kind of ideal, especially in the academic world, where a lot of people continue to think that eventually, their work will speak for themselves. That is very, very rarely, if ever, the case. If you're doing great things, tell others about it!
The other benefit of networking with interesting people is not just to tell them about what you're doing, but to learn about what they and their contacts are doing. The number of interesting ideas one can get from a good social network is absolutely astounding.
So overall, I would argue you should network as much as possible, i.e. to talk about your work, and to get more ideas, where "as much as possible" means as long as it doesn't negatively impact your work. Coincidentally, this is why I am such a huge fan of Twitter - it's an extremely efficient way to talk about your work and ideas, and to get input from other people you find interesting. But that's something for the next rule.
Closing tidbit 1: My own introduction to social network theory was during a sociology class at Stanford, where the professor asked us to read work by a sociologist named Mark Granovetter on "how people get jobs". Pretty boring, I thought. But as I dug deeper, I came to learn about his fascinating findings that most people seem to get crucial information about job opportunities not from strong ties in the network (good friends and family), but predominantly through weak ties (i.e. acquaintances). This phenomenon has been observed in many other network phenomena. His paper "The strength of weak ties" has been cited over 45,000 times, and he's a strong contender for a Nobel.
Closing tidbit 2: The US Bureau of Labour Statistics says that 70 percent of jobs are found through networking.