Success Isn't About Hard Work or Luck—It's About Who You Know
Your Key to Success Isn't More Luck or Hard Work
A new analysis of 21 billion Facebook friendships reveals that economic connectedness—having friends who earn more than you—is the strongest predictor of upward mobility, outweighing school quality and poverty rates. The effect is causal: a 2022 LinkedIn experiment showed that weak ties boost job mobility. The data suggests we've been optimizing the wrong lever.
The people who move your career and your income are usually not your closest contacts or your longest hours.
- asdfasgasdgasdg
Surprised to be the first person to point this out. The entire premise of the article is dependent on a single study that definitely cannot demonstrate causation. The results of the study could equally well be explained by a third variable that causes both better financial outcomes and a higher likelihood to have more relationships with people who are wealthier.
Beyond that, I just have a lot of trouble accepting the conclusion because of everything I have seen in my career. Hard working people tend to know other hard working people. Hard working people get more done. Getting more done seemed to get you promoted, at least where I worked. Getting promoted had a meaningful, positive effect on income. People who weren’t very productive languished, conversely.
Possible this experience does not generalize to all workplaces!
- throwaway_7274
I attribute 90% of my success in life to the fact that I happened to make the right childhood best friend. One thing led to another and I got a PhD and earn [unreasonable salary]/year now. Life is insanely unfair. On some level it is luck. I don’t know what the “skill issue” twitterites don’t get about it.
(Hard work doesn’t hurt, either, but that goes without saying.)
- michaelfm1211
I don't disagree with the result but the argument may be flawed. How do you know it's not the other way around, that richness causes having rich friends, rather than rich friends causing richness?
- pavel_lishin
This is probably the biggest value from going to college, or at least it was - making those connections. I got my first job from a college connection, and my second one as well. I'm not sure how useful the actual classes were, or the degree - my first job certainly didn't require one, and the second one would have likely waived the requirement for one since I was already employed as a software engineer.
- anticorporate
Meeting people and making friends outside my income class through civic volunteering probably had a bigger impact on my lifetime earnings to date than either of my degrees or my work history itself.
- Supermancho
I think it's how you appear to other people you work around.
Over a period of time, when the right person thinks you are useful/attractive/interesting, you get more opportunity/promotion.
This happens to explain the networking effect implied by the post (and related analyses).
- glaslong
The key to success is the same as it ever was: you buying my Product! Or even better, my Course about how you too can achieve success with your own Product.
- xyzelement
This article feels like a "wet streets cause rain" kind of thing.
I think there are two factors at play beneath this:
1. Your expectations of yourself. If you grow up with studious and career oriented friends and family, you expect that of yourself. Same when you grow up around enrepreners. On the other than there are social groups that have the attitude roughly "I work a random job until I get fired" - if that's the subculture you are brought up with, that can steer your own life too.
2. You self select your friends. My highschool had a mix of poor but motivated immigrant kids, and just like "bad" kids. The two groups didn't mingle, one ended up in the 1% by and large and the other group is in jail or on welfare. So you could say we did better because we had friends who ended up better off but I think it's the other way - we associated with people who are on our trajectory.
"Who you know" is important - but the first job I got through a connection was at age 45. Everything before that came from who I am not who I knew, but who know is shaped by who I am (ie I wouldn't have had the connection that got me this job if the guy hadn't known he as a high performer to begin with)