This is advice that I endorse but struggle to follow myself.
Something it’s somewhat in tension with is a different set of advice I’ve been trying to adopt, which is to try to cultivate a small number of close friends rather than a smorgasborg of acquaintances.
[Epistemic status: synthesis of observation, intuition, advice from other people]
I don’t think the “rather than” in that second paragraph is workable. Strong ties usually grow out of weak ties, so if you don’t have a broad buffer of weak ties (or if it goes away, or if you let it go away), your replenishment pool for strong ties also goes away. Even strong ties frequently don’t last forever, so if you have only strong ties, you’re in an unstable position in the long term. Sometimes strong ties can give you access to more weak ties, but sometimes they can’t, and even when they can, you still have to step up to take advantage of this.
I also vaguely think the investment metaphor might go wrong places for reasons similar to what Dagon mentions, but I don’t think I can unpack that now.
This is advice that I endorse but struggle to follow myself.
Something it’s somewhat in tension with is a different set of advice I’ve been trying to adopt, which is to try to cultivate a small number of close friends rather than a smorgasborg of acquaintances.
[Epistemic status: synthesis of observation, intuition, advice from other people]
I don’t think the “rather than” in that second paragraph is workable. Strong ties usually grow out of weak ties, so if you don’t have a broad buffer of weak ties (or if it goes away, or if you let it go away), your replenishment pool for strong ties also goes away. Even strong ties frequently don’t last forever, so if you have only strong ties, you’re in an unstable position in the long term. Sometimes strong ties can give you access to more weak ties, but sometimes they can’t, and even when they can, you still have to step up to take advantage of this.
I also vaguely think the investment metaphor might go wrong places for reasons similar to what Dagon mentions, but I don’t think I can unpack that now.