The world is a big, yet a small place as well. With over 7 billion people on the planet, the average person may only know 30 to 50 people in their lifetime. I am referring to people with whom they may have interacted directly or indirectly.
Although it varies, some people may know slightly less or more than others. While we are wired to be social animals, we are not meant to spread ourselves too thin; instead, people thrive in social circles where they can share similar identities with others and create something together.
If you look at a business person who meets a lot of customers on a daily basis, they are unlikely to remember people they only meet once or twice; even if you are making millions of transactions, your face or identity may not register in their mind.
This is not a subconscious action; it is primarily unintentional. Memory works through the constant repetition of new information. Even salespeople cannot afford to know so many people at once, and the people they will most likely remember are the ones who consistently patronize them.
However, in life, people try to do more than they can actually do. I understand the importance of casting a wide net into the ocean, but sometimes we try to catch everything and end up with nothing.
Someone recently asked me why they had not been getting traction on Hive. To them, it was most likely a Hive issue, but they overlooked something: you can not have everything. We cannot be friends with everyone, we cannot form bromance or SIS-mance relationships with everyone, and even if we tried, we would fail miserably because we simply cannot keep up with "knowing everyone" all in the name of networking.
Networking is meant to be impactful, concise, and intelligent; we need to understand who we are before we know who we need to network with; however, if we simply want to get everyone on our side, we will lose out.
The option for Variety does not simply imply that we are wired to maximize our available options. This is why people can only hold two or three jobs at a time.
The body cannot cope with the stress, and the mind will most likely become ill as a result of the overload of detail and information. It is why people have a limited number of children, spouses, and many other things, and we simply cannot go hard on the options we have when they are just too much for us to handle.
For example, most businesses give bonuses or discounts to their longest or most consistent customers because they are more than just loyal; they have established identities that deserve recognition, and sometimes the relationships extend beyond business to achieve even better results.
For example, I only patronize a limited number of people in commercial real-life activities because I prefer to keep numbers to a minimum. I prefer quality to quantity. I can not accomplish anything by spreading my patronage too thin, because I have learned that money relationships require consistent patronage to produce better results.
People can go from business people to friends and from that to brothers. This cannot be achieved simply by spamming a few interactions.
Business interactions or networks can sometimes take 5 to 10 years for the parties involved to realize that they are no longer just business people; there is something deeper going on.
It works exactly the same way in real life as it does on Hive.
Sometimes you have to be involved with people for a long time in order to form a genuine network and relationship. We regard chronic interactions as genuine relationships because the mind is wired to acquire knowledge through constant repetition of information.
This is why you do not build networks over a few days or weeks; networks require constant interaction to be built. Knowledge like this is very simple; it does not require a genius to decipher.
For example, if you smile at someone every time you see them, you may appear to them as a freak or a deluded person for the first few days or weeks, but as you continue to do so, this stranger will eventually become familiar with that smile, and once this feeling of familiarity is established, you will no longer be a stranger to them, but you may have to do this for a long time, and if you stop halfway, your previous efforts will be foiled and broken.
You cannot simply network with everyone, you just need a few, and go hard as well. Although I agree that you should try everything you see before deciding what you truly need or want, if you do it for too long, all you will end up with is noise rather than sound.
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