Weak ties are your strongest ones

In 2020 my nonprofit was growing faster than it ever had. I was in Tanzania, and I wanted funding to expand what we were doing there.

So I decided to approach one of the wealthiest people in the country, Mohammed Dewji, then the youngest billionaire in Africa.

I was eighteen and nobody knew who I was. The obvious question was how you get to someone like that from where I was standing.

The long way round

I had always liked the idea of six degrees of separation, the notion that anyone is about six people away from anyone else. It seemed like a reason to try rather than a fact I could use.

I started with his sister, who was marketing director at their company. I followed her on Instagram and engaged with what she posted, consistently and over a long period. Sharing things, replying, commenting. She followed me back, so I knew the name registered.

What I did not do is message her. That felt like spending something I had not earned yet.

Instead I asked around. Family, friends, and then I asked them to ask the people they knew. Eventually a chain came back: my mum had a mutual friend with her assistant.

I contacted the assistant. The assistant set up a meeting.

The boardroom

I prepared properly. A detailed budget, a sponsorship package, an actual pitch rather than a request for help.

I went up to the top floor of a tall building and into a large boardroom, and she arrived with two other people who looked about my age. Nobody explained who they were, so I did what I had prepared and delivered the pitch to all three.

When I finished, she asked me whether I knew who the other two people were.

They were Mohammed Dewji's children. They were home for the break and looking for a summer project in menstrual health. That was why the meeting had been taken at all.

By the end of that summer we had worked together, I had met their father, and the project had supported two hundred girls and built ten washrooms in Tanzania.

Why this is not a story about luck

For a long time I filed this under fortunate coincidence. It is not, or not only.

The chain that produced it ran through a friend of my mother, who knew an assistant. Not one person in that chain was close to me. Not one of them was someone I would have listed if you had asked me who could help.

That is the pattern the research describes. In 1973 the sociologist Mark Granovetter published a paper called The Strength of Weak Ties, showing that people more often found work through acquaintances than through close friends. The result was counterintuitive then and still is.

The explanation is straightforward once you see it. In The Defining Decade, Meg Jay puts it well: your strong ties are like you. Similar backgrounds, similar experiences, overlapping contacts. They know what you know and who you know, so there is not much they can add that you do not already have.

Weak ties sit in networks you cannot see into. They know different people and different things. They are bridges where you cannot see the far end, which is why they are worth crossing.

Your closest people are for support. They are not usually your route to something new, and it is not a failing on their part.

How to build them

The good news is that this is much easier now than it was in 1973.

Make your work visible. Most weak ties do not form through introductions, they form because someone came across what you were doing and remembered. That only happens if the work exists somewhere findable.

Contact people directly. Cold outreach works far more often than people expect, particularly when you are young, because so few people do it well. Be specific about why them.

Meet one new person a week. Not as networking, which is unpleasant for everyone involved. As a habit with a low bar. Weak ties are cheap to form, which is the entire advantage.

Ask who they could ask. When you ask someone for an introduction, the useful answer is usually two steps further out than they first think. My mum did not know the assistant. She knew someone who did.

The part I would emphasise

I engaged with someone's work for a long time before any of this happened, and I never asked her for anything. That mattered. When the meeting eventually came, I was not a stranger.

I would be careful with that as a tactic. Engaging with someone's work in order to extract something later is a different activity from being genuinely interested, and it reads differently to the person on the other end.

If you are trying to turn a first conversation into something that lasts, that is a separate skill and I wrote about it in how to follow up after a coffee chat. If the harder part is starting the conversation at all, how to start a conversation without feeling awkward is the place to begin.

Think about who is two steps away rather than one.