How to become insanely well-connected
Hey everyone!
Welcome back to Spark Teen Weekly. Each week, we'll send you handmade, hand-picked, and handpacked content on teen entrepreneurship, investing, creating, and more.
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How to become insanely well-connected
The best way to be highly influential is to be human to everyone you meet. In this post, Chris Fralic suggests 7 actionable rules for making memorable relationships.
We loved his follow-up system: after a meeting, save a 1 minute audio note with takeaways and next steps, then set aside an hour every Friday to go through these notes and craft follow-ups.
He also uses a reminders app to ping himself every X weeks, months, or years to remind himself to reconnect with the people he’s met.
Change your environment to maximize innovation
Human behaviour is affected by nature and nurture, and so is creativity. Here are three takeaways from Steven Johnson’s TED Talk:
Don’t look for the “eureka!” moment. It doesn’t exist and its subconscious presence as a goal hinders creativity.
Great ideas don’t come fast. Often, they develop over long periods of time.
If you are trying to build organizations that are more innovative, build spaces where interesting, new, unpredictable collisions from different people of different backgrounds can take place.
Survivorship bias
Survivorship bias is the tendency to focus on successful outcomes while ignoring unsuccessful outcomes. Here are some things survivorship bias tells us should work, but don’t.
Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg all dropped out and became billionaires. Therefore, dropping out = success, right? Turns out, 94% of the most successful businesspeople in the US have graduated college.
“Reading about how others became successful will bring me success.” Although you can imitate the habits of successful people, autobiographies don’t always show the full picture.
“If my product is better than another product, I will succeed.” Some products are in fact better, but your success ALSO boils down to branding and growth marketing. A good product alone will not make a company.
These are just 3 examples where survivorship bias is misleading. Learn more on Meg Prater’s blog.
Resources and opportunities
Lunchclub - An AI powered tool to help you make new connections and meet with them through weekly video calls.
Next Gen HQ - A media company in pursuit of empowering entrepreneurs is now hiring!
That's it for this week!
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Mei & Jodi from the Spark Teen team