In 1994 evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar posited that the maximum number of stable relationships a human being can maintain is about 150.  He arrived at this number by observing factories at companies such as Gore-Tex, Military Organizations  and Nomadic Indian Tribes. The significance of this number to your network is that it gives you a target number to work towards. Now, you may have 500+ contacts in linkedIn or 1,200 facebook friends.  That’s fine, but according to science and common sense, it is virtually impossible to maintain a meaningful relationship with that many people.  And as discussed earlier, the value of the network isn’t in the number of business cards, but in the number of meaningful relationships. 

How do you define a meaningful relationship?  You should know quite a bit about the people who you have realtionships with.  Remember the three keys of relationships, money, Health, Kids.  What do they do for a living?  Have they recently recovered or are they currently dealing with an illness. Do you know the names and ages of their children?  This type of information is what relationships are built upon.  We sometimes tend to think that because this is a business relationship, you shouldn’t pry. This assumption would be incorrect.  Asking questions and becoming involved in peoples personal lives is where connections are formed and friendships built.  Remember the game 21 questions. Every conversation, including the initial one should be that kind of game.   If you think about the people who seem to have an uncanny knack for connecting with people, you’ll see that the on consistency is the amount of questions they ask. There is an old saying that people don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care. That saying is very true here and leads to my next point, which is actually caring.

Yes, that’s right the key to networking is actually giving a damn.  Not pretending to care, but actually caring. You may be thinking to yourself that you can’t will yourself to care about something you don’t. While it is true  that understanding the motivations and emotions of others often proves elusive, it is an important, if not critical skill to develop while building your network. In Michael Manson’s book, “The Subtle Art Of Not Giving a F—-. He talks about focusing on a few things that we really, really care about and not worrying about the rest.  I think his philosophy lines up nicely with Dunbar’s number.  By limiting the size of our network intentionally, we can focus intently on the people inside of our network. This may sound a bit calculating, but remember this is just an approximate number, you don’t have to forget aunt Maggie, because she is not part of your 150. You are just choosing the folks you will spend some time getting to know better based on non-random criteria. I use the term non-random to make a point.  We believe that our closest friends should be discovered randomly.  It is somehow strange to seek out the type of person that we want to make friends with.  I argue that an active search is exactly what we should do. 

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