Who are you connected to, and don’t even know it?
Sept 3, 2025–How many connections to “important” people do you have because they were neighbors?
I am curious about how connected we are to well-known/accomplished/famous/key people simply due to randomness.
Many times, when I am looking for a favor or trying to find a benefactor or trying to reach someone in a position of power, someone I know will say, Oh, that’s my neighbor. And, presto, just by an accident of geography, the loop is closed.
But this happens way too often to be coincidence. Sometimes it is an accident of circumstance. Maybe you were Kindergarten classmates, or roommates in college.
I’ve experienced it myself. While running an adult education program, we were looking for a keynote speaker who would draw a generous audience for a fundraiser. One of my mentors came into my office and closed the door. He revealed that he was tutoring a ranch worker to pass his Citizenship exam. The kicker was that this ranch was owned by a famous astronaut, who had been asking how he could help pay back all the effort put into his employee. Voila, favor called in, and we had a packed gala.
I think I now understand why people play golf. It is not the game itself that has any appeal, but the fact that it allows you to interact with other business people outside of the office. I don’t golf, but I have experienced that sweaty connection on the basketball court. For many years I hooped it up three times a week with doctors, attorneys, politicians, entrepreneurs, financial advisors, and business owners. But “what they did for a living” is not why we played the game. We only cared if you could play defense and find the open man on a fast break.
But we were connected. When one guy found out my love of the Spurs (this was back in the Duncan days), it turned out he worked with the NBA franchise and brought me courtside seats. Another became my financial advisor, because I fed him assists before I had any finances to be advised about. A doctor noticed symptoms in a player on the court one morning and took him across the street to the hospital for a triple bypass.
The examples are all around. One former school principal became an usher for the Astros and got me seats behind the home dugout in Minute Maid Park.
I wager you experience these same random connections, where you hang out with people because you enjoy their company, only later to find out parenthetically that they were department heads at General Motors or art directors in Hollywood. I think it happens more often in retirement communities such as ours, where you are more likely to bump into a former CEO walking their dog.
Is this the way the world works? Wouldn’t that be a kick? What if, instead of working hard and climbing the ladder in any field, the secret to success lay simply in picking the right neighbors?
Being aware of this phenomenon, the next step would be to intentional-ize it.
I audit a class with college students, and it’s not an accident that I sit next to a future pharmacist, a future nurse, and a future bioengineer. I’m counting on the fact they’ll remember me when I get wheeled into their waiting room down the road.
I guess the moral of this story is to make connections wherever you wander. You never know who holds the keys to a kingdom you would never otherwise enter.