Social Networking and the Import of 2D and 3D Relationships
Posted Jun 18, 07:24 am in business, experiences, marketing, social networking
One of my college professors once said about advertising that it’s about getting the right message to the right person at the right time. This would suggest that we are not always the same person, and that our personalities morph— bend and fold, expand and contract— depending on our situation. To many, this is probably no amazing revelation about others (like your brown-nosing co-worker or the Eddie Haskell-like friends your kid hangs out with), but once your starting thinking about it with regards to yourself, you’re likely to find yourself putting up resistance. Most of us would probably like to think that we’re consistent, that we tend to act the same irrespective of who is around us, and what environs we happen to find ourselves in. Not that we want to be considered predictable, per se; but we tend not to see ourselves as the social chameleons that we actually are.
Ponder this point: let’s say that you’re being watched by six hypothetical but identical clones hired to monitor your behavior in six unique situations: at work, at home, when you’re hanging out with friends, when you’re at the bar, when you’re playing recreational sports, and during a job interview. Read over the notes taken by these impartial witnesses, and it would almost certainly suggest six distinct identities. Sure, there might be similarities between different sets of your doppelgangers, but if one were to extrapolate each of these sets of characteristics and mold them into full-blown and separate people, you’d have six guys who are only somewhat alike. You might not even like them all, which is an interesting thought.
So what does this have to do with relationship-building and networking?
Think about someone you have spent a lot of time with only in one physical setting, like a co-worker, or perhaps an acquaintance that you only see at a certain friend’s house. For the sake of example, let’s say we’re talking about your hypothetical co-worker Mark. You spent 8+ hours with Mark nearly every single day. Yet, you never— never —see him during the weekend, or after work. He’s “Mark from work,” after all.
Now think about people you know very well but haven’t literally spent thousands of hours with year after year, like your closest friends. Let’s say your best friend is named Jeff. You’ve gone everywhere with Jeff, like to the movies, bars, parks, road trips, other cities, Jeff’s house, your house, Jeff’s parents’ house, and so on. You’ve done things together, worked on projects together, and have discussed ideas at length. You’ve gone through some trying times with him (like the time you were hundreds of miles from home and you had got a flat tire in the boiling summer sun, and were far, far from help), and you’ve had great fun (like your great trip to Seattle just before that tire went flat). Your cache of shared experiences with Jeff are diverse and many, though the literal time amount you have spent with Jeff is perhaps not as much as it has been with Mark.
The distinction between your relationships with these two individuals is what I describe as 2D vs. 3D relationship.
Mark is a square. To you, Mark will always be a two-dimensional figure. He’s just a simple shape on an otherwise blank piece of paper. You can rotate him, but he always looks pretty much the same. Even turning the paper over just reveals an empty space.
Jeff, on the other hand, is a sphere. You can walk around Jeff and see all different sides of him, and from different vantage points. Sometimes he can appear bright, sometimes dark. You can see the flaws on some parts of him and the brilliant construction on others.
Interestingly, though you know Jeff as a sphere, his co-workers see him as a circle. They have no idea that he likes to build tiny replicas of Civil War battles and sell them on EBay, and they would be floored to hear that his favorite band is Slayer and that he’s seen them 200 times in concert.
You would be surprised to know that Mark likes to collect antique mayonnaise jars—just like you! But you don’t know that because you haven’t been in a situation in which that little factoid would come out. And so to you, Mark remains a square, rather than the cube that he really is. Given the nature of your relationship, no matter what you do, the complexity of your understanding of him will always be somewhat simple because you only know the “work Mark.”
And that’s kind of a tragedy because you have someone close to you who shares your interests— except you’re not aware of it. So that’s a wasted opportunity. But it’s a double tragedy for you because Mark thinks you’re a triangle, not the pyramid you really are. He doesn’t know your character well enough to recommend you to an old friend of his in the publishing industry who came to him desperately looking for someone with your qualifications. And that’s too bad, because you’ve been trying for years to break into publishing.
Because we are not always the same person, at any given time, the people around us are only getting a cross-section. The more settings we see someone in, the more complex our understanding of that person is, and the more they transform from a 2D figure to a 3D figure. Further, I would argue that if you want to accelerate the development of a friendship for whatever reason, the single most important thing you can do is to meet with that person under a wide variety of circumstances or settings. Find or make reasons to do it, if you are committed to befriending someone, whether it be a potential business partner, just a friend, a “more-than-a-friend,” or just someone you find interesting.
Contemplate this with regards to your own life, and you’ll see how crucial a wide variety of settings is in getting a full picture of someone. It’s important to how your relationships develop, and how strong they will likely be in the future. And often, these relationships are the fuel for our own courses in life. This is not to suggest that we should all forge artificial friendships based on the vague desire of capitalizing on them sometime in the future. What I’m saying is that it’s never a bad thing for you to know people fully, and unless you’re in the most demented 0.05% of the population, it’s probably good that they know and appreciate who you are. Social scientists argue that deep, meaningful relationships are the fundamental building blocks of happiness, and suggest that the more people experience these relationships, the happier they typically are.
Will Rogers once quipped that a stranger is just a friend you haven’t met. After seeing who my friends were in college, I find that statement remarkably true. A lot of my friends in college weren’t even the slightest bit like me and in normal circumstances would not have been in the same room as me, but we were forced into shared experiences that helped us see each other in many different lights, which almost by necessity developed into mutual respect and friendship. This leads me to believe that my friends could have been pretty much anyone who I had gotten saddled with in the dorms. Which, in turn, suggests that anyone I meet could be a 3D friend. Why not? We’re all just like tiny babies, lost in the big world, after all.
Think about that the next time you blow off networking, sadly, as I regularly do.