Most of the blogs in your inbox and tweets in your feed are AI generated.

This brave new world of AI everywhere has counterintuitively made one thing more and more and more important: social capital, i.e your network.

Agency is The Answer

The key to life and success is agency, the amount influence you have on the world around you. Agency is the product of ability, network, and the context in which you apply them; the equation is simple:

Agency = Ability x Capital x Context

^This is a simplified version of Pierre Bourdieu’s agency framework (where ‘capital’ can be social, economic, and/or cultural).

Social, economic ($) and cultural capital are all enabled by your network. Specifically, being plugged in to a network of other human beings who think you’re cool.

Now that AI is bringing the cost of ability toward zero for pretty much any intellectual endeavor (ie. with AI everyone is now a genius), cultivating a network is the best investment you can make for yourself.

The Value of Network

Some anecdotes that have come across my Twitter feed recently:

So network is important. Look at any field, the majority of outlier successful people have outlier-level networks. This is causation, not correlation.

SO then how does one cultivate a network?? There are really two pieces here:

• being in the right place

• having charisma

That’s pretty much it. Plug yourself into the most impactful communities, and increase the value of your connections by having charisma. It’s both art and science.

Having Charisma

You see this in sales and political contexts most acutely - the impact of having charisma.

Paul Graham wrote about this in the context of Presidential elections in one of my favorite blog posts: https://www.paulgraham.com/charisma.html 

^He argues that, if you look back at any election in recent history, the winner is just the more charismatic candidate (Kennedy > Nixon, Carter > Ford, Reagan > Carter, Clinton > WH Bush, W Bush > Gore, Obama > McCain, Trump > Clinton, etc.)

A very recent example is Mamdani vs Cuomo for NYC Mayor. Politics aside, Mamdani is simply the more likable guy (this tweet sums it up well)

Of course this theme plays out across pretty much every field where network has an impact on outcome - business deals, startup fundraising, student and club level organizations, the list goes on.

If you want to be successful here, you should probably try to be likable and charismatic.

High-Signal Networks

The other half of the network equation is just finding the right places to be.

There are high-signal communities (online and in-person) where social, economic and cultural capital congregate. Plug yourself into them.

Some of the highest-signal networks for young, tech, finance, startup ppl:

• YCombinator, Techstars, gener8tor (startup accelerator networks)

• Stanford, Harvard, MIT (prestigious academic networks)

• HackerNews, r/Startups, #BuildInPublic on X, AngelList (online startup forums)

• GitHub Community forums, StackOverflow (online developer forums)

• AI Tinkerers, AI Meetup, Data Driven (in-person tech groups in NYC, Chi, SF, etc)

• Neudata, BattleFin, EagleAlpha (alt data hedge fund communities)

• LessWrong, EA, e/acc, etc. (intellectual/rationality focused communities)

These are some examples - I am not endorsing any of them. Copy/paste any field and there will be a few that you should plug into.

Some are in-person, some are online forums on Reddit/Twitter, others are in discord/whatsapp chats.

End of the day, ability matters less in an AI world, network (the means by which you cultivate capital) matters more.

Do what you can to build a network.

Be charismatic.

Find high-signal communities.

That’s the recipe.

Agency (𝒜)
𝒜 = Ability × Capital × Context

Where 
Capital = f(Network) = f(Charisma × Community_Quality)

Peace,
Ramsey