“When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world.” – John Muir
When everyone was born, the first connection you have is with your parents. Then you meet your parents’ siblings and their parents (your grandparents). Your parents’ siblings have their own kids and they become your cousins. After meeting your first-cousins, you find out that your parents also have cousins who have cousins and so on and so forth. Next thing you know, you are related to a lot of people who you barely know and have a humongous family reunion. This type of connection is something humans cannot control.
In terms of math, connectedness works like a combinational logic where the output is determined by its inputs at the current time without regard to previous inputs using logical gates such as NOT, AND, OR, NAND, NOR, XOR, and XNOR. Each gate affects or changes the outcome whenever it passes through one of them. Thus, what you put in to a connection gives a certain output in a relationship.
As mentioned previously, one thing humans do have control over is relationships. From attending the Women 2.0 event this February, Porter Gale shared the topic of her latest book Your Network Is Your Net Worth. When both parties A and B have a connection, where B and C also have a connection, then that means A and C also have a connection. Why? With the invention of Social Media like Facebook, Twitter or Google+, the Six Degrees of Separation concept has been reduced to Three Degrees of Separation.
The best way to increase your net worth is to be authentically open and let people know why you care. But that also means what you put in for your current relationships will affect every outcome for other relationships. Why? Everything is related. Your every action naturally is connected with another reason. There is a purpose why you meet everyone you meet. What that reason is depends on what actions (logical gates) above you want to pass through for each person. Therefore, spend more of your time with people who can bring out the best in you. Why would you choose to have it otherwise?
Similarly, a relationship with your current and potential customers exists within your business website. A user interface that displays connections is the Tagcloud interface where a bigger text size has more contents within and a smaller size has less. For example, SEO Service includes all the blog posts, projects and services related to SEO. This allows search engine bots as well as your visitors to easily find the topics they want to see in your site that is related to something they are searching for.
This is one reason why “content is king”. You want to keep visitors browsing through your website and engage them for as long as you can. However, there is a difference between fun engaging and annoying engaging. Annoying engaging is when people cannot find anything on your website that they take forever to figure out how to navigate through it. Instead of spending time to “learn” your complicated website, users tend to leave completely. In fact, websites have a balancing act for attention.
Online users have short attention spans because, instinctively, they know they can easily search Google to find another result. We want to avoid this from happening. How? Keep your posts simple, to the point, but provide connections to related posts so that they get enticed to look and read something different.
Different is following change, which is the only constant in time. What kind of changes are you currently making? Of those connections and relationships, what do you want to happen? Consequently, who do you want to become?
