Getting attention and co-operation

Connecting to people isn't easy. Connections have to be two-way to have any value. They are only valid if the person you want to be connected to also wants to be connected to you. This puts a serious restraint on the choice of people you can include in your personal hub of contacts.

An appropriate communication strategy must allow for the fact that everyone has a limited time available to spend communicating. This forces them to be selective. For example, it would be very nice to be able to be connected to the President of the United States and Bill Gates, but, it is unlikely that they'd have sufficient incentive to include you as one of their limited number of contacts. This would mean that, even if you could manage somehow to send a communication to them, the link would be worthless because they'd probably have no time to read or respond to it.

A realistic strategy for connecting to people must ensure that you don't aim too high with your choice of connections and that you have sufficient to offer the contacts to make you one of the few people they have the inclination and time to respond to. On the other hand, you don't want to aim too low because you also have only a limited time available and you'll want this to be as valuable as possible.

This returns us to the need for a strategy to get people's interest and co-operation. Everybody you'd want to help you with your problems would have problems of their own. The tit-for-tat strategy tells us that co-operation has to be built up slowly. You give a little and they may co-operate and give you a little. You respond back and gradually a valuable relationship is built up. In this cafe of millions, there will be many others trying to claim the attention and time of the same people you'll want to co-operate with you. Why should they co-operate with you, rather than the others?

A solution to this problem is to think in terms of object oriented strategies and the concept of inheritance. People who are valuable to you might be valuable not because of what they know themselves, but, what their contacts know. Their value would derive from the knowledge they would inherit from the people they were in communication with. This could appear to make them super specialists, with a virtual knowledge that gives them status and cause them to be desirable people to know.

To be able to stand out in the crowd and be able to attract the interest of such super specialists, you'd need to become a super specialist yourself. This would involve choosing an area of speciality for yourself and then going around assembling appropriate contacts with people you can inherit knowledge from.

This would be the route to achieving a a powerful Solution Point where your communication time would be optimally valuable and productive.