Hello everyone, this is Helen Huang @ Organizing, based in Beijing, China. In order to better learn and practice the YiXiaoNeng Time Management System, after finished publishing 100 Chinese articles, I decided to continue writing and publishing a daily English article in another 100 days based on the "YeWuBin Time Management 100 Episodes" audio program. Today is the 173rd day.

Today's topic is: The Strength of Weak Connections

In this lesson, I will talk more about interpersonal relationships.

Remember from our last lesson that skills account for only 15% of a person's success, while interpersonal relationships account for 85% of person's success.

Harvard University studied over 200 men for 76 years and determined ten reasons that people will be successful in life. Wealth had very little impact on success and happiness in life. Instead, mind and body health, and the ability to build interpersonal relationships were most important.

Warm and emotionally connected relationships will lead to a beautiful life. Emotion relies on a strong connection such as the close relationship between husband and wife, mother and father, or parent and child.

There is a different kind of connection – the weak connection or weak relationship which I will talk about today. Our interpersonal relationships are made up of either strong connections or weak connections. When you make new friends, which connection will you build with that friend? The weak connection or the strong connection?

In 1970s, a professor at Stanford University once examined people obtained three different types of jobs: a professional job, a technical job and a management job. All of this took place in suburban Boston.

The study became the man's doctoral thesis at Harvard University. He studied 282 people and selected 100 of them to have face-to-face interviews with. From the interviews, he found that less than a half of them found their job the traditional way through an advertisement in the newspaper and then delivering a resume to the hiring manager. 54 of the applicants found and received the job through networking and interpersonal relationships they developed with weak ties. This is a considerable number.

Imagine all the time you're spending to create and improve your resume and then trying to get it into the hands of the right people, and yet over half of the applicants don't get the job at all through a resume. That's very important for you to know. You might try to change your strategy from knowing this.

An article from a "Sociology Network" talked about the real power of this isn't from relationships but what kind of relationships you built. The study found that the valuable connections that helped you get a job weren't the strong connections you have with family and close friends, but rather the weaker and lighter connections with associates and acquaintances.

In handsight, it is easy to explain this phenomenon. The people who hang out with us every day,  who has strong connection with, are more likely to do the same thing as us do and their ideas are also similar to ours. So, if I don't know about a good job opportunity, how would they know about it? We gain more information from our network of weaker connection and friends, because they are more diverse than us.

Later, the professor generalized the theory and named his thesis: The Strength of Weak Ties. Ties in other words are for connections. This sociological thesis has been cited more times than other in the sociology circle. It has been cited more than 20,000 times. The data used in the study is not so very large and its revelations are relatively simple, but it's impact and value to everyday life is profound. It tells us why connections with other people are the most valuable ways to get ahead in life. They are quick, reliable and powerful. The strength of recommendations is more powerful than any resume can show. This is why they say that the world of mouth marketing is the most powerful form of marketing.

Why are Facebook and WeChat founders Mark Zuckerberg and Zhang Xiaolong so successful? It's because they both realized the power of weak ties or weak connections. They created the powerful tools to do a simple thing – help all of us develop weak connections more easily.

Our strong connections don't need this software. We are always together with those we have strong connections with whether through telephone, email, or in person meetings. But weak connections are difficult for us to maintain.

Therefore, the Internet has helped us to expand our network of weak connections and therefore strengthen our overall strength of interpersonal relationships. No matter where we are, we always connect with each other through the Internet.

I also take advantage of a something called a circle of friends to manage my interpersonal relationships. For example, Yixiaoneng is a circle of friends, and the circle also develops our weak connections.

If you have read my book Make the Best Use of Time, you can see how I have used the rule of 8 to grow my network exponentially in only 90 days. Go read it now and in the meantime, find 8 people that will read it with you. You can find these people in a blog site or using Facebook or WeChat. The key is to find new people that you don't already know today. Establish new weak connections using a common interest or goal, such as reading the book.

Each of my students in the two-day offline Yixiaoneng class can easily find 8 new people to make friends with. In the Yixiaoneng class, we practice this skill and help each other develop these connections over the 90 days. We succeed by helping each other together.

If all you're doing here is taking the online class or listening to the Ximalaya courses, you will never improve. That is not the way to progress. But, if you start to share these skills that you learn with others in your circle of friends and develop new circles, then you will begin to internalize the lessons you've learned in the course. If you do this, first you will be helping me immensely and for that you have my great appreciation and thanks. More importantly, it will be more helpful for you, and it may even change your whole life. Over the last three years, my Yixiaoneng students have told me that implementing what they've learned in this way has increased their learning and skills.

Developing weak connections has had a tremendous impact on my own life. Do you remember I shared my plan to begin traveling around the world, beginning on Sep 21st, 2013? Well, I shared the idea with people I met in a circle of friends I found in a WeChat. I developed the idea and gathered ideas from talking to these new friends. Later as I developing the plan, I met a tour guide in Taiwan who travelled to over 100 different countries. He helped to make my plan much more practical and my life much easier.

Do you also remember how I shared my running experience with you? The training for a marathon? One of my students saw this through his circle of friends and introduced me to the running teacher Wu Dong. You see, we network Yixiaoneng in this way too and it has expanded my ability to reach new students who have a need for these services – who, like you, want to improve their lives!

At first, I taught my course in my basement, teaching iPad and iPhone skills to lots of customers. Later, I shared my time management course with clients. And after that, I was able to share the course with many people for free from Ximalaya. From this I was able to expand my course and reach many students from southern China to the eastern seaboard and finally to all of China.

In the Ximalaya app, these 100 audio lessons are for free and then there are 10 additional courses for a fee. I have shared all of this and developed the content mostly from the knowledge gained through weak connections around me.

This skill of developing weak connections is so important that I begin all of my classes with the concept. I have even learned voice training skills from my weak connections which I've used to create the audio lessons.

Therefore, I want to tell you that every single one of your encounters with others in life is important. Remember them all. You never know which of these will prove valuable to you long after the meeting has taken place.

Thank you from the bottom of my heart for continuing to listen / read to these time management courses on Ximalaya, and thank you very much for your encouragement, comments and shares. The interaction between you and me makes our life more beautiful.

I hope you now see how the weak connection is actually more important than the strong ones. Strong connections rely on emotional ties whereas weak connections rely on information. The combination of these two form our interpersonal relationships.

That's all sharing today. Thank you being with me together. Have a wonderful day!