3.57 Degrees of Separation

Six Degrees of Separation

You may have already heard of the term Six Degrees of Separation.

According to Wikipedia, the six degrees of separation (also called the theory of six degrees of handshakes) is a theory established by the Hungarian Frigyes Karinthy in 1929, which suggests that any person on the globe can be connected to any other person through a chain of individual relationships consisting of at most six links.

Put differently, the idea is that every person in the world is connected to every other person by fewer than six social connections. Researchers tested this in the 1960s and found it to be roughly true.

 

 

Of course, there are far fewer degrees of separation between you and me 😀

In the era of social media, one might assume that since we all know many more people from so many different regions of the world, this number has surely changed…

Who better than Facebook to analyze this? After analyzing 721 million people and their connections, Facebook discovered that in 2016 (eight years ago already!), on average, two people in the world are separated by 3.57 people.

So now we can talk about Three point fifty-seven degrees of separation!

We have never been so many on Earth: 3 billion when I was born and officially over 8 billion since 2023.

We have never been so interconnected: since 2014, there have been more mobile phones on Earth than humans, and over half of the human population is connected to the Internet.

 

 

We live in a very particular time in the history of humanity, an exceptional transition in terms of its scale and speed.

And thus our world has become more uncertain and more chaotic in the scientific sense of the term.

And as you already know: chaos isn’t just a mess!

There are hidden orders that you can use, what I call the gifts of chaos:

• the strange attractor: even though we can’t predict everything precisely, not just anything happens, and you can create your own attractor, your vision, your dream. You can find here the method I use every year to find or refine my dreams for the year.
• the butterfly effect or self-amplification phenomenon: by changing one small thing, by implementing small exponential routines, we can achieve immense changes, create emergences. My favorite routines because they are the simplest and fastest: silence, forgiveness and gratitude.

So enjoy the gifts of chaos and thrive in this more uncertain world: create your strange attractor and implement small exponential routines in your personal and professional life 🙂