I learned about the Bounce Curl Brush at a Customer Success event. 😜

I learned about the Bounce Curl Brush at a Customer Success event. 😜

I've been intentionally showing up to more in-person events lately. Not networking events necessarily - just more situations where I'm in a room with people I don't see every day.

And without fail, something useful happens.

At one event, I mentioned my kid’s suddenly curly hair to someone I see a few times a year - she spent ten minutes telling me everything she knows about managing curly hair, even sent me an amazon link for a great brush. At another, someone I'd just met gave me a genuinely good idea about how to use case studies in my marketing.

Neither of those conversations was planned. Neither person was in my immediate world.

I didn’t have a name for this experience until this week.

If you know me, you know I love a good Brené Brown or Adam Grant quote or fact. 😉 And in their new joint podcast, the Curiosity Shop, they talked about this exact idea - the power of "weak ties".

Adam even cited a meta-analysis of 50 years of research showing that “you get more fresh ideas from people you don’t know well and don’t talk to every day”. 👀

The people closest to us want good things for us. They're also living inside the same assumptions we are. The person we see twice a year (or just met) isn't.

What’s something novel you got from a weak tie recently?