How it all began

June 2020: After seeing people engaged in all kinds of creative lock-down pursuits, while feeling deeply uninspired, I got the idea to interview people in my network as I was reading Tim Harford’s book Messy. In the book he introduces the work of Mark Granovetter:

In 1973, Mark Granovetter, an American sociologist, introduced the paradoxical idea of ‘the strength of weak ties’./.../Granovetter observed that the most irreplaceable social connections were the distant ones./.../The more peripheral the contact, the more likely she is to tell you something you didn’t know.

So I used this as reason to reach out to people in my network that I was curious about, but hadn't been in touch with for a while. This is The weak ties project; an opportunity to be curious and to learn something new.