"You Remind Me of Charlie Munger"

Matchups and Magnet Places

Similarity is a good place for us to start, because common interests and sensibilities usually bring future partners together in the first place. I saw three kinds of meetings: an introduction made by a mutual acquaintance; an encounter at a place of common interest; and a seemingly chance meeting that turned out to be driven by a subterranean similarity.

In 1957, a twenty-seven-year-old investor in Omaha, Nebraska, pitched some family friends named Edwin and Dorothy Davis to join a fund he managed. Dr. Davis hardly seemed to listen. But after he conferred with his wife, they agreed they'd put in $100,000 — most of their net worth, and a huge sum to the investor, Warren Buffett, whose portfolio at the time came to $300,000.

Buffett asked Dr. Davis why he'd take such a big risk. "You remind me of Charlie Munger," Davis replied. Two years later, when Munger, a thirty-five-year-old lawyer in Los Angeles, returned to his hometown of Omaha for a visit, the Davis family arranged for the two men to meet. Thus began the partnership behind what's probably the most successful investment operation in the history of capitalism.

The human mind naturally matches like and like. It satisfies a primal need. It's like those memory games children play. You turn over a card showing a watermelon, and a sudden appetite arises: seeking the other watermelon card feels as natural and urgent as breathing.

In pretty much the same way, people match friends they think have things in common. That's why one day in 1971, a teenager named Bill Fernandez introduced a sixteen-year-old high-school friend named Steve to another Steve, a twenty-year-old college kid who lived on Fernandez's block. "One day," Fernandez remembered, "Steve Jobs bicycled over to hang out with me and do electronics projects in the garage, and out in front was [Steve] Wozniak washing his car. So I thought to myself, Okay, this Steve is an electronics buddy. He's an electronics buddy. They'd probably like to meet each other."

Sometimes introductions spring from practical needs. When Józef Kowalski discovered that his young Polish friend Marie Sklodowska, a physics student in Paris, needed lab space, he thought she might get help from a physicist he knew named Pierre Curie.

In a screenplay about great partners, a conduit like Edwin Davis or Bill Fernandez or Józef Kowalski would be excised, because we cherish the romantic notions of matches made by fate.

But if there is such a thing as fate, it works through human agents. Unlike in the movies, where the girl who will change the hero's life just walks up to him in the doctor's waiting room, most significant real-life connections emerge from other connections. Consider a study by the sociologists Duncan J. Watts and Gueorgi Kossinets on how friendships form on a university campus. Roughly 45 percent of new pairs met through mutual friends, and another 41 percent of new pairs met through mutual friends and shared contexts (like classes). The formation of new ties varied with network distance, meaning that individuals who were separated by two intermediaries (that is, they shared neither friends nor classes) were thirty times less likely to become friends than individuals who were separated by just one intermediary.

The fact that sublime, life-changing introductions often emerge from other, more mundane relationships may seem obvious to the socially sophisticated, but it's a crucial lesson for those of us who seek to connect from a place of relative isolation. As John Cacioppo and William Patrick observed in their book Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection, people starved for intimacy tend to lose their bearings even in ordinary encounters. Frustrated with the awkwardness they feel, they may retreat further. The way up from the bottom of this social staircase is not to leap straight for the top but to simply take the first step: Say hello to the guy in the elevator. Make eye contact in the conference room. For God's sake, call your mom. Even the smallest moment of authentic contact can be elevating. Like a pianist warming up with scales before tackling a sonata, we can use social niceties or bland factual exchanges to set ourselves up for the possibility of something more advanced — sharing a risky idea, say.

Just as loneliness can be a downward spiral, so can connection whorl us up into higher spheres. When we get moving, we can move quickly, because, as the science of social networks shows, we're even more broadly interconnected than we realize. A 2011 study of Facebook found that, of its 721 million users at the time, the average number of links from one arbitrarily selected person to another was 4.74 — less, even, than the "six degrees of separation" made famous in John Guare's play of that name.

But making those links isn't necessarily easy. In fact, some clusters of society can be devilishly hard to penetrate. One key to fluid movement is what the psychologist Karen Fingerman calls "consequential strangers." These are people outside your inner circle who have enough interest in you to make connections but enough distance from you to be exposed to interesting people in other spheres. According to a study by the sociologist Mark Granovetter, well over half of a sample of professionals in Newton, Massachusetts, got their jobs through personal connections. And more than 83 percent of the personal connections that led to jobs involved only occasional or rare contact.

This may tempt you into magical thinking — that someone in the outer reaches of your circle will swoop down and deliver you to someplace new. But it's more accurate to view these relationships as magnifiers of your own interest and attention. In all the cases I've mentioned so far, both future members of a pair had given the conduit a reason to...