Network is a key for a new world

Abstract

Network is a key for a new world. Unlike a solo skill, it involves different people and various relationships. Delicate practice break down the wall which prevent me get in touch with other people and lead me to a resourceful rich field of life.

Introduction

When face to the uncertain and complex situation in the real world, whether I want to own a business or not, what I can confirm is, only with the help of others, I can gather the information, find the opportunity and start to convince myself, you can do it.

Network is a ecosystem that it provide you resources, information, support and legitimacy, people in network give and receive, maintain and improve this system (Adler and Kwon, 2002). For a such passive person like me, I merely know new people proactively, even if I am always prepared offer what I have to others, so long as they ask me. It bothered me for several years and even though I have a nice business plan or self-improvement intention, I cannot find the legitimacy and mess less make it tested by real world.

In this paper, I will firstly provide academic guidance of how to design and carry out the deliberate practice. The discussion of the network method will be in the second section. Following will be an initial practice outline and trials, and the assumed difficulties in practice situation.

Literature review

What are the roots for individual difference in professional achievement? It can be a controversy in sport, music, business and more different area.

Whether a talent is born or made is the central of these debates.

Colvin(2010) provided us two strong examples about Mozart and Tiger Woods. We all know Mozart is almost equivalent to greatness, what makes him more legendary is, he revealed his music achievement from such an early age. But his father was often overlooked by the apotheosis. Leopold Mozart designed an intensive training system for little Mozart at age three. Another counterarguments is Tiger Woods. Tiger have prodigious achievement in golf when he was at high school, which was usually seen as a talent evidence. But the fact was, he has receive designed intensity practice for seventeen years. According to Colvin(2010), we must admit that the specific talent is conclusive element of tremendous achievement, but the great professional need deliberate practice.

These saying can be dated back to the founder of behaviorism, John Waston (1930), he argue the intensive practice maybe the most reasonable explanation for success. Ericsson et al.(1993) used a experiment with violinists, to propose that the long term deliberated practice is more crucial than the talent. Ericsson (2006) argue that there is a acceptable level for the performance of our daily activity, once people reached there and satisfied with it, they do not need to put effort, especially mental effort into it, to maintain the performance.

However, the experiences are not sufficient to produce the best performer, since experience are not designed to improve, and even it can be repeated a lot, but there is not feedback mechanism and last but not least, maintain the performance don’t need highly mentally investment.

Baron(2010) emphasize, the deliberate practice plays a crucial role in extortionary performance development, but deliberate practice itself should be seen as a magnifier of initial skills, otherwise, a long period deliberate itself is not sufficient for high levels of performance. And for entrepreneur, they are differ from musician chess masters, when they are intent to launching new ventures, opportunity, timing are crucial element as well. So a successful entrepreneur must be a generalist, but not a specialist.

Discussion

According to Friar(2007), access the resources and knowledge will not only emerge in the directly network, but also form the indirect ties. The indirect ties are often referred from connect ties. These weak ties will set up the relations between groups (Granovetter,1973). For the target group of network delicate practice design, both dense and diversity should be considered. That means, exclusive relationship and the bridge to disconnected networks are two important components. Thus, one of the important features of high efficiency network is structural.

Besides structural character, Cross et al. (2008) also conduct other two important features of high quality networks, namely relational and behavioral. The relationship which can expand expertise and go through career taps should be intensively invested. Meanwhile, man should not only just focus on the size of networks, but also think seriously about the behavior which lead to the high-quality relationships.

A network should be built before it be used. Ferrazzi (2014) pointed that a network should be based on mutual understanding and trust with others. In your network, everyone need feel respected and valued. The initial intention for knowing people should be” what can I offer you” rather than “what can I get from you”.

As above mentioned, the quality of network is more crucial than the size of you network. How to spend time to build network matters more than how long you spend in building network (Ferrazzi 2014). The acquaintances are not equivalents as real, trusted friends. The first step of setting trust is open and honest, giving people full attention and sharing vulnerable moments from you experience.

Most of the network are often required to interact with strangers, so a concise pitch about yourself, no matter in form of oral or written is very important. A concise pitch indicates you have a clear and structural understand of yourself, and also transport the information efficiently (Denning & Dew,2012). This should be the first step of persuading people connect with you (Pincus, 2007).

Delicate practice plan

Since I want to pursue a career in food and beverage industry, especial about food process and how to run a restaurant, the demand for me is quite clear, know more people working in this industry and try find how can I get on this new professional track from starch.

First, find several mentors in the target group. I would like use social media such as LinkedIn and Instagram to find who have similar experience as me and through self-taught went on a food career. Meanwhile, I will dig my existing network, to get the people connect in the real world. For example, now I am working as a appearance in a bakery, there is an existing community who work with food. In the next two weeks I will first make a list of 20 people in Amsterdam, who I want to get connect with, do the research of their personalities, work experience and hobbies. This research will delivered by a excel file.

Second, prepare a concise pitch and interactive with these people. In this stage, I will choose proper pitch form depends on how can I get reach of my target group. Like I will volunteer for a food event or use email to send my pitch message and try to invite them to a informal lunch.

Third, go lunch and gather feedback. If the previous two steps go well, I wish I will get several( at least 3) lunch opportunities and keep in touch with 6-10 people. For the lunch meeting, I will treat it like an interview (Kumok, 2019) and prepare several topic based on my research about these people to show my interest, and offer something mutually beneficial, try to set up the friend kind relationship. During the meeting, I will use the metacognition to do the self-observation and use this method to fact the changing conditions in nest meeting.

Fourth, keep tracking and follow up. In the entire process, I will track my implication route of every step, and after each lunch meeting I will conduct several points, which can provide me clues to further steps. Meanwhile, I will discuss with my peer coach once a week, and use case method to present problems I had when facing with my target groups. In the discussion, I will find which talking strategy can be repeated, get suggestion to improve the action plan in next week as well.

Fifth, do deeper research. Based on insights and knowledge from the prior steps, I will repeat this action plan circle from a new round research, either go depth towards one direction or expand my network, waiting for the opportunity continuously. Thus, setting mental model to make the knowledge I get form practice as system, and in the next circle update this system by new network and new knowledge.

References

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