Trail of Six

Six degrees of separation: a theory that suggests that we are separated from any person on Earth by an average of six steps. So you may know someone, who knows someone, who knows the friend of someone, who is the butler of someone, who is the best friend of someone, who is a famous person. 

And what has made this theory a fact? The internet, of course! Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, LinkdIn – you name it! We hear about social networking all the time, but we never really consider what a phenomenon it actually is. I first thought about this the day I started following Conan on twitter. He is my absolute favorite stand up comedian and after watching his documentary, Conan Can't Stop, I thought to myself, how cool would it be to work on his show as one of the writers. All I had to do was tweet to him and ask how I could do it. Somehow, he just felt so close...like a text away. (I haven't done it as yet, but will keep you posted!).

Just the other day, I received a broadcast message on my smart phone, and I forwarded it to people, filtering out those who might already have received it before. Five minutes later, I received the same message from three different people who, I know, don’t know each other at all! They are not connected to each other in any way! How astonishing is that?

Six degrees of separation, indeed.

Of course, you have to know the right person that would link you to the right six people to make the connection correctly. The bigger picture, however, is that it is, without a doubt, a very small world.


To read a slightly different version of this same article, click here.

Mind Boggle

If your objective is failure, and you fail, have you succeeded?

Let’s look at this interesting question with a real life example. You are stuck in a bad job which you can’t get out of. What do you do? You try to do your very worst and your boss ends up firing you. So, basically, your objective was to fail (lose the job) and you did fail (got fired), hence succeeding! Does this mean you are a successful failure, or that you are good at failing?

Imagine if, despite all your counter-productive efforts, you failed to achieve your goal. Did you not then, in fact, fail at failure?


To read a slightly different version of this same article, click here.