This is August — the eighth month, and, by one popular estimate, the month by which we’re reminded of an unsettling fact: across a lifetime, the average person will only ever cross paths with roughly 80,000 people. That figure comes from a simple calculation — three new people a day, every day, from childhood to old age — and researchers who’ve revisited it note it is still a rounding error against the eight billion people alive today. Out of those 80,000, most will never register as more than a face. A small fraction will become acquaintances. Fewer still will become the kind of friend who changes the trajectory of your career, your business, or your city.
This month, my focus is on that fraction — on what I call friend-raising: the deliberate, unglamorous practice of showing up for relationships long before you know what they’ll yield.
A decade at one table
Let me tell you a true story — mine. For nearly ten years, I attended the same industry convention annually. Five years in, someone asked why I bothered — nothing seemed to be changing. That year turned out to be the turning point. During cocktails, the convention bureau’s chair mentioned, almost in passing, a brief she was preparing on burnout recovery. That conversation opened one door. That door opened another. What followed was a ripple effect — introductions, opportunities, and eventually a breakthrough — that traces back not to a single stroke of luck, but to years of consistently showing up and letting an ordinary acquaintance deepen into a real friendship.
It is tempting to call this luck. The research says otherwise.
What the evidence says about “who you know”
In 1973, Stanford sociologist Mark Granovetter published what became one of the most cited papers in social science, built on a survey of how professional men actually found their jobs. His finding was counter-intuitive: people were more often helped by casual acquaintances — “weak ties” — than by their closest friends and family, because weak ties sit outside our own circle and carry information we don’t already have. Fifty years later, MIT and Stanford researchers ran a five-year, large-scale experiment on LinkedIn to test this causally, and confirmed it: the connections that moved people’s careers forward were not their strongest relationships, but their moderately weak ones — familiar enough to trust, distant enough to bring something new.
My convention-bureau chair was exactly that kind of tie. Not a best friend. Not a stranger. A familiar face I kept choosing to show up for.
The research on women specifically sharpens the point further. Industry surveys of women in leadership find that more than 80 percent of professional women at manager level and above credit networking with driving career milestones — board seats, C-suite roles, higher-paying positions. Yet the same body of research finds a persistent gap: fewer than a third of women report having a mentor, even though those who do are markedly more likely to be promoted, to sit on boards, and — tellingly — to go on to mentor someone else, creating a compounding cycle of support. Sponsorship research adds a further nuance: unlike mentorship, sponsorship is episodic and opportunity-specific — someone with standing puts your name forward when you’re not in the room. That, too, only happens inside a relationship someone was willing to keep investing in.
Why this month, why here
South Africa marks Women’s Month in August, commemorating the 1956 women who marched on the Union Buildings. It is a fitting backdrop for this reflection, because friend-raising, done well, is a quietly feminist practice — it rejects the myth of solitary self-made success and insists, instead, that advancement is relational. This month, I paused to thank the women whose friendship raised me and my work to a level I could not have reached alone. That gratitude is the whole point of the exercise: friend-raising isn’t networking for extraction. It’s an investment, offered without knowing the return.
Your move this August
Whatever you are building — a calling, a career, a club, a community, a city, a company, or a country — the data and the story point in the same direction: relationships compound, but only if you keep showing up. As you navigate the rest of this month, consider four moves:
- Re-attend. Go back to the one meeting, group, or gathering you were tempted to write off. Consistency, not novelty, is what turned my decade-long convention into a door.
- Reach sideways. Reconnect with one dormant, “weak tie” acquaintance this week — a former colleague, a course-mate, someone you haven’t spoken to in a year. Novel opportunity tends to come from outside your inner circle.
- Say thank you, specifically. Name one person whose friendship raised your work, and tell them exactly how — this week, not someday.
- Sponsor someone. Don’t just mentor with advice; put your name behind one person’s opportunity where you have standing and they don’t.
Friend-raising won’t show up on a balance sheet. But a decade from now, it may be the only line item that explains everything else.
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Dr. Joshua Awesome is a Coaching Psychologist/Executive and Business Performance Coach who has supported over 100,000 professionals across Africa and the globe. He can be reached via: joshua@africainmind.org
Friend-raising: The overlooked discipline behind every breakthrough