How To Increase The Strength Of Your Network

I secured my position at Amazon not because of my extensive technical knowledge, but due to the impression I made on people years earlier, back in high school during the '90s. It's often said that it's not what you know, but who you know. The entire trajectory of my career and life would have been different had it not been for a serendipitous connection.

After graduating college in 2006, I struggled to find work. Despite being a proficient programmer with a solid grasp of data structures and algorithms, I wasn't getting any callbacks because I lacked a computer science degree and relevant experience.

To my surprise, I received a call from a friend, let's call him Connor, whom I hadn't heard from since high school. Connor was now working at Amazon and invited me out for a drink.

The reason for his call was intriguing. He had just met a coworker, let's call her Heather, and discovered that they grew up in the same town as I did, but attended different nearby high schools. Since it wasn't a…