My wife and I were in Edinburgh last weekend. The Edinburgh International Festival is taking place. I looked around at the mass of faces as we walked around The Royal Mile.
"It's strange, we are connected in some way or another to every person here." I said to my wife. I was talking about the six degrees of separation idea. The theory that we are six or less social connections from one another. The idea came to the public ear when Frigyes Karinthy wrote of it in a short story in 1929.
We may be connected. Does that surprise you? I don’t mean your great, great, great grandfather was a Celt from the Braveheart country. No, it’s something else.
The theory stipulates that we know a friend of a friend of a friend or business partner or neighbour to a maximum of six steps before we discover we are connected. Fascinating! Let me illustrate.
2008: Auspicious Coincidence
It was the depths of the British recession. I flew to Krakow to visit Auschwitz. I had never been to Poland before.
One evening, I was having a meal with some friends in the square in Krakow. A man around 22-years old kept staring at me from a nearby table.
Eventually, he put on his jacket and stood up. But before he left, he approached me and asked if I gave a lecture in the UK about young people in crisis? I said, yes, and asked how he knew. He said he had a copy of the lecture on a CD that he received from someone un the UK.
Six Degrees of Separation
Image by https://unsplash.com/@federize
My wife and I were in Edinburgh last weekend. The Edinburgh International Festival is taking place. I looked around at the mass of faces as we walked around The Royal Mile.
"It's strange, we are connected in some way or another to every person here." I said to my wife. I was talking about the six degrees of separation idea. The theory that we are six or less social connections from one another. The idea came to the public ear when Frigyes Karinthy wrote of it in a short story in 1929.
We may be connected. Does that surprise you? I don’t mean your great, great, great grandfather was a Celt from the Braveheart country. No, it’s something else.
The theory stipulates that we know a friend of a friend of a friend or business partner or neighbour to a maximum of six steps before we discover we are connected. Fascinating! Let me illustrate.
2008: Auspicious Coincidence
It was the depths of the British recession. I flew to Krakow to visit Auschwitz. I had never been to Poland before.
One evening, I was having a meal with some friends in the square in Krakow. A man around 22-years old kept staring at me from a nearby table.
Eventually, he put on his jacket and stood up. But before he left, he approached me and asked if I gave a lecture in the UK about young people in crisis? I said, yes, and asked how he knew. He said he had a copy of the lecture on a CD that he received from someone un the UK.
“It's your voice I recognised,” he said.