The word “lebensraum” means “habitat” or “living space” in German and was one of the components of disastrous Nazi ideology. I picked the word up when reading J.F.C. Fuller’s “The Second World War: A Strategical and Tactical History” many years ago and it stuck fast in my mind. All of us require living space, and there is actually much more space available on this planet than proponents of spectres like “greenhouse gases” having disastrous effects on global climate patterns would have us believe. For instance, if you put everyone on the planet on Rhode Island, each person would have about four square feet of space. Not very much, of course, but then Rhode Island isn’t very big either. I wrote about things like that elsewhere and in one or two of my other posts. In a sense, the world is shrinking. We can talk to people we’ve never met in person halfway around the globe, which, to put in perspective, is actually as far away as you can get on the planet. Many of us have so many connections we’ve never met that we could walk past them on the street and never know! That’s dysfunctional. It makes no sense to me that, on social media, I can be “connected” to 12 million other professionals! It is weird that people who have never seen me in person give me “endorsements” for skills they have never seen me employ. Is the profile I wrote that good? Then again, has any of you ever seen a bad resume? Same line of thought.

Just thinking about the number of connections can give us a serious case of connection fatigue! Let’s take 12 million connections. If I spent just one minute to get to know each of the 12 million persons and go at it day and night non-stop, it would take me 22 years just to hear 12 million “elevator pitches”! 12 million is just a number. It means nothing. What we really need are fresh new connections. Meaningful connections. Mutually beneficial relationships. Just as the level of your intelligence does not merely depend on the size of your brain but on the interconnections within that brain, so the efficacy of your business/ social networks does not depend merely on how extensive they are but on the number of interconnections you have within that network.

Think about it. That should create a few more neural connections in your brain that could possibly lead to more quality interconnections within your own network. Have a great time making fresh connections ahead!