Your network is key

The network is key. This is a large part of how you learn new things. Connect with smart people. Talk. What have you seen in last couple of months? What do you know? It’s not a go-and-read-everything strategy. You’d die before you could pull that off. Just exchange ideas with the smart people in your network. Not constantly, of course—you need to do work too—but in a focused way. Take what you learn and update your strategy if it’s warranted. And then keep executing on it.”
Reid Hoffman.

We sometimes get so entrenched in the project or product we’re delivering that we miss some of the broader context of what’s happening in the OSS industry don’t we? They can become all-encompassing can’t they?

But by nature, any given product or project, no matter how large, is only a tiny sub-set of what’s going on in OSS.

In the past, we may have reached for books or journals or the Internet to expand our knowledge, but in this age of abundance there is so much content to trawl through.

I’d never thought of it the way Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn, does above. You can’t read everything. You’d die before you could.

But you surely do have some clever friends in your network who are experiencing other projects, developing other products, reading other content and observing other industry trends. Do you get out to exchange ideas with them?

How do you bring alternate perspectives into what you’re doing, either individually or as an organisation?

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