In today’s digital world, social currency is the coin of the realm.
It buys us friendships, it gets us jobs, and it helps to generate purpose in our lives.
But what may surprise you is how something so valuable can be so easy to acquire.
Social currency is about more than gaining clout with others through favors, it’s about sharing information too. And sharing information is the fast track for building your social wealth.
The secret to all of this? Suggestions.
Suggestions, those small bits of helpful information that help us decide and save us time. And unlike helping someone move or sharing a big secret, suggestions don’t require a lot of physical or emotional effort. They’re also plentiful, you can find them pretty much anywhere you go. While the social currency they generate may not be worth as much as helping to carry someone’s couch up a few flights of stairs, they make up for it in volume. Your friends don’t move every day, but they’re always in need of a good recommendation for something.
But all too often we come across a useful suggestion and let it get away. It’s like seeing money on the ground and walking past it. The reason for this is our lack of preparation. We often let good ideas slip through the cracks because we don’t have a centralized place to hold them all.
Building good habits can be hard, but this one is worth it. Usually, we don’t save an awesome recommendation because it doesn’t apply to us at that moment or we can’t think of anyone who might be able to make use of it. This doesn’t mean it won’t ever apply to us or that someone we know (or will know) can’t use it. Start building a preemptive saving mindset. When you come across a good idea don’t just think about how it matters today, think about if it might matter in the future. It’s like insurance, you don’t need it when you’re buying it, but you buy it because you might need it someday.
When we need a good recommendation we always turn first to our friends and trusted colleagues, and this is just as true for those friends and colleagues as it is for us. We can always expect to be the first stop in the search for a great idea, so it makes sense to prepare for it. The trick to building a preemptive saving mindset is to have a place to do the saving. Lists are great for this, they’re like piggy banks for ideas. An empty list is a blank canvas, it’s hard to resist wanting to fill it up.
When you start saving the recommendations you come across you’ll notice just how many opportunities there are to share them. And as you start sharing these suggestions your social currency reserves will grow and grow. But the benefits don’t stop there. The more you’re able to help those you care about, the more fulfilled you will be.
We live in a world flush with great ideas. Will you be the one to capitalize on this opportunity and turn them into valuable social currency?
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