Relational capital
Ask a professional to talk about their career and you’ll hear the story of a lone figure: talent, sacrifice, intuition at the right moment. It’s a misleading narrative. Retell the same story by putting a name next to every turning point — who recommended that job to you, who said the words that made you change direction — and the protagonist changes. No one is self-made: we are the sum of encounters made possible by others.
And yet there is no sign of this capital anywhere. No chart of accounts, no KPIs, no compulsory courses. And the figure is telling: in the first quarter of 2025, according to Istat, 73.6 per cent of jobseekers in Italia found work through relatives, friends and acquaintances, rather than through CVs, job adverts or job centres. The asset that determines who gets a job and who doesn’t is precisely the one that nobody measures, nobody teaches and nobody budgets for.
The emotional infrastructure
To call it a network is an understatement: it is an infrastructure. Our career path, the talents we are recognised for, the opportunities that open up and those we will never see all depend on it. And our health depends on it too: Harvard’s 85-year follow-up study on adult development found that the quality of relationships at the age of fifty is a better predictor of health at eighty than cholesterol levels. According to the WHO, loneliness is linked to around 871,000 premature deaths a year. This is no metaphor: the people we meet either lengthen or shorten our lives.
The Constellation of Possibilities
Here is the least intuitive paradox. Turning points almost never come from strong ties — family, long-standing colleagues, friends you see every week — because they inhabit the same world as us and have access to the same information. They come from weak ties: the acquaintance you bump into at an event, the person sitting next to you on a course, the sporadic contact from years ago. A study published in *Science* in 2022, based on 20 million LinkedIn users and five years’ worth of data, analysed over 600,000 job changes: career mobility follows an inverted U-shape; the greatest return comes neither from close friends nor from strangers, but from moderately weak ties, and this effect is amplified in highly digital sectors. This is Ronald Burt’s ‘structural hole’: those who bridge worlds that do not communicate with one another are the first to spot good ideas.
These connections trigger turning points because they exist on the fringes; they chart a course by linking distant points, unlock tangible opportunities and resurface when we need them most: the person we met on a course years ago who stops to help when we’re in trouble. That is where the difference between a mere contact and a lasting connection is measured.
