little red rocks

After a week of fruitless research I decided to publish this even though I don't quite remember all the details of the story (later on in the post).
The main portions of the story is still factual, but some small details were changed for creative reasons. Creative bits are highlighted in blue.


Let's face it, in this day and age, your network is a serious competitive advantage. You hear people saying, "it's not what you know, but who you know" and not only does this apply to finding a job, but also applies to developing ideas and identifying opportunities.
Steven Johnson, author of Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation, is a proponent of keeping a diverse network that is organic and liquid. Flows from one form to another, never fixed in its composition and at the same time, diverse enough to lend different perspectives for any given individual within the network. I like this idea too.
To highlight the importance of having a liquid, diverse network, let's take a look at a lesson from a little red rock.

One of the biggest investing blunders happened because some guy consulted with the wrong friend. Didn't have the patience to develop or pursue a hunch. And the most damning of all, didn't have a diverse network to fall back onto after consulting the wrong person.
So the story goes, a railroad engineer one day picked up a piece of small red rock along the tracks after a regular maintenance. Later he consulted his friend who was a surveyor for the railroad, he concluded the red rock was worthless and the engineer shouldn't pursue it any further and get back to doing his job.
Later, a geologist went to the site and discovered that the red rocks were actually copper ore. Eventually, this lead to the discovery of the Sudbury Basin, yes, one of the largest copper/nickel deposits in the world (#8 actually). That Sudbury Basin. If the engineer had a nice diverse network of friends to turn to, he may have had the opportunity to consider buying the rights to prospect, explore and mine that plot of land. He may have become one of the richer people in the world nowadays (at least his family would be a rich and powerful one by now).

Don't just stick to what you know. Venture out and create connections and expand your network into groups of people that have knowledge you don't.
Where else are you gonna find diversity if everyone in your network is similar to you?

Note: it might not have been specifically the Sudbury Basin, but from my research it does seem like a very likely candidate for the identity of the mine that I read about a few weeks ago. Nevertheless, the copper/nickel mine that was discover was a rather large one.