Hi,
My wife and I can trace our early career breaks back to the same source: the college friend of our high school best friend. This friend connected my wife to her first job working for an interior designer in Santa Monica; by twenty years old, she was doing design for a firm that would be featured in legit publications like The New York Times and Architectural Digest.
Just as I graduated college, I found out that the woman who ran that firm hired business consultants. I asked my wife to find out if they were hiring, and they were. A few weeks later I was gainfully employed and launched into a new world.
It’s hard to know the impact of those early breaks, but I’m certain they set the stage for our upward mobility. I’ve always known that the friends I made in college have given me access to a world and to people I’d never known existed before.
My best friend went to USC, and from that fact alone, I got tapped into a network of young kids that were smart and studying to be creative professionals. They were musicians that hung out with filmmakers, and animators that dated composers. Before I knew it, I was the only finance person in a group of up-and-coming creative professionals.
My friends’ parents were the kind of parents that supported their kid’s decision to get a creative writing degree. They understood the power of a strong network and could tap theirs to get their kid’s film financed. I got to see a different world and how it worked. I always like to joke that I learned a lot from USC without having to pay the $40,000 a year tuition.
This was my personal lived experience: I was the lower-income kid with friends that pulled me up just by virtue of knowing them. What I thought was unique turns out to be more common; there is a large, new study that offers clues to how this phenomenon works; It’s called “Friending Bias”.
The three main elements about cross-class friendships that can increase a person’s chances of escaping poverty are: raised ambition (seeing what’s possible), basic information (how to apply for a loan), and networking (the thing that got me my first break). All three of these things made a huge impact on my life.
It’s weird to have intuitively known this for my adult life without having the data to verify that it’s more than anecdotal. And while friending bias alone won’t solve systemic poverty and inequality, it demonstrates how cross-class communities impact mobility upward.
Your finance friend,
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P.S. I’m certain some USC friends are reading these words right now. Hi guys, thanks for everything!
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