Networkers: Superior Humans

Networking, the term was totally alien to me till I was in school. I got exposed to the word when I joined college and with every progressing year I started understanding its worth. No doubt people do understand its importance since very early stages and hence have build strong networks in all the networking sites in place (social networking, business networking, professional networking etc etc). Although networking in virtual form is pretty easy and doesn't call for much skills, but when presented in actual scenario, it does qualify to be an art and hence I would like to call a networker as a "Networking artist". Like all other art forms, it too comes naturally and not acquired artifically.You can learn the nuances of networking from an expert networking artist (interestingly there are no institutions to teach this art) but its hard to become yourself a networking artist even under the mentorship of best of networker. It is one of the few arts which is not taught anywhere in the world (as far as I know and correct me if I am wrong) but can be a single largest contributor to ones' success, if perfected. Hence it would be highly justified to dedicate an entire post to this art which has even been ignored by the psuedo social workers who have thronged every nook of career building industry.
Networkers are of different types; I would like to put them in two buckets, entirely on the basis of motive behind performing the art. In the first bucket falls those who do network for the purpose of networking and in the second bucket are those who become networkers because of few natural traits that they are blessed with. I would like to call the second category as that of "accidental networkers". Now elaborating over the two categories: the former type, lets call it type A, often have larger network than type B (the accidental networkers), but the key difference is that of people in each of their networks. People falling in the network of type A , are in the network because they are a type A networkers as well or wannabee Type A . So the web is large but with weak links (links for benefits). Anticipation of benefits in a situation ,which can't be visualized at the moment, is the key which maintains such a network alive. These networkers are easy to identify, they would be knowing a lot of people who have no relation with them. They are quick to gather important details even on a single meeting. Striking a conversation with anyone is a cakewalk for them, no matter if should be done through silliest of the topics. Each such meeting translates into an addition into the network and gets stored in the form of phone number. So these people would often have phone numbers of people, whom even they would not remember but still the number would never be deleted, no matter if it came to notice many times that you don't remember who he is and hence number is redundant. Type A could also be called the hardworking type as they work really hard to maintain this network and maintenance does not comes cheap either, so they have to invest a lot of time in visiting places where network could be enlarged or for servicing the ties with already existing network and not to mention the phone bills, which are proportional to the network size.
Type B, as I already mentioned are the accidental networkers, are blessed with certain traits that make them popular amongst people around them. Others enjoy the company of people belonging to type B and hence the network is grown from the other side. It is like everyone moving towards the centre to get into the circle. These are the populist networkers and are often unaware of the power of the tool that they have accidentally got. The network span is small in lenght as well as cross-section, but is formed of stronger links. The type B people often recognise everyone in their network and often do not have phone numbers or other connective links of the connections, which the type A people acquire on priority basis. Most of the times they are not able to utilize the full power of their network. They could be compared with a tribal artist, who possess a raw talent and trait but is not able to make much out of it as he/she do not visualise it as a talent but more as any other trait. Interestingly if a Type A has a Type B networker in his network than , it is the type A who is able to extract the advantage from the network of Type B ,which Type B could never have. So Type A people often like to keep Type B networkers close in the whole web, as they prove to be a valuable resource.
But be it Type A or Type B, both are exceptionally blessed people, one is blessed with the traits which lead to networking while other is blessed with skills which make networking, work. I had often thought that what is the reason behind the fact that there are too few networkers ,but recently I got the answer while reading Malcom Gladwell's Tipping point. It picked an old theory behind the development of human mind. The theory said that with increasing complexity in relationships, you require a better mind to maintain it. The theory projects that 150 is the number of the active relationship that the mind of humans can bear at present configurations. Obviously the theory presented a number basing the processing power of normal human brain and like in every other aspect, here too are the outliers. These networkers are the outliers, whose brains are blessed with processors to maintain the number of active relationships much larger than the number 150. Although we keep reading about the people who were outliers in various fields, but we keep ignoring the ones who are outliers on the basis of being a superior being.It feels good to know that you too came across few people who were outliers too , no matter if you know them because of their skill which makes them an outlier. (they knew you probably becasue they were networking)