 And let's talk about that second factor in increasing our likability, and that's we naturally like people that our friends like, that our network likes. It's called social proof in online marketing. When we see that other people like something, especially people that we know, like and trust already, we naturally feel comfortable liking it as well. So you can imagine you're throwing a house party and you invite a friend and they bring one of their friends. How are you going to react to that person? What the hell are you doing here? Why are you in my house? No, you're going to be excited that your friend actually brought someone in their network. You're going to be warm to that person. You're going to most likely find them to be likeable simply because your friend likes them. So your reputation makes you likeable. When people like you, more people naturally like you. And that creates referrals, introductions, vouching for you, lots of ways that your network and being likable in your network has an impact on more people liking you and naturally growing your network. So there are a couple of psychological principles that are behind this. Actually, there's plenty of them. Here are three that I think are most salient for the way that we talk about propinquity. One is simply the similarity attraction hypothesis. And that is I like my friend because we have certain things in common. That's why we became friends. By extension, the friends of my friend are also in that same area. They probably have a very high likelihood of being similar to me as well. So this is simply social preselection. Friends of my friends, very likely they're similar to me as well. Another one, and here we're going back a couple of hundreds of thousands of years. This is an evolutionary pressure to create group cohesion. When you have two groups of Homo sapiens that are hunting mammoths, you want to be in the group that kind of sticks together. And that maybe even when there's someone who's just like 90% compatible with you, just 80%, you still want to be friends with them because it helps you hunt that mammoth. So groups are just a lot stronger and had a higher chance of survival when everyone made an effort to get along with everyone else. Hence, the friends of my friends are people I should appreciate in my life. And then lastly, heuristic processing, which is a fancy way of saying, this is just a mental shortcut in terms of decision making, thinking about things, pros and cons and judgments. It's like, no, I mean, like, use a shortcut here. This is AJ's friend. He's probably a cool dude. I'll make an effort to be nice and meet that person as well.