Successful people, in my experience, engage in a great
deal of issue entrepreneurship, repeatedly evolving their issues
and expanding their networks as they go along. A well-chosen issue
will identify what sociologists call a structural hole: a bunch of
people, preferably already well-connected in other ways, who ought to
know one another but don’t. By identifying such an issue, the issue
entrepreneur spots an opportunity to become centrally located in newly
emerging social networks — a position that can generally be converted
to some kind of advantage, even if the details of that advantage
are not necessarily clear at the outset. There is nothing wrong with
this. It is a powerful way of understanding the world, and I wish
that everyone knew how to do it. Yet this central skill of social
life is a mystery to almost everyone, with the result that society
is filled with misguided theories, e.g., that power is completely
seamless and static, or that success is simply a matter of hard work
or else entirely arbitrary. Issue entrepreneurship is rarely taught,
and until recently it has scarcely been codified. So the real puzzle
is how anyone ever learns it at all.