In 1816, a 19-year-old girl sat in a candlelit villa by Lake Geneva, surrounded by the most brilliant minds of her time. Outside, the sky churned with unnatural storms—thanks to a volcanic eruption on the other side of the world, summer had turned into winter. Inside, a challenge was issued: write a ghost story.
Mary Shelley wasn’t supposed to win. Lord Byron was in the room. So was Percy Bysshe Shelley, her husband, a poet worshipped by intellectuals. And yet, it was Mary, young and largely unknown, who pulled a monster from the depths of her imagination.
But let’s be honest—Frankenstein wasn’t just the result of creative genius. It was the network effect in action.
Without Byron, without Percy, without that strange apocalyptic summer, there’s a good chance Mary Shelley’s novel would never have existed—or worse, never been read. Ideas don’t just need creators. They need ecosystems. They need tension, competition, cross-pollination.
This is where most creatives get it wrong. You sit in a room, alone, grinding, convinced that if your work is good enough, the world will find it. You think obscurity is a problem of talent, not visibility. But talent, raw and isolated, is like a candle in a basement—flickering, brilliant, unseen.
This is why the network effect isn’t just some tech-bro jargon. It’s the only way art has ever reached the world. Every great movement—Paris in the ‘20s, the Harlem Renaissance, Warhol’s Factory—was a collision of minds, a closed circuit of influence and elevation.
Mary Shelley’s story proves it: creativity isn’t just about making things. It’s about who you make them around.