aka....why Adam has so many friends...

Studies of offline social networks show the same trend. It has nothing to do with personalities; it follows from basic arithmetic. For any network where some people have more friends than others, it’s a theorem that the average number of friends of friends is always greater than the average number of friends of individuals.This phenomenon has been called the friendship paradox. Its explanation hinges on a numerical pattern — a particular kind of “weighted average” — that comes up in many other situations. Understanding that pattern will help you feel better about some of life’s little annoyances.

Article was worth reading alone for the phrase "friendship paradox".

I thought the friendship paradox is that the number of friends is for the most part always increasing, like entropy.

So how does knowing the friendship paradox help in any networking strategy?

is it a good thing or a bad one or neutral?

It should be encouraging if you're trying to expand your network without too much effort. Unless you're an outlier like Adam, your friends are more likely to have more friends than you do. So asking them for introductions should disproportionately payoff more than you might have guessed.

That even works for me, for what it's worth.

I'm going to have to process all this math later, but it's a really funny premise... true for me:) I tell myself I'm going for quality, not quantity.

Quality is best, Dawn. No doubt.