Life - Friendship

Good advice:

1. Build a habit of making friends. It’s not good enough to make friends once or twice in your life and then hope they’ll stick around forever. It should be a continual process that you do for its own sake, from now until you die. Otherwise the number of friends in your life will always be declining (or at risk of doing so). Also, since this should be an ongoing process, you need to find a way to enjoy it so it’s fun and sustainable.

2. Be proactive. Be open to things. Get out of the house. Go out and do real-world events with people. Reflexively say yes to things people invite you to. When you meet new people, be interested, agreeable, and pleasant, yet forward. If you hit it off with someone, ask for their number and casually invite them to future hangs.

3. Prioritize people who are also open and proactive. Not everyone has time to make friends. Not everyone wants to maintain friendships. Spend more of your time on the people who do.

4. Rather than make individual isolated friendships, build a tribe. What that means is you should make an effort to introduce the friends you meet to other friends. Do group hangs. You want it to be the case where the people you know also know each other. This solidifies relationships and helps them last longer, because like any other network, the value of your tribe will increase to the people in it as the size of the tribe grows. It also leads to a higher frequency of hangout opportunities, as everyone in your network now gains the power to catalyze hangouts with everyone else in your network. It also makes serendipity easier — the more people you know, the easier it becomes to meet new people who are friends of friends.