Selecting Your Friends

The importance of having an extensive and reliable network (“a Rolodex”) cannot be understated. It is key if you are looking to make money, go places in the business world, or especially if you are in desperate need of help because your life is in immediate danger. With that said, the overwhelming majority of people are absolutely terrible at picking their friends. They pass up the mentor who tells them to work hard on improving their batting skills in favor of the overweight neighbor who invites them to watch baseball and drink Coors Light after work. They write off the Asian kid with a knack for math because he is not “cool”, instead opting for the point guard on the varsity basketball team who has a different girlfriend every week. 

At the most fundamental level, choosing and making the correct friends is a variable within the success equation. By picking the right people to build and maintain long-term connections with, you are effectively identifying future success stories whom you can learn and receive help from. Alternatively, getting cozy with the wrong kind of ‘friends’ can lead you into a life of mediocrity (i.e. most people) or even worse, suck up all your time, energy, and money until you have close to nothing left. 

So before you go around introducing every single person you previously shook hands with as your friend, learn to first distinguish between different people and the kind of value they bring into your life. Similarly, be in position to recognize when the value goes from positive to negative and be prepared to cut someone off completely in such an instance. 

This may sound harsh, and you will certainly run into some heat by bringing it up, but it’s one of those inconvenient truths that you cannot afford to ignore. In fact, all of you have either ghosted or permanently cut out someone you once considered a friend because you felt they did something wrong… Or because you did something wrong but did not want to admit it. 

With that said, there are plenty of other inconvenient truths, some of which do not become evident for most people until they are already in their late-thirties/early forties. If you are in your twenties recognizing and understanding these truths will save you a ton of time, work and emotional trauma as you get older. Utilize them to make good decisions that will translate into huge gains 5-10+ years down the line. 

Inconvenient Truth #1 – People Are Busy.

As you get older, you will notice that many of your long-time friends are no longer available as much as they once were. This is a good sign. You should not be looking for friends who want to watch sports and drink beer all day. That just means they live a boring and mediocre life. These kinds of friends are unlikely to offer you anything that will help you grow. Chances are they are also the extremely envious type: They will discourage you from doing things to improve yourself and will even actively sabotage any efforts you make. 

Inconvenient Truth #2 – Most People Never Change.

99% of people have an issue with letting go of things they believe, regardless of how false or irrelevant they are. Some of these are taught, while others are generated as a way for them to evade the need to face the real world. Their perspective is completely relatable: Why face an uncomfortable reality when you could be in an enjoyable fantasy world instead? 

While we do not sympathize with these people, we do empathize with them. They are essentially all the people around us so by now their sentiments are nothing new. However, the problem here should be obvious. People who are resistant to change can be read like a book, which means that we can already extract in the present the maximum value they bring to the table. Staying connected with them for any longer is just a waste of time. This goes for your family members and relatives as well. If they are negative people with bad habits there is no benefit in speaking or meeting with them very often. All they will do is bring you down or influence your emotions in a negative way. 

Inconvenient Truth #3 – Business Contacts Are Not Your Friends.

A sign that you are doing well in life will come when you realize you are spending a lot of time talking to your business contacts. Initially, it may be just over the phone or during coffee meetings, but as you become involved in more lucrative deals and projects this could take place over dinner at a Michelin restaurant, during a Knicks game in the front row of Madison Square Garden, or even onboard someone’s $80MM super yacht. 

When this happens it becomes very easy to think that your clients/partners/business contacts are treating you to such luxuries because they see you as a friend. This is especially the case if you come from a more modest background. Avoid this tendency and always draw the line between business and friends. Your real friends are the ones you have maintained contact with before any opportunity to financially benefit was ever on the table. The people you become acquainted to through business should be segregated in a separate category — soft touch relationships. This means you can discuss anything with them that will lead to more $$$, but refrain from sharing unnecessary personal details. The likelihood is that these people are just as smart and ambitious as yourself. Even if you feel the relationship is good you do not want to risk them profiting at your expense. 

There are exceptions though. While the majority of these business connections will stay within the soft-touch relationships category, it is possible that a small minority can be labeled as your friends later on. For example, if a business contact offers you a place to stay and a hot meal when you go bankrupt, then definitely recategorize him as a close friend. The vice versa holds true as well. Cut off anyone from your friends list who refuses to help you when you are in trouble (excluding financial trouble such as giving you a loan as friendship should never depend on pressure scenarios involving money). 

Inconvenient Truth #4 – Fame Is Not Good. Avoid It Like The Plague.

Guess what? You just made $2MM net from your online business and now some eCommerce magazine wants to do an interview. Think twice before you say yes. 

While fame will seem amazing at first, it becomes a pain in the long-run. All sorts of people will emerge from the woodwork as soon as you advertise your wealth. There is no going back at this stage. You will have a hard time recognizing your real friends because everyone will be trying to hold your hand and get a piece of the pie.

A better option is to be rich but not famous. You can do this by promoting your business without overly promoting yourself. Sure, there is a possibility that your level of fame may spiral out of control once your net worth exceeds $100MM, but there are plenty of billionaires who are not famous. Ever heard of Zhong Shanshan before? No, we didn’t think so. He’s only the 16th richest person in the world with a net worth of $65B (at the time of writing). 

By learning how to avoid/manage your level of fame, you will also learn to recognize other successful individuals. When you go to the golf course you’ll instantly be able to tell the single-digit millionaires from the industrialists and hedge fund managers. Their speech mannerisms and body language will give it all away. With some practice you’ll also learn to detect the miserable rich people from a mile away. Avoid them too. 

Inconvenient Truth #5 – Do Not Put Too Much Trust In Friends.

As you become more and more successful in your career or in business you will realize that most of your friends are not reliable. They are susceptible to human nature, and as already mentioned, human nature seldom changes. Be wary of your friends—most will be prone to envy and will handily betray you for the right price.

You will notice that whenever you tell your friends about a recent breakthrough like getting a promotion or buying a penthouse on the Upper East Side, they will seldom be happy for you. Sure they might put on a charade by feigning surprise and happiness, but any idiot with the most basic cognitive functions can read their faces and detect jealousy and vitriol.

It is surprising how many successful people end up getting sold out by their friends because they overlooked this reality. Of course, people who experience consistent success have a tendency to be more optimistic and willing to help others replicate this success. If you come from an underprivileged background and are rewarded for many years of grinding by finally striking it rich, it is only natural to feel inclined to hire your friends into positions of power and compensate them generously. After all, we live in a ruthless world, and our friends will hopefully minimize the ruthlessness. So why spend time and effort bringing in a stranger when you could depend on a friend instead? 

The trouble lies in the fact that you will often find out the hard way that you don’t actually know your friends as well as you might think. Honesty is a rare quality among most friends which hinders any realistic potential for building profitable business synergies. Friends will often agree on agendas publicly so as to avoid a confrontation. They will compliment each other’s choice of clothes even if the colors are hideous and mismatching. They will laugh hard at one another’s jokes even when they don’t find them funny. Overtime, scenarios like these that appear trivial and meaningless compound and add more fuel to the flames of jealousy and resentment. 

Experience and competence are far more critical to successful outcomes than friendly sentiment. All working relationships require some distance between the key decision makers. While hiring a friend will limit your ability to make decisions and implement them, hiring a qualified enemy can actually yield incredible results. As Abraham Lincoln once said, your enemy is destroyed once you make a friend out of him. By understanding the motivations of an adversary, you can make an offer that outbids any other option available to him. This will both neutralize the threat he poses as well as make you substantially more powerful. In fact, this happens within business all the time. An industry leader will reach out and offer an extremely generous offer to the COO of a rival company and convert him from an adversary into a friendly. 

Inconvenient Truth #6 – Your Success Will Depend On Your Ability to Recognize Future Success Stories.

You can maximize your success by learning how to piggyback off of other people’s ideas, talents, skills, and work ethic. This involves a degree of humbleness. You need to be able to recognize the limitations of your knowledge and then understand how other people can compliment you by alleviating these limitations using their own strengths and capabilities. For example, if you are an excellent programmer and want to develop and bring an industry-revolutionizing software to market, there is no point in adding a partner who also comes from a programming background and has a skillset that overlaps with yours. Instead, you should recognize that your weakness lies in sales & marketing and bring in someone with a proven track record to promote and sell your product.

Inconvenient Truth #7 – Quality Trumps Quantity.

By now this should be obvious to you. You do not need that many friends as the majority will become liabilities in the long-term. While it may not be easy, it’s important to cut off those who are taking advantage of you or holding you back. These include people who constantly borrow money from you, deceive you, or demonstrate any kind of jealousy towards your success. This includes relatives and family members. 

By the time you are done cutting off all the deadweight, you should be left with a handful of proven long-term friends and a wider network of soft-touch relationships. Soft-touch relationships are people you can meet with as frequently as possible whenever there is money to be made or reputation to be gained. Long-term friends refer to those who have proven their reliability and loyalty to you. Treat these long-term friends like gold and feel free to help them make money when such an opportunity arises. It will only solidify the friendship even further. 

Do not feel an obligation to meet with your long-term friends on a frequent basis. If you are both successful then you will be busy achieving anyways. Simply meet up once every few months to have a conversation about what kind of new milestones you have both reached. You don’t need to worry about a lack of socialization as you will continue to interact with your wide network of soft-touch relationships and reach out to new people too. 

Inconvenient Truth #8 – Others Will Cut You Off Too.

You won’t be the only one who does the blacklisting. Expect others to cut you off too. Whenever this happens, always do your best to find out the reason why. 

Sometimes this may be out of resentment towards you because you are doing well but they are not. Treat this as a favor; they have indirectly saved you the time and effort of having to cut them off. In other instances it may be because you are the one who is at fault. Whether it’s conveying jealousy, freeloading, or wasting their time, it is important that you reflect and pinpoint the possible reasoning and do your best to change these shortcomings. This can be especially painful if it’s a close friend that cuts you off, but use it as an invaluable opportunity to improve yourself for the better. 

Conclusion

Selecting and managing your friends is an art that takes considerable patience, time and effort. Much of it can feel boring or repetitive; you will need to go out of your way to message high-potential contacts on their birthdays or during Christmas so that they remember you. At other times it can also feel like a strain. If a not so close friend of yours is in trouble and no one else is willing to help, drop everything you are doing and go to their rescue. Nonetheless, in both instances the friend should be somebody who will be able to transfer long-term value in your life. Otherwise, cut them off.