Johannes and I get together about once a week when he’s bored and I’m stressed. He’s one of those people that has only two emotions, bored or happy, and is never stressed because he never has anything go wrong. Really. It’s not normal.
I saw Johannes last night after a long day and an even longer meeting, and started talking as we sat down at the restaurant. I told him the recent gossip. I talked all about my latest success. I described how I got in trouble for my recent post. I told him who had called me, who I had seen, who was annoying the heck out of me. Mostly, I just dumped. Dumped my entire life on him. For fifteen or twenty minutes straight. I talked and he listened. Then, far from finished, but eager to eat the food that was placed in front of me, I said:
“Okay. You now.”
“What?”
“Yeah, go, you talk now.”
He looked at me smugly as I waved my fork through the air. Then slowly, calmly, he explained to me that normal people didn’t have conversations this way. Normal people ask questions of the other person that solicit more than yes or no answers, and then they ask follow up questions to show interest. Oh. Is that how it works, I nodded, half-smiling, half-chewing, and waved my fork again.
“Okay, but really,” I said, “you talk now.”
Success means nothing if you don’t have someone to share it with. Someone who understands you’re too tired to engage in a normal conversation. Someone who not only understands, but will protect your neurosis. Good friends are irreplaceable.
And in a quasi-anonymous world this is increasingly important for Gen-Y, whose social circles are shrinking and whose loneliness is increasing.
In his book, The Rise of the Creative Class, Richard Florida argues that “weak ties are critical to the creative environment of a city or region because they allow for rapid entry of new people and rapid absorption of new ideas and are thus critical to the creative process.” We even choose where we live, in part, by how easy it is for us to maintain our quasi-anonymous lifestyle.
In such an environment, it is all the more important to have real friends, because “family and significant others don’t count when we talk about the benefits of friendship,” career guru Penelope Trunk reports.
Not the acquaintances that fill the photos of your “friends” on Facebook. Real friends. Acquaintances could care less if you need to sit on a certain side of the table or that you snagged ten subscribers in one day. Acquaintances care about themselves. Friends care about you.
“Friendship is to people as sunshine is to flowers,” says Ben Casnocha, young entrepreneur and author of My Start Up Life. Corny. But true. It’s not just nice to have friends outside of your professional life, it’s absolutely necessary. You can’t be successful without friends, and if you are, your success will be meaningless.
So, go – find friends that are normal where you are crazy, that are honest and trustworthy, who love you no matter what. And if you’re lucky enough to have those kind of friends already, get up in the middle of dinner, walk over to their seat, and give them a big hug. I’m sure they will tell you to go sit back down immediately, but they’ll smile at you, amused. That’s what friends do.
19 replies on “In a quasi-anonymous world, success is nothing without friends”
Great post! I couldn’t agree more. It’s interesting because having friends outside of SOs and family help you value your family and SO relationships more, I’ve found.
Thanks, Tiffany. Both my friends and family are valuable to me in different ways, but I get what you’re saying about them complimenting each other. If I wasn’t able to complain to my best friend about a date for instance, it just wouldn’t be the same. :)
You have to talk about things to make them real.
What’s really great about working w/ Healy on EE is that we’ve been friends for five years now. So he’ll flat out tell me if something I’m doing absolutely sucks. And I’ll do the same.
We also have a solid group of cronies who back us up when we’re both doing something stupid.
Great post. It’s real important to remember the value of real-world friendship w/ all the digital social networking Gen-Y has become infatuated with.
Don’t worry, you aren’t the only one who goes on conversation monopolizing rants – I did the same thing to a friend once after a performance review pulled straight out a Dilbert comic.
As I stopped to catch my breath they cut me off and said ‘It’s your turn to shut up now.”
We all need to blow off some steam every once in a while – its the only way to stay sane in this world!
Ryan, your comment absolutely sucks. Just kidding, very true.
I think it is going to be increasingly difficult for young people to keep up those solid friendships after college. For me, Facebook started in college, so I keep up with most of my weak ties from school, but not to many high school acquaintances. However, now that high schoolers or even junior high students are on facebook, myspace etc. they will never have to wonder what happened to “that guy” from school.
This is good, but it may also lead to people sacrificing a few real, solid relationships for a whole bunch of weak ties. We all need a good mix of both.
First, I can’t believe no one has mentioned that there are now PARAGRAPHS available in the comments section as opposed to before when it was all jumbled together. Exciting stuff.
@ Paugh- Group of cronies? Are you in the mafia? ;) No, I agree it’s good to have people who will have your back. It’s too easy to get sucked into the online world, when really the online world is only fun if your offline world is exciting and eventful.
@ Andrew- as I mentioned in my email, that story is hilarious! You should tell us the story of the Dilbert Performance Review – sounds great.
@ Healy- Agreed. I think it’s very easy to become disillusioned and unhappy quickly if you don’t have strong ties. Weak ties influence our decisions, but strong ties keep you grounded.
Mafia you say???
I am from NJ you know…
I can’t say anymore.
Paragraphs!
Wonderful improvement. Good job!
I’m going to go ahead and be the only one here without a blog to link to. You guys are kinda like the mafia.
The part I liked best about this post is about picking a city to maintain a partly anonymous lifestyle. I like that, and that’s something I studied briefly in a sociology class back in the day; like how we kinda like riding the bus cause you’re a stranger surrounded by strangers, and people choose generally not to communicate at all though they’re surrounded by people who CAN communicate, or even change their day or life. Anonymity’s refreshing, BUT over the long-term detrimental.
Keep up the good work.
p.s I’m choosing not to start a blog YET, though i had talked about it…it’s going to come at a more meaningful (in the networking sense) time when I take my job experience and start a business with it.
[…] Millennial bloggers are writing about the importance of spending time with people in real life. Marci Alboher recently touched on the immense value of the simple act of picking up the phone to call someone rather than to chat online or via e-mail. This simple act was so meaningful that the reporter she called wrote about it on her blog. […]
[…] That means you have to enjoy being alone with yourself. It’s hard to do that. I myself love being around other people. People would describe me as an extrovert. But I am most comfortable alone. Even on days like today. I don’t have to brush my hair, and the words out of my mouth are not timed and measured. There is no one to worry about trusting in hushed voices, and it’s okay that I haven’t done the dishes. […]
[…] And yet, as a newly minted Gen-Y leader, there isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t wish I had someone to come home to, someone that would understand and support and be there for me. Someone to share the success. It’s hard to be a leader and not have personal support, even with wonderful friends and family. […]
[…] How could this woman who had known me less than twenty minutes hit on the exact thing that I tried to ignore daily with the right friends and the right clothes and the right job? […]
[…] As such, dating is a dangerous ingredient to add to the work/life blender. Friends and work and business associates and drinks and family all mix quite nicely. But the moment dating (and the prospect of sex) comes into the mix, people get all crazy. Seriously. Many in our generation would prefer not to even talk about dating and sex. A foreign concept to me because that’s essentially all my best friend Belle and I talk about. […]
[…] For example, at our last happy hour, Johannes told me that I looked like a word that rhymes with rut. Which was quite upsetting to me, because I had chosen my outfit carefully to say “hip young professional,” not “five-dollar-corner-of-the-street-ho.” I promptly hit him in the chest, lucky for him, because I really wanted to poke him in the eyes. From now on, I will lovingly refer to him as Johannes the Jerk. […]
[…] At the time, I was grateful to hear that others were just as crazy as me, but as Belle and my sister amuse me with their updates on promise rings and wedding plans, I’m anxious for the whole “not having a life” thing to be over with. Because I do want it all. The family. The career. And everything in between. […]
[…] When I got sick, one of the first things I had to do to get better was learn to give myself shots in the stomach. The very first time I had to do it, I sat on a hospital bed with Johannes across from me and the nurse beside me, and I cried. And when I say cried, I mean I bawled harder than I have ever bawled in my adult existence. My whole body heaved with the impossibility of the task. […]
[…] And as we moved throughout the day, I felt how great it was to be making a new friend. It’s single-handedly one of the most powerful things, to begin to trust someone, to share your dreams and goals, and your frustrations and livid anger. To have a mutual respect and desire to change the world. Our generation thrives so much on loose connections, Facebook friends, being quasi-anonymous, that making deep connections often seems like too much work. […]
[…] instance, I had drinks with Johannes last week. He’s been planning one particular career path for a number of years now and found out […]