The Power of Making Friends

I should set this up by saying two things. I’ve spent most of my life talking to strangers and I’ve rarely made significant friends. Recently, however, I’ve found that I’ve been making a lot more friends and I’ve started to feel a lot more enriched in my life. The turning point happened about two months ago when I realized why we’re friends in the first place.

For a long time I looked at friendship as a very categorized endeavor. I had friends that I played sports with and friends that I lived with. I had friends from classes and friends that were geographically isolated from each other. Very few of my friends interacted with any of my other friends. In fact, I actively tried to keep them separate as if they might contaminate each other. And then, two months ago, the lightbulb clicked. Friendship is the exact opposite. It’s about sharing and connecting. The real power of friendship is trust.

I’m starting to believe that friendship is the thing that allows our society to work in the first place. Without it we’d all be running in forests trying to hunt down animals all on our own. To me, friendship allows us to separate the world into three parts. The unknown people, the people we trust, and the people we do not trust. The people we trust are the people with whom we can do business, work together for protection, celebrate, and enjoy our lives with. The enemies are those who we know will try to destroy us with every chance they have. They are few and far between. The unknowns are generally thought of as enemies because, even though enemies are few and far between, they have incredible power when they are true enemies. Friendship allows us to shine a light into the darkness of the unknown. The more friends we have, the further we can shine that light.

This concept or understanding is pretty basic to most people. For a long time I viewed people as either being pertinent to my life currently or of little value. So, I rarely kept track of anyone because I felt that it would be too long before they would have anything I needed and it would be hard for me to provide any value until that point. I’ve now started to realize that the power of friendship is a completely different phenomenon. It’s not about what you can do for me or what I can do for you, it’s about how we can work together to shine the light deeper into the unknowns of strangers, and how we can help each other find the resources we need to solve the problems we have, at exactly the moment we have them. The power is in our combined networks. It’s in sharing our trust.

If I trust you and you trust someone down the street, I will immediately have raised my trust level with the man down the street because he gets a little bit of your reputation applied to him. That is shining the light into the unknown. The guy down the street might also be a plumber and I would thus trust him more at a time of need (like when my water heater breaks) than I would a guy out of the yellow pages.

In the last few months I’ve been enjoying making friends for no other reason than to help each other shine lights into the unknown. I’ve connected researchers with business people whom they would never otherwise meet, allowing them to use my flashlight to connect to a resource they couldn’t see before. I’ve connected business people together. I’ve connected friends together. It’s almost like playing matchmaker, but without the risk. And it’s fun. The best part is that all the people I’ve met are now getting value from me even when I have no direct value to give because I’m sharing resources they wouldn’t have. I’m gaining their trust, becoming their friend, and then I’m sharing my friends. Without the sharing of friends, the world would be a very treacherous place.

Finally, remember that the value of a friend is the amount that you can trust them. If you’ve barely met someone, they cannot help you see very far yet. But as the person shares their beam and proves that they can help you find significant resources, you will trust them and gain more friendship with them. I sure am enjoying sharing my little flashlight in the world.

Note: Picture from Dan Wildman of the UK.

The new frontier

While the credit markets have created massive upheaval in the US economy, there are still plenty of investments that will pay off handsomely elsewhere. Africa is poised to take off. Sure, scoff at the idea, but that’s exactly why it’s a great investment. Twenty five years ago, no one thought anything of East Asia and now China and Japan are integral to the world economy.

More and more, it seems to me that the people willing to take risks and dive into foreign ideas and places before everyone else are the ones that make the really significant amounts of money. Both Bill Gates and Steve Jobs dove into personal computers before they were anything more than hobby kits. Real estate agents in Dubai (selling to people in the UK) have been making a killing because they’ve jumped on a massively growing market that few people truly understand.

Also, because Africa is significantly less involved in the world credit markets, they’ve been less affected by the global recession so far.

On the other hand, a recent post on World Bank African Chief Economist Shanta Devarajan’s site suggests that there may be other immediate problems that would stiffle immediate growth in African markets. On his site today, a guest poster noted these five concerns:

1. Weakened local investor confidence in equities and bonds on African Stock Exchanges

2. Return to ultraconservative lending practices

3. Losses arising from central bank reserve management practices

4. Renewed debate on the role of governments in the financial system

5. Weakened balance sheets resulting from a downturn in the real economy.