THE LIFESTYLE ENTREPRENEUR

Read time - 4 minutes

Friendship is Critical

In my first issue I laid out my main content pillars:

1. Health/Wellness

2. Mindset & habits

3. Building businesses

4. Community/relationships

5. Play & self expression

And in Issue #2, Issue #3, and Issue #4 I detailed my Physical and Mental Health Prescriptions, and my philosophy on business building as a career.

And in Issues #2, 3, and 4 I detailed my Physical and Mental Health Prescription, and my philosophy on building businesses as a primary career.

Today I’m digging into my fourth content pillar - community & relationships.

Specifically within that category - friendships.

This topic is so important it makes the top five, but so slippery that it’s often difficult to prioritize writing about.

Which is kind of how it shows up in most of our lives.

We know intuitively, and now we’re starting to hear scientifically, how important deep friendships are.

Yet the demands of modern life, especially around child-rearing years, constantly push this critical aspect of life to the back burner.

And just like our health, friendships need consistent nurturing to flourish. With consistent work, our social life creates vibrant interactions throughout life’s spectrum - professional, spiritual, romantic, personal - that make our experience on this earth better and better.

Just like our health, when life gets tough, we can take a short break from a healthy social life when we need to, and pick up right where we left off without a hitch.

But just like our health, if we neglect our social life over a long enough period of time, our bonds begin to fade. Our friends move onto other activities and fill their schedules with other people and things. They continue on without us.

And just like our health, with enough neglect, we’ll find ourselves robbed of a social life. Time that should be spent interacting with friends - critical time that makes life more fulfilling - gets filled with individual pursuits that contribute to loneliness, isolation, and a lack of vital connection.

Allowing our friendships to fade makes life less enjoyable and degrades all facets of our experience.

And taken to the extreme, it shortens our lifespan.

Loneliness is as deadly as smoking 15 cigarettes a day, according a now famous report released this year by the US Surgeon General’s office.

This report, and words from the Surgeon general, Dr Vivek Murthy, tell us what we know intuitively if we listen to needs:

“We now know that loneliness is a common feeling that many people experience. It’s like hunger or thirst. It’s a feeling the body sends us when something we need for survival is missing.”

Food, water, and shelter, aren’t our only survival need. Human connection, community, love - those things are required for survival as well.

Maybe not in the short-term, but for long-term thriving, they are essential.

Loneliness is an epidemic, like obesity. And technology is making it worse. To truly live our best possible life, we need to actively spend parts of our days and weeks to build our friendships, and keep it a priority throughout all of life’s phases.

The modern professional and my experience

Let me paint you a picture of a typical American high-achiever.

1. You begin making friends the moment you start going to school

2. Throughout school your friendships are the most important part of your life

3. You go to college and get even deeper with your friends

4. You get a job and maintain an active social life, but your time with friends is cut in half.

5. You have a kid and your time with friends is cut in half again

6. You have another kid and your time with friends is cut in half again

This is a pretty typical path when it comes to our friendships. Anyone who has a typical career path and has children can relate to the difficulty of maintaining friendships.

Except for a select few, we all end up in this spot. What we do after that is up to us.

Here is a graph of time spent with different groups as we age. In green is time spent with friends. It peaks at age 18 with 137 minutes, and then declines as we appoach 40, down to between 30-35 minutes for the rest of our lives.

I followed this path exactly. This path is me.

I maintained an active social life through my 20s.

After finishing my MBA, my wife Andrea (ex-wife now) and I were newly married, and moving half-way across the country from Virginia to Minnesota.

We made new friends instantly and stayed active socially.

Then we had twins. Then we had our third kid, Baby Alex. Then we started our first and second business.

We let our social time decrease every year, to the extend we didn’t have much social interaction.

We buried ourselves in building our businesses and caring for our children.

Our marriage suffered.

We kept going.

We divorced.

I started dating. I met some amazing women and built some strong relationships.

But I didn’t have any friends that I spent time with regularly.

I was extremely lonely.

My business started to suffer during this time.

I developed extreme anxiety. My mental health tanked. I hit rock bottom.

I slowly climbed myself out of the worst period of my life, by far.

I also slowly finding friends to spend time with.

I fell in love. We started making more friends together.

Our free time started centering around our time with eachother and our friends.

I started feeling better.

Fast forward a few years. I’m healthier than I’ve ever been. My relationship with my kids is unbelievably tight and strong. My businesses and work is healthy and productive.

And I have an extremely active social life with deep friendships that I nurture every week.

I have a new baby with a new life partner. The first year has been intense, just like the previous baby years.

But we’re protecting our friendships. At all cost. They won’t be neglected this time.

Because I know firsthand how important they are to my wellbeing.

I’ve felt firsthand how having fun with friends I love make me a better parent, a better business leader, a better person.

My friendships aren’t a luxury. They are an essential part of life.

How community and relationships make us better

Intuitively we know that having deep friendships and being part of communities make us enjoy life better.

But during busy life phases we’re forced to make sacrifices in order to accomplish our goals and function.

Building a great career, being a good parent, and staying healthy alone will completely fill up your day.

So it’s logical that we’re all going to let our friendships slide.

But just like prioritizing our health first, despite taking time away from other things, makes us a better performer at work and a better parent.

So does prioritizing friendships and community.

Frequent and intimate connection is a requirement to truly live our best life:

• It allows us to perform better at work

• It allows us to be a better parent

• It allows us to be a better person

Without them we are out of balance, and out of balanced people, by definition, cannot live their best life possible.

How to make friendships

The tactics of making friendships aren’t as important as mindset and habits required to nurture them.

Yep, just like most other things in life, building this part of your life comes down to how you approach it. And once you create the mental space and environment to build friendships, the business of finding new friends will come easier.

Mindset - If friendships aren’t a priority, they’ll never thrive.

But with so many competing time and energy activities, how do we prioritize friendships and maintain everything else?

That’s obviously the existential question facing us all.

But it comes down to taking a leap, and trusting that time and energy spent on friendships, is important.

And making it a priority of your week. And making a commitment to nurturing friendships.

Habits - Like everything else, relying on willpower will fail us very quickly. So if we want to nurture friendships, we need to make it habit.

The science of habit formation rely on cues (triggers), routine, and rewards, and require consistency, repetition, and discipline to be successfully formed.

Here’s a simple example:

Cue - I want to connect with one friend per week

Routine - In my weekly planning, I block and schedule a fun actitivity with a friend every week for 2 months.

Reward - I make sure my first 2 months are friends I really enjoy spending time with and we do something that’s very easy to comply with and I know will be fun

Doing this simple “challenge” for 2 months will yield 8 outings with friends that are almost guaranteed to build a positive feedback loop for us.

that’s just one simple example, but the concept is sound.

If we want to prioritize friendships, we need to create habits around it and make a favorable environment for them.

The lucky among us who have great friendships into middle age probably haven’t read this far, so if you have I know you’re probably like me, and need to constantly work to nurture your friendships.

It’s worth the effort. And it’s not acceptable to wait until our kids go to college.

Find the time now, I know I am going to. Instead of sitting on my ass this evening and watching a movie, I’m going to invite some friends over and enjoy the nice weather in Minnesota while we can.

I hope you do the same.

Talk to you next week,

Mike