How I learned to make more friends

I've been very blessed to have had some absolutely amazing friendships in my life. While many of them have come and gone—some of them got married, some of them moved towns, one of them became a priest, actually—but all the amazing friends in my life have taught me something about what it means to be me. I think you view yourself through the eyes of other people, especially people you're close with. So, I think it's really important to surround yourself with the right people to form your tribe with intention. You want to surround yourself with people who make you a better person.

For the most part, those types of relationships are going to be friendships. But you don't get quality friendships by following a step-by-step action plan or something like that. Some of the best relationships I've ever had in my life seemed to have just randomly happened when I wasn't really expecting it whatsoever. So, needless to say, with this video, I'm not interested in giving you a step-by-step guide as to how to make everyone want to be your friend or anything like that because I think that's kind of futile and dumb. But I do want to talk about some really useful things that I've learned throughout my life that have really helped me make friends easier, make higher quality friends, and overall just connect with people a lot more genuinely.

The number one tip that I have is to always assume initiative. Back when I was like 15 or 16 years old, I was browsing Reddit, self-improvement forums, and stuff like that. I was on like r/socialskills, and I came across this post that pretty much changed my entire life. I've been looking everywhere for this one post, but I can't find it anywhere. So if someone can help me out with this, that'd be great!

In the post, there was this guy who talked about how he didn't have very many friends and the friends that he did have were starting to fade away. He didn't know why—he was kind of a loner, kind of an introvert—and all these friends started to just drift away from him. He was getting really upset until the very last friend that he had finally stopped calling him. Angry, confused, and saddened by this, this Reddit poster runs up to his friend and says, "Dude, where'd you go? Why'd you stop calling me? Why don't you invite me to stuff anymore?"

His friend turned to him and simply said, "It's because you don't invite me anywhere. I figured you didn't like hanging out with me." This really kind of changed my perspective because I just never invited people anywhere. I always waited for the invitation. I was always sitting there on my butt wondering why nobody was inviting me to cool parties and stuff. I eventually realized that I wasn't making any effort whatsoever to make plans and call people up, invite them to stuff. You know, if you don't have very many friends and you tend to not do things very often, and you want to be someone who does things with people, then take control. Just like any other aspect of your life, if you want to change something, it's up to you because it's your life. So take control of your social life as well. Always assume initiative.

If you want to do something fun, come up with an idea, invite the person to that idea. If they don't want to come to that idea, leave them be. Is that recording? I recorded you peeing. Did you? Yeah, okay.

So the next big thing that I've learned is that honesty is the antidote. One of the biggest pitfalls in any social interaction is the fear of voicing your opinion or being controversial or politically incorrect or offensive. But this fear really has to go if anybody is to know who you are in this world. So many people are so agreeable; they're extremely careful about every little thing they say. They're making sure they're not hurting anyone's feelings; they're making sure that they're laughing at everyone's jokes. They're being very pleasant, and what this eventually does is that you tend to be seen by a large amount of people as, "Oh yeah, he's nice." You know, like, people are kind of—they don't really know you, but you're unoffensive to them, so you're okay to have around. You'll be liked by everyone but loved by no one.

So, if you're the kind of person who doesn't ever want to make any sort of waves or make anyone feel uncomfortable, and you find it really hard to make it past kind of a surface-level acquaintanceship with most people, then that's probably the reason. By not voicing your true opinions, by not speaking honestly about things that you're passionate about or things that you've learned or standing up for what's right, you're basically concealing your identity from people. People don't tend to bond with people that they don't know at all, especially people who they don't trust.

I feel like everybody has a few people in their life that when they come across them in a grocery store or something like that, you have the exact same conversation every single time: "Hey man, how's it going? Oh yeah, that's cool. How's the hockey team going? Oh yeah, sweet. Yeah, so you getting on the ice a lot? Oh, that's good, man. That's good, man. Yeah, your wife's, you know, family's all good? That's good, that's good. Well, I'm gonna let you go, I gotta get running, but great running into you, I'll see you some other time."

You know, I feel like I have that conversation with like eight to ten people in my life—usually just like people I play hockey with or something like that. So I'm not saying you need to get past that stage with every single person that you meet in this world and form deep friendships with everybody you lock eyes with, but what I am saying is that if you're interested in forming deeper relationships with people, then you have to be willing to kind of break out of that small talk.

Break out of that small talk. Ask questions you're actually curious about and that you might think is like a weird thing to ask. But if you want to ask it, just get good at just asking it. When you say something that's like controversial and polarizing, people can do either two things: they can either really bond with what you're saying and be like, "Yeah man, that's awesome, I totally agree," or they can be like, "I'm out of here, this guy's cracked." And both of those things are a really good thing because of my next point, which is rejection is a very useful tool.

When you communicate honestly, when you wear your opinions on your sleeve, when you're not afraid to be controversial and be who you are in front of other people, then you're inevitably going to make a lot of people run the other way because they completely disagree with you. That's a very good thing because you can find out very quickly who the people who are actually staying are, and the people who are staying are probably people who you can actually bond with.

I was thinking about this the other day because I think rejection is like an inevitable thing that always happens if people are incompatible, and it can either happen right away or it happens very gradually over the course of a very painful and toxic relationship. A quick rejection is one where one person starts talking and the other person starts talking—you know, you don't vibe with that person at all, so you kind of go the other way, and you never talk with that person again. That's an acute rejection. You know, from a dating perspective, you walk up to a girl or a guy or whoever you're approaching and you're all like, "Hey baby," and then they're like, "Nah, get out of here, you suck. You smell, your breath is bad, I don't like you." And then that's it! You're like, "Okay, that kind of sucks, but fair enough, I should probably brush my teeth." That's an acute rejection, and you never have to talk with that person again.

But that's what happens when people are being honest; they're saying what they mean. One person's like, "Hey, I'm interested in bonding with you," and the other person's like, "No, go away," and then they split up. I think that's absolutely perfect—it's honest communication, clear-cut results. But a gradual rejection is something that people don't really think about a lot, and I think it's when two people are incompatible but neither of them are very good at communicating honestly.

So these two types of people might actually get into a friendship or a relationship and then find out later down the road that they actually don't really like each other at all, and they resent tons of things about them. So they start to become bitter at each other and start to get mad at their fundamental differences. They start to get petty about little things like, you know, if they leave a banana on the table, and you lash out at them, but you're not really lashing out at the banana; you're lashing out at the fact that you disagree about religious and political things, but you never sorted out to begin with, and now you have to deal with all this like drama later. It's just an absolute mess, but usually that only happens because two parties aren't really communicating very honestly at the beginning. They can't see the differences right off the bat, evaluate them, and then realize, "You know what? This person's so much different than me. This is probably going to cause a lot of pain and turmoil down the road, so I'm just gonna split before it gets too deep."

So if someone's incompatible with you, rejection will happen no matter what. It can either happen right away or way down the road. So opt for honest communication and quick rejection. This is probably the most unfun, unflattering social interaction advice of all time: "Hey, it's better ideas here—here's how to get rejected nine times out of ten."

So this last bit of advice is all about demographics, and I picked up this bit of information from "Models" by Mark Manson, which is actually a book about dating and relationships and stuff like that. But this honestly applies to friendships or any kind of relationship that you want to enter into.

A lot of people complain that they can't meet anyone like them. You know, they're a special little snowflake; they have their own little interests and hobbies. Maybe they have some weird hobbies and interests and pretty strange opinions, and they lament because they can never find their tribe, their people. You know, people who think exactly like them, people they can just hit it off with and have a great time, they can spew all their bizarre opinions about whatever together.

But people get sad because they can't find people who get them. Well, a lot of people look in the most general places, the most general public venues of all time for their soulmate, their best friend. They're not actually evaluating what interests they have, what values they hold, and going to the places where those people exist. You know, you want to increase your chances of finding people that you connect with— that's just basic demographics, statistics, come on!

You know, if you're religious, start actually going to that church, young adults group that you've been avoiding. You know, there are a lot of people who think like you in that group. You know, if you're into sports, you're really athletic, then join an intramural or communal sports team. Start to get involved with the extracurricular events and the little optional group meetups and stuff like that. Go where your people are! There are people who share your hobbies and your passions; go there.

But sometimes, you might not have a crazy proficiency in every single one of your hobbies, so you're afraid that if you go to one of those group meetups, like a photography club, everyone's gonna laugh at you because you suck. You know, you're not good at all; you should probably put down the camera and never take a picture again. But luckily, if you use today's video sponsor, Skillshare, that'll never happen to you!

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