A simple 3-step plan for making friends as an adult.
Solving the world's hardest problem...
There I was, sitting in nothing but my Nike Pro Combat compression shorts that I got in high school.
About to plunge into a 39-degree ice bath with another half-naked man across from me doing the same.
Typical Saturday in NYC.
I had been gifted a pass to this cool Social Wellness Club for Christmas and was ready to give it a go.
I guess the rest of the club overslept or something because it was just me and this one other guy that morning.
The experience consisted of 11-minutes of breath-work, 6-minutes in an ice bath, and then 15-minutes to heat up and hang out afterwards.
Breath-work went great, however the ice bath was a mental battle. Luckily we hung on for the whole 6 minutes (only because they let me play Autumn by Ben Böhmer on the speakers which is my ice bath song — highly recommend).
As we finally emerged from the frigid water, I congratulated my ice bath comrade for sticking it out!
Now it was time to heat up and hang out.
We get to talking and he tells me he’s new to the city (been here 2 months).
I asked him how his experience has been so far and he said “To be honest, I don’t feel like I’ve really gotten the flow of the city down yet.”
Pretty vague answer so I got my stick out and started poking around. As I prodded a bit more, I found out that the real problem was that he doesn’t have many guy friends here (a very common problem).
He’s in his 30s and came here to move in with his girlfriend.
I told him, first off, congrats on having a girlfriend, and second, that I faced the same problem when I first moved.
He asked me how I figured it out.
And that was the biggest mistake he made that day.
He had no idea the can of worms he was about to open.
Had he known that he was talking to an up-and-coming blogger who was working on a framework called “how to make friends as an adult" he may have never asked, out of respect for the next 15-minutes of his life.
So without further ado… I’ll tell you what I told him. Here’s my framework for how to make friends as an adult.
3 Phases of Choosing Friends
Before we jump into our 3-step plan for making adult friends, we need to understand how we choose our friends.
Throughout our lives we choose our friends based on different criteria. There are 3 different phases I’ve identified.
Convenience - The first friends we choose are typically the kids that lived on your street growing up or that sat next to us in kindergarten. Their most redeeming quality as a friend was that they were physically right in front of us, and that’s all you really need as a kid (assuming they weren’t selfish with their toys). You might also share some common interests, but the main driver for those friendships are convenience.
Interests - Once you get into middle-school, high-school and college you expand your friend-making criteria to include finding people with shared interests. You’ve know what interests you and you look for people who share those interests. If you like theatre, you join drama club and become friends with those folks. You try out for the lacrosse team and make it? Great, that’s your new friend group.
Values - The final phase of choosing friends is when you begin looking for friends who share your same values. You’ll still want them to have similar interests, but that is no longer enough. There are lots of people that like playing basketball. You are looking for somebody who likes playing basketball but also shares your same worldview or who has similar goals as you. Somebody who is reliable, somebody who treats others well, etc. Whatever values you hold, you look for somebody that also has them.
So now that we know the different evolutions of choosing friends, we can use this to help us in choosing our adult friends.
Ideally, you are looking for people who have all 3 criteria met.
People who:
live close to you physically
have shared interests
have similar values
There are exceptions to this of course, but if you can hit all three that’s going to be a great friend.
So what’s the plan?
Okay enough stories, let’s talk tactics.
Actually, I lied, one more thing before getting into tactics.
I need you to do 5-minutes of self-reflection, thinking about the following:
What are you looking for in your new friends? You can use the convenience, interest, values framework we talked about earlier to help think through this. Do you want friends that are active? Do you want friends that are calm and mellow? Do you want friends in the same industry as you? Different industry? Defining what you want will help you align your actions towards getting it.
What do you bring to the table that makes you a great friend? - Damnnn thats a big question. Look in the mirror and determine what you are bringing to the table. How does being friends with you benefit others? Are you a reliable person? A rock they can lean on? Do you bring enthusiasm? A positive spirit? Are you someone that is always pushing your friends to be better? Are you a great listener? Are you well-read? Are you in great physical shape? Can you help your friends with that? Understanding your strengths in a friendship will allow you to demonstrate them early and often.
Okay now that you know what you are looking for in your friends and what you bring to the table, here’s the FOOLPROOF plan for making friends as an adult.
The Plan for Making Adult Friends
3 Months of Yes - This is where it all begins. A 3-month sprint where you commit to saying “yes” to every social encounter that comes across your plate. Drastically increasing your social efforts is a surefire way to build some momentum in the friend-making department. Will this be exhausting? Yes. Will it be worth it? Yes. In addition to saying yes to inbound request, I also want you to seek out new social opportunities that are adjacent to your interests & values. I did this when I first moved to NYC. For me it was e-commerce events, run clubs, book clubs, and any random party / event I could get invited to. It was exhausting but it really worked.
Host a recurring monthly dinner (at a restaurant / or your apartment) - Now that you’ve got the “3-Months of Yes” engine running, you need a way to reengage cool people that you meet out at these social events. It’s really hard to create lasting relationships with people you only meet once. So what you are going to do is host a monthly or bi-monthly recurring get-together. When you meet cool people out in the world that you want to get to know better, you can casually invite them to your monthly get-together. It’s a much stronger offer to say “Hey man, I host a monthly dinner where I bring together a bunch of awesome, like-minded folks in the city. Would love to have you come to the next one. I can send you the details.” versus saying “Hey man, we should totally hang out again sometime.”
2nd-Degree Dinners - I stole this from my boy Randy, who probably stole it from somebody else lol, but here’s how it works: you and a friend co-host a dinner. You each invite one cool friend that the other person doesn’t know and instruct that cool friend to invite one cool friend that nobody else knows. You can put parameters on what type of person they should bring, but its pretty fun to leave it open-ended and see what you get. What you end up with is a dinner of 6 people where everyone is kind of connected but nobody knows each other too well (except for the two co-hosts). This is a great way to expand into different friend groups quickly.
So to recap you’ve got:
The “3-Months of Yes” engine running
Your recurring monthly dinners to build deeper relationships with cool folks you’ve met
2nd-Degree Dinners to expand into different friend groups.
That’s a pretty awesome system!
And if this sounds like a lot of work, that’s because it is. But nothing great comes without work.
So these are the tactical steps to take, but these next tips are going to really help make the whole system hum.
Things that’ll make this system work better
“Everybody wants to talk to you, you just have to go first.”
During my first months in NYC, this is the mindset I adopted when going into social situations. There’s this weird social stigma to not talk to people we don’t know. But usually (roughly 95% of the time) if you break the ice with a genuine compliment or question people are actually delighted to talk with you (exceptions: at the gym and on the subway). This is a muscle you can build, trust me. I used to be terrified of breaking the ice with people and I now I can do it very easily. I’m like a mountaineer, breaking ice left and right. I’d recommend adopting this mindset and you’ll find it way easier to get more conversations going. They want to talk to you! You just have to go first.
Be a giver, not a taker.
Everybody loves a giver. Bring something to the party. Be the person that asks a lot of really good questions and really listens to somebody and makes them feel heard. Remember peoples names. Follow up with people. Be a giver of opportunities. Throw events, invite people to stuff, take initiative in a world of people who won’t. The bar is so low these days because most people do the bare minimum when it comes to conversation and social interaction. So being a giver will really set you apart.
“To be interesting, you need to be interested.”
This saying changed my life when I heard it at age 18. There’s two ways to interpret it:
Have hobbies & interests that you actually care about and can speak on that are more interesting than the norm. This will make you a more interesting person to talk to.
Be interested in the person you are talking to and ask them questions. It’s a crazy world, I’m sure the person you’re talking to has some awesome stories and skills. It’s your job to learn about them! Very few people do this and it is an easy way to stand apart.
I found it much easier to connect with people when I applied this principle.
Be present. Get off your phone.
Be present, be alert, be ready to jump into a conversation. If you bury your nose in your phone you are basically saying “Don’t talk to me.” Get those eyes up and get in the game!!
The squeaky wheel gets the oil.
If nobody knows that you are open to making new friends, then how the hell do you expect people to engage with you? Are they supposed to just read your mind?! When I first moved to NYC I made a Tik Tok where I told New York City that I was new in town and in the market for some friends.
I then outlined:
what I bring to the table
my interests
and what I was looking for in a friend
Was this kind of a cringe thing to do? Of course.
Did it result in 102 comments of people interested in being friends? Yup.
Were most of those comments from thirsty 18-year-old girls who don’t even live in NYC? Sure.
But was one of those comments from a guy who is now one of my best NYC friends, running buddy, and the guy who trained me to run a marathon? You bet your ass it was.
So the moral of the story is to put yourself out there. Squeak your wheels and you might get some oil.
Wrap Up
Alright, that was a long one!
There’s all my thoughts on making friends as an adult. Let me know what you guys think. This is a really interesting topic that a lot of people struggle with but isn’t widely talked about.
And let me know: do you guys have any strategies for making friends as an adult?
I’d love to hear them!
Until next time,
Flickman
Thumbnail source: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/who-americans-spend-their-time-with/
Incredible sir. Yet again! 10/10 x