The closest bonds I have in my life, are bonds that have been tested. One of my closest friends is someone with whom I decided to make a 450-person conference happen, given us having zero experience running conferences, and we eventually had some really big names coming, and things could have gone badly wrong and reflected terribly on us. But we worked hard and it succeeded, and now I know that when that friend tells me that we are going to do ambitious project X, then we are going to do ambitious project X, and they will not leave me behind to fail.
I trust that person in a way that I couldn’t have if we hadn’t opened ourselves to massive failure.
Something else I want in life, is the ability to talk with people about what thought processes I’m having, what’s stressing me out, and what I’m worried about. Maybe I’m angry at my partner. Maybe I’m feeling depressed. However, many people have very different internal lives, and if you don’t quite have the same internal life I have, something I say could come across wrong—as petty, or as selfish, or as nasty for example—when I’m trying to deal with the thought processes and reason about whether they make sense. So, for me to tell someone, is to take a risk, the risk of not being understood and being rejected. Yet only if I try this, and test whether myself and a friend really understand each other, will we be able to get the value of communication about difficult and important things.
(Here’s Scott with the closely related point that Friendship is Countersignalling: building trust requires putting things on the line.)
I’ve tried this, and sometimes I’ve been burned. And sometimes I’ve built stronger relationships by it. And I couldn’t have gotten the latter without risking the former.
The closest bonds I have in my life, are bonds that have been tested. One of my closest friends is someone with whom I decided to make a 450-person conference happen, given us having zero experience running conferences, and we eventually had some really big names coming, and things could have gone badly wrong and reflected terribly on us. But we worked hard and it succeeded, and now I know that when that friend tells me that we are going to do ambitious project X, then we are going to do ambitious project X, and they will not leave me behind to fail.
I trust that person in a way that I couldn’t have if we hadn’t opened ourselves to massive failure.
Something else I want in life, is the ability to talk with people about what thought processes I’m having, what’s stressing me out, and what I’m worried about. Maybe I’m angry at my partner. Maybe I’m feeling depressed. However, many people have very different internal lives, and if you don’t quite have the same internal life I have, something I say could come across wrong—as petty, or as selfish, or as nasty for example—when I’m trying to deal with the thought processes and reason about whether they make sense. So, for me to tell someone, is to take a risk, the risk of not being understood and being rejected. Yet only if I try this, and test whether myself and a friend really understand each other, will we be able to get the value of communication about difficult and important things.
(Here’s Scott with the closely related point that Friendship is Countersignalling: building trust requires putting things on the line.)
I’ve tried this, and sometimes I’ve been burned. And sometimes I’ve built stronger relationships by it. And I couldn’t have gotten the latter without risking the former.