#004 | Mon 3 Sep | Friends and acquaintances

Ludo De Angelis
Sep 3, 2018 · 4 min read

When you want to go fast, go alone.

When you want to far, go with friends.

There is a time for everything in life.

One time, you may be surrounded by people who love you and support you. There may be other times where you feel all alone in the world, even if you have the same people around you and you simply don’t relate as much.

It’s important to remember that this is fine, it’s normal and nothing you should beat yourself up about.

As with everything in life, change comes relentlessly and it’s up to you to learn to ride the waves.

A lot of people won’t let go or lower their priority of being with friends and family, even though there is a project or endeavour they would like to pursue.

When it comes to looking at the people in your life with an objective lens, people stray away. People will see it as too clinical to treat other humans for the pros and cons.

It’s easy to relate to. Going after something alone takes internal fortitude and courage.

Your friends may also serve as a means to relax at the end of a long week at work. Even harder to let go of.

But if the quote at the start of this article holds true, the pace at which you build will take a hit if you have a high priority on keeping your friends in your life.

I’m not advocating ditching the people you care about in order to focus on your project. But you do need to put your prioritise in place and think about what you want in your life, at least during a particular period.

If the people around you don’t serve you or fulfil you, you must honour yourself and lower their priority in your life.

Or if you need to simply focus on your project and simply need to see your loved less because of it, that’s fine too.

Either way, if your friends love you, they’ll understand.

Having moved country under my own steam and no university network of people to lean on, the people I spend time with in my life are few and far between.

I don’t see it as a bad thing. It’s just the situation I’m in right now.

I like it like this though as I can go deep into our relationship and we can really get to know each other.

Plus, most of these people are entrepreneurial and building something for themselves, so we relate on those levels too.

I recently allowed myself to blow off some steam by going to a club with an old work colleague and her friends.

I quickly saw how almost everybody in the club new my colleague but also noticed most of the conversations she was having, including those with myself, spanned about 20–60 seconds.

Granted it was a club environment, not the most conducive to having fulfilling or even long conversations at all (depending if and what drugs you’re on that is) but it made me think about the difference between having a large group of friends versus a small and carefully selected group of people to speak with and hang out with.

Much like everything in life, you must chose what is right for you, at that particular time in your life.

By being purposeful with your decisions, you build the life you want.

Crucially, being purposeful in the decisions you make around what kind of people to have in your life will also affect how you live too.

What works for me may not necessarily work for you and it’s really important to remember that.

I grew up wanting the lifestyle of wanting many people around me where we would go on all sorts of adventures and shenanigans together.

It never happened because subconsciously, I didn’t actually want that so it never materialised.

What did materialise though is my desire for deep relationships over the quantity of connections, something which took me by surprise.

I’m better off because I have embraced this now.

If you surround yourself with people that lift you up and support you, you will have a better chance in achieving your goals than having a collection of people that waste your time.

It’s up to you to decide what a waste of time is though.

Ultimately, you can achieve a lot if you’re focusing hard on those goals of yours. You could cut out all distractions from TV to friends and romance and you would get a lot of work done and become extremely efficient.

But clearly, removing human connections from your life is not an ideal scenario. We are social creatures after all and we need other humans to talk to and be with.

There is a balance though and it’s worth exploring it and to remember that it may just be for a particular time in your life that it must be a certain way and that it will pass, just like everything.

Ludo De Angelis

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Regular human running on iOS and coffee.