“People talk all the time about how successful people ‘find out who their real friends are’ when they hit the big time,” a mentor of mine told me. “But almost nobody talks about how successful people treat their friends when they hit the big time.”
As I’ve ventured into entrepreneurship, I’ve discovered this is true — and most of the time, successful people aren’t the only ones finding out who their “real” friends are.
I’ve witnessed a lot of entrepreneurs abandon their friends on their quest for success, reasoning that their friends will still be around when the dust has settled. Others have preemptively accepted that their friendships with people who aren’t entrepreneurs will naturally fade away. Some simply think losing friendships is the cost of admission to life as an entrepreneur.
But research has shown that friends make our lives better — and entrepreneurs are no exception. People with close friends are half as likely to die early, making friendships a better health regimen than avoiding smoking or maintaining a healthy weight. Spending just six hours with friends makes us 12 times more likely to feel happiness. And doubling our friend group has the same impact on our happiness as boosting our salary by 50 percent! Are we willing to give all that up for entrepreneurial success?
Why Friends Are Key to Entrepreneurship
Friends not only make me happier, but they also make me a more effective and efficient businesswoman. Rather than treat my close friends as distractions, I view them as rewards; the faster and more successfully I complete a task I’ve been dreading, the faster I get to spend time with my friends. They provide motivation, simply by existing, on the days when my internal motivation is flagging.
They also give me perspective. One time, after I lost a client who had provided a quarter of my business’s monthly income, I was complaining to a friend of mine. I was telling her that I couldn’t figure out what I’d done wrong, and I had no idea how my company was going to make up that missing income quickly. In the worst-case scenario playing out in my head, I was imagining having to lay off my two best employees and do everything myself again. The burden I felt outweighed the money.
My friend looked at me and said, “This just proves that you have attracted high-paying clients, and you can do it again. You’re feeling sorry for yourself for things that haven’t even happened yet. Go out and try to get another client before you start complaining about how unfair things are.”
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