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Last week, we explored The Costs of Friendship Misplaced. Today let’s consider the benefits of friendships well forged:
A light meme inspired by a heavy quotation:
"... I looked about me. Luminous points glowed in the darkness. Cigarettes punctuated the humble meditations of worn old clerks…
I heard them talking to one another in murmurs and whispers. They talked about illness, money, shabby domestic cares. Their talk painted the walls of the dismal prison in which these men had locked themselves up. And suddenly I had a vision of the face of destiny.
Old bureaucrat, my comrade, it is not you who are to blame. No one ever helped you to escape. You, like a termite, built your peace by blocking up with cement every chink and cranny through which the light might pierce. You rolled yourself up into a ball in your genteel security, in routine, in the stifling conventions of provincial life, raising a modest rampart against the winds and the tides and the stars. You have chosen not to be perturbed by great problems, having trouble enough to forget your own fate as man. You are not the dweller upon an errant planet and do not ask yourself questions to which there are no answers. You are a petty bourgeois of Toulouse. Nobody grasped you by the shoulder while there was still time. Now the clay of which you were shaped has dried and hardened, and naught in you will ever awaken the sleeping musician, the poet, the astronomer that possibly inhabited you in the beginning." - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand, and Stars
A quotation that some days inspires and other days unravels me. This passage is from my all-time favorite book (a frequent gift from the house of Lemmons), and speaks to the horror of a life lived in mediocrity. This seed of aspiration was planted with my initial reading in high school and subsequently nourished with each successive revisit, at this point exceeding a dozen reads. Saint-Exupéry’s words imprinted upon me the fleeting nature of life, and the fear of squandering it through compromise.
That being said, I now return to this quotation with a very different context than when I was seventeen. With our recounting of it here, I highlight the final two sentences. These words have become integral to my vision of true friendship: authentic friends inspire you to more. The real ones embolden the musician, the poet, the entrepreneur within you, and with their presence provide you the push to dare to dream.
Dare to Dream
Dare to dream. This verbiage is intentional. It comes from a thought cooked up in the late night hours of a good friend’s studio. We were in deep conversation, and I had paid him the compliment of how the modicum of success he’d achieved as an entrepreneur inspired me to think more boldly with my own life. Watching my buddy chart the unknown with his grit, audacity, and a pinch of luck was incredible. It made me analyze his profound impact in pushing me to pursue my own path and led me to consider my ‘five closest friends’ more broadly.
When I was younger, I viewed the whole “you are the average of your five closest friends” as an overplayed dictum for recognizing your good influences. But in truth this consideration stands up to scrutiny and its relevance has become increasingly important to me. I have found as I grow older that it isn’t so much the genteel security that solely ensnares people, but the absence of inspiration (the grasp on the shoulder above). Without the exposure to people that have ‘made it’, to dreamers and risk-takers, one is never led to believe it can be done. To conquer the impossible, one must internalize his or her own capacity to overcome it.
A subsequent conversation, with its clarifying contrasts, helped to crystallize this thinking. A few months after I began ruminating on this theme, I spoke with an old roommate of mine. We were discussing our drastically different life paths (stable engineer working for the state vs. fast-and-loose crypto capitalist), and an off-hand comment of his shook me to my core. As we discussed our careers and some of my entrepreneurial ideas, he defeatedly said (of founding a business / working for oneself) something to the effect of “I’ve never seen it done. I’ve only seen attempts and failures.” This slapped me in the face. Without exposure and without encouragement, without finding a tribe of aspirationalists, it’s incredibly hard to imagine alternatives to the traditional life channels.
He lives a great life with a good job and a couple dogs, but he doesn’t take risks. It’s a great life, but not an impassioned life. His career is merely work, and he views it as a means to an end, funding his hobbies and travels. There’s an entire other Words with Wynn to be dedicated to the preciousness of time, but suffice to say that I appreciate this as a happy, stable life, but not one which I would personally want. And from this I circle back to the importance of one’s closest influences-
Some of Us Are Looking at the Stars
“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.” - Oscar Wilde
I have found it to be acutely true that we are all beaten down by the doldrums of everyday life. My dad once said “After five years, every job is just driving a bus...”, and this is precisely why I take solace in the above quotation. It ties to the following that, although life does its best to slot us into channels of banality, there are some who maintain a sense of wonder, looking up and dreaming of more. These are the friends you should grab with both hands and hold onto for dear life.
Furthermore, I submit that this thought isn’t exclusively relevant to entrepreneurial pursuits. It’s important to recognize that the truest friends you keep, the ones worth keeping, will make you better in all arenas of your life, including creative endeavors. Whether that push be personal or professional, I adamantly believe that “steel sharpens steel.” The company you keep should be your most careful investment.
And as for grasping you by the shoulder while there’s still time-
“One cannot always tell what it is that keeps us shut in, confines us, seems to bury us, but still one feels certain barriers, certain gates, certain walls. Is all this imagination, fantasy? I do not think so. And then one asks: My God! Is it for long, is it for ever, is it for eternity? Do you know what frees one from this captivity? It is very deep serious affection. Being friends, being brothers, love, that is what opens the prison by supreme power, by some magic force” - Vincent van Gogh, letter to his brother, July 1880
Cheers to a few of the goons that inspire me to dream a little bigger:
"Dream no small dreams, for they have no power to move the hearts of men." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Keep looking up at a the stars.
- W