- I've been very blessed to have had
some absolutely amazing friendships in my life.
And while many of them have come and gone,
some of them got married, some of them moved town,
one of them became a priest, actually.
(crowd laughing)
But anyways.
All the amazing friends in my life have taught me something
about what it means to be me.
Because I think you view yourself through the eyes
of other people, especially people you're close with.
So I think it's really important to surround yourself
with the right people, to form your tribe with intention.
You wanna surround yourself with people
who make you a better person.
And for the most part those types of relationships
are gonna be friendships,
but you don't get quality friendships by following
a step-by-step action plan or something like that.
Some of the best relationships I've ever had
in my life seem to have just randomly happened
when I wasn't really expecting it whatsoever.
So needless to say with this video
I'm not interested in giving you a step-by-step guide
as to how to make everyone want to be your friend,
or anything like that,
because I think that's kind of futile and dumb.
But I do wanna talk about some really useful things
that I've learned throughout my life,
that have really helped me make friends easier
and make higher quality friends.
And overall just connect with people a lot more genuinely.
♪ Somebody sexy, tell 'em hey ♪
♪ Give me ev-- ♪
- The number one tip that I have is to
always assume initiative.
So back when I was like 15 or 16 years old
I was browsing Reddit self-improvement forums
and stuff like that.
I was on like r/socialskills and I came across this post
that pretty much changed my entire life.
I've been looking everywhere for this one post,
but I can't find it anywhere.
So if someone can help me out with this, that'd be great.
But in the post, there was this guy who talked about
how he didn't have very many friends,
and the friends that he did have were starting to fade away
and he didn't know why.
He was kind of a loner, kind of an introvert,
and all these friends started to just drift away from him,
and he was getting really upset.
Until the very last friend that he had
finally stopped calling him.
Angry, confused, and saddened by this,
this Reddit poster runs up to his friend
and says, "Dude, where'd you go?
"Why'd you stop calling me?
"Why don't you invite me to stuff anymore?"
And his friend turned to him and simply said,
"It's 'cause you don't invite me anywhere.
"I figured you didn't like hanging out with me."
And this really kind of changed my perspective
because I just never invited people anywhere.
I always waited for the invitation.
I was always sitting there on my butt,
wondering why nobody was inviting me
to cool parties and stuff.
And I eventually realized
that I wasn't making any effort whatsoever
to make plans and call people up, invite them to stuff.
If you don't have very many friends
and you tend to not do things very often
and you wanna be someone who does things with people,
then take control.
Just like any other aspect of your life,
if you wanna change something it's up to you
because it's your life.
So take control of your social life as well.
Always assume initiative.
If you wanna do something fun,
come up with an idea, invite the person to that idea.
If they don't wanna come to that idea, leave 'em be.
Is that recording?
- [Man] I recorded you peeing.
- Did you?
- [Man] Yeah.
- Okay, so the next big thing that I've learned
is that honesty is the antidote.
One of the biggest pitfalls in any social interaction
is the fear of voicing your opinion, or being controversial,
or politically incorrect, or offensive.
But this fear really has to go
if anybody is to know who you are in this world.
Because so many people are so agreeable,
they're extremely careful about every little thing they say,
they're making sure they're not hurting anyone's feelings.
They're making sure that they're laughing
at everyone's jokes.
They're being very pleasant.
And what this eventually does is that you tend to be seen
by a large amount of people as, oh yeah, he's nice.
People are kinda, they don't really know you
but you're unoffensive to them
so you're okay to have around.
You'll be liked by everyone, but loved by no one.
So if you're the kind of person
who doesn't ever want to make any sort of waves,
or make anyone feel uncomfortable,
and you find it really hard to make it past
kind of a surface level acquaintanceship
with most people, then that's probably the reason.
By not voicing your true opinions,
by not speaking honestly about things
that you're passionate about, or things that you've learned,
or standing up for what's right,
you're basically concealing your identity from people.
And people don't tend to bond with people
that they don't know at all.
Especially people who they don't trust.
I feel like everybody has a few people in their life
that when they come across them in a grocery store,
or something like that,
you have the exact same conversation every single time.
"Hey man, how's it goin'?
"Oh yeah that's cool, how's the hockey team goin'?
"Oh yeah, sweet yeah.
"So you gettin' on the ice a lot?
"Oh, that's good man, that's good man.
"Yeah, your wife's family's all good?
"Oh, that's good, that's good.
"Well, I'm gonna let you go I gotta get running,
"but great running into you,
"I'll see you some other time."
I feel like I have that conversation
with like eight to 10 people in my life.
Usually just people I play hockey with
or something like that.
So I'm not saying you need to get past that stage
with every single person that you meet in this world,
and form deep friendships with everybody you lock eyes with.
But what I am saying is that if you're interested
in forming deeper relationships with people
then you have to be willing to kinda
break out of that small talk,
ask questions you're actually curious about,
and that you might think is like a weird thing to ask,
but if you wanna ask it, just get good at just asking it.
When you say something that's controversial
and polarizing, people can do either two things.
They can either really bond with what you're saying
and be like, "Yeah, man, that's awesome.
"I totally agree."
Or they can be like, "I'm outta here.
"This guy's cracked."
And both of those things are a really good thing
because of my next point,
which is rejection is a very useful tool.
When you communicate honestly,
when you wear your opinions on your sleeve,
when you're not afraid to be controversial
and be who you are in front of other people,
then you're inevitably gonna make a lot of people
run the other way because they completely disagree with you.
And that's a very good thing
because you can find out very quickly
who the people who are actually staying are.
And the people who are staying are probably people
who you can actually bond with.
And I was thinking about this the other day,
because I think rejection is like an inevitable thing
that always happens if people are incompatible.
And it can either happen right away,
or it happens very gradually over the course
of a very painful and toxic relationship.
A quick rejection is one where one person starts talking
and the other person starts talking,
you don't vibe with that person at all
so you kinda go the other way
and you never talk with that person again.
That's an acute rejection.
From a dating perspective,
you walk up to a girl, or a guy,
or whoever you're approaching and you're all like,
"Hey baby."
And then they're like, "Nah, get out of here.
"You suck, you smell, your breath is bad, I don't like you."
And then that's it.
You're like, ah okay, that kinda sucks.
But fair enough, I should probably brush my teeth.
That's an acute rejection,
and you never have to talk with that person again.
But that's what happens when people are being honest.
They're saying what they mean.
One person's like,
"Hey, I'm interested in bonding with you."
The other person's like, "No, go away."
And then they split up.
I think that's absolutely perfect.
It's honest, communication, clear cut results.
But a gradual rejection is something
that people don't really think about a lot.
And I think it's when two people are incompatible
but neither of them are very good at communicating honestly.
So these two types of people might actually
get into a friendship or a relationship,
and then find out later down the road
that they actually don't really like each other at all,
and they resent tons of things about them.
So they start to become bitter at each other,
and start to get mad at their fundamental differences.
Start to get petty about little things like,
if they leave a banana on the table
and you lash out at them.
But you're not really lashing out of the banana,
you're lashing out of the fact that you disagree
about religious and political things.
But you never sorted it out to begin with
and now you have to deal with all this like drama later.
It's just an absolute mess.
But usually that only happens
because two parties aren't really communicating
very honestly at the beginning.
They can't see the differences right off the bat,
evaluate them, and then realize,
you know what, this person's so much different than me,
This is probably gonna cause a lot of pain and turmoil
down the road so I'm just gonna split
before it gets too deep.
So if someone's incompatible with you,
rejection and no matter what.
It can either happen right away, or way down the road.
So opt for honest communication and quick rejection.
(chuckling)
This is probably the most un-fun, unflattering
social interaction advice of all time.
Hey, it's Better Ideas here,
here's how to get rejected nine times outta 10.
So this last bit of advice is all about demographics.
And I picked up this bit of information from
"Models" by Mark Manson,
which is actually a book about dating,
and relationships, and stuff like that.
But this honestly applies to friendships
or any kind of relationship that you want to enter into.
So a lot of people complain
that they can't meet anyone like them.
They're a special little snowflake,
they have their own little interests and hobbies.
Maybe they have some weird hobbies,
and interests, and pretty strange opinions.
And they lament because they can never find
their tribe, their people.
People who think exactly like them,
people they can just hit it off with and have a great time.
They can spew all their bizarre opinions
about whatever, together.
But people get sad because
they can't find people who get them.
Well, a lot of people look in the most general places,
the most general public venues of all time
for their soulmate, their best friend.
They're not actually evaluating what interests they have,
what values they hold,
and going to the places where those people exist.
You want to increase your chances
of finding people that you connect with.
That's just basic demographics, it's statistics.
Come on.
If you're religious start actually going to that church
young adults group that you've been avoiding.
There are a lot of people who think like you in that group.
If you're into sports, you're really athletic,
then join an intramural or communal sports team.
Start to get involved with the extracurricular events
and the little optional group meetups and stuff like that.
Go where your people are.
There are people who share your hobbies
and your passions, go there.
But sometimes you might not have a crazy proficiency
in every single one of your hobbies.
So you're afraid that if you go
to one of those group meetups, like a photography club,
everyone's gonna laugh at you because you suck.
You're not good at all, you should probably put
down the camera and never take a picture again.
But luckily if you use today's video sponsor,
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So make sure you take advantage of that link,
learn something new, explore your creativity,
and as usual, have a great time.
If you liked this video, make sure to hit like,
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potentially helping them make friends and stuff.
It helps me out too,
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If you haven't noticed already, actually,
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There's another video coming out like less than
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there's also lots of activity on the second channel
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go to the second channel where there's more content.
Catch you next.