Who are your 15?

We spend 40% of our time with the inner 5 and another 20% of our time with the next 10.

That’s 60% of your time in their eco-system, influenced by their ideas, their passions, their reactions, and their actions.

You spend less than 20 minutes a month with the remaining 135 people. Digital mediums have not extended this. It is time together not prompted birthday nudges that keep relationships alive. This is an inconvenient truth.

I just finished Robin Dunbar‘s book on Friendship. It’s brilliant!

The seven pillars of friendship stand on language, hometown, educational trajectory, hobbies and interests, worldview (religious/moral/political views), musical tastes, and sense of humour. (musical taste was the surprising one for me and seems to be deeply connected to an age even before language).

There is a very real biological difference in how different genders nourish relationships – communication vs. activity. And there seems to be a different intensity to the connections.

Some of us have a few close relationships and several weak relationships. Others have more close relationships and fewer weak relationships

Your family sticks around and requires less maintenance – The kinship premium is real. I’ve seen this in my own life.

“Friends are not, in reality, all that easy to acquire and maintain.” We spend the better part of the first 25 years of our lives learning the rules of social engagement.

There are a lot of cliche’s (“Your Network = Your Networth.” “You are the sum of your five closest friends.”) And they are largely correct. Though what seems to matter most is that we have a group of friends we can rely on.

Navigating this complex maze is quite literally life or death. Physical fitness and Social interaction were the two most important indicators.

Dunbar’s book on the structure of friendship goes beyond the outcomes of friendship and is the most in-depth study I’ve read on HOW to navigate it all.