I want to invite you to imagine a situation where you have so many friends in college. If someday you are getting sick, who will you call? You will start filtering all of your friends and pick a person who most likely will help and give their best effort to look after you. College times are full of ups and downs, and we need someone to trust and rely on.
Once again, let's imagine another condition. Where you have few friends but are in a deep relationship. You have spent so many times together, maybe saving each other's lives in the past. If someday you are looking for job employment and we know that close recruitment is a usual thing in companies, how big is your chance to get those opportunities?
Making friends is one of the major upgrades we should consider carefully. How vast should we expand, or how deep should we dive into our connection? It is not "or" but rather "and." We need them both---the inner and outer circles.
I want to simplify the terms of connection to circles. Imagine you are a center point that has multiple circle layers, just like an onion. Pull the center point downward, and we will have a funnel. I think that is an analogy to our relationship with our friends. We have a few friends that have deep connections and shallow but wide relationships with many friends. We might have to accept the reality that we can't make all of our friends have the same deep connection with us. We can't have a pool shape with a deep and wide base in this case. Times are limiting it, and a relationship is like a slime where you need efforts to maintain its shape; otherwise, it will continuously collapse.
Maintaining vast relationships is a time-consuming job. It's not just about making acquaintances where you know their name and they know your name. People can be categorized as the outer circle when you have a meaningful reciprocal relationship. Some kind of mutualism. We need the outer circle to own us something to the point where they feel like they need to help us one day.
It's easy to say in the beginning, but I found out that in this social media era, there are so many ways for us to build a pile of help by providing them with something that makes them feel appreciated. It will help us maintain our relationship with the outer circles. Today, so many people use social media for attention, validation, and appreciation. Those kinds of demands can be fulfilled easily just by liking, commenting, or even seeing their posts and stories (of course, they don't apply to everyone). But this method is just the first phase.Â
Bacteries need scratched skin before entering wounds (what an evil analogy). Fulfilling their simple demands may open the first doors, so you can get in and do something real by providing meaningful help. Continuing to the deeper doors is optional. If you want to build or maintain your outer circle with small efforts, this method may help you.
On the other side, inner circles are a little bit more complex for me. We have to note that deepening relationships with the inner circle requires more than insincere efforts. Same hobbies, same sense of humor, same interests---we need to have similarities to get it. That's why sometimes the inner circle is not some kind of "just business" relationship. However, many times, people fail to find or match their interests with anyone. But it's okay, or maybe not okay. Either you have to "lower your ego and try to adapt" or you can "swim in another pool.".
Having a few friends or many friends is not the problem. You can have them both. But, it is a problem when you don't make any friends.
Pick your inner circle of friends carefully, because it shapes you. Toxic friends can make you a toxic person. Ambitious friends can make you an ambitious person. In college, having an inner circle that contains productive people is important because we go to study to be productive. Furthermore, spread your wings. In a world with so much uncertainty, the probability of catching opportunities will increase as we have a larger standard deviation, especially after college.
A relationship with friends is like building an upside-down pyramid. You need to have a strong foundation, but it won't be any impressive if it is not a wide skyscraper.
