With 0r Without you
People always find it strange that I’m at the intersection of many different circles. A question I often get, “How do you enter this circle of people who do something completely antithetical to how you’ve lived so far?” Or more bluntly “How do you end up with people who do this shit?”
My answer to finding the people to do weird shit with is always: Find the people who do weird shit with or without you. I personally think this is the greatest recruiting and selection technique for just about anything.
There are two mental models for searching friends, partners, lovers this way:
- Try to get the people you know to do the things that you actually like doing. This might be climbing, reading, art, philosophy, coding that kind of stuff.
- Or find the people who already do those things with or without you and drop expectations about how they should be.
Sketch a Venn diagram of your circles X, Y, and Z and notice where they overlap.
So for my case: One circle is the dirtbag travelers who spend every spare dollar getting to the middle of nowhere. The second circle is a circle of skiers and snowboarders. The third circle is the people who spend 14 hours a day grinding to optimize AI models. Maybe there’s a fourth circle for gym bros, and a fifth for philosophy/art nerds who obsess about why brutalist architecture is a crime against humanity.
I don’t necessarily think that any of those circles, taken alone, are unique. Being in two or maybe three of those groups simultaneously is very plausible. But being present in all of them together is very unlikely.
Quite often, people in one of these circles are gonna think the people in the other circles are fucking insane. And they’re probably totally okay with thinking that way. Most of my friends think everyone else’s circle is pretty weird. Any individual slice of your friend group probably wouldn’t vibe with another. Therefore, you have to be a person who is:
A) Individually willing to do all those things, and
B) Ready to do it with people who will do it with or without you.
Does this mean you can’t entice people to do new stuff? No, that’s definitely not what I’m saying.
I’m sure you can get people interested in things you love(I’ve gotten many people to try AI in different ways and skiing).
But to me? You want to find people who just do weird shit with or without you and ideally before you even asked them. Respect people’s autonomy, respect their desire, because trying to “rah-rah” people past a certain age(say 29) is much harder and I like to think that if you haven’t figured out a genuine love for something are you only doing it to make someone happy or do you actually love it?
One of my best life habits has just been being able to hang out with people who are nothing like me. For me, if I am really into something I’ll even step away from my usual friend group without neglecting them if that’s what it takes. If that means moving to a new city, I’m open.Even if I have to do it alone, as long as I’m with people who would do it anyway, I’m good.
With or without you is also a hiring metric, a relationship filter, a friendship test, a way to find collaborators. It takes away the friction of needing to be nice, to charm, to entice as it self-selects! You really can find community anywhere, It may not be how you would have imagined it to be but you can find it.
Of course, this isn’t always possible. Sometimes the people you want to join just aren’t interested in doing it with you. And that’s totally fine, you either learn to look harder or learn to love your own company as life goes on.