find useless friends

When I first heard Arthur Brooks say on the Tim Ferris Podcast, “find useless friends,” I was slightly taken aback. 

When I rewound the podcast and listened again in context, a lightbulb flickered on. 

“They have deal friends but not real friends.  The deal friends are very useful to you.  Your real friends are useless.  Cosmically, beautifully useless… useless friendships, not worthless.”

Useless, not worthless.

Lots of relationships are made over deals.  Give and take.  Networking.  And there may not be anything wrong with those relationships but in the end, they end… they end when one side no longer has something to give. 

To bring it too close to home, I can probably count around 100 people I haven’t heard from since… I was no longer able to give out free Trail Blazers tickets.  Personally realizing how many deal relationships I had.  But on the flip side, seeing how many cosmically, beautiful, useless friendships I had as well.

When you strip down the deal parts of relationships, you find what’s most valuable.