"Friendship Circle" by Peace Hyde

Hello and welcome to a Piece of Peace, your weekly dose of motivation and inspiration.  This week I would like to share with you on the topic, “friendship circle.” There is a popular saying that you are a sum total of the people you have around you. I have come to realize just how true that statement is. I was having a conversation with a friend of mine who decided to cut a group of his close friends off. He has been the most successful one among his group of friends for a long time. He is a professional footballer who earns quite a lot of money each month. As a result, he has a number of friends who have consistently depended on him for their livelihoods. He went through a tough patch recently. He suffered a bad injury and as a result was on the bench for quite some time.

Things went from bad to worse when his team decided to trade him to a lower division team. All of a sudden he went from a high salary to quite a low one in contrast. My friend needed to think long and hard about what the rest of his future was going to be like. He needed to plan properly with his money. First thing he did was to cut costs. He calculated that a significant amount of his monthly budget was spent taking care of the needs and wants of his friends. He however did not remember a time when any one of his friends had done anything thoughtful for him. He decided to run a little experiment. He stopped giving all his friends money for a month and decided to tell them that he had to file for bankruptcy on account of his frivolous spending habit. After two months, he moved out of his mansion into a 1-bed apartment and explained to his friends that he had lost his home.

He began asking them for money each week to help him get by until he got a new contract. My friend realized very quickly that all his friends had gone from spending the weekends at his house to not seeing them for months at a time. When he called his friends he got no answer. Over the course of the experiment, which covered a 3-month period, my friend went from being the most popular guy amongst his mates to being completely ignored. He was extremely hurt because he had known most of his friendship circle since childhood. He decided to let all of them go. It was a hard lesson for him to learn that he only had perceived friendship based on how useful he was to the group of boys. Once that usefulness evaporated, he ceased being the center of attention of the group.

It is important to understand the motivation of your friendship circle. Why do some people make the decision to be around you? Understand that it is not everyone that you have in your life that genuinely cares about your well-being. Like my friend realized, everybody wants to be part of the success story but nobody wants to help you grind. It is easy to be your friend if you are successful. Do not get complacent and put a lot of stock in the people you have around you. Ask yourself, if my living circumstances changed today, will they still have my back? If the answer is no, then realize you are investing your time and energy building the wrong friendship circle and adjust accordingly. And no matter what you do, always be yourself, because everyone else is taken.

Much love,

Peace Hyde.