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Intentionally Making Close Friends (2021)
One of the most valuable experiments I ever ran was intentionally practicing the skill of making close friends, and this directly led to most of my friends today. This post is the story of that experiment, and distills the lessons learned
I was trapped in a ‘normal’ mode of conversation - making small talk, being inoffensive, feeling aversion to being weird, respecting where I thought other people’s boundaries were. Even beyond meeting new people or following concrete algorithms, the spirit of ‘seek the most exciting thread of the conversation’ makes talking to friends way more fun! I prefer to express lots of small vulnerabilities throughout the conversation rather than sharing something major and making it feel like a big deal - the latter tends to create an obligation/expectation of reciprocation, while the former better establishes a ‘I consider this fine and normal’ norm.
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