People of Quality
Those who know me well know that I have an almost obsessive interest in networking and families, so much so that it has become part of my PhD and a consuming interest in my life. In fact I have been so immersed in my work that I had begun to forget why I started down this path; luckily events of this week served as a reminder to me of why I find this area both compelling and useful and I thought it would be an interest blog to share with you all that leads to an insight I believe is crucial to personal success; a topic I featured in a video on over at 6aliens a couple of weeks ago.
The story of this week starts with a wedding and the preparation for that wedding which brought together a group of friends I have been lucky enough to share my life with (some for now for almost fourteen years); we are a disparate bunch with many interests and personalities, not perhaps your normal group of twenty something friends we are gamers, geeks, rockers, role-players, scientists and wrestlers.
The older we get the further apart we find ourselves geographically and the more challenging the friendships become to sustain but even against this background we are united by a history of shared experiences and passions which are the foundation of an evolving discourse that we continue through email and social networking sites and which whenever we come back together is as fresh and punchy as the day we all began to separate.
We are close in a way that most groups of friends will never be, we are a network of individuals who support each other in times of need and celebrate each other’s successes; we are the first people we turn to for help and support and are arguably more important to each other than some of our own relatives, we are in short our own weird, wonderful and at times dysfunctional little social family.
During the build up to the wedding: the talks, the meetings, the role-play, the nights out and the hurried morning of preparations I have never felt more relaxed or more at home than with this group and it’s given me the opportunity to bounce around a few new ideas and find the emotional support I needed to get some of them moving, but more than that it’s also helped me to get re-energised and reminded me of why it’s so important to invest time in friendships just as you would business relationships, because it’s this supportive network that has been so crucial to my success and the success of many others.
In my case my friends have always been the ones pushing me to be the best person I can be, and for every way they have done that (even the ones which are hard to hear) I thank them because without them I would be less of a person.
So my message in today’s blog is to value your social family and invest time in them, real valuable time, because in a changing world having people of quality around you can make the difference between success and failure
Thanks to my friends, you are all awesome
Matt
