Relationships

• Have fun with the people you love.
• Build small groups. Small communities do more things that larger ones.
• Do novel and exciting things with your friends often.
• If you feel that something is not right, it probably is not right. Deal with it early. Problems are much quicker and easier to resolve when they're fresh and small than after you let them simmer into deep resentment.
• Relationships are a coevolutionary loop. Make it explicit by writing and sharing everything that goes wrong. This helps pinpoint the bottlenecks, the frictions. It also forces you to put words to your goals, values, and assumptions, opening those up for discussion and refinement.
• Acknowledge and apologize for any mistakes made. Learn and improve.
• Friends make life good. They provide the scaffolding that makes it not just bearable but fun. They give us a sense of meaning and purpose and are a source of security, self esteem and happiness. Almost nothing predicts how happy you will be as how connected you feel and a lack of social connection is associated with a number of diseases and a shorter life.
• When presented with a challenging or boring moment with another person, deliberately adopt an attitude of curiosity in which your goal isn't to achieve any particular outcome or explain your position but to figure out who this human being is who we're with.
• Create many contexts. A friend who you see in only one context is likely to be a less close friend than someone who you see in many contexts, and connect with over many different things, rather than a single shared interest.
• Be the first person to reach out. Be the first person to organize events. Be the first person to say hi. Everyone is nice but you have to say hi first.
• Spend more time with fewer people.