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Understand that seasons by their very nature and and then look back and say like we both contribute to another and then we found out that we want a different things which is great that's the whole point of learning.

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Welcome to the game where we talk about how to sell more stuff to more people in more ways and build businesses worth owning.

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I'm trying to build a billion dollar thing with acquisition.com. I always wish pesos musk and buffet had documented their journey so I'm doing it for the rest of us please share and enjoy.

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One of the hardest things about pursuing your dreams and pursuing your goals is that a lot of the people that are in your life right now will not support you and will not support the future version of you that you need to become in order to accomplish those goals.

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And it's arguably one of the hardest aspects of entrepreneurship on a personal level because you want people who believe more in the future version of you and don't buy the old identity of you that is keeping you where you're currently at.

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And old friends often have old versions of you that they continue to want to reinforce because one of the things that I found true is that people don't actually want the best for you.

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They want the version of you that best serves them now the closer they are to you in terms of long term alignment the more likely those two versions of you will intersect which is often why often not always why family and your spouse should hopefully be the most line with you because long term.

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Their best interest is often aligned with your best interest now how you get there may be the point of contention where you might have to break ties for a little bit for a season and then maybe re-engage later.

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Now there's a handful of contrary and views that I hold around friendship and I'm just saying these are things that have worked for me and I get lots of questions about it so I'm just sharing my viewpoint.

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Number one is that I don't see friendship as a binary term meaning it's not that we are friends or not friends it's how good of friends are we and I think just from that onset you can have a much better understanding of all the people that are in your life which is well how good of a friend are they.

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Now to define friendship rather than define what it is I think it's more useful at least for me when I trying to find something I think well what's the opposite and what would have to be true for the opposite.

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So the opposite of friend would be an enemy or a rival and so an enemy would be someone who doesn't root for me obviously they actively try and destroy my efforts in order to succeed they try and get me to be emotional whenever I can rather than make logical decisions they try and confuse me and they try and distract me from my ultimate goal.

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So they try and drain resources from me that I could otherwise allocate towards what I'm trying to do and so you have a goal and they try and knock out the legs underneath of that achievement from every angle they possibly can that's what an enemy would be and for many of you some of your friends fit that description now.

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So the reverse of that would be somebody who roots for you in front of you and most specifically behind your back and I think the telltale sign there is not whether they do it in front or behind is that they actually root for you and real talk that's one of the hardest things out there especially amongst guys where it's very alpha competitive etc and as soon as your status starts to raise within the group you buy comparison make everyone else worse and so it's in their best interest.

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They're best interest to make you less of a threat to them by diminishing your status and they will use the things like talk and mind your back trying to distract you make you emotional make you feel guilty about the things that you're doing take you away try and label you with old labels that are your old identity not aligned with the things that you want to do later.

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These are all like techniques and the thing is is like I don't think these are bad people to be clear I don't even think there's good or bad people anyways.

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But the question is just are they going to help me towards my long term goal are they not and for me that is an easier way now that is a binary in terms of decision for me it's a it's a more helpful way to sift through who I want to keep in my life and oftentimes when I actually make it that cut and dry will this person make it more likely that I achieve my goal or not.

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If it's more likely then they've earned a spot they're paying their rent for my time and attention if they're not more likely to help me hit my goal by being in my life then for me the question is is the relationship more important than my goal and that's a decision for you for me I need my goal my most important thing because I believe that if I achieve that goal I would feel better about myself my identity associated with it and I think that there would be a new level of friends who would unlock as I got to that new level and for me up to this point that has been true.

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As a side my single one strike policy like I understand that people are human and people make mistakes but if you want the one strike not three strike one way ticket out of my friendship you only have to do one thing you have to not root for me meaning you actively resent either explicitly or implicitly when I win.

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And for me that's it like if you resent me winning why are you here like and I'll answer the question the reason they're still there is because there's a chance that your success will benefit them but while you're succeeding they'll still try and destroy it in case they can bring you down so they're hedging so they try and destroy you but they keep their friendship on the surface in case your status can benefit them.

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It's fucked up but it's true and there's a lot of statements that friends will make to try and keep you where you're at they'll say you've changed and they'll phrase it in a way that makes it feel like you're doing something wrong by changing and all you have to do is look back at them and say you're right and you haven't.

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And that carries almost an equal way back to them because some people want to stay the same comma and that's okay the biggest issue that I've had with friendships in general is that people project what they believe friendships should look like in their minds onto our relationship and so oftentimes we have disagreement on what that relationship should look like for me I am transactional and this is going to probably piss a lot of people off but what I mean by that is simply that.

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The pros of this relationship should outweigh the cons that's it and if you were like I can't believe you'd say that well then we probably wouldn't be friends and that's okay you'll probably friends with people who don't have that definition but for me that means that like my life is better off with you in it.

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You help me achieve my goal you root for me along the way and for me the definition of help is giving attention back so everyone had somebody who's like I was just trying to help and like you're all you did was just like in that person just like made your life 10 times harder.

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That is not help that is inverted health that is destruction right and this would a lot of your current friends will claim to be doing and either do so knowingly or unknowingly but true help comes from someone who comes into your life and all of a sudden everything gets easier.

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That is help that is a friend that is somebody who's an ally if you think about this in terms of allies and enemies it's probably easier than friends which can seem really amorphous and so maybe using that word like is this person an ally of mine.

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It makes us a lot easier at least for me. So in terms of exchange I believe in a bun and a change same way in business as I do a personal relationship which is if both of us feel like we're getting the better into the deal then this relationship will continue at infinite it's going to keep going right so I try and deliver value to them and if they deliver value back to me and it feels like it's in access of the value I provided which most times in any kind of exchange it takes me less effort to take 10 years of experience to provide value to somebody in terms of time versus how much value they get from that investment.

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And they should be able to take the same level of investment and put it back to me and I get a disproportionate return if that's how the relationship is you would have no reason to end it where you get into trouble is the types of relationships that you're wondering should I keep these you probably already know you shouldn't and I love this this little framework for decision making is that when you're when you're faced between a hard thing and the easy thing and you're not sure what to do you should do the hard thing because if the easy thing were the right thing to do you would have already done it.

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And so let me give you a little frame shift around burning bridges because people love using that for it's like you don't want to burn bridges remember where you came from and so I want to give you a counter to both of those things one is that analogies and metaphors persuade they also confuse so you can consider burning a bridge but you could also consider it pruning a tree in order for the tree to grow right where you only have certain amount of sunlight water and minerals in the soil if you're a tree and you're trying to grow.

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You have branches that start spouting off of you and draining resources away from the direction you're trying to go the healthiest thing for the tree is to prune it means to cut the branch off and that may seem uncomfortable for many of you but again there's the hard thing and the easy thing if you're making the decision you already know the right thing is probably the hard one.

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The next line is actually one from Tupac that I like a lot and I think Tupac embodies this transition between friends really well and he said just because you lost me as a friend doesn't mean you gained me as an enemy I'm bigger than that I still want to see you eat just not at my table and so it's one of those things that's like I don't wish you ill I want you to succeed and I want you to do all the things you want to do in your life it's just that your vision for your life doesn't merge with my vision for my life it's the same thing is having an ex girlfriend or an ex boyfriend and you.

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A season together it doesn't mean you don't honor the season and all of a sudden start destroying the memory because why would you want to live a life where all you did was destroy every memory of your life until that very moment well that sounds like not fun appreciate the fact that you had a season understand that seasons by their very nature and and then look back and say like we both contribute to another and then we found out that we want a different things which is great that's the whole point of learning.

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Hey guys real quick if you're new to the podcast I have a book on Amazon called $100 million offers that over 8,000 five star reviews has almost a perfect score you can get it for 99 cents on Kindle the reason I bring it up is that I put over a thousand hours into writing that book and it's my biggest gift to our community so it's my very shameless way of trying to get you to like me more and ultimately make more dollars to that later on in your business career I can finish the part with you so that's my give go check it out Amazon and back to the show.

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When I think back to friendships in that way it allows me to maintain the good will I have associated with that person and also say like you want different things and that's okay and so if you encounter somebody who's in that kind of camp right where it's like it's clear that they want to you know play fantasy ball they want to drink on Sundays and they want to you know do the bar crawls and all that stuff and this is really common or they want to close every night whatever it is.

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If that's not aligned with the vision of your life and it used to be your old life and now it's coming in conflict.

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Those people are going to and like rightfully so they're losing a friend so they want to keep you there and that's okay like don't hate them for wanting that.

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It's just that it no longer aligns anymore and I think there's really two directions for these types of friendships number one is that if you decrease the frequency of communication with someone over time you get fewer and fewer invites and then it kind of fizzles that's how most friendships or lose acquaintances and.

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The very hand select few times where you have family or like super close homies whatever you want to call it sisters in those instances usually you have to confront this conversation which probably grows as a pink you know as an elephant in the room that needs to be addressed and I have one framework for having really hard conversations but I stole from Layla which is.

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Keep the other person as a human being at the forefront of the conversation rather than being right.

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And if I remind myself every time I go into hard conversations that way it's amazing how much better of a conversation I have and accepting responsibility for the fact that like hey I've changed like and that's not on you that's on me and you want these things right.

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I don't feel like I can be the friend that you deserve in your life and so like if it means that we're not hanging out as much anymore again it doesn't mean that you have me as an enemy it just means that like I'm moving in a different direction.

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Common and that's okay the thing is is a lot of people have these precepts of what a friend should be they're like we're going to be friends for life but how many 85 year olds you know who are friends with the same people are less not many and if they are they've got like one.

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It's not common and so to expect something that's really uncommon from the probably 10,000 people you're going to meet throughout your lifetime that they're going to be the one is not really reasonable but it is okay in my opinion to have seasons of friends.

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We're friends for the season and then we had train tracks that aligned and then we found out we had train tracks that diverted comma and that's okay and so I think that's been my recurring theme with friendships is just accepting them for what they are and saying that's okay things have changed.

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Good that's what growth is you can't grow and stay the same doesn't work and if we want to grow as entrepreneurs then we have to expect change and that also includes the personnel on our roster in our bench.

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Now some people have said that my approach or view on friendships is transactional extreme whatever and I'll say sure you're right and like I'm not trying to achieve a common life goal and so it would make sense that my views would be more extreme than other people's I also think that some of these views become compounded when you have increasing demands for your time.

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And so if that's not real for you right now if you don't have people vying for every minute of your day right now then what I'm saying might not be relevant for you but for the people who do have people vying for every minute of their day.

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Then it might make more sense there's a reason LeBron says no new friends.

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Like at a certain point he's decided like he doesn't need any friends or he doesn't trust anyone and that's fine that works for him he has a rare life it would make sense that he has rare rules you might not say no new friends that sounds extreme.

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So does being the best or second best or what are top five basketball players of all time.

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And I think one of the things that helped me out a lot during this transition is that some people just like boyfriends and girlfriends who like go from boyfriend to boyfriend or girlfriend or girlfriend or girlfriend or girlfriend like they never spend time alone.

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I think there's some people do the same thing with friends it's like they like overlap friends and then they drop one friend.

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I think it's very helpful to be okay being alone and like learn to enjoy being alone because then you're kind of like a whole person who adds value into and of themselves and then you can add value to someone else's life but you do not require them you don't necessitate them you don't become dependent on that friendship.

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And so that's always you know been my goals to like be interdependent we're like I can operate on my own you can operate on your own but together we are better off.

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And until we are no longer better off I will continue to make that exchange we trade time we both get better trade time with get better until eventually one of us is not getting better and chooses to end the relationship or decrease the frequency the relationship.

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Like that's a really common one you might just be like hey we're not every week friends but like I'm a once or twice a year phone call friend maybe it's just to what degree or we friends and I think you can decrease the frequency of communication with people as a very.

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Easy way to balance maintaining a relationship if you want it for long term but you don't have as much good stuff to exchange in the short term.

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The negative friends are the easy ones okay they're the party unless we're not easy because they're the ones probably going to cling on to the hardest and probably insult to the most but if they're insulting the most like you probably already know that it's not the right fit.

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But what about the neutral friends right what about the ones who like they don't really hurt you know your your goals but they don't really help your goals.

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I have rather extreme views which is like if you are not helping me you are hurting me because you were taking the place and the time of attention of something that could be helping me and so I just see that as the same exact continuum.

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It's just further along on the same continuum which is where you're going to trade right and fundamentally if you think about everything you do as an investor you invest time and energy into a relationship with hopes of getting some sort of positive return right.

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And so you spend that time no matter what and the people who build the best relationships best networks are the ones who invest in relationships that yield the highest returns and the thing is is not all the relationships have to have returns in your financial realm right like I have a very close friend of mine who is an FBI agent and he's my oldest friend he and I've been friends with six great kind of raises my one friend of friends and six great and he is exceptional at what he does.

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But I obviously make more money than he's like you look up what I make on Google.

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And he jokes about it but you know what he's doing he's knocking down like pedophile rings and drug pain pins and like every time I talk to him he's got like new stories of things that he's doing and for me.

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The benefit I get from the relationship is that it gives me an escape from the day to day business stuff that I'm dealing with I have somebody who never really asks me for anything because he benefits in no way from.

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The status from the followers from the anything because he is no way to financially benefit he's an FBI agent right into the same degree but we both mutually appreciate about one another is that we've both been committed to being excellent at our craft he works every hour of every day he works overtime he works weekends because he loves it.

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And that is something that will always have my respect so it's not about money for me it's about who has a commitment to excellence now the vast majority of the friends that I have.

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Our entrepreneurs and their vehicle for excellence is entrepreneurship but if someone came to me and they're like a rapper you know me and they're exceptional at rap their art for me businesses my art for whatever your art is for my buddy.

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Taking out bad guys is his art is crazy as that sounds like that's his art and so I just want people who are as passionate about their art as I am.

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And who wrote for me to make the best painting possible that's what I'm really going for and I think if you can see it that way at least for me it's been helpful.

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So I think that you can have friends who aren't necessarily pursuing greatness as long as they're helping you pursue yours and that's the that's like that's the bridge in my opinion I like to be inspired by the people that I'm around I want to admire.

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Something in every friend that I have because like if I if I were to characterize like okay what about fitness wise what about relationship wise what about business wise what are like whatever their art form is what are their dedication their mindset their spirituality whatever it is.

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I want to be getting better from every friendship that I have like they have to be better than me at something and I want that and I think the most important person that should be better than you at stuff is your spouse.

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Like if you don't admire your spouse and don't feel like you have things to learn from them that's tough in my opinion and so like that is the best friend you have for life which means you have to have the most alignment with them which means they should route for you harder than anyone else they should never resent your success they should always be rooting for you to stay in the game when the games on the line.

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Like a true friend would on the sideline rather than shouting from the sidelines and trying to distract you and trying to make you feel bad for still playing trying to trying to like make you feel emotional about beating the other team like all of those things detract and so like I think the spouse is like the

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fifth degree of what the most extreme friendship look like ally the biggest strongest ally you have and then the friends you have are just non-sexualized versions of that core ally you have but I mean at the end of the day it's just like does this person make me better and that like if there's one bottom line question that I have to say yes to it's that is like does this person make me better and like if they don't then why are you here.

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And here's a tough one where you make someone else better in a lot of ways and they don't make you better.

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This is where there's dynamics that sometimes have to change where sometimes your friend you break up for a minute and then you reconnect but it's in a different context like you might almost be a little bit of an advisor or a mentor because you've moved you've leveled up a lot right in those relationships sometimes you do get things out of that relationship like teachers learn just as much as students do in those dynamics and so again

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it's like is this making me better. Kids make parents a lot better in a lot of ways they're more patient after they have kids they're more empathetic they learn how much they can love something that they never thought like there's lots of ways that kids even though transactionally like all they're doing is sucking resources out of you but most parents would probably think yes my life is significantly better.

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I am better as a result of this relationship and then yes I'm ridiculous but like just boiling it down that's a lot of what it is right.

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you