Only Befriend Those Who Believe In You

Friendships require time and effort to maintain. An untold secret is the fact that friendships are an investment, therefore should be subject to the same critiques as any other — be it a financial or time investment.

Whenever you befriend someone, you are using your resources on them that you otherwise could have spent on another — potentially more deserving — person. I define ‘deserving’ by ‘most constructive to our personal development’.

People might label this worldview as selfish, but if you choose to sacrifice your precious time for people who are not good for your personal development — do so at your own risk.

Negative people — I do not mean people with mental health issues, but people who make you doubt yourself instead of encouraging growth — are ‘energy sinks’. When you dream of something, they will tell you that you are delusional or self-absorbed for ever thinking that it is possible. And when you achieve something, they will scoff at you, thinking you achieved it only out of luck.

In truth, these types of people are not expressing their ‘honesty’. Rather, they are projecting their insecurities on other people. Ironically, the more accomplished someone is, the less likely they are to doubt your abilities. This is because their success comes from the sense of security within themselves, which they extend to others.

In contrast, insecure people tend to judge your mistakes harshly and doubt your potential could actually manifest into something concrete — or even if they exist at all.

One day, I applied for advanced lessons during high school to prepare myself for university. When I first came to the first class, the tutor asked me what I wanted to achieve in the future. I told him honestly that attending an Ivy League school would be a dream, and he just looked at me from head to toe and scoffed. He then said, with a telling smile I would love to wipe from his face, “It’s not as easy as you think, you know. You know that, right?”

Maybe he thought that way of me because I had glitter on my eyelids and wore frilly skirts straight out of Lolita town? Either way, intelligent people do not judge based on looks — and I was soon proven right given the utter incompetence of my teacher.

He couldn’t teach at all, and even I had to correct him constantly because he didn’t bother to fact-check himself. He then revealed to me his dream was to go to Harvard Business School. Look at where he is now!

Another example is my ex, who constantly made fun of my choice of school — by this time I was completely disillusioned from studying in America. He was a pretentious prick who is likely to brag about going to Eton on their death bed (assuming he went there, which he didn’t).

Essentially, he made fun of me for not applying to Ivy League. Again, guess who got rejected?

He also made fun of my passion for humanities instead of science (which I still took out of financial security reasons). Guess who scored better in all departments? Not him!

The Pygmalion effect

There was once an English experiment that observed the Pygmalion effect, wherein high expectations lead to high performance. Perhaps due to moral ambiguity, it was a secret experiment — but was eventually released to the general public.

The experiment involved separating children into two classrooms: Class A and Class B. Students in Class A included the child who came first, fourth and fifth, eighth and ninth, and so on in the exam. Class B had students who came second and third, sixth and seventh, tenth and eleventh, and so on — the central premise is that both classes must equal in mean intelligence. Every other factor in their education, such as teachers and materials, must also be of equal quality. The only differentiating factor was people’s perception.

The people outside the class and inside the class all assumed that Class A students must be more intelligent than Class B. Even though this was far from reality, their assumptions proved true during the next exam: The students of Class A vastly outperformed the students of Class B.

Interpretation

What we can take out of this is that your external environment — in this case, how people’s behavior towards you make you see yourself — does have real implications on the final outcome. In other words, the people you surround yourself with can be a determinant of your success and wellbeing.

While some people might argue that success is determined by the individual’s personal will and dedication, those factors are heavily determined by the environment they surround themselves in. It is the difference between trying to work productively in a messy workspace and a clean one. Technically, your hands can type on the laptop just the same in either environment. Still, we must be lying to ourselves if we think that the difference does not impact us.

For a long time, I thought I was pretty good at filtering friends. I was a recluse who barely talked to anyone, and a pretty sensitive person, in the sense that I would actively avoid people who say overtly hurtful things, such as gossips or insults.

But I still felt like something was wrong; some people drain my energy with every interaction. Usually, I would just blame it on my ‘low social battery’. As a result of these people and my assumption of the source of the problem, I closed myself to more people — even if they had the potential to do me good, I wouldn’t know.

But then I looked more deeply, and I noticed there was a particular type of people who I — or this may just be the general human condition — gravitate myself towards: the self-appraising productive person. Productive people have a special allure to them, a veil of mystery that invites you to ask, How did you become the person that you are? Tell me your secrets…

Now, after repeated experiences with people of the type, my disdain remains; about how they are secretly approving of us, not because we are decent human beings with our own unique experiences, with our own worth in a small niche in the world — that does not have to be necessarily something valued by the general society.

Unlike attending prestigious colleges or earning a lot of money, what they were seeing right before their eyes were all the outward stigmata of the inferior, the less productive, intelligent, efficient creature — someone who has no clue about opportunity cost, someone so foolish as to not use their resources to produce something of value but instead prefers to dolly around with their insignificant interests — that’s why the productive bunch sat there approving.

It’s still better to approve, because other more disagreeable types say it more clearly to my face — yet not clear enough for me to incite genuine discussion, only clear enough insofar I get the hint while remaining vague enough that they can avoid confrontation.

I tell them about my hopes and dreams, and they just sit there with an infuriating, disbelieving smirk, a smirk I wish to wipe from their faces, and they say in an ingratiating tone: yeah, sure someone can do it — just not you. They don’t really say that though, they just sit there, nod and smile disbelievingly for the less confrontational ones. For the more confrontational ones, they tell me it might be too difficult — for me. Or perhaps, their judgements might have some merits — I would never know.

But what I do know is that there are a few rare gems in the world — the people who make everything worth it — that do exist. The people who believe in you when no one else does; the people who believe in you at times in which you cannot even believe in yourself.

I was blessed with finding one such friend. He had such relentless belief in my abilities in a time that was one of my lowest — after getting away from a toxic relationship that made me believe I was stupid, talentless, and couldn’t do anything with my life.

I thought I was only good for following the system — know how to score well in school — and that’s it. I’ve gone so used to the system I was useless outside of it — but he made me believe otherwise, and when I asked him why he thought these things, he just smiled, but not the disbelieving type — this one was different; a rare, genuine one.

Such friends are worth keeping, and while I still do not have complete confidence in my abilities, remembering that people like him exist makes me want to fight the world — for the sake of these people.

TL;DR: The friends you surround yourself with determines how much you can maximize your role in the world. Avoid people who lower your confidence and make you doubt yourself. Instead, surround yourself with people who believe in you and dare you to do things you are otherwise scared of doing.

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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.

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