For better or worse, when you’re in school, your social circle is kind of on autopilot in that your friends are gonna come from the class that you’re in or at least this school that you are in but once you graduate, it can be very hard to figure out where you’re supposed to go to meet cool new people or how you’re supposed to actually make them your friends.
I want to give you three awesome ways to meet cool people after graduating and this is gonna be really useful if you’ve just graduated or you may have graduated a long time ago but you’re moving to a new city and you have to start over or quite frankly, anywhere in between; because these are the principles for making friends in any situation. So first one is this — be the hub. Now, what I mean by this is if you think of a bicycle wheel, it’s got a bunch of spokes coming into a central hub. And the question is — in your friend group, are you more like the hub — the person who is organizing events saying, “Let’s go to my house,” or “guys, do you wanted me to this restaurant at 7:00?” or “go to this movie on Wednesday night,” — or are you the person who is the spoke? — sitting at home waiting for the text to come in which sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn’t. That is the downside of being a spoke. Yes, you don’t have to take charge of organizing events but you’re only invited some of the time and even worse, when one of the other spokes has a party or a cool event and they can’t invite everybody, who is the person that they invite? It’s inevitably the person that invited them; it’s that hub. And this is why people who tend to organize events or just have dinners where they invite a bunch of people over tend to make friends exponentially faster than the people who are just invited. So if you want to kickstart your friend group, this is a really easy thing to do Think of something this week that you can invite your immediate circle of friends to or even your family and also encourage them to bring anyone that they might like — it could be a dinner, could be movie, or it could be game night. The second thing — I’ll admit is the one that I do because I’m not an organizer; I hate planning things and I’ve really almost never do it so I have to rely on this one — and it’s to be the beacon.
And what I mean by this is to stand out in a way that makes you stand out in people’s minds as a little bit different but then they associate you with other people like you concretely. When I first left my job along with Ben, we were dealing with a lot of conversations from our friends trying to talk us out of quitting our jobs becoming entrepreneurs and moving to Brazil with no plan. When that inevitably failed and we said, “No, we’re going,” they said, “Alright, at least talk to my buddy who quit his job last year and is an entrepreneur” or “alright, you should talk to this guy who moved to Brazil last year; he can help you sort of get your bearings.” And that’s how we met our best friend in Brazil and I’ve met countless entrepreneurs from other people who maybe didn’t necessarily approve of what we were doing but because we were so different in their mind, they kind of set up like friend dates where they put us together and that had never happened to me in my life until I started to stand out. Now, you might not be an entrepreneur and you may be wondering how do I do this. If that’s the case, there’s actually a very easy way. And it’s to take a hobby of yours — preferably something you really like or that is very different — and put it early in conversation and I’ve seen Ben do this a ton. People say, “What do you do?” when you can of course say your job but then you can say, “Also, on the weekends, I like surfing. Now, some people won’t respond to that but some people very enthusiastically will go, “Oh, my god, man. Me too. I’ve been looking for a surf partner. Do you want to go sometime?” They go surfing; if they’re friendly, they hang out outside of that. Or they’ll say, “I’m not into it but my buddy is. You guys should meet,” and the same thing happens. Quite frankly, this is how I have met 95% of the people in my life; they have come into it through Charisma on Command since I graduated college and I am forever thankful of this — those of you who have emailed me, my friends and my roommates, guys who came to the first ever class that I held, a guy one of my roommates was a guy who came to the first ever class of which is our online course. Shameless plug — if you want to check that out, it’s in the link below. But all of these people came in because we were the beacon and I highly recommend doing this. If you’re curious for more, I’m also going to put a link to a video that is on finding and identifying your passion so you can put it out there — in social media, Instagram, blogging, and YouTube. You will be surprised and you can feel awkward and strange putting your music out there or whatever it is that you love but inevitably, over time, people do tend to go to the one that’s raising their hand and saying,