Making friends after high-school/uni for dummies

A common sentiment I see among young adolescents on the internet is that making friends is much harder once you get into the swing of your professional life, and that’s only partially true in my opinion. The thing is, the school environment is conducive to making friends because you are in a place with people around the same age working towards a common goal, and it isn’t really something you get without thoughtful action outside of uni.

The real world doesn’t play by the same rules. Take a walk down the street and you’ll find people from extremely dissimilar backgrounds, age groups, interests and hobbies. Finding friends with them no longer seems as easy as it used to be. However, the first step to fixing this is realizing that from this moment forward, the world isn’t going to hand you anything. You need to take it upon yourself to identify what you need for the betterment of your life, and take actions toward obtaining them. This includes making new friends.

Coming back to my original point, if you had to summarize the entire post into one sentence it would be this: Make sure you have at least one activity that you do every week outside of your work, and do it consistently. You’ll eventually run into people similar to yourself.

Here’s the thing: don’t get into doing this activity for the sake of making friends. This has to be something you’re genuinely interested in pursuing. Could be an arts class, boxing, golf, poker, anything. If you’re an entrepreneur there are tons of tech events happening in and around major cities which is a great hot-spot for like-minded people. Go to these places with a personal goal in mind (that isn’t “making new friends”), and be sure to introduce yourself to a couple of people. This is similar to being in a space with people who you have a shared goal with, and you’ll find it much easier to relate and make friends.

The most unproductive way to go about this would be to actually go out there with the goal of “making friends” and reaching out to people with the hope of kindling something. It is very unlikely you’ll find like-minded people this way. Just focus on things you’re genuinely interested in or passionate about and everything will align itself.