I hope you are ready for a great week.
- When they aren't 50/50, we get our feelings hurt.
- If a friendship is a 60/40 or a 70/30 we intuitively sense that the imbalance is wrong.
BUT WHAT IS WRONG WITH IT?
If you think there is a deficiency in the person giving 30, I want to challenge your framework for measuring friendships.
Equal contributions need not equal 100%!
It's not a quantitative measurement, but qualitative.
It's about PROXIMITY, not priority!
We are all very busy people and we each have a set of responsibilities and obligations that eat up a great measure of our bandwidth. If we hold to the 50/50 model, we are setting ourselves up for failure and disappointment in our friendships as well as other areas of our lives that require our diligence.
For example:
If I have a busy friend who can only give 2% and I can only give 2% then at those times when our proximity overlaps, the friendship is pure JOY.
The moment either of us changes our available proximity to anything other than 2%, the relationship actually suffers unless both parties are able and willing to do so.
People get hurt because they are actually deficient in assessing the friendship, and they are deficient because they use the wrong scale.
If we burden our friendships with an unrealistic expectation of priority then we are actually undermining the relationships we supposedly seek, we may actually be making enemies out of our friends.
To be a real friend this week, find 1 friend who require less than 1% proximity and then give them a sincere 1% of focus and care (24 min based on 40hr week).
I'll bet that you'll discover that the compounding effect of the 1% will fuel the rest of your life. This will prove to you that an honest 1% is better than a needy or guilt ridden 50% in serving each others souls and fueling the rest of your life's endeavors.
And best of all, your friendships will be true.
Have an awesome week!
