Your friends hopefully support you and contribute to your success. You can talk about them with everything, and you may also think that they give you advice that is in your best interest, if you need it. However, you probably didn’t actively select your circle of friends. Instead, it was in most if not all cases maybe a bit random at first, but sooner or later you realized you had something in common and opened up to each other. 

This implies that there is a strong bias among the people you associate with. If you hang out with the same four or five people all the time, then you may not even be aware that you are, abstractly spoken, a self-selecting group that only admits new members if their points of view are not too far apart from each other. I may sound dry and technical, but what I just wrote has important consequences. 

What if you want to grow and challenge yourself? Say, you want to leave your small conservative hometown and move to New York, travel to South East Asia because you like the idea, even though you have never travelled that far before, and your friends don’t travel, or that you want to quit your job because it drains you. It is not always easy to say whether your friends really help you in making the best decisions. After all, they are usually afraid of change. Most people are. And if you suddenly want to start following your urges and ideas, they probably feel threatened by it because they know that they never would dare to do X. Yet, you suddenly announce those plans and want to follow through with it. 

I have uprooted my life a few times, and the people around me were often skeptical. When I announced that I wanted to leave my conservative hometown and move to Berlin, many of my friends thought it was an immature idea if not completely misguided. They couldn’t see why I would want to move there. Others assured me that no matter where I move to, there will be something I won’t like. Or, I was told that I wouldn’t have to move this summer. I could just go there after graduating from university, or after I have gained some work experience.


What this kind of feedback had in common was that it was a reaction from people who felt that their view of the world was being challenged. Many of those guys and girls grew up with the belief that you should not move too far away from your parents, and that it was normal to spend your life in the place you were born. Obviously, the known feels safer than the unknown. Who knows what will happen if you do X? 

Looking back, I am glad that I moved to Berlin as my life did indeed take a dramatic turn for the better, but this is not the right place to talk about that in detail. However, most of those who tried to talk me out of my plans back then now life the same kind of life they were living back then. Their objective was to not change, seemingly at all costs. 

On the other hand, I wanted to make some new experiences. I wouldn’t go as far as to say that they live boring lives. They probably do, though. This wasn’t about them. It was about me and what I thought I had to do in order to grow as a person. So, the next time your environment responds with resistance to your ideas, you may want to ask yourself whether it really is because it is as stupid as your friends say it is, which could very well be the case, or because you question their worldview. This is really worth thinking about it.