The Life of Lou Ruppert

I have a lot of friends. It’s one of the things I’m most thankful for in my life, other than Jesus Christ and maybe Linux . Having a close circle of people who you trust and enjoy is one of the most important things in being successful at life. The strange thing is that they don’t teach it in schools. There are no classes in having friends. Nobody exhorts you to make lots of friends when you go to college. Plenty will tell you to throw the ball through the hoop, or to study hard, or even to be creative and try new things, but nobody says to go out and get to know people. That’s weird to me. I wish they had.

I’ve always had a very wide range of interests and distractions, so people were never really high on my list of priorities. It’s only through helping to start a church with some of the friends I had when I graduated college that I began to understand how important relationships are. Life is meant to be shared. If it wasn’t, we’d all be hermaphrodites.

From a financial standpoint alone, making friends is worth it. I’ve never had to pay someone to help me move. When my car is broken down, I’ve never had to call a taxi in order to pick it up. I’ve saved hundreds or thousands of dollars in car and house repairs because of the experts I know who were willing to donate their time or share their knowledge.

The real treasure, though, is the companionship. Before I discovered the benefits of a large social circle, I was usually the kid sitting by himself in the cafeteria. Believe me, it’s no fun. But at the time, I was unwilling to invest in getting to know other people, so I was without the dividend of their company. Now I know interesting people all over the world, not just the people I spend my nights and weekends with here in town. If only I knew then what I know now.

The best sort of companionship is diverse companionship. I’m not talking about the “one of each” montage used in commercials and sitcoms. I’m talking about people who are so unlike you that you may even find them slightly annoying. That’s how you learn your weaknesses and discover the coolest things. It’s cross pollination and the whole “iron sharpens iron” thing. If you pack yourself in the middle of an entourage of people who think exactly as you do, who come from the same social background and so on, you don’t really have meaningful companionship at all. You’re just listening to the echoes of your own personality.

So, if you want to enrich your life and get the most out of what’s left of it, find a good church, or user group, or a club like Toastmasters International, and use it as the starting point in spinning your social web. It more than pays for the effort you put into it, and you’ll have a lot of fun in the process. You might even pick up some skills or eternal life as a side effect. Talk to strangers. Eat with people. Laugh with friends.