Vishen Lakhiani argues you should set explicit goals for your friendships because social connections correlate most strongly with happiness, citing Ed Diener's Harvard study of very happy people. He explores the tension between keeping old friends and moving on when you've grown in different directions.
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So there's a section in the Code of the Extraordinary Mind and the accompanying course, extraordinary by Design, where we talk about setting goals for friendships. So a lot of people in our modern world are trained to set goals for your career, for your money. But what we are advocating here is that you have to set goals for the quality of friends you want in your life, the people around you, the. The people who are your supporters, your allies, and the people that you spend time with. And there's a really important reason why. So Harvard did a study by Ed Diener. It was called the Very Happy People Study. And essentially they were trying to answer the following question. What is that magic ingredient that makes us happy? So they looked at all of these different variables and what they found is that there was one thing, one thing that had the single highest correlation with happiness. And that thing is the strength of your social connections. In short, your friends, your allies, the people around you. Yet so many of us forget on our vision board or our goal list or our bucket list to list down the visions that we have for friendships. And this is something I really want to encourage you to do. Really. Don't just write down your goals for your career or your money, because friendships and social connections are what lead to the greatest elevation of happiness. Start setting goals for friendships. Now, in addition to that, one of our community members recently raised this question. So his name is Bo hatelam. And on September 19th, Bo posted this in the Mindvalley community. He says, as I move towards my mission, I'm finding that I need to release several people I know from the past, since we're on really different wavelengths. While this is bittersweet, I know that in order for me to move forward, I have to do it at the same time. However, I'm meeting like minded people, which is awesome. So, Bo, thank you for raising that question. Now, I want to flip that question back to you, right? As you set your visions for the friends and the people you want in your life, how would you deal with that contradiction? So the contradiction is this. As you're growing, as you're building a more extraordinary life, what do you do with your friends? If you have friends who aren't growing as fast, do you abandon them or do you take them with you? If you take them with you, isn't that too much of a burden for you to bear? Isn't it easy to just let them go and as you grow, attract new people at a higher level into your life? So I'd love for you to join in this conversation. How do you take your friends with you or let your friends go. As your life expands into a level of being extraordinary, what would you say? Comment below.
