Do You Really Need A Lot Of Friends
You have probably heard that you have to rely on yourself and not others. Or that you should have enough inner power to be strong on your own.
Tai Lopez Aug 29, 2014

In today's Book-Of-The-Day I discuss a book that debunks this mentality and a lot of other groupthink around social life.

"The Power of Others: Peer Pressure, Groupthink, and How the People Around Us Shape Everything We Do" by Michael Bond shares the newest research proving that you will be happiest when you have a lot of friends.

But the key is that they have to be an exact type of friend for the 'magic' to really work.

In 2008, two social scientists (Christakis & Fowler) found that:

"...most people will not be surprised that people with more friends are happier, but what really matters is whether those friends are happy."

The book then adds:

"Four decades of research into how people decide to do what they do has shown that we are highly susceptible to the winds of social influence - indeed it is impossible to escape them, short of living in hermitic isolation (and even that may not immunize us...)."
 

So the good news is that if you have been told you are too 'dependent' on the approval of others, well, maybe you weren't so off-track after all.

Although like Aristotle said, you have to have the balance. You don't want to be co-dependent.

But if you have to lean one way or the other (assuming your goal is happiness), you should lean to the side of having a few too many friends.

I was down in San Diego at a wedding with old friends and I saw a man who was a childhood mentor to me, Manny Deleon.

Manny Deleon

He is the most social man I have ever met. My childhood memories of Manny's house are of the homeless people he would let stay with him.

Manny would just drive up when they were begging on the road and say,"Come stay with me and my wife and kids."

His door was always open.

After I became an adult, I have always tried to be like Manny and keep an open door.

My other mentor, Joel Salatin was the same way. On average 10 or 20 people a day come to visit his Polyface Farm.

There is power to an open door and having friends oozing out of your pores.

Don't get old and grumpy.

And now there is science to prove the exact correlation between the number of good, happy friends you surround yourself with and how much 'happy' dopamine hormones your brain will release.

Go surround yourself with more happy friends and tell me how it goes.
 

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