Friendships on the Antarctic island of South Georgia

Are We Losing the Art of Friendship? Here’s a Quick & Powerful Way to Regain It.

A shocking statistic about friendship emerged in 2024 – way back in 1990, a mere 1% of people reported having no friends. By 2024, that number jumped to 17%. What happened?

Also, according to the Survey Center on American Life, the number of people who were highly social, as measured by having 10 or more friends, was 33% in 1990. Any guess what that number is today? Now they estimate only 15% of people have 10 or more friends.

That decline in friendships highlights the growing challenge of connection in our fast-paced, tech-driven world. I’d like to suggest a simple way to build more real-life, in-person friendships.

The idea is derived from the research that David Hirzel and I did for our recent book about how small teams functioned. We studied two and three person teams like
🔸 Wright Brothers,
🔸 Hillary and Tenzing climbing Everest,
🔸 Gilbert and Sullivan,
🔸 Peary and Henson in the Arctic,
🔸 the Apollo astronauts, and
🔸 Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton who championed women’s rights in the 1800’s.

🔸 We even looked at how small teams were portrayed in Hollywood, the media, and even fictional teams like Kirk and Spock.

What we discovered was this:

The secret to a small team’s success (think the Wright Brothers or Hillary and Tenzing) was the team members did not measure who did what with an exact expectation that it should always be 50-50. Instead they focused on the team’s goal.

They thought about what outcome was desired, and the impact it would have on others. They inherently knew it might take a 50-50 effort, but at times it might be far more skewed than that. One person may be doing far more of the effort than the other. One thing they knew for certain was measuring ‘who did what’ was counter-productive.

So, what does this have to do with building real-life friendships in 2025?

Too often, in speaking with people about their friendships, we hear people say, “Well, I called X and we met up and had a fun time, but they never call me. I put in all the effort. It has to be equal.”

The reality, just like in small teams, some people will make more effort than others. When you stop measuring who made what effort, and focus on the goal – whether it is building the first airplane, conquering Everest – or just building friendships, big things can happen.

As the world evolves in 2025 and 2026, being grounded with real-life friendships is still important. Take a moment today to message a friend for coffee, or plan a catch-up walk, even if you think it’s their turn to reach out.

#Friendship #Values #Worklife #Timeout #Mindfulness #SmallTeams #Teamwork

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Further Reading:

Re: What About the Bad Decisions?

There are no bad decisions, only bad results.” Decisions quickly made under extreme circumstances in the face of sudden unforeseen hardships or opportunities cannot be faulted for inattention to preparation or willful disregard of reality.

Hindsight, as they say, is always 20/20. The results of decisions—polar and non-polar, extreme and ordinary—are known by their outcomes. The roads not taken lead to obscurity.

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