After decades of building networks, it’s worth asking which relationships would still exist if nobody needed anything.
In “From Strength to Strength”, Arthur Brooks uses a distinction I haven’t been able to shake: “deal friends” vs. “real friends.”
Deal friends are the people we know through work, business, projects, introductions, opportunities, or mutual usefulness. There’s nothing wrong with those relationships. Most careers are built partly through people helping one another, and I’ve benefited enormously from relationships like that over more than 30 years in business.
The older I get, though, the more I appreciate the people who are almost completely useless to me professionally.
They aren’t going to introduce me to a client or help me land a piece of business. Some have only a vague understanding of what I actually do for a living. We stay connected because we like each other and genuinely care about what’s happening in each other’s lives.
Adult life gets busy
When we’re younger, friendship often happens naturally. School puts us together. So do teams. We live near one another or spend lots of time together because life keeps creating opportunities for it to happen.
Adult life becomes much more scheduled.
Careers get busy. Families need attention. People move. Calendars fill up, and friendships take more effort because life no longer puts us in the same room.
Professional life adds another layer. We’re encouraged to network, stay visible, make connections, and be helpful. I believe strongly in the value of a good network and have built much of my career through relationships.
But here’s what I keep thinking about…
It’s possible to become very good at maintaining useful relationships while quietly neglecting the ones that offer no obvious return. The person who can make an introduction is easy to remember to call. The former colleague who might become a client tends to stay somewhere in the orbit. The friend who can do absolutely nothing for us is often easier to postpone.
We assume they’ll understand. We tell ourselves we’ll call next week. Then a few months disappear.
What happens when usefulness disappears?
The 4th Quarter can bring some of this into sharper focus.
Titles change. Careers evolve. Some of the professional currency we’ve spent years accumulating starts to carry less weight. People retire, sell companies, or simply move into different chapters of their lives.
Relationships change with them.
Some continue easily because there was always something underneath the work. Others fade because the work was the thing holding them together. Neither outcome makes the relationship false. People come into our lives for different reasons, and some relationships belong to a particular chapter.
Still, there are questions worth asking.
Who would you call if neither of you could help the other professionally? Who knows you beyond the role you play now? Who could you spend a couple of hours with and never once need the conversation to go anywhere useful?
Those questions feel more important to me now than they did 20 years ago.
Time starts to feel more finite as we get older. We get more selective with it. We also get better at noticing which relationships leave us feeling connected and which ones mostly leave us feeling productive.
Maybe I should become more useless
There’s another side to this that I find harder.
It’s easy to think about which people are valuable to us. The tougher question is what kind of friend we’ve become to other people. Do we reach out only when there’s a reason? Have we become so comfortable talking about work that we struggle to connect without it? Have we carried the habit of being useful into relationships that don’t need anything from us?
I can see some of that in myself.
After decades of working, building, and helping people, usefulness can become part of your identity. It feels good to solve problems. It feels good to be needed.
Friendship sometimes asks for something more basic: Attention with no agenda. Time that doesn’t lead anywhere productive. A conversation where nothing needs to get fixed, solved or sold.
That’s probably worth protecting.
We spend a lot of adult life trying to become more valuable.
Maybe we should spend a little more time becoming useless.
