Things I Wish I Knew in My 20s: Your Friends Are Your Team

Let me start with something nobody told me early enough.

The people around you, the ones you call on a random Tuesday, the ones you're at the bar with every weekend, laughing, drinking, talking about everybody's business, those people are your team. And like any team, the people on it will either push you toward something or keep you exactly where you are.

In my 20s, my criteria for friendship was simple: do we have fun together? If we could shut a bar down and laugh the whole way home, we were friends. And for a long time, that felt like enough.

But I started to notice something. There were guys, older, more established, who were always warm when they saw me, always down to party, always at the next event. But it never went deeper than that. At the time I thought they were being distant. Looking back, I understand it completely. They already had their team. People who were invested in the same vision, moving toward the same kind of life. I wasn't that. I was the fun add-on, the guy you call when you want a good time, not the guy you call when you're building something. I was the referral, not the partner.

And the friends I did have? I loved them. But I started to notice they didn't really want to see me grow beyond what they already knew me as. Not out of malice, they just couldn't relate to where I was trying to go. My goals felt too big, too scattered, too unconventional to them. When I'd talk about what I wanted to build or become, I'd get a laugh, a subject change, or that look. You know the one.

So I did what a lot of people do, I shrunk. I told myself not to take things too seriously. That if I wanted to keep these people around, I needed to stay relatable. Likeable. I dimmed it down to fit in, and I watched the years pass.

Meanwhile, the people who refused to dim down, the ones living loudly in their so-called delusions, started to surpass everyone around them. And here's the thing I noticed: their team found them. The people who believed in the vision were drawn to them naturally, because they never stopped broadcasting it. They didn't attract everyone. They attracted the right ones.

By the time I hit 30, it was obvious. You cannot build anything meaningful alone. You need at least one person who will believe in the delusion with you. Someone who pours into you from what they have in abundance, and receives the same in return. And yes, every relationship is transactional. That's not a cynical thing, that's just honest. I'll save that conversation for another post.

What I'll say here is this: birds of a feather really do flock together. You might be a bird who can barely get off the ground right now, but if you surround yourself with people who are already soaring and willing to bring you along, you'll fly further and faster than you ever would have figured out alone. Stay around the chickens long enough and you'll forget you were ever meant to leave the ground.

And here's the thing about perspective, not everyone realizes that a pigeon and a dove are the same bird. It just depends on who's looking at it, and what they've been taught to see.

Choose your team carefully. And make sure you're the kind of teammate worth choosing.

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