RULE TO BREAK

“Stick with your own kind”

When I was in my early twenties, I worked for a while in an industry where people came from all sorts of backgrounds. Seventy-year-olds from the rough end of town rubbed shoulders with 20-year-old toffs. Thirty-year-olds were often in charge of 50-year-olds. People with top degrees hung out with others who had left school at 16 without two decent exam results to rub together.

It was wonderfully liberating, hugely educational and enormous fun. It’s easy to spend most of your life with people about your age, who do the same kind of thing you do, and have similar interests away from work. But while friendships with these people may be easy, they’re also, well … easy. It’s far more interesting to spend some of your time with people who are very different from you.

I’m not suggesting you dump all your old school friends. Far from it. Some of them may be wonderful and they should be cultivated. But do your best to put yourself in situations where you can make new friends who are a bit more challenging. I don’t mean they’ll be tricky people (some might), but having a very different background – whether in terms of generation, education, class or anything else – means they’ll have a set of attitudes and values that may be unlike your own. And that’s a good thing, because it will make you think.

We’re all blinkered to some extent. It’s unavoidable. No one can know what the world is like all over. Mother Teresa probably had very little experience of what it was like living on a ranch in the Australian outback. But the more forays you make into lives that are different from your own, the more you understand other people – and the more that sheds light on your own life. Not to mention that you also discover that people are fundamentally the same everywhere, and you’ll find just as good friends in unusual places, if you look for them.

Some people are harder work to stay friends with – and a few may not be worth it. But it’s important you don’t dismiss people who aren’t like you, because you’ll miss out on some of the most rewarding friendships that way. Maybe they come from a world unlike your own, or maybe they have different interests or attitudes from yours. If you really have nothing to share with each other, you can just wave and smile. But see if there isn’t more common ground than you recognize at first. Often the unlikeliest friends can be the best.