How do adults make friends?
Recently I got a WhatsApp message from a guy I hugely admire, Renato Contaifer.
He does amazing work at Be Officeless (if you don’t know it, I highly recommend it, even if you don’t work remotely) and has interviewed lots of people on their YouTube channel. He wanted to schedule a chat with me.
Right there you can tell he’s a guy who likes people, conversation, stories, right…
So much in common! He started in design, worked in front-end, works in communication, is an enthusiast of remote work and, above all, of balancing work and personal life for better quality of life and better results at work. Ahhh, he’s also the kind of person who bakes a cake as a gift for the neighbor — just like that, for free, for the joy of it. :)
In the WhatsApp message he sent, he brought up the question “how do adults make friends?”. I thought it was the title of some book and immediately thought: I’ll look it up and buy it. It wasn’t. Ha.
The coolest thing about our one-hour chat was that both sides were more interested in asking questions than in giving little lectures, you know!? It wasn’t that kind of conversation where everyone is just waiting for their turn to talk about themselves. You could tell we genuinely wanted to know about each other — for real. And as that happened, the things we had in common kept surfacing.
Renato is the brother of another guy I’ll talk about some other day, Lucas Contaifer, who lives on a boat and works remotely from it — and also runs an agency. And that’s how we got connected.
I think that’s how adults make friends: through that curiosity, asking questions, making room for similarities and differences. Room for exchange.
The conversation was so good… knowing that some of the processes he went through, and still goes through, are similar to mine. We are not alone. We just need to ask ourselves this question more often: how do adults make friends?
It was awesome, Renato! A virtual hug to you — until the day we meet in person!
Originally published on my Instagram in July 2022.