Here are some of the most useful simple methods I’ve adopted for improving my connection with others (though I still have room for improvement):

1) When you like someone, greet them warmly, demonstrating with your face and body language that you like them.

2) Try your best to channel “interested attention” in conversations – where you give the other person your total focus while paying very close attention to what they are saying (and how they are saying it) and starting with the premise that they are saying something worth listening to.

3) When you disagree with a friend about something important, ask open-ended questions until you deeply understand their perspective, and if you still disagree, express that disagreement gently and respectfully while pointing out the parts you agree about before exploring what you disagree about.

4) If a close friend does something that bothers you one time and it is out of character for them, just let it go. If that friend has a pattern of behaviors that bothers you, wait until you are not actively feeling bothered, and then tell them how it makes you feel when they do that behavior (describing the behavior in objective, fact-based rather than subjective terms) and request that they try to avoid it going forward (in order to help strengthen your relationship).

5) Try to balance the amount of time you spend speaking vs. the amount of time the other person spends speaking so that it doesn’t go outside of the 40%-60% range. Note that this is an average across conversations, there are specific situations where it makes sense to do more or less of the talking (e.g., if one of you has a big story to tell).

6) When you think a nice thought about someone (and you don’t have any reason to think they wouldn’t want to hear it), tell them the nice thought. For instance, if you admire them in some way, or if they did something you really appreciate, or if you’re really looking forward to seeing them, let them know! As the saying goes, thinking something nice about someone and not telling them is like wrapping a nice present but then never giving it.

7) Don’t complain about how old you are unless you’re sure you’re the oldest person in earshot by a significant margin.

This piece was first written on March 15, 2024, and first appeared on my website on March 27, 2024.

[Note: I’ve updated this post based on some feedback in the comments I received when I first wrote it.]

1. ADHD Focused Temperament

Since a core aspect of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) involves difficulty regulating focus, which may manifest as challenges in choosing what to focus on, and may involve hyper-focusing on a particular thing without feeling there’s a choice, an aspect of Focused Temperament would be finding it easy to focus on whatever you choose, and finding it easy to focus with whatever degree of intensity you choose. 

Since restlessness and fidgeting are other common symptoms of ADHD, Focused Temperament would involve finding it easy to still while doing nothing.

2. Schizophrenia Grounded Temperament

Since a core aspect of schizophrenia is seeing connections between things that aren’t really connected, an aspect of Grounded Temperament would be avoiding such false positives, but also failing to see hard-to-spot connections between things that really are connected. Since it’s common for schizophrenia to involve paranoia, Grounded Temperament would involve an absence of conspiratorial thinking and a tendency not to impute negative motives.

3. Imposter Syndrome Poster Syndrome

Since a core aspect of Imposter Syndrome is the belief that others see you as more capable than you really are, an aspect of Poster Syndrome would be a belief that others see you as less capable than you really are.

4. Autism Spectrum Social Savantism

Since a common aspect of being on the Autism Spectrum is having trouble spotting or interpreting subtle social cues, an aspect of Social Savantism would be an unusually strong ability to process and make accurate inferences from all subtle social information in interactions and to respond so as to produce the exact impression intended.

5. Borderline Personality Unreactive Personality

Since some of the major aspects of Borderline Personality are a high intensity and variability of emotion, an aspect of Unreactive Personality would be having dulled emotion with little fluctuation. Other aspects of Borderline Personality are a lack of sense of self/core identity, along with a strong attachment to others to root one’s identity to, so Unreactive Personality would involve a stable sense of self with unusually low attachment to others.

6. Sociopathy Selfless Personality

Since major aspects of sociopathy are a lack of (or greatly diminished capacity for) compassion and empathy, an aspect of Selfless Personality would involve extremely intense empathy and compassion, with these emotions driving an unusually large amount of the person’s actions.

And as a bonus, here’s one by John Nerst:

7. Nerd Wamb

Nerst describes a Wamb like this:

“Wamb is a vernacular label, not a scientific one, but it’s usually earned by a love for activities that are social and physical rather than intellectual — football, dancing, or socializing rather than learning, building things, or playing games. The leisure activities we associate with wambs — team sports, gossiping and partying — all depend on primal instincts like competition, alliance building, and mating, and tend not to involve intellectually complex exchange with others or the physical world.”

If you’d like to learn more about your own personality, you can take the ultimate personality test here, which gives MBTI-style, Big Five and Enneagram results all in one test.

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This piece was first written on January 7, 2023, and first appeared on this site on January 28, 2023.

I’ve included the details of the event format below, including materials you can use to throw your own version of it.

Important Note: this event format requires at least ten attendees to show up (I recommend at least five males and five females) so as to avoid de-anonymizing participants. When I ran it there was about 20 people, which is close to ideal, I think.

GOALS

The goals of this event are:

• to help attendees understand each other on a deeper level (including potentially gaining some insight into human nature in general)

• to enable attendees to see how their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are similar or different to those around them on topics that typically are taboo to discuss

• to have an interesting and enjoyable time.

I got a very positive response to this event format from those who attended.

THE FORMAT IN BRIEF

• Attendees will be asked to completely honestly fill out an anonymous survey at a minimum of 24 hours before coming to the event, which will contain many controversial, taboo, embarrassing, uncomfortable, and rarely asked questions.
• You’ll then compile the responses (grouping them by question in a totally anonymous way and calculating the % of people that gave each response for multiple-choice questions).

• You’ll hand out printed versions of these responses to attendees when they arrive. After the attendees have time to read through all the responses, you’ll then go question by question, having a quick group discussion about the responses to each.

• At the end, you’ll discuss as a group what you all learned from the experience.

• Finally, you’ll collect the sheets from everyone and shred them so that no one has a record of people’s private responses.

HOW TO DO IT

Step 1: Make a copy of my online survey containing taboo, controversial, and rarely asked questions (using the survey of questions I already created is the easiest option – preview all the questions here: http://bit.ly/2o5GBjq, and make a copy of the survey here: http://bit.ly/2Cm9oVH so that you can send it out). Or, if you have more time and want to customize the questions, you can crowdsource them from attendees in advance and put them on a survey platform that doesn’t record any personally identifying information (i.e., no email address, no IP address). If you plan to crowdsource questions, you should send out an anonymous survey to attendees beforehand to ask what questions they would want to be answered by other attendees (anonymously) that they would never normally be able to ask (here is my survey for collecting these questions from attendees: http://bit.ly/2BYQDvM and you can make your own copy of this survey here: http://bit.ly/2EqVszY). Once you get the questions back, you’ll turn them into another anonymous survey (where you actually ask those questions) which you will also send out to attendees before the event (being sure to give yourself plenty of time to process the responses to prepare event materials).

Step 2: Send an invite to potential attendees (sample invitation down below), including a detailed explanation of the event format (so they can knowingly opt-in rather than having it sprung on them). If you have the survey questions already, you should include them in the invite as well. Make sure to make it clear what the deadline is for fill out the survey (I recommend setting it to be at least 24 hours before the event starts so that you have time to prepare the results). Be sure to send a reminder before this deadline to increase the percent those who respond.

HOW I CONSTRUCTED THE QUESTIONS

I constructed my set of “taboo, controversial and rarely asked” questions (available at my survey link above) using the following process:

A. I crowdsourced question ideas from all the people who planned to attend the event.

B. I brainstormed additional ideas on my own that seemed like they could be interesting.

C. I then ran a study where 100 people in the U.S. on the Amazon Mechanical Turk recruitment platform were asked to answer each question anonymously. I ended up with way too many questions for the final survey.

D. I winnowed them down by reading all the responses of people on Mechanical Turk, retaining for the final survey those questions that seemed to me to produce especially interesting or surprising or discussion-worthy results (see link below for anonymous Mechanical Turk user responses if you’re interested).

PREPARING FOR THE EVENT

After you’ve received everyone’s survey responses, you’ll want to prepare handouts for each participant with all of those responses in completely anonymized form. It is critical that you never read any one individuals responses while you’re preparing the materials. Group the responses immediately by the question, and shuffle their order, so that you can only ever see the responses for all respondents as a group. This helps ensure the anonymity of every respondent. For multiple-choice questions, you should calculate the percent of people that gave each response (I put these on PowerPoint slides which I presented to the group, but you could put them right on the handouts). For free form text responses, you’ll want to have a list of all responses to each question, grouped by question. Be sure to shuffle the order so that the 1st response to each question is not the same person each time (otherwise, participants may accidentally be de-anonymized).

If you use the exact questions that I did, you can also show alongside your group’s responses, the responses from Mechanical Turk respondents, which you can find here in the anonymized form: http://bit.ly/2HgzX2s. I recommend only doing this for the multiple-choice questions, as otherwise, the handouts might become unreasonably long (expect to give at least seven pages of handouts if you have 20 attendees and you use a small font and are smart about space on the page).

OPTIONAL: USING MY PYTHON CODE TO PROCESS RESPONSES

If you use my exact survey, you can also use python code (download it here: http://bit.ly/2Hgi6su) that I wrote to make the process of preparing responses easier and prettier (you’ll need to use Python 2.7 to use it, which you can easily install on Mac or PC). You’ll also need to install the pylab and text wrap libraries (first install pip, which is a python installation system, then you can easily install these using pip). The way the code works is that it takes two input files: one has the responses from mechanical Turk workers (which is already provided for you in the folder you download, so there is nothing for you to do), and the other is the CSV file you download yourself of your attendees’ responses to the survey (you can get to this download option from the edit page for your copy of my survey, just click on data and you’ll see a download button). Place that CSV file you downloaded into the “python code” folder once you unzip the code (usually, you can unzip just by double-clicking). Then change the line of code comparisonFileToProcess=”…” within the file prettyPlotYesNo.py so that the … is replaced with the name of your CSV file. Finally, run the python file prettyPlotYesNo.py by navigating to that folder in terminal (Mac) or Cygwin (Windows) and doing:

python prettyPlotYesNo.py

It should then automatically fill the folder “figures” with all the results (including both figures and text files of qualitative responses). The skinny bars will represent the responses of mechanical Turk workers, and the thick bars will represent the responses of your attendees, so you can compare them side by side (i.e., you can see how representative your attendees’ responses were).

AT THE EVENT

Hand out printed sheets that show the responses of all the attendees to each of the questions. Give people 10 minutes or so to read them all (to form initial impressions and reactions). You may want to provide pens so that people can jot down notes as they go or mark responses that were especially interesting. When people are done, start with the first question, have everyone quickly read the responses to that single question again to remind themselves what others said (if it was a qualitative question) or have them look at the percent of people that gave each response (if it was a quantitative question), and then have a short group discussion about the responses to that question. If people are quiet, you may want to ask the room questions like:

•What was your reaction to reading people’s responses to this question?

•What surprised you about the way people answered the question?

•What patterns did you notice in people’s responses?

After a few minutes, or if people no longer seem to be engaged in the discussion, or if the discussion has gone on a tangent, move onto the next question (having everyone quickly read the responses to that next question again before discussion ensues). Repeat this until you’ve gotten through all the questions.

At the end, ask people what they feel like they learned overall from the experience of seeing attendees answers to these questions and discussing them as a group. When we ran this, people had a very positive reaction to the experience!

Be sure to collect all the handout materials back at the end and shred them. Make sure everyone knows at the beginning that they will not get to keep the sheets of people’s responses and that they should hand them back to you before leaving to protect the private responses of all attendees.

SAMPLE INVITATION TO SEND FOR THE EVENT

I’d like to invite you to an event called “Anonymous Answers to Anonymous Questions,” where you’ll get to find out the (anonymous) answers that all the other attendees have to controversial, taboo, embarrassing, uncomfortable, and rarely asked questions.

Here’s how the format works in detail. Please read these instructions carefully if you plan to attend, and let me know that you’ll be coming!

Before coming, all attendees will fill out an anonymous survey (see link below) with a bunch of controversial, taboo, or otherwise unusual questions. At the beginning of the survey, you and the other attendees will be asked to swear that you will respond completely honestly.

When you arrive at the event, you’ll get to see all the responses given by other attendees to all the questions (in a completely anonymized format). We’ll then go question by question, reviewing them together, and discuss them as a group (without knowing who gave which answer)! You will not be able to take any materials with you when they leave because they will contain the personal responses of group members.

LOOK make eye contact when people are talking to you (but look away occasionally so as not to be creepy, and look away for a greater proportion of the time when you’re talking since that’s what people do naturally)

REPEAT reflect back to people what they’ve said to you (e.g., “So you’re saying that…”)

ASK get people talking about themselves by asking questions, and follow up to their responses with further questions (e.g., “It sounds like you don’t like your work, why is that?”)

DISCOVER figure out what the person you’re talking to really cares about and talk to them about those things (e.g., “How did you originally get interested in painting?”)

MIMIC copy the body language of the person you’re talking to (e.g., if they sit up tall, you sit up tall)

COMPLIMENT give genuine compliments and make the person feel liked

REWARD make sure the other person feels good during the interaction and enjoys it.

I think this advice is largely accurate. People would tend to be more liked on average if they did more of these things. Very specific and explicit advice like this can also, I think, be very helpful for people whose social instincts are not well-tuned or who find socializing especially difficult.

But this advice can also sometimes come off as robotic (“generate these inputs to the system to cause a certain response output”) or even manipulative when used in pursuit of personal gain (“run this social algorithm and people will come to like and trust you so that you can get what you want”).

I think there is a simpler and more genuine distillation of the above advice, namely:

Give the person you’re interacting with your complete, genuine, interested attention.

That means paying attention to nothing but that other person during a conversation; letting go of any distracting thoughts that pop into your mind and not paying attention to other things happening in the room. It also means adopting a genuine interest in the other person (e.g., curiosity about them, or a desire to know them or see the valuable things in them). I’m not advocating simply appearing like you are giving your complete interested attention. I’m suggesting that you actually be focused and interested in the other person. This is not necessarily easy to do.

To understand the mindset I’m referring to a bit better, consider this metaphor. Imagine you’re going to an art gallery that you’ve heard (from a reliable source) has incredible, complex art that requires effort to understand. In that circumstance, you might approach each piece of art with “interested attention.” You’re assuming there is something worth seeing there, so even if, at first, you don’t “get” a piece, you’re going to keep focussing on it with interest to try to uncover its value. This interest is genuine before you even know what the value is because you’re giving the benefit of the doubt. If you start thinking about what you’re having later for lunch or glancing ahead prematurely to the next piece of art, it’s going to interfere with the experience. The “interested attention” causes you to notice more that’s of value, but also, potentially to value more of what you notice.

Contrast this with a situation where a friend dragged you unwillingly to an art gallery, and you’ve heard the art is terrible. You may pay little attention to each piece and view the art with little interest. If you don’t understand a piece right away, you may immediately move on to the next one. This is the opposite of “interested attention.”

While interested attention does not necessarily cause all the “likable” behaviors listed above, I think that it does tend to make them significantly more likely. Hence, I think it will tend to make you more likable.

Here’s why:

LOOK the more focused attention you have on someone, the more of a tendency I think you’ll have to look right at them, and therefore to make eye contact.

REPEAT if you are interested in someone, you’ll want to actually understand what they’re saying, and repeating back your current understanding is a natural way to confirm that you got it right.

ASK if you’re truly interested in someone, you’ll tend to ask them questions rather than spending most of the time talking about yourself.

DISCOVER interest in a person tends to make us want to understand them, and figuring out what someone really cares about is an important part of that understanding.

MIMIC while full attention on another person may not cause you to cross your legs when they cross theirs, it will presumably make you more likely to notice what they are feeling, and therefore to respond to it appropriately. So if you notice the other person is somber, with a sunken posture, you may well adopt a more somber tone and posture to adopt.

COMPLIMENT if you are giving someone your interested attention, you’re assuming there is something worth knowing about them, which presumably makes it easier to see their positive qualities, setting you up to give compliments.

REWARD it usually feels good to have another person be genuinely interested in us and even to have someone pay deep attention to us.

So if we give our genuine and complete interested attention, I expect it will tend to cause others to like being around us for a variety of reasons. And it’s good for both us and those we are around. Plus, it feels less icky than ticking a bunch of charisma boxes, especially if we replace the goal of being likable or charismatic with the goal of deeply connecting with others.

But how do we actually give interested attention to someone?

– try to make sure we are actually fully focused on them when they speak
– try to make sure we understand what they are trying to communicate
– let stray or distracting thoughts go when they occur during conversion
– not let ourselves become distracted by whatever else is happening in the room (unless it is something we can bring into the conversation) by returning focus to the person we are speaking to
– avoid checking our phones around others
– give others the benefit of the doubt
– assume others have true value even if they haven’t shown it to us yet
– foster our curiosity for what other people are like

Now, of course, it’s not always appropriate to give someone interested attention, for instance, if that person seems to themselves lack interest in continuing the interaction, or if that person seems to be responding negatively, or if there is limited time for the interaction. Maybe the other person wants to be left alone, and if so, we should go away.
Furthermore, there are, of course, many cases where we don’t desire to forge a deeper connection with a person, and there’s nothing wrong with that. We may not be in the mood, or not like the other person, or think that giving too much attention would signal something we don’t want to signal, or simply need to end the interaction soon.
But when we do want to create stronger connections, I think we should strive to give each other our complete and genuine interested attention. It’s not easy, but it’s probably worth it.

In an environment with little criticism, it’s easy to forget about your flaws. But the more aware of them you are, the better position you will be in to correct them. So when you get really serious about self-improvement, being in a position to regularly receive criticism becomes a hugely valuable resource.

Other people see things about us that we ourselves can’t see. In part, this is because they tend to be less biased, but also because they watch us act from a third party perspective, which leads to different observations than occur from inside our own minds. For instance, others are more likely to notice if we do inconsiderate things, or if we have a goofy looking smile, than we are ourselves.

When I started to actively seek criticism from those who knew me well, I made many discoveries. It was incredible to me that I’d been so oblivious for such a long time about some of my undesirable behaviors, and that no one had ever mentioned them before. It became clear that most people (even those who care a lot) wouldn’t risk upsetting you or annoying you, even to tell you something that you really should hear. Fortunately, in many cases, merely becoming aware of a flaw was enough to get me to correct it.

To get honest feedback you shouldn’t ask “How would you say I’m flawed?” That may just be perceived as fishing for complements. What worked for me is making it clear that I’d gotten serious about improving myself, but that I needed help discovering more ways that I could improve further. When people realized that I truly did want to know my flaws, and that I wouldn’t get angry or defensive at what they said, the process went smoothly. Of course, it helps a lot if you really aren’t going to get angry or defensive. If you’re not at that point, hearing criticism from a friend could damage your relationship. Also, you should choose your sources of criticism wisely. Pick someone who is likely to give thoughtful comments, rather than use the opportunity as an excuse to attack you.

When you learn about a flaw for the first time, you’re probably going to wince. It hurts when you realize you’ve been doing something wrong for so long, and that people may have been judging you for it. This is one of the big reasons that so few people actually seek criticism. But if you set the goal of being a great person rather than just thinking you are great person, then criticism is less difficult to hear. It may also help to think about what an advantage it is to be the sort of person who finds flaws and then demolishes them, rather than taking the standard course of pretending they aren’t there. Flaws become opportunities the moment you learn about them, and you can improve at almost anything once you’ve figured out your weak points.

When you do receive criticism, it takes some skill to get the most out of it without feeling too bad. It’s useful to learn to dissect it into its basic types. There are three types of criticism, which often come mixed together:

1. Accurate criticism. This is a criticism that is warranted, and relates to one or more of your flaws.
2. Ignorant criticism. This is criticism based on a confusion or misunderstanding, and it does not actually relate to your flaws.
3. Emotive criticism. This is criticism designed to express emotion or evoke emotion in the person hearing it.

To see how dissecting criticism works in practice, let’s consider a hypothetical example. Suppose that the last three times your friend called you forgot to call him back. You kept intending to do so, but then it would slip your mind. One day, you bumped into this friend on the street. He came up to you and said:

“I just have to tell you, you’ve been an asshole lately. You’re so busy with your new girlfriend that you don’t even call me back anymore. You’re going to lose friends if you keep treating people like this.”

Ouch! Let’s dissect this criticism:

‘You’ve been an asshole lately’ is an example of Emotive criticism. Your friend is simultaneously expressing his negative emotion, and trying to make you feel bad. Although this part of the criticism doesn’t actually tell you much of anything about your flaws, it shows how angry your friend is which is important to know.

The second part, “You’re so busy with your new girlfriend” is Ignorant criticism. In this case, it has nothing to do with what you’re being criticized for, and is merely your friends misperception of the situation, since your girlfriend had nothing to do with you not calling back. Though this doesn’t relate to your flaws, it presents an opportunity to correct your friend’s misunderstanding, and explain what really happened.

The last part, “You don’t even call me back anymore. You’re going to lose friends if you keep treating people like this.” is Accurate criticism. It represents a useful call to action. You need to figure out a system for reminding yourself when you need to return a call, or you might actually lose friends. It can be upsetting to think of yourself as having been flaky, but in this case it’s a fact that you have been. Now that you’re aware of it, you can do something about it.

Breaking criticism into these three parts (Accurate, Ignorant, Emotive) will streamline the process of extracting useful information.

Criticism is easier to hear when you have sought it out than when it is thrust on you. And most people won’t volunteer it, until they are quite annoyed. So don’t wait until criticism comes your way. Seek criticism from your friends, your boss, and your spouse. Even acquaintances can provide an interesting perspective. Break down this criticism into the Accurate, Ignorant, and Emotive components. Know your flaws so you can correct them. Become greater.

Consider the complete opposite of expectation adaptation: you have a single set of expectations that you hold all of your friends to. If these expectations are very high, and require that the person has a large number of positive traits, then what is likely to happen is that your friends fail at least one of these expectations from time to time. One friend will be kind and sympathetic when you have problems, but then keep you waiting for 45 minutes at a restaurant. Another, while very punctual, will often be a bit of a boring conversationalist. A third, while a lot of fun, wasn’t there for you during your recent breakup. Since your conception of friendship requires that people meet all of your different requirements, when they fail to do so you are likely to end up feeling that the terms of your friendship have been violated. This may lead to regular arguments with your friends, or feelings of disappointed, frustration and anger. As a result it is possible that you will end up with a small friend group (only people who satisfy all of your criteria quite reliably), or end up feeling regularly annoyed at the behavior of your friends.

If, on the other hand, you set your expectations for friends quite low, then the opposite sort of trouble can occur. You are willing to befriend people who don’t add much (or perhaps any) value to your life. You are likely to end up with a wide group of friends, but this wide circle may not be benefiting you very much. Whereas excessively high expectations may make you feel disappointment, excessively low expectations can lead to you feeling used or bored. And both have a tendency to produce frustration and arguments.

The ideal case for a fixed set of expectations would be if you could set them quite high, and still find a good number of people who easily exceed them. While this can work well, for many people it is unrealistically difficult to achieve. Most people have at least one significant flaw that impacts their friends.

The alternative to having fixed expectations is to have adaptive ones. You try to expect from each person what your understanding of them predicts it is realistic to expect. You ask yourself, “given what I know about this person, what do I expect them to do in this situation?” and then you expect that. You think about past situations you and your friend have been in, and anticipate that if he has canceled 40% of the plans you have made with you in the past, there is probably something like a 40% chance that he will cancel the next hangout that you schedule. If he has been unhelpful every time you have called him when you are feeling down, you start calling someone else when you are feeling down. If you have consistently found that hanging out with him is a bit boring, you assume you will be a bit bored if you choose to hang out with him.

Adapting expectations has a handful of advantages to using fixed ones. For instance, this mindset:

• Tends to reduce feelings of disappointment and frustration. If you know that Bill spends most of his time talking about his car, then when you make plans with him you are expecting this to happen, so are mentally prepared (or better yet, willing to talk about his car).
• Broadens your potential friend group compared to what you could have with high fixed expectations. Diana may be unreliable, but she really is fun to talk to. So you don’t rely on her for things that are important, but you do get together every so often for great conversation. Sally often cancels plans, so when you have plans with her, you figure out in advance what you are going to do if she cancels (e.g. pickup a movie to watch or a book you are going to read). And if you’re just not in the mood to have her cancel on you this week, you don’t make plans until next week.
• Tends to produce a mindset of problem solving. Timmy tends to be late whenever you hang out, so now you assume that this will happen and always bring a book with you, and show up a little late yourself. You assume that you could be waiting up to 40 minutes for him, and so just count on getting some reading in while you wait.
• Makes it easier to think about friendship in terms of the value, comfort, happiness and fulfillment that a person adds to your life, rather than in terms of whether they satisfy a set of abstract criteria. It might be that Don has a very serious flaw in his personality, but that overall he still adds a lot to your life. Carrie’s biggest personality flaw, on the other hand, might be such that interacting with her just makes your life worse. You can keep Don as a friend, doing everything you can to make his big flaw more tolerable so that he adds even more to your life, and choose not to be friends with Carrie. Even if Don would not satisfy the requirements a friend should theoretically meet if you had to make such a list, it is still quite beneficial having him in your life.
• Produces a realization that not every person needs to give you all things. Sue may be the best person you know for providing emotional support, Danny may be your favorite person to go out to bars with, and Annie may give excellent advice. It would be extremely hard to find a single person who is simultaneously as supportive as Sue, as good company as Danny, and as great an advice giver as Annie. But this is also unnecessary, as these three people together can play these roles in your life.

While adapting expectations can be quite a happiness generating and fulfilling view of friendship, it is worth noting that there are still some pitfalls to watch out for. For instance:

• If you become used to predicting from people what they are likely to give, it can be easy to forget that you do have some ability to modify the behavior of your friends when they are not acting in an ideal fashion. So it is important to not just predict the behavior a friend who normally have, but also, predict how likely the friend is to respond well to feedback and implement behavioral changes that you suggest. In practice, it is very hard to change people’s long-standing personality traits, though occasionally you can get them to change specific frustrating behaviors (especially if they are reflective types, who are willing to accept criticism and are motivated to become a better person). So maybe you can get Timmy to show up 15 minutes late instead of 30, if you give feedback in the right way and help him figure out how to correct his bad habit. But then again, maybe you can’t correct this behavior even if you try hard, so you might have to predict it and then adapt to it in order to avoid frustration and maintain your otherwise valuable friendship with him.
• It is also important to remember that just because you can, by managing expectations, be friends with people with many negative traits, and still find that your interactions add value to your life, that doesn’t mean that you always should be friends with such people. If you find amazing people, who meet most or all of your criteria for ideal friends, you should probably prioritize them. More generally, those people who have more of the traits that you desire and value are probably ones that you should invest more of your time and trust in.

If you are the sort of person that tends to hold friends to a strict set of criteria that you feel they must meet, consider changing the way you view friendship. Try to expect from people what they are likely to give you. Remember that people who have repeatedly behaved like X in situation Y, will likely behave like X in situation Y in the future. Ask yourself, “Given how I can expect this person to behave in the future, is he likely to add value to my life?” If so he may be worth keeping as a friend, even if he has some non-ideal traits. Then ask, “How can I adapt to the way he is likely to behave so that his negative traits become less problematic and bother me less?” Adapting expectations for friendship can allow you to be friends with more people, while experiencing less frustration and disappointment.