Several conversations with several friends - and also the story of my entire life - is getting me to crystalize some thoughts

The most valuable thing I know is how to make friends

The most powerful + valuable thing I can do is teach it to other people

The most important person you have to be friends with is yourself
Possibly the most important thing in a friendship- including one with yourself, or your spouse, or your child - is attention. Deep, focused, undivided, non-judgemental attention.

To really see + hear the other person, in a world where people constantly feel unseen & unheard
So: the most important thing about the most important thing in life is attention,

and in schools, IMO, we often screw up how we teach it.

If you use threats and coercion to force kids to “pay” attention...

...you set people up for dysfunctional relationships their whole life
becoming friends with yourself: https://t.co/35UnodNImE
making friends by correctly reading and responding to the implicit proposals in other people's utterances https://t.co/7kjmEMdXW8
give sincere compliments.

(fantastic side-benefit of this is that you also develop your taste in the process, and taste is *extremely* valuable)

https://t.co/IocuGZ5MMj
gently, kindly and curiously ask people about their experiences

https://t.co/1RdFHqYMDm
but don't push too hard for the answers to any particular question – rather, be sensitive to the other person – their gestures, body language, expressions – and look for opportunities for excellent followups https://t.co/UC8VTTazou
putting together a list of threads about making friends here. Will probably eventually expand this into a series of blogposts: https://t.co/CGhsQhefwp

More from Visa’s Vexing Vacillations

There is an art to replying and commenting, and probably like 60-70% of people I’ve seen on the internet fail at it. The important thing is not to speak your mind, but to “support” the OP. You can support them by disagreeing well & you can “mis-support” them by agreeing stupidly

Every “utterance” (status, tweet, whatever) is a bit of an invitation, a bit of a proposal. “Let’s play this game”. When strangers read the proposal accurately, and support the game, a shared understanding develops. You can make friends this way.

Some people deliberately choose to ignore, misread, disregard or denounce other people’s bids. Others are outright clueless and don’t know how to play, and sometimes cluelessness leads to worse bungling than deliberate malice (JJ’s razor)


I was a lot more belligerent and disagreeable when I was younger, in part because I simplistically thought playing other people’s games was a sheep-like way to live. Why should I support other people’s dumb games? Why not mock them instead? It’s easy, and intoxicating

I learned that you rarely build anything worthwhile that way. The “best” case scenario: you win over other disagreeable people. A few years of this & it becomes the world you live in – surrounded by other belligerent assholes who don’t know or care how to play nice. A cursed life

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So the cryptocurrency industry has basically two products, one which is relatively benign and doesn't have product market fit, and one which is malignant and does. The industry has a weird superposition of understanding this fact and (strategically?) not understanding it.


The benign product is sovereign programmable money, which is historically a niche interest of folks with a relatively clustered set of beliefs about the state, the literary merit of Snow Crash, and the utility of gold to the modern economy.

This product has narrow appeal and, accordingly, is worth about as much as everything else on a 486 sitting in someone's basement is worth.

The other product is investment scams, which have approximately the best product market fit of anything produced by humans. In no age, in no country, in no city, at no level of sophistication do people consistently say "Actually I would prefer not to get money for nothing."

This product needs the exchanges like they need oxygen, because the value of it is directly tied to having payment rails to move real currency into the ecosystem and some jurisdictional and regulatory legerdemain to stay one step ahead of the banhammer.