Information Related to "Friends for Excellence"
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You'd think that choosing friends for their excellence would be
easy. But for most people, choosing friends because of their admirable
qualities isn't that simple.
Sarah, a teen friend of mine, put it this way: "I don't just
go out and decide ‘that person is going to be my friend because
she is excellent at something.' It doesn't happen that way.
There are many things involved. Even if a person is really good at something
I like, it won't necessarily mean I want to be a friend. One thing,
for example, that I can't stand is arrogance. Sometimes people
good at something are arrogant. I won't be their friend."
Sarah is really good at a lot of things and makes an excellent friend. But choosing friends for their excellence is often an unconscious mixture of decisions about interests, likes and dislikes, and character.
Jeff, another friend of mine, put it a little differently. This tall, athletic 18-year-old, who is currently attending community college, and I met two years ago while climbing the South Sister, a snowcapped 10,000-foot-plus peak in Oregon's Cascades. Even though we started out together, I ended up staying back at the 7,500-foot level to take care of a teen who had injured her foot. Jeff was really cool about the problem. He offered to drive the 300 miles back to the mountain a couple of weeks later just so we could climb it together—and we had just met. He was a great friend made on the spot!
On a recent wake-boarding trip with Jeff, I asked him how he chooses his friends.
"I'm very active and like to do a lot of stuff," said Jeff. "So if they don't like my kind of lifestyle, they don't hang on. If they don't keep up, they just drop away." Jeff added that it wasn't only his active lifestyle that had to match up for a friendship to develop. "Values are also a big part of my friendships. If their values don't match, they don't become my friends."
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