

Ask HN: How do you make productive friendships? - diminium

I'm hitting a wall here.<p>I tend to find friendships based on relaxation or wasting time easy to make.  I also find friendships based on conversation (especially negative ones) also easy to make.  However, the friendship I want to make is a profitable one.  I'm stumped on how to do this.<p>I find people tend to bail faster than I can count to 3 if I suggest an activity which requires tedious work.  I would love to one day say "look, this charity needs a website, how about we create a small site to help them?" to my friends and seeing us make it happen instead of seeing a everyone's jaw drop in horror to completely change the conversation to involve only fun things.
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anujkk
Most of us are self-oriented to such an extent that we can say that everything
we do is for some selfish reason. It's natural. You and your prospective
friends both have their own selfish reasons to be friends. You want their
friendship so that you get a partner in doing things that you value(creating a
website for a charity) and they do the same (watching a movie or hanging out
together for fun).

So, you need to meet with people who have values/interests similar to yours.
Now, most people want to do fun things so it is easy to find such friends. Not
many want to WASTE their time in things such as building a site for charity,
so it is difficult to find such friends.

Personally, I have different groups of friends - friends to hang out with,
friends to discuss ideas with, friends who are always available when needed in
emergency, etc.

My suggestion : meet with people having similar interests. Attend meetups,
events etc.

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tonyjwang
Hang out at top universities. People there are ambitious and always looking to
work on stuff - and there's usually an event or club or two that you can
attend where you can meet like-minded, action-biased individuals, even of
you're not a student.

Hack-a-thons are also good.

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diminium
I'm beginning to think a lot of my problems will be solved if I just moved ;)

Top universities are few and far in this area. There's a major regional
university nearby but......

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Joeboy
Try finding friends among like-minded people, rather than turning existing
friends into like-minded people? Join a group that does something productive,
then cunningly manipulate people into forming lasting and meaningful
friendships with you.

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imagination
You;ve typed out the story of my life. Looking forward to great answers

I found myself with a different set of friends for my multiple personalites

party people girl chasers volunteer motocycle riders

