Show yourself Friendly

Do you want to have a multitude of friends? If you don’t the only reason is that you haven’t invested the amount of time that you need to. It doesn’t matter how you look. Whether you are attractive or not or how big or small that you are not things that add to or detract from the equation. Have you ever known someone who was not good looking at all but had a multitude of friends? The only thing that made that person popular was the fact that they invested their time in the making of friends. The bible says that he who has a multitude of friends must show himself friendly. You have to make having friends a continual effort. I am sure that popular people get turned down by many people but that doesn’t stop them from trying to gain friends. Remember that any endeavor will only succeed with continual effort. The successful salesman only closes about one in ten sales. The all time home run hitters struck out many more times than they hit the ball so don’t be discouraged.

I was attempting to build a twitter following and I noticed that celebrities will have a lot of followers while they don’t follow very many people at all. Things were different in my case. I am an unknown so many of the people that I do follow won’t follow me back. This was discouraging at first but I knew that I couldn’t allow it to stop me. I now have a very large following because I did what I had to do. I would get only about one out of ten to follow me back so I just followed as many people as twitter would allow me to. I will admit that it took me longer but I did manage to get a decent number of followers. Sometimes I get more followers now because when people see how many others are following me they think that I am someone important.

We must think of making friends much the same way that we think of growing a garden. We must invest time into making them, planting the seeds of friendship, fertilizing the ground with kind words and watering it with good deeds. The quality of the friendship will take on the appearance of the type fertilizer that we use. Gossip will produce malnourished and anemic plants, while strong positive words and deeds will grow a friendship which is strong and vibrant. False flattery is the same as a fertilizer which doesn’t contain the advertised ingredients. It sounds good and may come in a colorful package but in the end it will do absolutely nothing for the friendship that you are attempting to nourish. If you want to grow a good garden you must use the best available ingredients.

Have you heard the saying that if you want to be the boss you must pay the cost? Well the same is true about friends. You will have to make a conscious decision about your life. The time that it takes to cultivate friends will take away from other social endeavors. You must be a people person. You must esteem your relationships with people more important than your other endeavors. There is a cost associated with having friends as with any other endeavor. The elite athlete spends most of his or her time training. I spend a lot of time on twitter, so must you spend a lot of time cultivating friends.