Here’s 8 Books I Read on Making Friends This Month

As I write this, I’m wrapping up the sixth month of my year-long foundations project. This month’s focus is outreach—making and maintaining friendships. In this post, I’ll share lessons from the eight books I read on this topic. Next week, I’ll share my personal reflections on this month’s work.



For those interested, my notes from the previous months are available here:

1.     Fitness: Start, End, Books.
2.     Productivity: Start, End, Books.
3.     Money: Start, End, Books.
4.     Food: Start, End, Books.
5.     Reading: Start, End and Books.

1-Minute Summary of What I Learned

Here are some quick takeaways from the eight books I read:

1. Good friends keep you healthier. People with better social networks live longer, and the health impacts of loneliness and isolation are in the same ballpark as well-known dangers such as smoking cigarettes.
2. Acquaintances matter too. Although the focus for most of us is on having deep friendships, there’s a whole literature on the role of “weak ties,” or people you rarely see, being *more* important for finding job opportunities or word-of-mouth opportunities.
3. Friendship isn’t fast. Estimates on the time required for people to become friends is on the order of 60+ hours of in-person contact. This threshold explains why you can socialize frequently, yet still fail to make friends—if you don’t have sustained opportunity to socialize with the same people over and over, many potential friendships drop off before they hit the 60+ hour threshold.
4. It’s better to be interested than interesting. People are egocentric. We like people who like us, who take an interest in our interests and who really want to listen.
5. Democracy itself may be at stake. Since the 1960s, community and civic life have withered from their post-WWII peak. This decay of social infrastructure may be a major reason for our collective distrust and polarization.

Overall I found this topic much deeper than I had expected, leading to some personal realizations which I’ll discuss next week. Now, some notes on each of the books I read…

8 Books on Making Friends

1. How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie

Every once in awhile, a self-help book becomes so popular that it becomes a free-floating meme, detached from its actual content. Carnegie’s classic belongs in that rare genre of books which you probably feel like you’ve read—even if you haven’t.

While the book has dozens of chapters articulating specific strategies for dealing with people, they all basically boil down to a simple observation: most people are egocentric. If you can adopt the other person’s perspective, and give them what they genuinely want, you’ll have smoother social interactions than if you focus directly on what you want.

The book definitely shows its age in a few places, such as a charming anecdote about a manager complimenting his secretary’s appearance, but the advice needs few updates because human nature hasn’t changed since Carnegie first wrote it.

2. Friendship by Lydia Denworth

I enjoyed this wide-ranging book discussing the science of friendship. The topics covered are eclectic, so it’s difficult to summarize adequately. Denworth’s investigation of friendship ranges from in-depth discussion of monkey communities, to the health impacts of loneliness, to whether or not Facebook is good or bad for society.

3. Supercommunicators by Charles Duhigg

Duhigg, a journalist whose previous work includes bestsellers on habits and productivity, tackles social skills in Supercommunicators. The idea is drawn from the observation that some people are consistently better in their ability to make friends than others, and that this skill is learnable to some degree.

A central idea of this book is that essential communication depends on understanding what kind of conversation the other person wants to have and ensuring you match them in that desire. Duhigg argues for three broad types of conversations: practical (What are we going to do?), emotional (How do we feel about it?), and identity (Who are we?), and that attempts to dialogue often derail when people don’t successfully synchronize this.

4. Never Eat Alone by Keith Ferrazzi

I first read this book shortly after it came out in 2005. I think Ferrazzi does a good job of practically explaining how super-networkers, such as himself, manage to meet so many people and maintain so many relationships. One key insight I enjoyed revisiting was his explanation that relationships are muscles which strengthen through use, not bank accounts where favors can be saved up for a rainy day.

While I found this book useful, it’s probably not the best book to persuade someone of the value of networking if they already find the practice off-putting. I think guides that focus on friendship and service are probably better to adopt as a mindset than the ambition-orientation that suffuses this book.

5. We Should Get Together by Kat Vellos

Vellos writes about how hard it is to make friends in big cities. People are abundant, yet genuine connection is often rare and fleeting. 

This book was interesting, although probably aimed more at an earlier chapter in my life when I was often newly in a big city with ample time for socializing but struggling with the revolving door of temporary friendships.

Still, I think Vellos addresses a genuine need for a lot of people, and her advice is practical and useful.

6. Getting to Yes by Roger Fisher, William Ury, and Bruce Patton

Negotiation is a central part of all relationships. From diplomatic conferences to deciding where to go for dinner, we’re always in a delicate dance of conflicting interests and desires. 

The authors argue that most people make the mistake of bargaining over positions, like hagglers at a street market who keep stating their “best price” until they either make a deal or walk away. The uncomfortable conflict this creates causes some people to go hard, trying to squeeze the other person at the risk of the relationship, or go soft, trying to accommodate at the risk of failing to get what you really want.

Instead, the authors suggest we should negotiate on principles, not positions. Separate the people from the problem; focus on your interests, not your position itself; look for options for mutual gain; and when you have to compromise, look for objective standards and principles to determine fairness.

7. The Art of Gathering by Priya Parker

A good book opens you to a new way of thinking. Parker’s book definitely did that for me. Before reading this, not once had I ever considered hosting a dinner party or social event with the mindset Parker espouses.

Parker’s key to throwing successful parties is to define a clear (and debatable) purpose and have everything tailored to that outcome. That means the venue, guest list and even the rules of the party (she thinks a good host should have and enforce them) should all work to achieve the gathering’s stated purpose.

Definitely a must-read if you want to have an important event and aren’t sure the right way to go about it.

8. Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam

Civic participation and communal life in America have been declining for decades, and the decay in our social infrastructure is showing.

 Armed with hundreds of charts and statistics, Putnam walks through various measures of social decline from club membership, church attendance, volunteerism, political activism, and even picnics. Across the board, people are spending less time connected to their community than they were during the heyday of communal life in the 1960s.

This decline is epitomized in the title of the book: at the time of its writing, more people than ever were bowling, but there were far fewer bowling leagues.¹

In this decline, Putnam sounds a warning about the health of American society. Places with lower measures of social capital have worse social outcomes: less civic participation, trust in government, higher crime and worse health. Communal interaction builds generalized trust, which acts as a social lubricant making transacting with strangers easier and safer.²

Unfortunately, it hardly seems like we’ve reached the nadir of Putnam’s social capital decline. Putnam blaming the entertainment value of television for causing the decline in social gathering now seems almost quaint when we have always-on, algorithmically-mediated entertainment in our pockets at all times.

While the message may be a bit of a downer, I still found this book enormously useful in reshaping my perspective on socializing. There’s value in belonging to communities, not merely circles of friends. Clubs and organizations that bring people together from different strata of society are both valuable and necessary.

_ _ _

That’s it for books this month. Next week, I’ll share some personal reflections on I’ve improved my own outreach this past month as well as my plans for the future.

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