Editor’s note: The following is a guest post by Cory Miller, the CEO of iThemes. Cory describes his approach to making friends and avoiding making enemies. You should also check out his recent talk on mental health and entrepreneurship, which is terrific.
I’d rather wave a white flag and compromise than make an enemy. Every. Single. Day.
I’ve purposefully and intentionally, throughout my life (and business), sought to not make enemies, but rather build friendships.
- Enemies are only trouble.
- Enemies are distractions.
- Enemies eat my time and energy and focus.
- Enemies seek your destruction.
- Enemies oppose you.
- Enemies seek to “harm or weaken” you.
Friends do the opposite.
My best example of this is my wife, Lindsey. I think of her as my greatest ally and my best friend. She’s the opposite of an enemy.
The words I use to describe her are “caring,” “supportive,” “loving,” and “wants my best.”
So why would I spend my time seeking to create enemies, instead of friendships?
- You can have opinions.
- You can take stands.
- You can and should draw boundary lines.
- You can have your principles and never budge on them.
But, you can also, simultaneously, choose to make and focus on friendships.
Some of my best friendships have come through business, and some of them would be considered “competitors.”
But I’ve cherished those friendships.
Additionally, I sleep better at night knowing we only want each other’s best and that there is plenty of room for each other instead of someone actively, purposefully seeking my destruction.
But instead of seeking to fester anger and hate and competition, I’ve sought the opposite, asking, “Where can we find ways to help each other do better for each other?”
So what if we approached life and business like this:
Instead of using that anger, bile, jerk-ness, and negative energy in telling the world who you hate and how big of a jerk you can be, and how you don’t want to be an enemy of — why not seek to build true, lasting, deep friendships?
The old quote, “Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer,” is pure B.S.
Why not create a friend instead of nurture an enemy?
Why not tell the world that you can be the best friend they ever made? And prove it by your actions.
Friendships do take an investment. They take consistency. They take time. They take compromise sometimes. It means showing up for them when they most need it.
But those relationships have been some of the richest relationships I’ve ever had. And totally worth the investment (multiple times over and over in fact).
And yes, I have made enemies in my life. Purposefully and sometimes not. In fact, someone recently asked me jokingly on Twitter who didn’t like me. I responded with:
“I can think of 1 or 2 a-holes but I don’t like thinking about them. 🙂 hahahahaha”
And although that’s sadly true, I’ve sought to minimize the enemies I’ve made in my life and business.
My perspective on making necessary enemies is that if you have to make an enemy — and when I say that, I don’t mean because your personality defaults to that of a jerk and you sadistically like being labeled one), but you have to make an enemy because you have to set a boundary and tell someone no, or take a legal action — make dang sure it’s either for a very good purpose, value or strategic reason.
And even then, question yourself about why.
As my attorney told me recently: “You catch more flies with honey.”
So don’t be a jerk while making enemies. You’ll make more enemies in the process.
Simple, lip-biting kindness in the face of anger and hate and bile helps deflate a situation rather than pour lighter fluid on it.
I tell people often: it doesn’t cost me anything to be nice and kind. (In fact most of the time it makes me happier.) And I seek out different avenues to vent my frustration and relieve my stress.
So I say: Don’t make enemies. Invest in friendships.
It should be common sense, but sometimes I (and maybe you) need a reminder.
Finally some real good advice. Like many people, I have trouble making friends. I feel it’s hard to make friends. Friendships require patience, communication, care, kindness. That’s a lot of work, specially if you also have trouble understanding the complexities of social interactions. The easiest thing we can do is to at least avoid making enemies. I have learned that people usually don’t tell you if they didn’t like something you said or did. But if they do, admit your mistakes and try not to repeat them. Eventually your wannabe enemies would start liking and understanding you. This could lead to a lasting relationship and even friendship.
Thanks for sharing Cory.
Hi @Nouman,
Same buddy here, actually you stole my words. I also feel as you are 🙂 Making new friends is difficult for me 🙁
Thanks
I welcome both of you to our secret little club 😉
Noumann, Muhammad, I agree sometimes it’s tough to make friends or break into a social circle (as an introvert, one of the many reasons I’ve loved the web).
Maybe we need a followup post on How to Make Friends.
@Cory,
Great Idea for “How to Make Friends”.
+1 from me
Regards,
Over the course of this year, I’ve actually managed to take my introversion, and turn it into extroversion. It’s like a transfer of power or, or better yet, refocusing that energy elsewhere.
For example, instead of walking around with my head down, so I didn’t have to look anyone in the eye, easily bypassing potential interactions with other humans. I started looking up and smiling at people in passing, or uttering a simple “hello”, or “how are you” when passing someone in the grocery isle.
You will be pleasantly surprised when someone smiles back, or utters a pleasant response back to you.
Yes, there may be times when every person you interface with is grumpy, or looks at you like your a nut, but I consider that as a practice interaction, and will usually try to present a much bigger smile, or say something a little more outgoing, or state a positive observation about the environment. Such as, “it’s sure a beautiful day” or “hey nice hat” or “hey cool shirt”, etc.
It takes baby steps, but it has sure helped me to come out of my shell over the last year, or so.
Hey Seth,
Thanks for sharing, its great advice but you would know how difficult it actually is. Since I do not feel the same level of desire regarding social interactions as others, even the baby steps become too hard. Add societal pressure from family, anxiety, inability to understand social cues, and the constant guess work regarding what’s expected of you in the course of relationships.
Susan Cain’s TED Talk “Power of Introverts” and her book “Quiet – The Power of Introverts” helped a lot with self realization and acceptance.
Like most introverts, I can turn it on and off when I need. However, building lasting friendships is a big challenge. Making enemies is quite easy for us, we probably wouldn’t even realize that we have enemies 🙂
yes. but still, lots purposely have no respect for others before saying or commenting something. worst; the comments they made can bring burst into someone anger. they are not bad people, but don’t think or take personal care before saying something. example; how could u make a comments like this: ‘are this business trustable? what if it is a con?’ – without studying wheter the business been around for decades or just a few days. (there a different there.) this ‘neglect respect’ attitude are always out there. some people might handle it well. some don’t. But best avoid because it can create an enemy out of nothing.
Absolutely Right. Sometimes Social Media cause/play a role for someone making too much anger due to negative comments.
Good points.
I think about the relationships I presently have and have had in my life – both good and bad. Life just goes so much smoother when there isn’t friction and strife.And some people just seem to be unable to keep it out of their lives. Just don’t let them bring it into yours!
But one quick comment I want to make about “Friends”. Let’s be honest, everyone you meet and associate with is not going to be your – friend.
But I think we can at least have a good relationship based on just plain respect and simple consideration. As Jesus once said “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”.
This advice can go a long way.
Thanks for sharing Corey. Great to see a solid guest post here on Post Status and kudos to Brian for opening the door.
Nice post. When we make a conscious decision to walk in the light (as opposed to the dark side–cultivating enemies, etc), it takes less energy to keep track of the negative things. One, because there are less negative things to keep track of, and two, we don’t have to keep track of positive things–we can just rest easy because they are there. For example, I struggle to keep track of why I’m pissed at someone else (or why they’re pissed at me.) It’s much easier to just know that things are good–no reason to keep track of why; as friends in good standing, we can default to just knowing we’re good. Like you point out–it’s a great place to be.
It’s all summarized very well by the classic Golden Rule (not the one about “he who controls the gold…” the other one), aka, the ethic of reciprocity: One should treat others as one would like others to treat oneself; Matthew 7:12; “Never impose on others what you would not choose for yourself.” (Confucius), etc etc. Thanks for reminding us to get back to the basics.
#BOOM – thanks!
I agree with this principle, but would like to hear more specific examples from your experience. At Event Espresso we are clearly in the event plugin niche, so that places us in competition with obviously every other event/calendar plugin. And while we want the WordPress ecosystem to grow as a whole, we all want a bigger slice of it (by the way, Drupal is the enemy! jk). We have had talks with the Tribe Events Calendar guys about building some integrations but neither company has yet put in the time to make it happen.
So what do you do to avoid making enemies with competitors? How has making friends with potential competitors helped?
What can you do to make friends of disgruntled customers? How has that helped?
How has making friends in and out of the WordPress community been of benefit?
Hi Mike!
I am a big proponent of Cory’s points, and my advice would be to ban the word “enemy” from your vocab :). Nobody you meet is an enemy, they are all possible collaborators, contributors, friends, competitors, or so on. At worst they might be someone whose negativity requires you to ignore them until they come around, but never an enemy.
I’ve been in the hosting industry for 14+ years and you might look at all the web hosts on the net and think we are in deadly competition. But the truth is most of us know and respect each other and talk pretty often. Once to twice a year we get together to have beers and chat at big conferences, and I talk to ceos at other companies every few months over the phone. When big problems come up like Sopa or wide spread security attacks come up we share data and reach out to help. I can think of several times when fellow hosts were having problems that we reached out to offer help and personal to assist, and vice versa when we were in similar instances. We even go so far as to setup shared mailing lists between our senior tech teams to keep communications open.
I would not view it as Event Espresso is in competition with every other event/calendar plugin, but more that Event Espresso is working to build the best event/calendar experience for end users (and possibly you have a specific niche in mind inside that group)! Other people are working towards that goal as well and what is going to make the difference is vision, and your ability to execute on that vision. If you get stuck in the competitor mindset you will end up doing nothing innovative and just get stuck copying every feature they add and trailing because you lack a vision for where you want to take your product.
I strongly believe by talking to others with similar goals in the WP ecosystem you will improve your self and thus the product you are building. The same goes for the event/calandar space both in wordpress and other industries. Those intense conversations will spawn the most wonderful ideas in my experience.
I’ll give a couple specific stories:
We noticed a fellow host who is a bit smaller than us was having a problem with a security issue, and we reached out to see if they needed any help as we ran similar software and had faced issues in the past. A member of our management team helped them out over 3 to 4 days with advice and help. And, eventually that has turned into a solid friendship and a partnership on a new project.
Back in ~March 2014 every host was facing a major attack against WordPress that was well publicized and causing massive problems. Our team as well as other hosts were sharing all the info from this attack behind the scenes and we were able as a group to build a signature to use to block that attack and share it. This bought us a few weeks before the attackers switched up again and by that time we had a better system in place to detect these type of attacks.
I hope that helps!
Thanks, Ben
Ya thanks Ben too! Ya the concrete examples especially do help. So it sounds like your business friendships turned out to benefit you and even your competitors mutually. Interesting.
for sure! Plus just being friends with them makes life worth living 🙂
Another example, I’ve connected loads of friends to other friends over the years and they do the same. That has resulted in a lot of cross business, acquisitions, etc.
Mike, absolutely … I have had the distinct privilege of finding some of my best friends in WP … but these below are two competitors and also great, dear friends who come to mind:
1. Grant Griffiths of Headway Themes. They have what I’d call a competitive product, in a very similar category, to our Builder Theme. We met at WordCamp DFW a long time ago and struck up a friendship. Often when prospective customers would email us they’d ask us to tell the differences and we’d say … we love Headway, go check out their features, and ours and see what best suits you. But we’d never get into “we are better than them” kind of thing. Also, Grant was the first person to call me and check on me when I was going through my divorce in 2010. He recognized something was up (from a video of all things) and instantly gave me a call. #Pals
2. Jason Schuller, formerly of Press75. We were both some of the first people to do commercial WordPress themes back in 2008. So direct competitors from the start. And he’s become one of my best and most trusted friends, even though I don’t see him very often. We regularly solicit advice and ideas from each other. Our friendship hit top gear when our beautiful amazing wives were pregnant around the same time. Some of my most cherished times with Jason have been sharing stories and pics about how our kids are growing and what they are doing.
Additionally, I’ve helped out and sought to be friends with a number of people in WordPress (and vice versa), who I would count as friends (and sometimes competitors). Admittedly, my attitude about all this changed a couple of years ago at Pressnomics, what I consider to be our annual gathering, when I stopped getting frustrated and deflated at all the young talent becoming my competitors and choose instead to develop and foster friendships with them by offering whatever help they might need (except for our proprietary info of course).
My intentions are to be helpful and generous with what I’ve been blessed with in life (the very spirit of open source software and WordPress) … but I believe it’s helped earn me an amount of respect and support as well. I think people want us to win because they see us wanting the best for others as well.
Now that doesn’t mean we trade biz secrets … or that collaboration on projects works … it often doesn’t. But that we’re friends, want the best for each other, and are rooting for each other.
I readily admit that it doesn’t always work out the way I’ve mentioned with Grant and Jason. Sometimes it just doesn’t work, but that doesn’t mean you have to go to war either.
Fantastic reply thanks!
I see the “payoffs” for making friends isn’t necessarily very tangible, nor monetary. Which is probably better anyways- if you’re just making friends in order to “get something out of it” I suppose that’s a pretty unstable foundation for those friendships.
It seems like the payoffs have mostly been emotional well-being, which is kinda what we’re all wanting in the end anyways.
I always thought that “Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer” emphasizes the importance of building a relationship instead of being enemies. So I think that old quote is actually summarizing what you’re trying to say here Cory.
Ed, the first place I remember hearing that quote was the movie The Godfather … and in that context, it was knowing you had an enemy but purposefully trying to get them closer so that you could best them when they made their move.
It’s the opposite of seeking friendship because all you’re trying to do is get closer to get the best of them.
I wrote about the Characteristics of True Friends as a followup to this here:
https://ithemes.com/2015/07/30/the-characteristics-of-true-friends/
Hey, Cory!
Nice read! We are already short of people, who understand what we do and who we are, having enemies in this little circle of people around you is like shooting yourself in the foot.
I have actually built some great friendhsips online, just by writing a good review or by helping a fellow developer identify and squash some bugs. I always try to cool down a situation, if possible, and if not, I’ll just stand back. It’s not worth my time to feed enemies or opposing circumstances.