Start a group thread

"Lina is REALLY good at making friends."

Zoe's sister Ariele and her friend Lina were visiting the other weekend when Ariele casually dropped this compliment.

I immediately leaned in and wanted to know more.

If I have one passion in life—maybe even an addiction—it's making new friends.

Most people want money. A nice car. A flashy watch. A beautiful house.

Why? Because they think if they get those things (money, success, an impressive outfit), it will somehow translate into the life they dream of.

A life where they have a great partner, interesting friends, and a community that welcomes them.

They crave connection—they just try to get it in the wrong way.

The reality is that building the connection we all crave doesn't require money, success, or fame—in fact, those things often get in the way of it.

Instead, building friendships and community simply requires openness, warmth, and consistency.

After decades of striving for the other stuff, I've come out the other side and realized that my goal in life is really just to have great relationships and a strong community.

If you can build a life that revolves around friends and family (plus sleep and exercise), you have most of the key ingredients for a wonderful life.

Science backs this up: decades of studies like the Harvard Study of Adult Development show that close relationships are the strongest predictor of long-term health and well-being.

I've always been lucky that making friends comes naturally to me, but one thing I've struggled with over the years is creating cohesive groups and communities.

I've always been jealous of those people who have a "crew".

You know the ones.

They've all been best friends since elementary school. Their wives and husbands get along perfectly. They go on vacation together and post cute group photos on Instagram.

If you aren't one of them, they're very irritating.

I've always had a wide ranging group of friends. I can pretty much land in any major city in the world and have coffee with a pal.

But where I've previously failed is creating cohesive groups.

In the past, I had a million disparate relationships, but few collections of people that I'd feel confident inviting over to my house without feeling low-grade anxiety.

Back to Lina. She shared a trick that I loved.

I asked her how she builds friendships. She told me her secret:

"Whenever I go out for a group dinner, pickleball, movie, whatever—I always create a group thread and give it a funny name. Then, if I like the group, I just keep texting the group thread. Before you know it, everyone gets comfortable, chemistry gets built, and then you have this little crew to do stuff with."

So simple.

Something that takes almost no effort—but when I thought about it, I realized many of my favorite friend groups had formed the same way: purely by accident, through group text threads.

It's a great trick.

But here's what I've realized: while Lina's group text move is perfect for sparking new friendships, it only gets you half of the way there.

The real magic happens when those spontaneous hangouts become intentional and structured.

That's why, in my own life, I'm focused on creating rituals.

Rituals are things you do over and over again, typically with the same group—the glue that turns strangers into friends, and friends into family.

As you get older, life gets busy.

Unlike in college, community doesn't just happen anymore.

If you aren't intentional about building friendship, you flat out won't.

You'll go to work. Come home. Put your kids to bed. Occasionally have a double date with another couple. Go make small talk at soccer practice and ballet.

You know. Life.

Those things are all fine. But they often don't create true community and relational depth.

To build a deep friendship, you need reps.

You can rarely go deep in the first few hangouts. It takes time to get to know one another.

The same is true of groups. I've been in business forums—confidential support groups where we talk through personal, family, and business issues—for almost twenty years. That's where I first discovered the power of rituals.

A group of six of us meet once a month and attendance is mandatory. Unless your kid's in the ER, you come.

We each prepare updates, sharing highs and lows from our personal, family, and business lives, and take turns sharing our updates one by one.

When I first joined one of these groups I thought it would suck.

What did I have in common with all these people anyway?

They all ran businesses in different industries and to be honest, I didn't think I really clicked with most of them.

Flash forward twenty years, and my forum mates are some of my best friends.

What made it work was the consistency and structure.

It became a special ritual—something I did every month—and over time we got insanely close.

So, over the last few years, inspired by the success of my forum, I've focused on building more recurring rituals.

These are my current ones:

Forum

I've now expanded to four different groups of 6 people. Each meets once a month, so I do one per week.

I find this creates weekly time to catch up with my friends while adding structure that pushes us to talk about deeper issues. It's part bullshit session, part group therapy, part business strategy.

My forums have resulted in some of my deepest, highest trust friendships and years of incredible laughs, group trips, and inside jokes.

Pickleball

I play 2-3 times a week, and I have an ever-growing group thread that we're always adding random friends of friends to.

It's great exercise and a fun way to casually get to know people I'd never meet otherwise.

Entrepreneur's Lunch Club (ELC)

I rent out a restaurant once a month and invite a broad range of local entrepreneurs to have lunch.

We share recent wins and struggles, introduce anybody that's new, and then sit down for lunch with no small talk allowed (we use conversation cards to prompt people to talk about deeper stuff).

ELC has created a lively community of local entrepreneurs who can band together to solve problems and connected a bunch of my favorite entrepreneurs who wouldn't otherwise know each other.

Interesting People

Once a year, I invite all my most interesting friends from all over the world to hang out together in Victoria for three days.

I call it Interesting People. It's not a conference—it's 100% focused on getting everyone to click and get to know one another.

I run it with my friend Nick Gray, who literally wrote the book on creating events that create connection and I can safely say that it's unlike any event you've been to.

I joke that Interesting People functions like FedEx: once a day, all of their delivery planes land in Anchorage, Alaska and swap packages. This masterful coordination gives FedEx the ability to deliver packages anywhere in the world within 24 hours.

IP is an opportunity for me to do the same with my entire network of friends from across the world. Doing so always results in good things: new friendships, business and creative partnerships, and a tribal community.

Sunday

A few friends and I recently started Sunday—a secular group that takes the religion out of church while preserving everything else.

I've always envied my religious friends. They just seem happier. But I don't think that joy comes from biblical stories—I think it comes from the ritual itself.

Every week, they get a built-in moment to pause, zoom out, reflect on life, and connect with their community.

So, we decided to build that same structure, minus the religion. Sunday is our weekly gathering for introspection, gratitude, and community.

If you're in Victoria and interested in joining, send me an email.

Camp Dad

Every August, me and a bunch of my dad friends rent out a summer camp for a few days with our kids.

It's the ultimate win-win: the kids make incredible core memories together and become buddies, our partners get a break, we all take time away from screens and work, and I get to introduce my dad pals to one another.

Father-Son Trips

I just started doing special 1-on-1 trips with each of my boys once a year.

Last week, I got back from a trip to Disneyland with my oldest son, and just looking at the photos makes me feel like I did some low-dose MDMA. I keep realizing that I only have 10 years left—at most—for special stuff like this, and the hourglass is almost half drained.

The days are long, but the years are short, and between this and Camp Dad, I feel like I've started building some core memories for the boys to lean on when they're older and I'm annoying them at family dinners.

All of these rituals have created their own unique cohesive group or community (including a group text thread) and have meant that I have a social scaffolding where, if I just follow my calendar, I will naturally spend a ton of time connecting with the people I love.

It requires a bit of advanced planning, but once you're in the groove it feels effortless to have a vibrant social life. And it all starts with a group thread!

What about you? Got any good social tricks or rituals? Reply to this email, I'd love to hear about them.

Originally published in the I lost ten million dollars doing something stupid issue of Never Enough.