underqualified as f_ck

Do you feel it’s necessary to have friends who are a lot older and wiser than you? Just to have someone wise around and help you through life? Or do you feel it’s better to go through life experiencing things on your own and learning the hard way, along with the rest of your friends figuring life out (I’m just assuming your friends are relatively close to your age) 

anonymous submission on June 8, 2018 @ 10:10am PST.

It’s funny you should ask this question (well technically, you submitted this question on June 8, 2018, so oops?), but nevertheless, I just tweeted something fairly applicable last week:

I had dinner with an old friend of mine last week. Long story very short, like V short, we met at a club because he was a DJ and I was enticed in the #NiTeLyFe in college. We matched on Tinder months later and somehow became friends out of it (shout outs to all the Tinder homies I’m still friends with from 2013). As the years went on, his circle and mine started overlapping, and from then on, we’ve shared birthday/half birthday parties, he’s dated one of my best friends, and we’ve stayed platonically close. He’s dabbled in a plethora of different professions, and has ultimately found something that is incredibly synergistic with his passion, talents, and skillset — all while being incredibly lucrative.

I’ve always thought of myself as someone who is relatively ambitious; though I’ve never been the type to know exactly what I want to do or exactly where I want to be, I’ve always known that my future needs to be filled with something great.

With that, I’ve preached to others that it’s necessary to be surrounded with people who are likeminded and goal-oriented.

Sure, it’s always an ego booster when you’re the best of best in your group, but what’s more important: a cushioned ego, or a consistent push to be better?

When we were at dinner, we talked about life and goals and career paths. I like to think that I’m fairly intelligent when it comes to strategically maneuvering towards my future, but when he started laying down his unfiltered thoughts towards what I was currently doing with my life, I was, for a lack of a better term,

shooketh.

I won’t go into the nitty gritty, but he basically dropped a whole lot of knowledge on me that I couldn’t ever have been prepared enough to catch. He went in on my seemingly strategic ideas, mentioning that he was looking at my 5 year plan and testing the reality of all the thoughts and dreams I was “attempting” to achieve.

He asked if I was looking for passion or money in my current career choice.
He asked if I had thought of infiltrating the system, versus working for it.
He asked a lot of questions I hadn’t even thought of, and let me tell you — I think a lot.

We talked about my dating life (or lack thereof).

I have been telling myself that I don’t have time for a mans; I want to work, I want to make money, I want to become the self-sufficient woman that I always claim and aspire to be.

In normal instances, after declaring those statements, the conversation would be followed up with something along the lines of:

– yas queen
– slay
– get it girl

However, at that moment, he expressed concern for my current state of affairs, and analyzed what was actually going on in my head and heart.

He asked why I really wasn’t dating.
He asked if I was really over my ex.
He asked why I wasn’t trying.

After this dinner, we said our goodbyes, and I was all types of emotional at this point. I was invigorated with a drive to work smarter, not harder (something I always preach but realized I wasn’t actually applying). I was excited to start thinking about myself and what I truly wanted in life. And, most upsettingly, I was angry at how static I had become. I hadn’t pushed myself in a while — or rather, I had been pushing myself but not as hard as I knew I could.

After this dinner, I concluded that it’s so important to have friends with similar goals as you. As the saying goes,

Age is but a number.

In this situation, it truly is; the number of years you’ve been on this earth doesn’t necessarily equate to experience, so surrounding yourself with likeminded individuals is always a good thing. You need to have a constant circle around you to help keep you accountable for your dreams.

However, if you want to enhance your life, yourself, and your future, you need to surround yourself with a couple of friends who are more successful than you. I’m not saying to go DM a random hedge fund…er (wtf is the term for that lol), but if you’ve made a connection with someone in your life who seemingly has their shit together,

try to bounce off their energy once in a while.

We’re all students of life, and its inevitable that you’re going to learn things naturally from good/bad experiences that you have to face, but it doesn’t hurt to get a tutor or a guest speaker every once in a while to motivate you in a way you didn’t know was possible.