Why are we friends?
Who do you choose to spend most of your time with?
A few years ago, motivational speaker Simon Sinek popularised a deceptively simple idea: if you want to understand yourself, you must discover your “why.” Your “why,” he argues, is the deep motivation behind your actions. It is the reason you push through difficulty and persist when life becomes complicated. Sinek’s message resonated widely after his 2009 TED Talk on leadership, which later became the bestselling book Start With Why. The idea is elegant and appealing. If we can identify the deeper reason that drives us, we can live with greater clarity and purpose.
The difficulty, of course, is that many people struggle to discover what their “why” actually is. It sounds straightforward in theory but is surprisingly elusive in practice. To help people uncover it, Sinek suggests a simple exercise. Ask your closest friends why they are friends with you. According to him, once the polite and predictable answers fade away, your friend will eventually reveal something deeper. The person who knows you best will end up describing themselves. In other words, we choose friends who reflect who we are.
It is an interesting idea. But when I thought about the friendships in my own life, I was not entirely convinced. When I think about the friends I have gathered over the years, I do not see a room full of people who resemble me. Some of them share similar backgrounds or interests, of course. That is almost inevitable. Friends often come from similar geography, similar stages of life, or overlapping circles of work and hobbies. But that describes proximity more than it explains friendship.
So I turned to the usual social indicators that supposedly make people attractive. The standard list is predictable enough: looks, money, power and talent. These are the traits society often assumes will draw people together.
Yet none of them seem to work very well as an explanation. I have met very good looking people whom I could barely tolerate after ten minutes. I have encountered wealthy individuals whose company felt exhausting. I am generally suspicious of people who wield too much power. Talent, meanwhile, is often more ambiguous than it first appears. Someone can be remarkably gifted in one narrow domain and yet be completely unbearable in every other aspect of life.
These qualities might make someone interesting at first. They may spark curiosity or command attention in a room. But intrigue is not the same thing as friendship. The initial fascination fades quickly if something deeper is missing.
So I looked again at the actual people around me. My friends come in every imaginable variety. Some are wealthy, others are barely getting by. Some hold positions of influence while others live very quiet lives. Some are exceptionally talented, others are simply steady and practical. Some are beautiful, others less so. The range is wide enough that if I tried to construct a checklist explaining why these specific individuals are my friends, the list would look like a mess. There would be no obvious pattern, no clean formula that could explain why these people occupy such an important place in my life.
Except for one thing: I like the person that I am when I am with them.
That is the only quality that all my friends share. When I am with them, I laugh more easily. I am more relaxed and less guarded. I become more curious about the world and more interested in the people around me. Sometimes I am kinder. Sometimes I am braver. Often I am simply more alive.
Somehow, simply by being themselves, they draw something out of me that I could never quite summon on my own. Je ne sais quoi!
Perhaps that is what friendship truly is. It is not a transaction built on status or advantage. It is not determined by beauty, wealth, talent or influence. Instead, it is a subtle transformation. The right people expand who you are. They make you feel a little more alive, a little more thoughtful, a little more generous with your time and attention.
The right people enlarge you. They make you more present, more thoughtful, more engaged with life itself. They reveal parts of you that might otherwise remain hidden.
And that, I suspect, is the real reason we keep the friends we do. Not because they mirror who we are, but because they help us become more of who we could be.
Can Sarawak be like a friend?