That the only thing that really matters in life are your relationships to other people. - Eric Barker

"Jeff Hall's research found that it took as many as sixty hours to develop a light friendship, sometimes one hundred hours to get to full-fledged "friend" status, and two hundred or more hours to unlock the vaunted "best friend" achievement...

Hall also found that how people talked mattered. We've all hit that wall with a potential friend where the small talk starts to go in circles...

Want to make good friends without the dozens of hours?... Arthur Aron got strangers to feel like lifelong pals in just forty-five minutes. How? Well that leads us to our second costly signal: vulnerability."

Ruut Veenhoven said, “The quality of a society is more important than your place in that society.

We spend too much time trying to be “good” when good is often merely average. To be great we must be different. And that doesn’t come from trying to follow society’s vision of what is best, because society doesn’t always know what it needs. More often being the best means just being the best version of you. As John Stuart Mill remarked, “That so few now dare to be eccentric, marks the chief danger of our time.” In the right environment, bad can be good and odd can be beautiful.