Three weeks ago I shared that in my experience, in order to ‘Move Up Faster’, we need to be authentic in all four areas of our life: Self, Family, Community and Business.

Here’s how I look at it, as four concentric circles, each of which is one of my ‘lives’:

If we want to succeed then we need to get our actions and our values in alignment across all our ‘lives’.

Today I would like to talk only about our ‘Community’ life, in 2025.

Thanks to my role as a Founder and CEO of a fast-growing 150-person performance media agency, I have the opportunity to interact with many new people, in a variety of situations.

I really enjoy it. I love understanding how my new acquaintances are wired, and hearing their life stories.

But I’m not looking to grow a list of acquaintances, or ‘friends’ on LinkedIn.

I’m 50 years old, and increasingly, I don’t have the patience for casual relationships. I’m getting more and more uncompromising about how I spend my time, outside of my Self ‘life’ and my Family ‘life’.

The way I see it is this: I have 95 ‘waking and productive’ hours in my working week. I have to decide how I ‘invest’ those hours to get the return I want.

I am willing to ‘invest’ a significant portion of those hours on my Community. By this I mean a group of guy friends who I meet with regularly, with whom I have a real deep connection. The return I’m looking for from that investment is a deeper connection.

How can I do that?

Even though what I’m looking for in my Community ‘life’ is deeper emotional connections, I’m not going to do that by starting to talk about my emotions.

In fact, I always seem to get there through shared sporting activity.

Over the past eight years, since I moved to Colorado from New York City with my wife and three daughters, I’ve leaned heavily into outdoor sports.

My real love? Mountain biking. I can go on and on about how wonderful mountain biking is. One reason? It requires an extreme amount of focus. I am pretty sure I have an undiagnosed ADHD, and mountain biking is my version of meditation. Mindful mountain biking, anyone?

But what does mountain biking have to do with my Community ‘life’?

First, people who mountain bike are obsessed about it. We can talk about gnarly descents or dreamy flowy tracks, forever.

Second, mountain biking is communal. Mountain biking alone is sad. It’s strangely unsatisfying. But mountain biking with at least one other person you have a connection with, optimally with several people? It’s very satisfying.

Mountain biking requires a deep sense of obsession and sacrifice to be valuable.

How do men and women build a community of friends? I’ve never really considered it as a process before. I always used to think of it as something that ‘just happened’.

But like a lot of what I’ve been talking about recently, I’ve discovered that building friendships is actually a process.

A process that takes small, consistent steps.

When you’re young, you just make friends with the people around you. People studying your subjects at school. The people in the cubicles around you in your first jobs. You’re not choosy. You work together, you chat around the water cooler, you go for beers after work.

But in your 40s and 50s, those people don’t exist. You’re successful. Close to the top of your business or on the way there. There may not be too many people to have a water cooler chat with. Or they could even be your rival? You are choosy. And you’re way too busy to be hanging out with anyone after work.

So new friendships just don’t happen anymore. Unless you invest in them. And the currency you need to invest is TIME.

To get to the real truths in people’s lives, to get beyond the idealized veneer, we absolutely need to spend time with them. We can’t short-cut that process.

We all know what it can be like when it comes to revealing our truths. We’re not that willing to make ourselves vulnerable, to open up. (Even talking about it now in this newsletter, it does feel kind of weird to me.)

Often, it takes multiple get-togethers to allow the space and time to actually open up about what we’re going through. And for our friends to share what they are going through. And it’s a lot easier if you’re actually doing something else at the same time.

It takes obsession and sacrifice to make those multiple get-togethers happen. Even something like a mountain bike ride every Sunday morning takes a hell of a lot of organization and negotiation at home. Let alone an annual three-day camping and mountain bike trip when we drink beers around the fire.

I have found that most of the guys who I would like to get to know better, who seem to have potential as new friends, simply aren’t willing to make that effort. Yes, they do want a real connection; but no, they aren’t willing to invest the time in building those connections.

Mountain biking for me is a vessel, a means to creating great connections with my friends.

And boy, does it take effort. You have to buy a bike, shoes, gloves, helmet, and other equipment. Then you have to learn how to ride a mountain bike – well. That also demands fitness, which requires a lot of time. Not to mention skill.

Last but not least, you have to get clearance from your family to be away from the house for three or more hours, in my case almost every Sunday morning, April through November, to ride your bike with your friends.

This obsession with riding, this sacrifice of our time, allows you to spend time together with your friends, to build deeper trustworthy relationships with each other.

I’m lucky to have built such deep relationships with a group of six other guys in Colorado. I believe we will stay close friends until the end of our lives. Because we all find great value in the relationships we’ve built through mountain biking, and because we obsess and have the capacity to sacrifice, in our love of mountain biking.

Here is how I think about how we all can align our actions around our Community ‘life’ in 2025, with obsession and sacrifice as the key to creating enduring friendships with others.

(Btw, this framework follows my Return on Marketing Career post – yes, this RoMC framework isn’t just about my Business ‘life’, it also directly relates to my Personal, my Family and Community ‘lives’ too.)

Warning: These ideas will work best for people who love to move their bodies.

Step 1, Get Out of your Comfort Zone: Do you wish you had more friends? Do you see old friendships, from your university days or a job you had in your 20s, peel away? Or how many close friends do you have in your life – i.e. friends with whom you speak to at least twice a month? If you want to build new friendships, you need to get out of your Comfort Zone and think of friendship-building as a Process.

Step 2, Develop a New Skill: What “friendship-building process” could you lean into? Is there a communal sport that you are curious about? Maybe it’s time to give golf a chance? Do you enjoy running? Or (I’m serious) lean into pickleball?

Step 3, Create more Value: I find that communal or team-oriented physical activity, obsession that we develop over it, and sacrifice needed to maintain our obsession with it, is the key to creating valuable relationships with other people.

Step 4: Move Up Faster: In the context of our Community ‘life’, moving up faster is spending more time with other people, who are not my wife and not my kids. In a way, the more obsessed I become and the more willing I am to sacrifice several of my 95 ‘waking and productive’ hours every week – to do a team activity – the faster I create deep relationships with others in my Community.

What does my philosophy of ‘obsession + sacrifice = community’, point me towards in the context of my own Community ‘life’ in 2025?

Step 1, Where will I Get Out of MY Comfort Zone? As I age, and my kids get older, I found that I’m able to get away more. In a typical year I will mountain bike with my friends for 30+ days, and do one annual three-day mountain bike trip, e.g. to Moab in Utah. Can I push the envelope, and do two (vs one), three-day mountain bike trips (e.g. over long weekends), every year?

Step 2, How will I Develop a New Skill? Adding one more trip per year seems doable. One three-day trip several hours away from my house in the Spring, and one trip in the Fall – seems like something that I should be able to fit in around my Family ‘life’, and my Business ‘life’.

Step 3, How will I Create More Value? One more mountain bike trip per year = new opportunities to invite new potential people who are getting into mountain biking, and a couple more evenings per year to have a beer around a campfire with friends.

Step 4: How can I Move Up Faster? In the context of community, one extra trip, over the next 20+ years, means 40+ additional days – across this part of my health span when I will continue to mountain bike – to create deep personal connections with people in my Community ‘life’. That’s a great return on my investment in my Community ‘life’.

A report from American Survey finds that friendship among men is falling. The number of men in their 50s who stated that “they had no close friends” tripled to 15% between 1990 and 2021.

This decline is being referred to as ‘the friendship recession’. And it has some very serious consequences indeed.

There is clear evidence that people with friends feel more satisfied with their lives and suffer less from depression (Choi, K.W., et al, The American Journal of Psychiatry, Vol. 177. No. 10, 2020). People who have friends are also less likely to die from all causes (Holt-Lunstad, J., et al, PLOS Medicine, Vol. 7, No. 7, 2010; Steptoe, A., et al., PNAS, Vol. 110, No. 15, 2013).

If you’d like to discuss your career journey with me one-to-one, please feel free to email me at [email protected] or message me on LinkedIn.

Thank you for reading.

If you know someone who you think would appreciate this newsletter, please forward it to them.