I’ve come to realize the importance of making friends quickly in a place where you knew almost no one before, and the power that making these new friends can bring is amazing. Friends can turn the worst day of your life into a fun night on the town where your troubles melt away, or your friends can transform into the most reliable confidants with fresh perspectives on any issue that comes to mind. Good friends are impartial in their sincere advice, “hearty in their approbation and lavish in their praise”, as Dale Carnegie said. As often as I try to surround myself by good friends, I also try to be a good friend because friendship is a two way street. In the case of a new environment, friends can make all the difference between a positive and negative experience, and a little hospitality can most definitely bring out the positive.
I have two examples to illustrate this positive attitude to friendship: First, I was in Paris last weekend and while I should have been enjoying my trip, initially I was not. I was in a completely new city with no one that I knew. Everyone had already determined his or her friend group and I appeared to be the odd man out. Walking the streets of Paris alone that first Friday night, I was determined to include myself in one of the groups for the rest of the weekend by being a little more proactive and demonstrating some hospitality on my part. The next day our class was given a bike tour of the city, and I opened up to one particularly nice group from the University of Missouri. In my exchanges, I made sure to ask them lots of questions, show them that I genuinely cared about who they were and what they did, and arouse in them an eager want to be my friend in return. After the bike tour, this particular group invited me on their escapade to the Eiffel Tower, The Avenue des Champs-Élysées, and the Arc de Triumphe, and we all took some pretty awesome pictures together while getting to know each other. These new friends showed me the simplest form of hospitality (acceptance and inclusion), to which I was incredibly thankful for, and because of that my entire trip was made so much better.
Friends don’t just reside in pure social situations; they also arise from one’s job. I’ve been at my internship for several weeks now and while I was absolutely loving everything I was doing, I was also worried that I wasn’t connected with my colleagues beyond the pleasantries of day-to-day conversation. I could tell that they knew I was working hard and that they appreciated the quality of the work I produced, but for some reason I wasn’t sure they fully accepted me as part of the team. That was until last Thursday, when my colleagues invited me to a social get together with the London Sales Office, a separate Marriott office that handles smaller bookings to all the Marriott hotels in London. It was an extremely fun night with delicious food (including some of the best cheesecake I’ve ever had, seriously), champagne, tours of the hotel, and an atmosphere away from my desk in which to talk with my colleagues as more than just an associate. I really felt like one of the team members that night and I went into work the next day knowing that as much as I care about my colleagues, I know they care about me just as much if not more.
These types of relationships, ones rooted in acceptance, inclusion, and appreciation, mean more to me than any number of physical gifts I could get from the same people. It has been said that one of the deepest human desires is to feel important and I have to agree; I feel very important when I’m surrounded by so many amazing friends, and each one I make adds to that feeling of importance. So consider that when you are ever feeling unimportant; make the effort to surround yourself with a few of your friends and you’ll be right as rain in no time.
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