Make good friends.
Life is short. Find people who make you laugh and who love you as soon as you can. Find people you trust. Find people you admire. Find people who build you up into the best version of yourself. Make friends. Be a friend. Keep your friends close and don’t bother to send your enemies postcards. One of the most important decisions you’ll ever make is who to spend your time with. They say you can know who a person is by knowing who their 5 closest friends are. Look at the different groups of kids at school, look at what they’re doing after school—sports, homework, volunteering, or just being up to no good—and decide who you want to become like because easiest way to become like someone is to spend a lot of time with them. Peer pressure is immense, whether it’s pushing you up or pulling you down. Your friends’ thoughts may become your thoughts without you noticing. Their habits may become your habits without you noticing. There are people who exercise everyday and people who never exercise and both do it almost without thinking. Habits are powerful things and the habits of your friends will be the habits that you will most easily pick up. So take some time to choose your friends. Think about what’s important to you and make sure that it’s important to them. Watch how they treat people. Watch how they win. Watch how they lose. Are they gracious? Do they bounce back quickly or do they give up quickly?
If it happens to be that your next door neighbor becomes your best friend, that’s fine, but just make sure you walk around a few blocks and meet several people before you decide who you want to be friends with. One of my good friends I met while commuting. We worked at different companies but both biked and took the train to work and we started talking and we’ve been friends for many years now because I liked him and we have some common interests. Another one of my good friends I met because he was walking by a soccer game that I was playing in and he asked us if he could join in. He was white and it was all Asians playing but that didn’t mean anything to him. We’re now lifelong friends. Two of my good friends I met while bartending. They visited this out of the way place, Molokai, because they had never been there before, and we had a good conversation about why hardly anyone visits Molokai. Now we all live in San Francisco, and I’m still enjoying their company more than 15 years later. One of my good friends I met because he was leaving the photo studio where I was taking a photography class and he took a picture of our class. My point is that you never know where your closest friends will come from and that you should go out and look for them. If you value having friends with diverse perspectives on life, then you will probably meet your friends in diverse places in life.
Seek a soulmate.
The most important person to choose is your life partner, if you’re lucky enough to find someone that you’d like to spend the rest of your life with. I hope you are that lucky. Even though a lot of people find their person, I think it feels lucky to everyone it happens to. It feels like you hit the jackpot with a shiny penny that you found on the ground.
Find a mentor.
Another type of good person that you want to meet is a mentor or advisor for you as you go on your journey. If you want to be a filmmaker, then you should seek advice from a master filmmaker, or any filmmaker who is farther down the road than you are. They will probably be happy to share some of what they’ve learned with you. And remember that you can get valuable advice and perspectives from people you’ve never met, and may never meet, through their writings.
Share what you’ve learned.
Once you are old enough and know enough to help someone who needs help, you should return the favors you’ve received along your journey by helping others on their journeys. That’s part of the reason that I’m writing you this letter hoping that it will help you in life. Be a parent, a teacher, a coach, a mentor, or a general yaysayer. Some of the good people you meet will be the ones who help you, and some of them will be the ones you help.
Be a good person and find the good people. They will help you grow into the awesome person you are meant to become.
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