Monday Morning Match is a quick post – maybe a quote, inspirational story or idea – intended to spark some motivation inside each of you so your week gets off to a fantastic start on Monday morning.
The cool thing about relationships is they can be built in days or over decades. The instant connections are based on common ground and personal interests while the long-time friendships and bonds are usually created around circumstances, situations and opportunities. This “hit it off quickly” relationships might be viewed as “wide” while the longer you have to get to know someone, the “deeper” you can go into the relationship.
This past week I was in Florida for an opportunity to create some new relationships. These were developed in a personal environment and will be extended thanks to the digital ability of social media. Most are just scratching the surface but the width and distance between is large.
While in the Sunshine State, I knew I was going to have some extra time before my flight home so I reached out to a long-time friend and fellow Fraternity brother from my days at the University of Florida to see if he had time to connect for a late lunch and beer. Even though we haven’t seen each other in 25+ years since our graduation, we have stayed connected thanks to social networks like Facebook.
As Rick walked into the sports bar in Fort Lauderdale, it was amazing how the depth of our relationship quickly brought our common ground and old memories to the surface. We compared notes on our careers, families and activities since graduation. We reminisced about old buddies and quickly realized that there were a few other “deep” connections in the area. Before long, we had a full table sharing laughs and longing for those awesome days before anything resembling responsibility and reason played such and important part of our lives.
It was great to see Rick and Greg and Amy and rekindle some of the magic from our undergraduate Gator days. In another month I’ll be able to connect with several other long-time “deep” relationships in person and thanks to the beauty of social media, I can connect with others with the click of a button.
One of the really cool things about being so focused on building relationships every single day is not knowing if some of them will impact you and your world tomorrow or next week or decades from now. Build them anyway.