Originally appeared on: https://www.quickanddirtytips.com/qdtarchive/how-to-stay-young-expand-your-social-circle/
August 25, 2014
Get-It Done Guy reveals his secret to staying young at heart (and mind): as you get older, find ways to ensure you have new friends coming into your life.
The secret to aging well is keeping your mind young. Your body, sadly, is a lost cause. If you’ve seen my picture, I know you’re thinking I’m 22 or 23, with my rippling, manly-man body, sparkling, wavy hair, and seemingly endless energy. What you don’t see is the two hours a day I spend pasting on prosthetics, outlining my abs lightly with an eyebrow pencil, drinking a gallon of caffeine for energy, and working out to go from “shlumpy” to “fit.”
The scariest thing about aging isn’t my looming mortality (which is terrifying), but seeing how so many people let life go by wasted. Some people give up early, by their late-30s or mid-40s. They have few friends, and their conversations consist of rehashing the same old complaints they’ve had since college.
They might get worked up about politics for a few minutes, even though they never both to inform themselves about in any substantive way. They’ll break up the monotony by shrieking the talking points from their regular propaganda outlet for a few minutes, before settling back into their dormant stupor. On a good day, they may also complain about their latest medical procedure, or their dead-end job.
The idea of turning into that…terrifies me. So here are 6 ways to keep that from happening:
Spend Time with a Wide Range of Ages
My friend Frances Hesselbein is older than I am. She’s near the end of her first century. But she’s still optimistic, forward-looking, and starting new initiatives.
Now it’s true, she isn’t doing quite as much as she did when she was CEO of the Girl Scouts and grew them to a million members, or when she designed the U.S. Army’s leadership training, or when she was named the Best CEO of the 20th century by Peter Drucker. Now, she uses her time more modestly: last year she finished a teaching stint at West Point, and then helped a school in the Bronx start a campaign to build a library, which they’d never had.
Frances is involved. What’s amazing about her is how engaged she is in her life. At an age when most people are, well, dead, she’s not just alive, but also active. It seems to me that part of how she stays that way is her ongoing work with promising young people.
Always Be Making Friends
Once upon a time, multiple generations grew up together, so old people automatically had younger people around. They were engaged with people in different stages of life. These days, many older people are quite lonely, with no surviving friends or family they can live with.
Don’t let this happen. Proactively make new friends. Often.
Do volunteer tutoring of high school students. Offer yourself as a career mentor in your field to new college grads, through a local university. Volunteer for Citizens Schools or Junior Achievement or TEALS or S.C.O.R.E. These all give you ways to interact and share your knowledge with younger people.
It’s Hard if You Have Children
I think cross-generational relationships are harder if you have kids, because you think of your kids as the dividing line between adults–who are to be taken seriously–and children, who aren’t.
At an innovation workshop, participants were told to have a 10-minute conversation with someone they’d never normally think of talking to. One participant reported, “I just had a fantastic conversation with a 16-year old. Then I realized my son is 16, and I’ve never even tried to have a conversation like that with him.”
If you ever think, “This person is young enough to be my child,” stop. Age is irrelevant. Make friends with them, as people. Talk to your office intern. Take a class at a local community college and meet the students. Actively bring younger people into your life.
If you want to have 30-year old friends when you’re 80, that means at age 70, you need to be making friends with 20-year-olds.
Offer Your Ear
One thing you have to offer younger people is your ear, just like Van Gogh.
Listen–without judging or offering advice. They may have never had an older person truly listen to them as an equal. Learn about their world. Ask what music they like. Maybe you’ll like it, too. Contrary to what you may think, “Lady Gaga” is a singer, not a contagious third-world medical condition.
Listen well. Other poeple–older and younger–grew up in a different world from you. Ask about it. Instead of saying, “Well in my day, phones were attached to the walls with cords,” and waiting for their wide-eyed gasp of disbelief, realize that in their day, growing up with a cell phone kept them on a leash in a way no corded phone could ever hope to achieve. Find out what that world is like.
You’ll most likely find they’re not so different from you. Indeed, they might make pretty great friends–which is the whole point.
Be a Mentor
But let’s face it: you do have experience, or at least age. You’ve seen patterns. Skirts shorten and lengthen. Tie-dye, facial hair, and internet bubbles recur at regular intervals. You can contribute to their world.
Some contributions might just be funny stories. “In my childhood, the fact that our phones were attached to the wall, and that our parents trusted us to be alone, liberated us to have a carefree, adventurous childhood for 6 or 7 hours a day!!”
Another contribution is perspective. A mid-20s friend expected his new job to be super-intense by the end of his first six weeks. It wasn’t. I pointed out that six weeks isn’t much time to get integrated into a company. A month later, he was in charge of several projects, and being groomed for advancement. He didn’t have the experience to know six weeks wasn’t a long time to evaluate a new job.
Save advice-giving for when they ask. If you do feel compelled to offer unsolicited advice, first ask if that’s OK. If they say, “yes,” then go for it. But don’t frame it as, “I’m more experienced, and therefore smarter.” You might not be–so just say, “This is what I’ve seen happen in the past.”
Have Fun Together
And, of course, once you’ve made friends, hang out with them. You can introduce them to the joys of the opera, and they can catch you an Uber to a virtual reality mosh-pit meetup. Everybody wins!
I started doing this about a year ago, and my social circle already spans from ages 19 to 99． It’s been wonderful, and humbling, to discover how much awesome is out there in all those generations I’d been ignoring.
Look around you. If the people you hang out with are all within a few years of your age, start branching out. By cultivating relationships with a wide range of ages, you’ll bring more community into your life, and everything that goes with that: wisdom, insight, idiocy, idealism, energy, and naiveté (on both your parts.) Look past parent/child generational roles.
Start today. The first person you meet after listening to this who is a more-than-15-years age difference from you, invite them to lunch. and get to know them as a person.
Start by listening to what their world is like. Then share your own. Then go get pizza. Not only will you age well, but by the time you’re 80, you’ll have a social calendar full of people who love you. And if you’re going to age, you may as well age loved.
*Photos of, and courtesy of Shutterstock. *
Work Less, Do More, and have a Great Life!
About the Author
Stever Robbins was the host of the Get-it-Done Guy podcast, an iTunes top-10 business podcast, from 2007 to 2020. He is a graduate of W. Edward Deming’s Total Quality Management training program and a Certified Master Trainer Elite of NLP. He holds an MBA from the Harvard Business School and a degree in Computer Science from MIT.
Copyright © 2025 Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC. Quick & Dirty Tips™ and related trademarks appearing on this website are the property of Mignon Fogarty, Inc. and Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC.