I once started closing more deals the day I stopped trying to close them.
As a young Banquet Manager, I did everything right. Prepared. Structured. Efficient. I arrived at every guest meeting armed with questions — date, occasion, timings, menu preferences, guest count, technical requirements. I was meticulous. And I kept losing business. Guests would listen, nod politely, and disappear.
So I changed one thing. I put the clipboard down. And started listening.
Something shifted immediately. The information came anyway — but now it came freely, with meaning. And the deals? They closed faster. Warmer. Easier. Because something more important had happened first: the person felt seen.
That experience gave sharp edges to a phrase I have carried as both professional standard
and personal philosophy ever since:
Arrive as a guest — leave as a friend.
The Friends Who Stayed
Cast your mind back far enough, and you will find them — the friends you have carried across decades. The ones who knew you before you had a designation, before you had a strategy, before you had anything to offer except your time and your unguarded self.
What made those friendships survive? Investment. Not financial investment. Not strategic investment. The kind that happens when two children spend an entire Saturday afternoon on a cricket pitch with no agenda except the game itself. There was no ledger. Nobody was keeping score of who called whom more often, or who showed up when it was inconvenient.
That is the first and most important thing we lost when we grew up and called our
relationships ‘professional networks’: we started counting.
The moment you introduce a balance sheet into a human relationship, you have already begun to lose it.
The Transactional Age and the Suspicious Eye
We live in a transactional age. The market metaphor has crept so far into the social lives that we speak of ‘investing in people’ with the same vocabulary we use for portfolios, of returns on relationship,’ of ‘leveraging our network.’ When we borrow the language of commerce to describe the act of caring for another human being, we should not be surprised when the relationship begins to feel commercial.
And with commerce comes suspicion. Here is something I have observed again and again, in boardrooms and banquet halls alike: whenever someone puts their very best foot forward — genuinely warm, proactively helpful, generous without apparent reason — the room grows quiet in a different way. Not with gratitude. With wariness. We lean in and ask ourselves, almost involuntarily: what does he want?
In an age of transactions, a genuinely generous gesture looks like the opening move of a con.
We have been so conditioned by the transactional model that authentic generosity has become statistically improbable. Sincerity has become the most misread currency in the room.
The Short Fuse and the Empty Room
This mistrust has a twin: impatience. Because we have not invested the time that trust requires, we arrive at every new professional relationship expecting it to either prove itself immediately or be discarded. We give it weeks when it needs years.
A contact is not a friend. A connection is not a relationship. A mutual follow is not a mutual understanding. These distinctions sound obvious when stated plainly — yet we collapse them constantly, and then feel vaguely betrayed when the connection offers nothing when we actually need something.
The Elevator and the Stranger Next Door
Consider the apartment block. Hundreds of families stacked floor upon floor, sharing walls, sharing water pipes, sharing the hum of the same generator. Neighbours in the most literal sense. And yet, profoundly alone.
We have all stood in that elevator. The doors close. Two of you in a space the size of a modest bathroom. The silence that follows is not a comfortable silence — it is a studied silence, the deliberate non-acknowledgement of another human being standing close enough to touch. Eyes find the floor. Phones appear from pockets. A small screen becomes a valid excuse not to be present with another person.
We live within metres of one another and construct, with great deliberate care, the experience of living alone.
From the Lobby to the Border: The Same Distance
Now scale that elevator to the size of a nation.
What we are watching play out on the world’s geopolitical stage — the aggression, the suspicion, the hair-trigger responses — is the same phenomenon projected onto a canvas so large that we mistake it for something uniquely political. It is not. It is the elevator problem, dressed in the language of sovereignty and security.
Nations that share borders but have not invested in each other find themselves like two strangers who have ridden the elevator in silence for years. When friction arrives, there is nothing to buffer it. No accumulated goodwill. No memory of kindness to complicate the impulse toward hostility. No voice in the room saying: but I know these people, and this is not who they are.
Nations do not trust each other for the same reason we do not know our neighbours’ names. We were present, but we never truly arrived.
This is not just a political problem. It is a Monday morning problem.
Go Back to School. Watch the Children.
There is a teacher available to all of us, and we walk past them every single day. They carry no business cards, no personal brand, and no networking strategy whatsoever. And they are, without question, the most accomplished relationship-builders on the planet.
Watch children connect. A child arrives at a playground carrying none of the apparatus that adults believe is required for relationship — no rehearsed introduction, no assessment of the other child’s utility, no calculation of whether this friendship is worth the investment of time. There is, instead, a shared glance at something interesting, a spontaneous laugh at the same moment, the simple gravitational pull of two human beings who have not yet learned to be wary of each other. And within minutes — sometimes within seconds — there is a
friendship.
A child does not ask what you do before deciding whether to like you. That comes later. That is what we call growing up — and I am not sure it is always progress.
What children understand instinctively, and what we spend decades unlearning, is that connection does not require a reason. It requires only the decision to turn toward another person rather than away. To be curious rather than cautious. We have named this quality innocence, as though it were something to be outgrown. I would argue it is something to be recovered.
Doing Business Amongst Friends
I have carried a conviction through my years with Skål International, stated often enough to become a personal motto within the club:
Doing business amongst friends — it is so much easier, and commercially the least expensive too.”
The most durable business relationships I have known — the ones that survived downturns and disputes and the ordinary friction of competing interests — were the ones that had, at their foundation, something warmer than mutual utility. They were, in the truest sense, friendships that also happened to do business. I have seen this play out in Skål time and again — a call made not to place a business request, but simply to ask how a fellow member was doing, that opened a partnership neither party had planned for and both had
needed.
When you do business with someone you genuinely know and trust, the transaction costs collapse. You do not need armies of lawyers parsing every clause because you trust the intent behind the words. You do not spend the first forty minutes of every meeting rebuilding rapport from scratch — it is already in the room, accumulated from shared meals and shared jokes and the kind of candid conversation that only happens when people feel safe.
Trust is not a soft asset. It is the most commercially efficient infrastructure a business relationship can have.
The One Currency That Cannot Be Devalued
Markets rise and fall. Currencies inflate and collapse. Reputations are built and dismantled in a news cycle. Empires that seemed permanent reveal themselves, in the long view of history, to be astonishingly temporary.
There is one currency that has never once been devalued in the entire history of human civilisation. It is the same currency the child spends freely on the playground. The same one that built every friendship you have carried across decades. The same one the young Banquet Manager discovered when he finally put the clipboard down and looked up at the person in the room.
That currency is time. Specifically: time given freely, without invoice, to another human being.
We all have exactly the same allocation. The head of state and the street vendor wake up to the same twenty-four hours. The difference between a life rich in genuine connection and a life of transactional efficiency is not a question of means. It is a question of where the hours go.
We do not lack the time to build relationships. We lack the will to stop spending that time on things that destroy them.
Consider, honestly, where a significant portion of your day actually goes. The argument replayed in your head for the third time. The conversation about a colleague added nothing except shared contempt. The rumour passed along with careful caveats. Arguments. Gossip. Rumour-mongering. These are not harmless background noise. They are active withdrawals from the same finite account that trust requires you to fill.
You do not need more time. You need to stop haemorrhaging the time you already have on things that leave you and everyone around you diminished.
Less argument. More curiosity. Less gossip. More genuine interest. The reallocation required is neither heroic nor expensive. It demands only the recognition that you are already spending the time — you are simply spending it badly.
That is the whole of it. That is the arithmetic
Time ■ Trust ■ Relationships ■ Meaning
Time, given freely and without agenda, to the person in front of you. Repeated. Accumulated. Sustained across the days and years until what began as a small, unremarkable decision to show up becomes — almost without your noticing it — a life genuinely rich in the only thing any of us will have wished we had more of.
Not money. Not leverage. Not followers.
Friends.
Who is the person in your life you have only ever transacted with — but never truly known?
