Friendship Breakage and Flashover
Volume 13, Number 14
Issue 614
Friends are like the beautiful rare antique bohemian cut glass crystal decanters from the early 1800s that I collect. It takes a great deal of investment in time and money to earn one worth having. One particular color is much more scarce than others and I have to be very careful about collecting them because there are many reproductions out there that look just like the originals. No counterfeits for me; only ones that are genuine.
I always seem to break one every now and then. I love them too much.
For me, friendship isn't entered into casually or lightly. It's earned over a long period of time. Friendship is obtained through traversing a treacherous journey with someone you love over a long period of time and surviving the events that occur along the way. If you are an entrepreneur, any genuine friend has to be closely involved in your business because, after all, you are the business. Whether you're friends with an entrepreneur or an entrepreneur doing the befriending, there are no borders between "business" and "personal," for the two are one-in-the-same. An entrepreneur doesn't just work 40 hours per week; they work 168. They are always "on."
Any interpersonal relationship worth having in a successful businessperson's life has to have a key mutual cornerstone that involves shared passion and enthusiasm for business because that's the most important thing in the entrepreneur's life.
In business, deep emotional bonds are formed based upon experiencing and surviving difficult events together. Powerful friendships can be formed in business. I've had them.
My great ally and mentor, 80-year-youngish Armand Roman, once said, "a true friend does not just expect to hear nice things because they are nice. They also have to accept the wrath of a friend when faced with the need to be told the truth, as unacceptable as that truth may be." Armand's words are especially true in the entrepreneurial marketplace where-on a day-to-day basis-relationships are constantly broken down and re-worked among co-workers as capitalistic successes and failures pass into a remembered history.
When two people with entrepreneurial spirits work together on common projects over a long period of time, a certain feeling of closeness happens. After dozens of seemingly impossible projects are completed, a history of triumphs and tragedies develops in the workplace that makes co-workers very tightly bonded emotionally. Together, the workplace best friends can accomplish anything, but not anything forever.
The bond between entrepreneurial best friends will continue until one of you dies or a sufficient amount of non-businessplace hate and anger arrives to create a sudden flash-over boiling point of emotion that ends everything in a simple matter of minutes. Then, once the pieces have been swept away, all that's left is the ghost of what once was.
I have a couple of hundred associates and enough strong allies to, if I think hard about it, fill up my fingers and toes, but I've never had much luck keeping close friends that meet the traditional definition.
I've been very blessed though, throughout my professional career, to journey with several people who I've truly let into my heart. They got there because of business reasons but--rightly or wrongly--they stayed there because of personal ones-but only until the flashover happened.
David B. Robinson, CPA
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