How to make friends in real life

Do you introduce yourself as a human or as a logo on your company t-shirt?

I suddenly get annoyed when people randomly ask for my age. It happens so often as if age was the easiest way to box me along with my ethnicity or “where are you from”.

Nope, I won’t make it easy for you, go make an effort or lose interest in me. I know it sounds arrogant and it gets even worse below.

I was born in Ukraine, graduated in Belarus and now live in Vilnius, Lithuania since I moved here from Stockholm last summer. Here is where I am from. Did it help to box me?

I avoid the “what do you do for life” question unless that’s a work event or I sense an unexpected industry match. “I work in game development” is usually as precise as I get unless people can figure out how to ask a deeper question for me to want to continue this branch of the dialogue.

When people make efforts to box me, they sort of remember me next time, the connection becomes deeper and we figure out what we have in common (or we don’t), what we can talk about (sometimes it is nothing). Naturally, I end up building connections only with people who can bear my personality and (“and” not “or”) who I make efforts to build relations with.

This is a playbook on how I build emotional connections and relations with people.

• How to make friends in real life? Find what is interesting about yourself and the human you just met.

• How to build industry connections as a professional? This is what the audio diary is about. And there’s the playbook below.

• Also below is the usual “what is on the cover” explainer.