This speech officially marks the end of my toastmaster competent communicator journey. Its been quite a ride, and I’ve certainly improved alot. Initially this speech was to be on “Lockhart’s Lament” but was changed when a friend of mine came to spectate.
Here are some of my notes from a toastmasters CC8 speech I completed recently. This is not my speech, but rather an altered version to make it more suitable for reading.
In modern world we increasingly have less and less time. Less time for friends, less time to do stuff. Instead we are tied to our social media as a substitute for our close relationships. This raises the question; how many friends do we really have? How does this change when we enter a relationship?
Firstly lets think about friends. How many friends do you have…on facebook? or your twitter, linkedin? maybe is say 100, 200, or if you’re really popular over a thousand! Perhaps a better question is how many meaningful relationships do you have?
Research suggests that no matter how intelligent we are, we really can only recall names and faces of 1,500 people. As a ridiculous upper bound, we can say that human beings can have at most 1,500 meaningful relationships.
This really is the limits of our cognitive ability. The reality is given we only have rather finite time with other people in general, the number of meaningful relationships we can have is around 100-250, roughly 1/8th of the people we can recall. “Putting it another way, it’s the number of people you would not feel embarrassed about joining uninvited for a drink if you happened to bump into them in a bar.”
So the reality is, we probably really can only have ~100-250 meaningful relationships at any one time.
That being said, you these people maybe acquaintances, long lost classmates from high school, colleagues, or perhaps fellow team-mates on your football team. At least on reflection, i think we sort of realise how expensive relationships are; in terms of time. The reality is you probably spend ½, to 6, and 75% to the ~25 people, people who i would label now as friends.
If we’re interested in our close friends, the people who we would call if our car broke down on a saturday night, then we’re down to probably around 6 people; these are our close friends.
So from these numbers, jumping from 1500, to 100-250, to 30, and 6. we can see the exponential different in each circle of relationships. How does this all change when we enter a serious relationship?
Let’s now consider close relationships. When we’re single, we generally have six close friends who we would spend half of our time with.
When you enter a serious relationship something interesting happens. in Dunbar’s research he found that people in general lose two friends. Since of course, you now have less time for these close friends, people who you would spend 50% of your free time with.
I’m sure my experiences with watching people in and out of relationships, it is quite frankly understandable and reasonable that these things happen. I certainly hope that I am not unique in this scenario of experiencing these aspects. I hope people won’t look at this and say, well this is the perfect excuse to say well we don’t have to know care about our friends, since it is only normal for them to disappear or leave our life. Perhaps we should consider how better can we improve the quality of time that we spend with our friends given the increasingly less time we have.
Perhaps with all this in mind, how best could we improve the relationships we have with our friends. From research we can observe that to retain emotional closeness with females the ideal situation is to have conversation; to talk and listen. Whilst with males, the aim would be to do something, for example go to the pub.
As we’ve looked at the cognitive limits of the number of people we can remember being 1,500 people to the 150 friends and acquaintances we talk to infrequently to our 30 friends we talk to regularly, we realise that that number drops exponentially, demonstrating the increasing need for us to maintain close friendships, especially in the face time scarcity. Of course, with different people we have to approach them in different ways, but as broad strokes, remember to call your mothers, or go for a drink with your fathers. We may not be able to control the amount of time we get to spend with our friends, but we can certainly make it worthwhile.