What do you have in common?

I had lunch with an old friend a few weeks back. We hadn’t seen each other for over 10 years and I was really looking forward to catching up.

When we used to work together, back in corporate world, we had been really good friends. We knew the same people, watched the same TV shows, went out for drinks – nothing special, just the usual things that friends do. We shared a lot over the 5 years or so we worked for the same company.

After we’d done the polite bit, you know ‘you haven’t changed a bit’, asked about respective families, and gossiped about mutual colleagues and where they were now, the conversation started to run dry ….. and we were still waiting for our meals to arrive!

I couldn’t believe how little we now had in common. He didn’t seem to have moved on at all – it was as if he was stuck in a time warp (I swear he was even telling the same old jokes!). I know he won’t be reading this so can safely say that, unfortunately, I found his company really boring! Oh dear.

As business owners we have a lot to learn and need to keep on learning and changing if we’re to succeed. Those around us must find it unnerving when we suddenly develop what seems like a completely new vocabulary.

It’s important to remember why you’re in business – who you’re working so hard for. Take care to keep communicating with the people that matter in your life. Involve them if they want to be involved. It won’t matter how successful you become if you lose precious relationships along the way.

For my birthday a couple of weeks back, I had two cards with computers on them – do you think they were trying to tell me something?