A life coach offers tips on how to create social prosperity by building meaningful relationships

At the beginning of 2022, a message from a 28-year-old subscriber of my newsletter attracted my attention.

Rohan Venkatesh was a somewhat younger version of me in a sense. As the eldest son of two Indian immigrants, he grew up in a small town outside of Boston, Massachusetts, where he was academically excellent at the public high school. He visited the Northeasters University in Boston, closed the Magna Cum Laude conclusion and began his career in financing, taking on a prestigious role as an analyst at an investment bank. A few years of strong performance later, he joined an investment fund and saw that his responsibility increased. Just like I put his head off and worked the work with the deeply rooted conviction that the best would come.

Things seemed like a August morning in 2021 when everything changed.

That morning Rohan woke up to take over the world. He had just accepted a new job that had catapulted him into an offi ce in the heart of New York City. The morning started like everyone else: a little work, followed by a run with his mother, something that had become a bit ritual. Rohan felt a strange feeling in one of his legs on the escape. Suppose he was tired of workouts or lack of sleep, just went home and jumped on his next appeal call. In the middle of the call he noticed that he couldn't move his left arm. He called for help. A few minutes later, his condition had deteriorated so far that he asked for a wheelchair to enter the hospital. A team of doctors entered his room within 24 hours and delivered the breathtaking news: Rohan Venkatesh had a non -operational brain tumor.

In one day, his future went “from wonderfully infinite to terrible finally”.

The week in which he had excitedly marked his calendar when the beginning of his new job was the week when he started his radiation treatment. The following months were a blurring of hospital rooms, tests and treatments. He experienced six weeks of radiation that threatened to get life out of him. He experienced the following time when he was waiting for the news whether the treatment had stopped growing the tumor. He had endured rehabilitation months when he worked to regain his mental and physical strength, a process that continues to this day.

When Rohan turned to me and told his story, he had just stepped in what could best be described as a “posture pattern” with the tumor – it hadn't disappeared, but it had stopped growing. I was taken with his contagious, almost inexplicable optimism for a new life contract. In the course of the year I had the opportunity to spend time with him and we developed a friendship. We talked about the light of life in the darkness of death, the beauty of a life without the false preliminary walls that have perceived the durability in them. The Apple founder Steve Jobs expressed it well: “Almost everything -all external expectations, all proud, all fear of embarrassment or failure -these things only fall in view of death and only leave what is really important. Remembering that you will die is the best way I know to avoid the trap that you have something to lose. You are already naked. “

Rohan Venkatesh was already naked – and in view of the dark he found his light:

“I had the power to choose.”

An old Buddhist parable reflects this feeling. The Buddha asks a student: “If a person is hit by an arrow, is it painful?” The student nods. The Buddha asks: “If a person is hit by a second arrow, is that even more painful?” The student nods again. The Buddha then explains: “In life we ​​cannot always control the first arrow – the bad thing that happens. However, the second arrow is our reaction to the bad, and this second arrow is optional. “The first arrow is the negative event that hits it – chaos, the pain, the challenges and the complexity they threaten to derail them out of the game. It hits and it hurts. But the second arrow is your answer to the first, and as the parable teaches us, you can avoid being hit by the second arrow. It is completely in your control.

Rohan Venkatesh was determined not to be hit by this second arrow, even in view of the poor circumstances. “I had lost a lot. I had this (literal and figurative) sword of Damocles over my head. But every morning I had to decide what I should concentrate on. I was able to concentrate on things outside of my control. I could choose to sit alone in my misery. I could choose to scroll on social media and see people who do the things I could no longer do. Or I could decide to concentrate on things within my control. I was able to spend time with people who lift me up and inspire me to grow. I could choose to be the way you want to be nearby. ”

Life is so fragile, but no matter how fragile it is, every day we have the choice of how to live it. Every day is a fresh start, a new choice. Rohan's words about the selection of his people are particularly moving. You have many options in the course of your life, but you can find the most important choice you will ever make: Who will join for this wild, crazy journey? Who will you choose to give your energy, love and respect? Who will you spend your terribly final time with?

You need a connection to survive and thrive, for your health, your happiness and your fulfillment. You have to build a life in social wealth.

Their social wealth is built in three core columns:

• Depth: connection to a small circle of people with deep, meaningful bonds

• Width: Connection to a larger circle of people to support and belong to the self, either through individual relationships or through community, religious, spiritual or cultural infrastructure

• Meritians status: the sustainable respect, admiration and trust of their colleagues, which they receive on the basis of deserved status symbols.

This does not require a special starting point, family situation or financial means. However, it requires a feeling of urgency: the time horizon of our investment in social assets. In The good lifeThe bestseller book of the New York Times by Marc Schulz and Harvard Study of Adult Development Director Robert Waldinger emphasize the authors: “Like muscles, neglected relationships atrophy”. If we incorrectly accept an infinite time horizon for our relationships – which means that an investment in the future effectively agrees with an investment – we can find that many of these relationships have not returned until the point of the return.

If you skip these family trips in your twenties and thirties, you may not have the chance in your forties and fifties. If you don't check your friends in your thirties and forty forty, you may not be there if you are in your fifties and 1960s. If you do not agree with this local group in your 1940s and fifties, you do not have these connections in your sixties and 1970s. If you do not appear to your loved ones in your needs, you will not appear for you during your time.

Investing in their social assets through daily, deliberate actions to improve their social fitness is the clearest way to develop a life that extends to connections, from depth to width and beyond.

If you measure social prosperity as part of your new scoreboard, the three pillars – depth, width and the deserved status – offer a blueprint for the right action to build it up. By developing an understanding of these pillars and the high -quality systems that you influence you can begin to achieve the right results.

With permission The 5 types of wealth: a transforming guide to design your dream life, Sahil Bloom, Harper Business India.