#13 – Working with friends – The dangers of mixing money and friendship

Transcript

[00:00:00] All right, welcome to the Becoming Great podcast. I’m enjoying my morning here with the founder of Great Eric bergland and my good friend Eric Berman. How are you doing today?

[00:00:13] I’m very good. Thank you. I thought you were going to say you’re a good friend. Oskar’s is I know your dog in the room. But then you saved it and gave me some love. And I really appreciate how you’re doing.

[00:00:24] You’re welcome. Oscar’s kindergarten. So you hear my number one for now. Now they say that I’m good.

[00:00:34] The most valuable antique in the entire world is a good friendship. However, if I was giving a Rembrandt, I would switch you out. Eric, I’m sorry. Thank you.

[00:00:52] Ok. And if if you listening, have a an old Backstreet Boys poster and you want to trade it for e-mail of the Richmond podcast at great dot com.

[00:01:04] And if it’s signed, you’ll get to Yemens.

[00:01:14] We’ve been friends for 10 years or so and still we work together. Is that something that you generally think is a good idea? OK.

[00:01:30] So. The reason we’re doing this, this podcast today is that we have then, of course, our first real quarter and we’ve been going into some challenges like every business does, and we realize that those challenges become very different because we are close friends to each other. A lot of them in the organization. And we want to explore if that’s a good or a bad thing and something that I, as you mentioned very often, give us an advice to other entrepreneurs out there starting up. The best thing is don’t hire your friends. And I realize that’s pretty much like being a parent, drinking and getting drunk every weekend and telling my kids not to drink. It’s not really going to work. So they’re probably going to drink anyway. So that’s what I’m doing. I’m hiring more of them. Are my friends more or less. And I think it’s a really, really bad idea to hire friends, at least historically. And yet I do it. So it’s it’s going to be interesting to explore the the ups and downs with this.

[00:02:48] What do you think about this? About working with friends. Yeah.

[00:02:56] Well, I definitely do enjoy it now, since we are it’s working well for us, but I can definitely see why that is being given given as an advice.

[00:03:06] I can see a lot of problems coming up with that. And I think we’re going to explore those things in in this podcast now.

[00:03:25] Someone once told me that a friendship. It’s like two ropes that you splice together and together, those two rope, rope, ropes become very strong like strong friendship and rope could be used to make a friendship stronger or it could be used to strangle someone or maybe hang your beautiful, beautiful. And you have been created a company creating a company, Catina Media, that have went from two employees to try to 50 employees in a short time. And you had some friends working to do during that time. Have you experienced some personal stories that I haven’t heard about?

[00:04:08] About what? That like? Yes.

[00:04:11] So I have a lot of situations where I’ve been working with with friends, and that sometimes ended very well and sometimes very, very badly. And the first thing that that comes to mind is, I don’t know, five years ago. I’ll tell this as a story. So I’m sitting there with my friend and I I feel that I have this grinding doubt within me. We’ve been friends for 10 years and I’ve always trusted him. Now I don’t. And I want to trust him. I want to believe him.

[00:04:56] You’re sitting in a meeting or sort of evaluation where it would be?

[00:05:00] Yeah, we’re in the in the office in kind of peer evaluation or is going over what’s been happening lately. And the reason why we’re in this meeting is that he has been working with us for. I don’t know, six months or a year now. And he has been sick a lot or he’s been on sick leave a lot. And many times he has to. One day this week. One day another week. And it’s happening very regularly. And I feel that I want to believe that he has been sick. I want to believe that he needs my support. But I’m gotten into a situation where I feel I think that he’s taken advantage of me. And if we wouldn’t have been working together. If he wouldn’t get a salary from a company that I had, I would obviously believed him when he said it was sick. I would have been there to support him. I would wanting to help him. I want to figure these things out and I want to be that person right now as well. But somehow I feel my emotions tell me that he’s lying. He is taking advantage of me taking these kind of things. And to this day, I don’t know if he was doing that, but this is what money can do to a relationship and where it happens. And every time I met him, I felt that I had doubts within me. I didn’t really trust him.

[00:06:28] It affected everything around that friendship and.

[00:06:35] I’m not sure if this story doesn’t end very bad, nothing happens after this. I’ve heard about stories where I really lost friendships that with tales and I’ve gotten very close, close friends from working together. So there are both sides of this coin. But I think that this is the middle ground and that happens in a lot of the relationships when you work together that it’s because you put money into the thing. It raises doubts and questions that. And in our relationship, they’re mine and his. It became like a constant presence of a dark cloud like, you know, it can start raining at any time, but it can also stay sunny. Mm hmm.

[00:07:21] I don’t know.

[00:07:23] So I think that this is it’s a good example of what I think had happened in pretty much every situation where I’ve been working with friends at various degrees. So it’s easy to say that it’s good or bad to do it work with people. But this has been a part that bothers me the most because it’s constant presence. And yeah.

[00:07:51] All right.

[00:07:54] It could be very frustrating when you don’t know if someone is taking advantage of you or if there’s actually something going on where the correct response could be empathy. But in this situation, how do you think the way you acted towards him were different when you were friends before, or if you weren’t if you if you weren’t friends with him, but would you have them? But you didn’t. Know.

[00:08:24] It’s a good question.

[00:08:29] I’ve been in those situations as well, and I don’t think that I’ve acted very differently. I’ve probably been a bit more harsher and controlling the things because I want to believe in my friends more than I want to believe in someone. I don’t know that well, and if someone would have been sick in a pattern like that and me really questioning if they are sick, I might have asked for more proof of it from a doctor or things like that to erase that trust.

[00:09:03] So I am hearing you say then that you have more expectations that a friend would be loyal and therefore you get more disappointed if you suspect that they’re not.

[00:09:14] Yes, definitely.

[00:09:16] Definitely. And at the same time, I want to be more loyal as well. So I feel more trust in them. And that means that I get more disappointed if if they are not living up to that trust. And at the same time, I want to be more trusting. So I don’t want to question their word in the same way as I would otherwise. I don’t want to say, Okay, Emil, I don’t believe you. You need to bring a doctor’s notice because of have relationship. We know each other. I want to believe your word. But if you were someone I didn’t know and you came to me and you were sick one day a week for two months, not two weeks in a row, but actually just sick here. Sick. They’re sick. They’re just happened to be after the weekend. Very often then that would be a completely different thing. I would have challenged you a lot more if we didn’t know each other. Say it works both ways where these kind of situations of trust gets a lot more challenging.

[00:10:13] So do you think that could be the other way then, if you have trust? It could be easier to challenge. Like what? What is actually going on here? That there would be more incentive for you to care about? How is this person really feeling?

[00:10:33] It’s a beautiful way of looking at it.

[00:10:39] Now, when you when you put it like that, I feel that would have happened today. I would probably have been handling it a lot better and I would have been able to use the trust to the situations advantage and actually challenge it more and question it more and be more prescient when this happened. I did not have having enough tools to do that and didn’t know how to checks that are very interesting to see that I might just be more suitable to work with friends today than I used to be because I could take that. Yeah, that’s an interesting point. I hadn’t thought about it that way. I’ve always I’ve just seen the negatives of this. I think mixing money and friendships is is a challenge. Well, I know it’s a challenge, and I think that’s it’s a tricky thing that sometimes you want to avoid and sometimes you can’t avoid and sometimes you don’t. What’s your experience with with mixing money and friendship?

[00:11:49] I just for a story that came to mind just now. Well, I haven’t thought of before.

[00:11:58] It’s actually the opposite story, it’s how money can build friendship. I have a poker I’m a professional poker player. That’s my background. And I was playing back in the day, so I was playing in Italy and many years ago to get even get started playing in Italy. You had to know Italian people. You had to set up accounts. I needed tax codes or super complex. So instead, you could rent accounts from Italian people. And in Italy, there is a mafia, which means that you can get fucked. And indeed, we did get fucked so good.

[00:12:38] And they get involved with the Italian mafia. I think that’s it sounds like a brilliant idea to start a friendship.

[00:12:44] Yes, but the mafia wasn’t the friendship. So the friend was the guy. The Swedish guy. His name is Leo. And these are awesome guy. Thanks. So I’ll use his name. And so Leo, he was setting up the accounts and lo and behold, the Italian guys scammed us and they run away with thirty thousand euros. And before this happened, I lost 30000 euros of my money. And before this happened, we agreed that I was the one taking the risk here. So Leo had agreed to see the risk and the guy run away with $30000. And Leo felt that thanks to him, hooked me up with this shady man, that it was partly his responsibility that the money got lost. So he decided to pay. I managed to get 10000 back from this guy and the rest of the 20000 or so Leo paid me with his own money, even though he didn’t have to.

[00:13:47] He took full responsibility out of nowhere and he didn’t have to.

[00:13:52] And you didn’t expect that at all to expect that at all? I really did. And how did you feel when that happened? Like the trust is 100 percent with this guy. No. You know, I could do business with him. I could trust him so much with money because he couldn’t win anything from doing that.

[00:14:13] So I’ll always have respect for him.

[00:14:17] So that was a in a way where money could very much build strong friendship and working and working together to hear those stories.

[00:14:28] Really cool.

[00:14:31] Yeah. And I can see a lot of challenges coming with. I mean, poker is a shady industry in itself in many ways at least that I was I was looked upon and I can see this this happening a lot. Did did you get scammed at other times as well? Oh, yeah.

[00:14:48] Oh, yeah. That’s part of the game. It is part of it. I think. So I think you should. I think on average, a poker player gets scammed for about 5 percent of their lifetime winnings. So if you’re up against fair funds that you’re unlucky, if you’re under that, you’re you’re like, yeah, I think I’ve been pretty lucky, actually.

[00:15:10] Okay. I think we’re taking the risk of ending up talking about things that people can’t relate to by going too deep into to poker. But stay on top. Do you have any do you have any all other scam stories that ended worse to get some perspective?

[00:15:22] Yeah. As well I do actually. OK. Stick on poker. Yeah. Certain. Sorry. Who does? And if you don’t like poker because m.ed really does it to me, it doesn’t really matter if it’s poker.

[00:15:34] Well what it highlights is the risk and reward of being financially involved with friends. So also back in the day when I was playing poker, I was staking one of my friends. And would you explain what that is? Sure.

[00:15:52] I suppose so. Staking is when someone else is playing with your money. You’re basically lending someone money to play for it. But if they lose, they don’t have to pay back. But if they win, you will get part of their profits. Yeah. So you’re kind of investing in another player, in a sense.

[00:16:08] Yeah. So they take no risk and they get a percentage of their winnings. Maybe in this case I think it was half of the winnings. This guy would get. And this guy is a friend with me and a friend with our entire friend group of maybe like 30 people. So it’s it’s a. It’s involved with all of my friends and I. I didn’t actually call him. So what he did was that he took the money that he had won in my account and he shipped bumped, which man means intentionally lost to one of his own accounts.

[00:16:48] So basically stole the money that way.

[00:16:51] Yeah. So he wants to get out of paying me 50 percent of the winnings. So he intentionally transferred lost money to his own accounts.

[00:17:00] I guess it would look like he had lost to someone else. Yeah, he was actually the one on the other side. Yeah, exactly. So in that way you wouldn’t be able to see that he had lost. Yeah. Well that it was something fishy.

[00:17:11] So he would just say that he had to go on break even to me. And then he would take all the profits instead of 50 percent.

[00:17:18] Okay. So you you are actually G.J. had agreed that you would get 50 percent of the profits and because he wanted to avoid that, he ended up on break even losing the money to his son.

[00:17:30] Yeah, exactly. How did you figure that out? Well, he got caught. So the site found it. So they saw that he they saw. They reviewed the play and saw that it looked like ship dumping. So my account got investigated for cheating because you’re not allowed to ship it up like that. So this is the site called him. And then he had to call me and confess.

[00:17:54] Yeah. See, you had hard evidence as well. It wasn’t just a theory. Yes, he had made it saying he admitted that he had shipped home because he had to.

[00:18:03] It was obvious.

[00:18:04] So what happened after this? But I didn’t know what to do. I understand that.

[00:18:11] And the fucked up thing, I think, is that there was very few repercussions for him. Well, I have Sarah trust for him these days, but I haven’t told anyone about this. This is the first time I tell this story to anyone.

[00:18:28] Why didn’t you tell anyone about it?

[00:18:32] Well, I told him what I thought about it. And if this was today, I would have been much, much, much harsher. And I think I would have told more friends.

[00:18:47] So how did you feel about this? Did you feel guilty or shame yourself for this? Why didn’t you talk about it?

[00:18:53] I felt betrayed and I felt like. I do know I don’t want to trust people anymore. Leicester’s proven trustworthiness. So I need in order to invest money in someone. I’m. I have. I have evidence that someone could have scammed me back tissues not to over manytimes to be able to trust with money like this.

[00:19:24] So would you say that this story still haunts you in a way then the job harder trusting people than you would if this wouldn’t not happen?

[00:19:33] Well, I’m not sure if haunting is the right word because it actually seems like it seems legit to think this way because obviously these things happens. So I’m not asking. To me, it’s more like I’m not that gullible.

[00:19:49] Maybe when you say gullible, what you mean.

[00:19:57] Yes, assuming that all people are nice and would take advantage. So I guess now I need trustworthiness. Assume that if not, I want things to be. I want to minimize the risks of being scammed.

[00:20:15] Yeah, I mean, that makes sense. So are you guys friends today or did this impacts the friendship boost for you?

[00:20:21] We’re friends. We are less friends because of that. Because.

[00:20:26] Because my trust is gone and.

[00:20:33] Yeah, I. I haven’t told anyone else because I didn’t want a. I guess he didn’t want was like risk and split the whole friendship group. I’m pretty sure I would have today, but this was like seven years ago.

[00:21:02] Yeah, I understand. And I’m not sure if I would have told anyone either. It’s a very tricky position to be in. Like, do I want to be that guy that says these things or do I want to be the guy who was naive enough to get betrayed? Or what will people think of me if if this is happening? And at the same time, I’m guessing that you wanted revenge, innocence.

[00:21:41] I guess what I’m the way I handled that situation didn’t really force him to learn from his mistakes because I think fair repercussions should have been more severe. It’s a really, really, really shitty thing to do to a friend because this was a lot of money as well. I think it was somewhere between five and ten thousand euros. Wow.

[00:22:14] It’s well, it’s safe to say, then, that mixing money and friendships are challenging for sure. Yeah, I think that’s the biggest challenge you can put on friendship.

[00:22:24] Well, maybe you could phrase it like this, that mixing money and friendship shows who the real friends are. I like that.

[00:22:35] Yeah.

[00:22:36] Someone told me once, and I remember who it was, but that when when you put money on something, it becomes more of what it already is. So if you put money on something good, it becomes better. If you put money on something with bad intention. It becomes a lot worse, you know. So it’s kind of like gasoline. I’m on a good fire or a bad fire. And that’s probably what happens here as well. So if you if you have two friends that really, really trust each other and you put money in between them, then they create Google. You know, if you have two friends that might believe they trust each other, well, one person is not trust trustworthy. And you put money between them. You create a war.

[00:23:19] I think it’s my mom always says that the opportunity makes the thief. Yeah. When running a business, it’s important to not even give people opportunities. So have you been thinking that when you created Catina or did you did you go blindly trust until proven otherwise? That’s kind of route.

[00:23:41] I would say that eyes still go with blind trust. In many ways, and what you said before about people having to prove their trust before you’re trusting them in a sense. It’s. It goes against the way I want to look at the world. I want to look at in a complete difference, a different aspect. I want to trust until proven different. So I want to start from a different place. And that has led to me being taken advantage of in a lot of situations where there with the company from small things like so we had a a soda fridge in the office where there were free sodas and free Red Bull. And one day someone just took all the Red Bull with them home and they were free. So they filled the bag and they went home. And it’s like, what do you don’t realize that you’re stealing from us? And there were. But they’re free. They know we’re paying for them. So you can drink them in the office. Not so you can bring them home, mix them with what can have a nice weekend.

[00:24:57] And you had another situation where we still don’t have support.

[00:25:03] So when someone is doing something like that, to me, that is the same mindset that would ship, dump and steal those five to ten thousand euros.

[00:25:15] It’s just not to have another opportunity, just to say it’s the same characteristic. So I would lump those two instances in the same category these days if I was looking at this if because I think if that person had the opportunity that my friend was presented to, he would do the same thing.

[00:25:37] It is likely it’s very likely the biggest the biggest difference that I would say to see here is that I as a founder of a company, I am not able to separate myself from the company. So whatever someone does to the company, to me it feels like they’re doing it to me, my friends. And this guy took the Red Bull. They separate me from the company to me to them. In my experience, they see the company as some separate authority entity like taking from school. And I see myself at school. And that means that they in my experience, they have a lot easier time of taking from the company than it would have taken from me. They don’t see how these two align. Or maybe it’s me who don’t see how it’s separate, but I don’t believe that that guy would ever go in and take a twenty four Red Bulls out of my fridge in my apartment. That would a number that’s far away, but it’s just tricking.

[00:26:44] Take whatever you want in the fridge. Oh yeah.

[00:26:50] I mean we’ve had worse situations where people have stolen money, where they have this claim that this flight ticket for some conference, both a lot more expensive than it was and it dumped on all kinds of these these things.

[00:27:06] And I do agree with you that it becomes easier to be dishonest when it’s just number on a screen. So, first of all, I don’t think that my friend would have gone into my apartment and steal something for 5000 euros. But that doesn’t feel like real money the same way.

[00:27:26] No, it’s it’s weird. It’s digital. Kids, it’s tricky once you start combining friendship and companies. When I looked about it, the hardest things I mean, when people have stolen from the company in one way or another, that’s been very small things and rare occasions that happen every now and then. So I’m happy to start the trust still. I haven’t been that. I haven’t had the same sense of betrayal as as you described. But I think the most chilling things when working with friends has been when I’m setting their salaries on when I’m actually responsible for their quality of life, innocence. And that’s something that I think is really challenging between the two of us, that I’m I’m setting your salary. Ultimately, if I said this or that would happen, or if I say you can’t work here, then then you can’t. And I think having that between people, I think that we deal with it very well and we share the same values and we share a lot of things. But I’ve really seen how painful that is and how strong is that is for a relationship with previous employees and previous friends that I’ve been working with. Especially like when if they get a raise or not, will determine if they have to take the bus to the job where they can drive a car.

[00:29:03] And it determines if you like them. If you’re proud of them.

[00:29:07] Yeah. Determines self-worth and is and projected from you.

[00:29:13] Yeah. Which makes it a weird power dynamic.

[00:29:17] You have friendships should be equal. That’s a great, great friendship as an equal to friendship. And by definition, this isn’t equal. And just as it’s hard to separate myself from the company in any other way, it’s the same thing here. It’s it’s very hard for me to separate myself as a friend from myself, as an employer. When working with a friend, it makes it very challenging. And I would say that those has been the most challenging times. And you know what? One of the situations where where I actually lost a friend from this and we’d barely spoken since was that we had so different approach to what salary, what what we had agreed upon. So what happened was that he started working for us at a fairly low salary. I don’t remember like say two thousand years, month. And we agreed that he could start on that salary because he should learn and moving forward. And then we would renegotiate the salary six months later. And he moved from Sweden to Malta for this. So he was living in Sweden and we hadn’t defined what reviewing the salary meant. So then when six months of it was time to review his salary, my intention was, OK, let’s raise it from two thousand two two thousand five hundred, which was a good increase in my head.

[00:30:48] And his impression was we raise it from two thousand to four thousand because that’s what he consider that he was worth. And to me, that was crazy. And to him, it was crazy that I didn’t think that way. So we were so, so far away from each other and we hadn’t clearly defined this at the beginning. So he felt betrayed by me, which I understand because I hadn’t at all clarified what renegotiating mountains. And he felt that he had moved from Sweden to Malta for this opportunity, and that he had worked underpaid for six months and doing me a favor. And I felt that I was doing him a favor by teaching him something that he didn’t know and bringing him down to this opportunity. And we didn’t manage to sort this out. And I take big part of this and I learned from this that, OK, if I’m getting someone to move from somewhere, I can’t use a loose phrase like we will renegotiate that. We will look at it six months later. I have to define that somehow, because now, you know, he felt that I had to use his trust and he felt that I used misused his and that he misused my trust. So this is just one of these situations where we didn’t manage to properly fix the.

[00:32:09] It’s tricky.

[00:32:12] You know, you and I ever have had conversations lately in private about the importance of thinking. We’ve talked about this in the last episode. We talked about the importance of for you as a leader and for anyone that wants to be a leader. But the words you use are easy to understand. And most importantly, worth their weight in gold. So if you as a leader say something’s going to happen, it needs to happen. And if it can’t be shorter, it needs to happen. There needs to be some kind of frame, some kind of.

[00:32:48] Okay, exactly. This will happen unless something else happens. So do you think. I feel like these ideas are connected. Would you like to read Reizei what I said?

[00:33:10] Yes. So basically what you’re saying that as the leader trust becomes super, super important. Yeah. And that means that my word becomes very important that that’s trustworthy. Yeah. And if I say something and it doesn’t happen, that will damage my trust in all other areas as well. Yeah. It will not just impact that specific situation, but it will impact my word in every other situation as well.

[00:33:38] Yeah. And if you two guys are friends outside of work, that means that your trust in everything goes down. So that can really ruin friendships. I think I have an example of of something similar. So I just I’m right now I’m helping your brother because he’s creating. He’s doing a project. And I think the product that Eric brought, Eric’s brothers is doing it. So it’s a great project. And I want to help him make this real. And I want to help your brother develop as a person, too. And I have some free space in my life, so I have offered him to help him with the project. Not Cahir, how the. I help you with a prop project. How vague that is and how loosely that can be interpreted.

[00:34:31] Yes, that’s like we will really get renegotiates.

[00:34:34] Yes. And how much opportunity there is for disappointment. And if there’s disappointment, there would be less trust. Yeah. So instead, now I had this recommendation from a friend and he said, don’t tell him that you’ll help him with a project. Say that for two hours per week, for two months. I will help you with this project and then I’ll see if I still want to help. But you can’t have any expectations, so you set a start and finish. I think there’s a great way of doing it. Yeah. Because I think that’s one huge pitfalls. We’re working together that there is a mismatch in expectations.

[00:35:15] Yeah. So yeah, that would have been the equal of saying we will ring renegotiate this in six months. And if you’ve done a really good job, this is the maximum we can read. Yeah, well that would have been similar.

[00:35:30] Yeah, for sure. And for you and me for example. Because a lot of my old cars, meaning my goals for this quarter is stuff where I learn things that will be useful for great in the future. So you are investing money in me as a person now. Six months back, I wanted to have kids. This has been looking like this for a while now. And I wanted to look at what are your expectations of me? How long do you expect that I will stay in this company and re contribute because of dedication? But I have had an opportunity to get and I think not having those conversations, you and I were pretty much on the same page there, but that to me was a huge opportunity for disappointment. If you expected me to stay in for 10 years and I expected to. Well, if something better shows up, then yeah.

[00:36:29] And that would have affected our whole friendship. I’d celebrate.

[00:36:34] Yeah. If if let’s say let’s say this year. At the moment mainly investing in you. I’m learning on the way. But the main thing is investing in you for the future. And you would just resign from one day to another. And I had expected you to stay on for 25 years. That would it would be very hard to to come over that pain and be just hanging out like friends.

[00:36:58] Yeah.

[00:37:02] It’s an interesting aspect, and I think this goes for for for any relationship, as I just saw an episode of the Big Bang Theory and this sitcom the other day where Penny and whatever his name is Len Leonard Leonard, they’re married and they’ve been married for a few years. And suddenly it comes up in the conversation that she doesn’t want to have kids and he really wants kids. And they’ve never spoken about this before, which is this huge disappointment for him and super reasonable. And of course, he has the right to say she doesn’t want kids. But this should probably be a conversation coming up three years before you get married and not three years after. Hmm. And it just raises the importance of touching upon these very important questions, regardless if it’s working together or getting kids.

[00:38:02] So we have been highlighting some dangers now of working with friends. A lot of them are disappointment for mismatching expectations and also that trust can be breached. So I would like to touched a bit on the upsides of this. So are you ready to move on from sort of the premature court? I if we can close the loop. So there are some obvious things. For example, you and I are friends. And in a couple of weeks, I’m going down to Malta and we’re going to do boot camp where we focus on finance for 10 days. We’re just hanging out. And all we’re going to do is talking about finance. That’s obviously a lot more fun if you’re friends than if you’re just someone you’re working with. Right. So, you know, you work with someone that cares about you. You all the chill time kind of becomes productive. You and I go out for lunch or walk and then I have some ideas for. Great. Those things are not obvious. But have you seen anything that might be less obvious as an advantage?

[00:39:06] Yes. First thing that comes to mind is what you touched upon earlier. How how much you can do if there is trust, if there is a proper trust in someone. You can have deeper and more meaningful relationships and communication and actually understand each other on a deeper level. And we are working a lot with feedback and we’re brutal in our feedback. A lot of times where if you see something with my personality that you believe hurts me as a leader, you will actually step up and tell me even if it’s very hard. And the first thing that comes to mind is this workshop we did in in Stockholm about public speaking and you and spirits also worked in the company. You had looked at this speech that I did on a stage and it was filmed and you went over it minute by minute. And I was actually very proud of that speech. I was very happy with my my performance. And you were not and especially not a couple of segments where I think you said the word that I discussed you here because it was very strong words. And what what what what’s going on here with you? Can you say what? What did I say? What happened? OK.

[00:40:40] Let me think back.

[00:40:43] Mm hmm. Yeah. There was a harsh word.

[00:40:47] And so what happened was that in one segment of this presentation, you talked about charity. And I thought from my perspective that you came from a supermom energy. But I’m a Superman for doing this. And I would have loved to see a more humble energy in that moment. And I thought for Eric doesn’t see this himself and it has to go. There needs to be like a head shot, her ego head shot. And it’s going to be painful, because I also know that the part back then in your ego that wanted to be Superman didn’t want to see this. So it wasn’t going to go easy. So. That was painful, but I felt like that harsh word was neither there just kind of snap out of it. And this is just where you were just shocked. It was like your reality was scattered and she didn’t know if you could trust me. And it was really, really oh was so intense. I actually think it was more intense for me in a sense, because, you know, I knew what was going on in your head when you were sitting there frustrated.

[00:42:09] I take the ball here and I’ll give my perspective and. Oh, yeah, sure. I’ll take it back to you. So, yeah, we will go through this segment. And now I agree with you, but I really didn’t see this. I felt that I was super humble and very good and very humble. I was really proud of my performance. And I was setting a place where I expected you to say kind things and you were super, super harsh. And as you said, my my ball was scattered and I felt farmers, I couldn’t physically speak. It’s felt like if I start talking right now, I’m going to cry.

[00:42:49] I felt humiliated. I felt betrayed. I felt heated. I felt horribly. And.

[00:43:02] I remember I said I’m just gonna need a minute here. And I started crying and I lie down on this this couch and I saw you looking at me and. She looked. You look pale. It’s like, well, it’s felt like you didn’t know what’s going on right now. If you want to continue from there.

[00:43:28] I love how you describe that. I couldn’t have described what was going on inside of you. But this is what I suspected. And like intensity in me was it was was one of the more intense moments I’ve had. And to me, it felt like I had to risk the entire friendship to say this. And I was risking the entire friendship. And that is where the tension came from and everything in me. Yes. Wanted to say what to say. Take it back. You know, make this smooth again. Say something nice. Like give him a compliment. And just sitting in that silence was one of my more painful moments in our friendship ever. I would say not taking it back again.

[00:44:15] And you didn’t.

[00:44:15] And I mean, this has resulted in me trusting that you will tell things to me at even when they’re super painful, and that I trust your judgment to do so and to care for me that much that you’re willing to sit through that pain. Mm hmm. Because looking back, I agree. I think that you were spot on. And I would not have seen it. And since we were friends, I am very close friends. That is I listened to you and I took this in. And I I felt like I do trust your judgment enough to evaluate this. If we wouldn’t have been friends, let’s say you were some coach I had hired. Mm hmm. I would probably not have been sad. I would probably stand up, scream at him and tell him to get the fuck out of my workshop. Because the lack of trust. Mm hmm. And yeah, it boosted my learning in the harsh but then the loving way. So let’s say we weren’t friends. How would you have reacted in this situation if if you didn’t if you were a coach that I had hired just to be there?

[00:45:35] You know, I think this highlights one of the huge advantages of working with a friend like this is that I think unless I was the kind of coach that just loves that frictions, I’m I’m sure there are coaches like that out there. But I think many coaches wouldn’t care about you enough to be willing to sit in that fire. And I think, like you said, if you didn’t trust me enough, you wouldn’t be able to take it in. No, I mean, so friendship is needed to care enough to do something and then trust enough to let it be a part of you.

[00:46:24] So to sum this up a bit, we could say that one of the huge upsides of working together as friends are that it can increase honesty and increase learning, that we can actually learn together and we can care for each other. And it increases the value of feedback because we know that there is a love and trust coming with it. Mm hmm.

[00:46:54] Would you like to add anything to that today? Sum it up. I thought you summed it up well, and we’re coming towards the end of this this episode.

[00:47:03] So do something to add before we sum up what new thing we have. We have learned today.

[00:47:10] You know, one thing that strikes me is so I mentioned before. I’ve given the advice, don’t hire your friends. A lot of times and I’d like to challenge that within myself and say, if you’re hiring friends, make sure to know why. Because when I when I look back at this, a lot of sorry. A lot of the friends that I’ve hired have been because it’s easy and it’s fun. So I’ve hired someone because I don’t need to go find someone else and recruit them. I know that I enjoy being around them, but I also know that if I were looking for someone, I could probably find someone who is more suitable for the job.

[00:48:08] This thing needs to get done. This person is right next to me. OK, let’s go.

[00:48:13] Exactly. And for me, that’s been the main reason why I’ve hired friends in the past. It’s easy and it’s fun and it’s a really shitty reason to hire anyone. If it’s a friend or not. If you’re if if the reason you’re doing, it’s easy and fun. Not that it’s the best person for the job. Then there’s a bad reason and looking now when I hired you. That’s short. It’s easy and fun. That’s part of it. But the main part of it is, is trust. And I believe that you are the perfect one for the job. I don’t think that I would find anyone who is better suited for what you’re doing with great. If I looked everywhere. Mm hmm. Thanks. So I think that’s a big difference that I hadn’t thought about before when when saying they don’t hire your friends. It’s very easy thing to say. And probably nine times out of ten it’s the right advice. But it’s because I think personally I’ve hired because it’s easy and fun. Not because it’s the best part of my job. But if I’m hiring a friend and I can honestly say to myself, it’s it’s because it’s the best person for the job. I’ve thought this through.

[00:49:26] It’s a completely different story. Mm hmm. I can feel it from you and sometimes. Do you believe in me so much? You believe in me more than I believe in myself.

[00:49:37] And that makes me want to rise to the levels that you see here. I really appreciate that. I really do. You’re a rock star, my friend. You just don’t know it. Thanks. Yeah, let’s. Would you like to sum up with me what we learned? OK. What I’ve learned is that I want to think about the situation with my friend that betrayed me more cause I hadn’t.

[00:50:11] I was very ill equipped to handle something like that back then, but I would like to make that into principles and know what I would do if something similar shows up again and I really think about what I could have done. So I realize I think more about how to handle betrayal with friends in the future. And this episode for me also highlight that because that story about my friend that had melted poker, I haven’t thought about that story for years. It just came to me now. It highlighted how much working together actually can strengthen our friendship. Yes, I think your my yours and mine friendship are way stronger because we have been working together for two years now than it would have been otherwise. So yeah, work is a great, great opportunity for friendship to.

[00:51:08] To me, when you when you bring up the thinking about what happened with this guy who betrayed you, it sounds like there is a conversation there that would be beneficial for you to have with him today when you are better equipped. I think you’re right. I’ll think about this. It’s a tough conversation to have, but it’s to me personally. For me, that would be something that I would probably hold grudge about for the rest of my life one way or another.

[00:51:44] I give, but it wouldn’t be big that it would feel like something in you issue when you’re walking. It’s like it’s a little annoying. It’s not going to kill you. It’s not going to bother you that much. But it’s it’s annoying.

[00:51:56] And it’s it’s a tough conversation and it’s opportunity to grow things into it for sure. Yeah. Yeah, the main thing I take with me is that last thing I said that the big reason here between the difference hiring a friend and hiring a friend. Mm hmm. So I think I’m gonna change my advice when giving it to people from don’t hire friends to saying don’t hire friends for the reason that it’s simple or that it’s fun to hire friends if they’re the perfect man for the job and fish have that big asterisk next to it. Mm hmm.

[00:52:38] I think that’s a really good note to end on. I think that’s a solid, solid principle. Let’s let’s say they’re on for the future. Saved. All right. And as always, remember, and if you some somehow get offered a Rembrandt for your friend, you should trade. And all right. We will see you next week.

[00:53:01] And if you have oh, and if you have any feedback for this for his podcast, if you think we suckers are great, do anything in between. I want to give us advice as circumspect. People want to be our friends. Send an email to podcast. Not great.

[00:53:15] Say goodbye, Eric. Goodbye. Goodbye.