In software design, one of the concepts that has been most formative to me is a pit of success. A pit of success describes a system that makes it easy to do the right things and hard to do the wrong things.
This shows up, for example, in the developer experience. If a new engineer joins a company and they try to get an app up and running to do development, is it common that things pretty much work out of the box? Or do they run into error after error and need help?
You can think of a pit of success literally as one of those gravity well spirals - a good system design will make it easy to fall into the pit.
There are pits of success everywhere
I’ve realized the pit of success concept applies far beyond coding. It is a measure of virtually anything that can be designed. From products, to cities, to an individual’s happiness. If there is a system that can be designed, how good it is can be viewed through the lens of whether or not it is a pit of success.
For example, I was traveling in Switzerland recently and it was so intuitive to get around. Signs were pointing to places I needed to go. There’s a plethora of public transportation. Everything is on schedule. It was hard to screw up. The Swiss have made it easy for people to travel around the country. I’m sure they have much lower rates of confusion than traveling in other countries. It’s a pit of success.
Because I’m traveling, I’ve been thinking recently about how this concept applies to friendships.
Applying the pit of success to friendships
The best example I’ve seen of designing friendships as a pit of success is Priya Rose getting a bunch of her friends to live in the same area as her. If a bunch of friends live near each other, they’d see each other all the time without even trying. It’d be really hard not to be friends. The convenience is manufactured intentionally.
Another good example is Nick Gray’s Two Hour Cocktail Party. It’s not just about hosting a single event, but a lifestyle of hosting. Hosting events makes it easy for people to be your friend and vice versa.
But these kind of fall to the wayside for long distance friends.
Long distance friendships are a pit of failure
Most of my friendships have been born out of convenience. I worked with someone. I went to school with them. I happened to see them regularly. That sort of thing. I think this is true for most people.
And when the convenience ended, most of those friendships, at least for me, were never the same.
Following each other on social media or being in group chats are all directionally good in terms of keeping threads of the friendship still intact. But actually feeling like a friendship is healthy, I think that requires regular interaction.
I call friends occasionally. But it can feel forced. It’s something I go out of my way to do. It’s not a pit of success. Most of my long distance friendships have drifted apart with this strategy.
Especially for men as we get older this anecdotally seems to be a common pattern, reinforcing that our current long distance friendships are not a pit of success.
Can I make my long distance friendships a pit of success?
The best times in my long distance friendships were when I’ve worked on side projects with friends. Even though what we were doing was “work”, it actually fostered the best friendships.
The ingredients of healthy friendships was there. It was convenient. We saw each other regularly. And because of that we were connected about what was going on in our daily lives.
So I think the key to making a pit of success for friendships is to foster convenience.
I want to have lots of friends who I’m connected with who it doesn’t feel I need to “catch up” with because we talk regularly.
Thinking out loud on some ideas:
- Setup a recurring meeting time to call a friend
- Setup recurring time for group of friends to get together
- Join some program together
I cringe a little at the thought of it because it feels robotic. Like I don’t have a recurring meeting to call my parents, shouldn’t I just call my friends sporadically?
But in the long run I think it is a decent idea and can treat it like a “coffee catch up”
I’ve done zoom meetings with friends. It was fun. I think this could be a good solution for groups
I personally do a lot of courses. Maybe I can be more mindful about things I do online that I could ask if any friends would want to tag along with me to do.
I’m not sure. I don’t have the answers. I will keep thinking about this and add more to the above list over time.