The first move
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Most friendships don’t end because of a falling out. They end because both people are sitting there waiting for the other one to reach out first.
On July 6, 1957, a 15-year-old kid named Paul McCartney rode his bike to a church fair in Woolton, Liverpool.
He wasn’t supposed to be there. He had no reason to go. A school friend named Ivan Vaughan had mentioned that a local skiffle band called the Quarrymen was playing on the back of a flatbed truck behind St. Peter’s Church, and Paul figured he’d check it out. That’s it. No grand plan.
The band wasn’t great. The lead singer, a 16-year-old named John Lennon, kept making up lyrics because he couldn’t remember the real ones. But something about him was magnetic. He had swagger. He had presence. Paul noticed.
After the set, Ivan brought Paul backstage. If you can call a church auditorium with folding chairs “backstage.” John and his bandmates were slouched around, barely paying attention to this younger kid. Paul could have stood there awkwardly, made small talk, gone home. Nobody would have remembered.
Instead, he picked up a guitar, flipped it upside down because he was left-handed, and started playing Eddie Cochran’s “Twenty Flight Rock.” Then Gene Vincent. Then a Little Richard medley. The whole thing lasted maybe twenty minutes.
John Lennon later said: “That was the day, the day I met Paul, that it started moving.”
Two weeks later, Paul was in the band. Within seven years, they were the biggest act in the history of recorded music.
Here’s the thing I keep coming back to. Paul McCartney didn’t get discovered that day. He wasn’t plucked from obscurity by some talent scout. He showed up uninvited to a church fair and made the first move. He chose John Lennon before John Lennon chose him.
If Paul goes home after watching the set, there are no Beatles. That’s not an exaggeration. John and Paul lived in different neighborhoods, went to different schools, were nearly two years apart in age. There was no natural reason for them to cross paths again. The entire thing happened because a 15-year-old kid decided to walk up and play.
Initiative is a hell of a drug.
The Scoreboard
Most people don’t operate like that. Most people wait.
They wait to be invited. Wait to be introduced. Wait to be asked. And in their personal relationships, they do something even worse. They keep score.
You know what I’m talking about. You have a friend you haven’t talked to in a while. You’ve thought about reaching out. Maybe you even started typing a text. But then a thought crept in: “I was the last one to message. It’s their turn.”
So you put the phone down. And they’re across town doing the exact same calculation. Two people who like each other, both sitting in silence, both waiting for the other one to go first, because going first means you cared more visibly and that feels like losing.
Nobody talks about this scoreboard, but everyone keeps one. Who texted last. Who planned the last hangout. Who made more effort. It runs in the background of every friendship like a program you forgot to close, quietly draining the battery.
And it has one function: to make sure you never look like the person who needed the other person more.
That’s what’s really going on. It’s not about boundaries or self-respect or any of the language people dress it up in. It’s about protection. If I reach out first, and you respond a little slow, a little flat, now I know something I didn’t want to know. Now there’s an imbalance I can feel. So I just... don’t reach out. And the friendship slowly starves. And I tell myself it’s because we “grew apart,” which sounds a lot better than “I was too proud to send a text.”
The Man Who Sent 100,000
Theodore Roosevelt wrote over 100,000 letters in his lifetime.
Not formal presidential memos. Personal letters. To friends he hadn’t seen in years. To people he’d met once and found interesting. To his kids, with hand-drawn illustrations of the animals he saw while traveling. To his friend Henry Cabot Lodge, for 35 straight years, hundreds of letters about politics and books and Shakespeare and whatever else was on his mind.
This was the president of the United States. Father of six. Author of 35 books. He had less free time than anyone alive.
And he still reached out first. All the time. Relentlessly. To an almost unreasonable degree.
The result was one of the most fiercely loyal networks of friendships in American history. People loved Roosevelt. They really, genuinely loved him, in a way that went way beyond politics. And it wasn’t because he was the most charming person in the room, although he usually was. It was because he showed up. In writing. Unprompted. Over and over.
He made people feel remembered. And they never forgot him for it.
100,000 letters. That’s roughly seven a day for forty years.
Most of us won’t send seven texts this week to people we actually care about.
Why It Matters More Than You Think
Researchers at the University of Kansas found it takes roughly 200 hours of shared time to develop a close friendship. But those 200 hours don’t magically appear. Somebody has to initiate every single one. Somebody has to text. Somebody has to plan. Somebody has to say “Thursday works, I’ll pick the place.”
The people with the richest relationships aren’t the most charismatic. They’re the most willing to go first. That’s the entire secret. It’s not complicated. It’s just uncomfortable.
Because going first means you might find out the other person doesn’t match your energy. And that’s a real risk. But the alternative is worse. The alternative is two people who both want to connect, both interpreting the other’s silence as disinterest, both slowly drifting apart over a misunderstanding that a single text could fix.
That’s happening in your life right now with at least two or three people. You know their names.
The 10-Second Rule
When someone crosses your mind, act within 10 seconds.
Don’t check the message thread to see who texted last. Don’t calculate whether it’s your turn. Don’t draft something clever. Just send it.
“Hey. Been thinking about you. How’s everything?”
“Saw this and thought of you.” [attach the thing]
“We should get dinner. Thursday work?”
That’s a 10-second commitment that might become the best conversation you have all month. Do it once a day for thirty days and watch what happens. Not as a strategy. Just as a person who decided to stop keeping score.
Some people won’t match your energy. Fine. Now you know. That’s useful information, and it frees you to invest where it actually flows both ways.
But most people will respond with something you didn’t expect: relief. Because they were sitting behind their own scoreboard, waiting for you to go first, and your text was the thing that broke the stalemate.
Your Move
Paul McCartney didn’t wait for John Lennon to find him. Roosevelt didn’t wait for his friends to write first. The people with the deepest relationships, the ones everybody else envies, are almost never the ones who sat around hoping to be chosen. They chose.
You thought of someone while reading this. The friend you keep meaning to call. The person who always reaches out to you and you’ve never returned the favor. Someone you miss but haven’t said so.
Send the text. It takes ten seconds.
You already know who it’s for.
Thank you for reading,
— Scott
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This is so helpful, truly, thank you