Alex Vasilevski asked:


Shy people can find it challenging to make friends especially if they are amongst people they don’t know. Would you like to have the skills to start conversation and make friends with total strangers? It is not so difficult and frightening as you think as with little effort and practice you can start right now. Even better once you learn how it will become second nature to you, each time it will be easier, you will overcome shyness and making friends will become pleasure instead of torture.

The first thing to understand is that your shyness can end up being a real gift. Why? Because most of the time, people would rather talk than listen. It is human nature. So if you want to learn how to make friends all you have to know is how to get people to talk to you. Now this is easy once you understand what people like to talk about the most. Themselves.

That’s right, if you want to get people to talk to you just ask them about themselves. Now, of course you are going to run into people who are more private and may be reluctant to do this. In this case, find out what they are interested in and get them to talk about it. Ask how long they have been doing it; ask why they started and why they like it so much. Then just let them go and listen. Knowing how to make friends is all about being able to keep a good conversation going. Get someone to talk about what they are interested in and you’ll hardly have to talk at all. Pretty soon, they’ll wonder the same thing about you. By then it ought to be easy to have your turn.

That said, let me give you a few tips on how to make friends by starting these kinds of conversations and keeping them going:

· Practice talking to people you don’t know:
You can start small and work your way up. Make it a goal today to say hello to at least one person who you don’t know. Do this for one week and then begin to also ask them “How are you today?” Once this becomes a habit, pick two people a day until you are saying this to everyone who you can. You will be surprised at how easy it becomes after some practice.

· Compliment them or ask for their advice

These are both powerful ways to earn someone’s respect right away. Of course, you may not always be in a position to ask someone for advice. That’s when you go for the compliment. Don’t worry about what you are going to say next, the conversation may not go anywhere and that’s OK. The point is that if you get into the habit of doing this that you are going to run into some people who will help move the conversation along.

These simple steps will make a world of difference; just imagine where you could be one year from now! So go ahead and work on putting them into practice. Soon you will learn that knowing how to make friends is something even shy people can learn.

Mike Samadi asked:


Doesn’t matter who you are, first you are a human. God’s creation, and God’s gift to the world. Whether you believe in him or not, we are all brought to this world (born) to serve our purpose, to live and experience the ups and downs of life, to cry and laugh, to share the same with others. You know that this life’s eternity is not promised to anyone. What we do on earth is the reflection of how we want to be treated. As we leave this world, some of us want to be remembered for our good deeds and some may not want to be remembered at all. The choices are yet our own.

Whether you believe in God or not, whatever your goal in life is, I hope the article below puts tears of JOY, LOVE and HOPE in your eyes, heart and mind. I hope it pushes you closer to your friends and brighten your days as you’ll do the same for others. My repeated message has been “Do to others as you want to be done to you.”

The following article has no mention of finances, credit repair or credit score. It is all about you, the God’s creation and your love for another human being.

Best of luck.

Mike Samadi

THE OLD FISHERMAN

Our house was directly across the street from the clinic entrance of Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore . We lived downstairs and rented the upstairs rooms to out-patients at the Clinic.

One summer evening as I was fixing supper, there was a knock at the door. I opened it to see a truly awful looking man. “Why, he’s hardly taller than my eight-year-old,” I thought as I stared at the stooped, shriveled body.

But the appalling thing was his face, lopsided from swelling, red and raw Yet, his voice was pleasant as he said, “Good evening. I’ve come to see if you’ve a room for just one night. I came for a treatment this morning from the eastern shore, and there’s no bus ’till morning.”

He told me he’d been hunting for a room since noon but with no success; no one seemed to have a room. “I guess it’s my face. I know it looks terrible, but my doctor says with a few more treatments…”

For a moment I hesitated, but his next words convinced me: “I could sleep in this rocking chair on the porch. My bus leaves early in the morning.” I told him we would find him a bed, but to rest on the porch.

I went inside and finished getting supper. When we were ready, I asked the old man if he would join us. “No thank you. I have plenty” And he held up a brown paper bag.

When I had finished the dishes, I went out on the porch to talk with him a few minutes. It didn’t take a long time to see that this old man had an oversized heart crowded into that tiny body. He told me he fished for a living to support his daughter, her five children and her husband, who was hopelessly crippled from a back injury.

He didn’t tell it by way of complaint; in fact, every other sentence was prefaced with thanks to God for a blessing. He was grateful that no pain accompanied his disease, which was apparently a form of skin cancer. He thanked God for giving him the strength to keep going.

At bedtime, we put a camp cot in the children’s room for him. When I got up in the morning, the bed linens were neatly folded, and the little man was out on the porch.

He refused breakfast, but just before he left for his bus, haltingly, as if asking a great favor, he said, “Could I please come back and stay the next time I have a treatment?

I won’t put you out a bit. I can sleep fine in a chair.” He paused a moment and then added, “Your children made me feel at home. Grownups are bothered by my face, but children don’t seem to mind.” I told him he was welcome to come again.

And on his next trip he arrived a little after seven in the morning. As a gift, he brought a big fish and a quart of the largest oysters I had ever seen. He said he had shucked them that morning before he left so that they’d be nice and fresh. I knew his bus left at 4 a.m. , and I wondered what time he had to get up in order to do this for us.

In the years he came to stay overnight with us there was never a time that he did not bring us fish or oysters or vegetables from his garden.

Other times we received packages in the mail, always by special delivery; fish and oysters packed in a box of fresh young spinach or kale, every leaf carefully washed. Knowing that he must walk three miles to mail these and knowing how little money he had made the gifts doubly precious.

When I received these little remembrances, I often thought of a comment our next-door neighbor made after he left that first morning. “Did you keep that awful looking man last night? I turned him away! You can lose roomers by putting up such people!”

Maybe we did lose roomers once or twice but, oh! If only they could have known him, perhaps their illness would have been easier to bear. I know our family always will be grateful to have known him; from him we learned what it was to accept the bad without complaint and the good with gratitude to God.

Recently I was visiting a friend who has a greenhouse. As she showed me her flowers, we came to the most beautiful one of all, a golden chrysanthemum, bursting with blooms. But to my great surprise, it was growing in an old dented, rusty bucket. I thought to myself, “If this were my plant, I’d put it in the loveliest container I had!”

My friend changed my mind. “I ran short of pots,” she explained, “and knowing how beautiful this one would be, I thought it wouldn’t mind starting out in this old pail. It’s just for a little while, till I can put it out in the garden.”

She must have wondered why I laughed so delightedly, but I was imagining just such a scene in heaven. There’s an especially beautiful one, “God might have said when he came to the soul of the sweet old fisherman. “He won’t mind starting in this small body.”

All this happened long ago — and now, in God’s garden, how tall this lovely soul must stand.

The LORD does not look at the things man looks at. Man looks at the outward appearance, but the LORD looks at the heart.”

Friends are very special. They make you smile and encourage you to succeed. They lend an ear and they share a word of praise. Show your friends how much you care.

Pass this on, and brighten someone’s day.

Nothing will happen if you do not decide to pass it along.

The only thing that will happen if you do pass it on is that someone might smile (or cry like I did…)~ because of you!

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Friends are special Hugs from GOD!

The Author of “the Old Fisherman” is someone other than Mike Samadi. They have no affiliations

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