Your friends don't have to be "useful to you". Real friends are waiting there for you when you take a break from work to have fun, relax and shoot the breeze.

Your friends don't have to be "useful to you". Real friends are waiting there for you when you take a break from work to have fun, relax and shoot the breeze. I've worked maniacally for the past 4 or 5 years and declined many many social invitations because I was focused on building my business. I would never EVER express that as "improving when my friends aren't" and I find this attitude deplorable. They're just living life differently to me. They don't get in the way of the way I want to live my life at all and when I take a break I go hang out with them and we have fun - it's just that I don't do that very often. There is no difference between focusing on a business, focusing on education, focusing on raising a child or on a new relationship. It seems like such a cliche that you "improve" somehow and leave everyone else behind and then see them later in the street with your new friends and ignore them as you walk by and make them all jealous with how much better you've become. Life just doesn't have to be like that. True friends are friends forever regardless of whatever life projects you're working on and if you're incapable of maintaining friendships with people who aren't living exactly the same life as you then there is something wrong with you. The whole "I want to win so I surround myself with winners" approach is just admitting that you're so susceptible to peer pressure that the only way you can succeed in life is to set yourself up with a bunch of friends who will force you to succeed. That's a strategy for addicts, not winners.