How to make 10,000 friends

What I learned meeting Rob Lawless for a coffee in New York.

Everyone is interesting if you ask the right question.

That’s what Rob Lawless told me over a coffee in midtown Manhattan in what was his 7,179th one-hour conversation with a stranger since 2015.

He’s meeting 50 new people a month right now, which puts him on track to reach his goal of 10,000 new friends within the next five years.

Before Rob, I’d never met anyone who connects with strangers for a living.

Most of us do so unintentionally. Hearing about what Rob’s doing made me want to do it more often, on purpose.

We connected because my friend Ted Merz met Rob through a friend of a friend last December.

Ted then wrote a blog post about becoming this stranger’s 6,689th new friend.

I didn’t understand. Everyone knows Robin Dunbar figured out decades ago that even the most extroverted people can only have 150 friends!

I wanted to learn more.

I messaged Rob on Instagram. His account is fittingly titled “Robs10KFriends” and he shares photos of everyone he meets to nearly 50,000 followers.

After more than six months of back and forth we found a time.

I put Rob one conversation closer to his decade-plus goal and he taught me his framework for unlocking great conversations.

The “FORD” approach — Family, Occupation, Relationships, Dreams — is meant to cultivate immediate and deep rapport between strangers.

This line of questioning unveils who someone is, how they spend their time, and where they want to go.

I can attest that — at least for he and I in a crowded cafe off Park Avenue — it worked like a charm.

Rob grew up in Philadelphia roughhousing with his older brother.

He’s as keen to take an eight-mile run as he is to attend a concert in a Brooklyn warehouse.

Now Rob gives keynote talks around the country to fund his ambitions of making 10,000 friends. He’s given talks in Berlin and India.

Literary agents have already approached him to write a book about the lessons he’s picked up along the way.

I asked him what stands out after connecting with 7,179 strangers.

Meeting people from so many different walks of life has given him more gratitude, Rob said, because it’s exposed him an unusual amount of reference points for his own life.

There’s no such thing as an easy life, he continued, but there is a much wider spectrum for a difficult one than you’d think.

(Strangers have told Rob stories of dead parents and unfulfilling careers, missed opportunities and regrets.)

He said the clearest pattern is that no one has their life entirely figured out.

Maybe that’s what makes strangers so relatable.

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Here’s the photo of Rob and I and the post he shared on his Instagram account after we met.