Mom's Advice For Hosting A Class Reunion
Pour more money and effort into them than you think is reasonable. Treasure them, because you can't actually host that many of them and keep expecting everyone to show up, even if they're good friends.
Especially if they're good friends.
We were wonderfully close friends, and I thought we'd meet up every year for the rest of our lives. They fizzled out by the fifteenth year. But the one at the tenth year mark was peak. That's because even ten years out, none of you really have money. Not real money.
It's because they're such good friends, really. This is what it means to be good friends with brilliant, ambitious people.
If you bloom into adulthood with people who are smart and driven, and you watch them start to climb the corporate ladder with grace, when they start a business of their own of course you are going to want to invest. You are going to want to give them an unwise portion of your savings. Not even out of politeness, but because you really believe in them, and perhaps you're caught up in the romance of it all. Some of the dealings are going to happen at the reunion parties!
But the business world is cruel and unpredictable, and they might lose that unwise portion of your savings through no fault of their own. And even if they are truly blameless, all the love will be gone anyways, turned into coldness, or acrimony.
This will happen a few times, between a few different people. After that, you can still get dinner with your university friends, three to six of them at a time. But you will not see everyone in a room together, ever again.
Those dinners are still going to be wonderful. I make sure to attend many of them every time I'm back in the country. But you are blessed to still be in the time before those dinners, and you should cherish the parties while they last.
It's funny how life goes, though. Given that you start with a group of smart, ambitious people, you really can't tell who will make it by the end, not at the tenth year anniversary bash, not through the quiet gossip shared across a small restaurant table in the twentieth year.
Some people will get lucky and start making money hand over fist immediately, and then they flame out before they even start a family. Others drop off the map entirely and pop up again at forty-five, one divorce under their belt and married to some African textile factory monopolist, and then they start making huge waves. Some have families and kids and disappear into that life. Others manage to have families and kids but not have that affect their career success at all. Hm? No, it's not a gender thing, it really comes down to temperament.
Of course there are also the ones blessed by luck their entire life through, and others that are dogged by one misfortune after the other. But I'm just saying, you might look around you at forty, or fifty, and be really surprised by how much the stack ranking has shuffled in the ten years previous.
And you should be very careful, taking money from friends, and giving them money. No, I'm not saying to not do it; of course you are going to do it at some point. No successful venture ever started off without a friends and family round. Just be careful, okay?
What does it mean to be careful? Well, I don't know, I've never done it. I left China too quickly after graduation, and your dad and I needed to make it on our own here. That's why we never ended up that successful in business.
But it means I'm still welcome at every dinner table.