• Pursuit of excellence: Seeing your work as your personal-creation (the opposite of work-life balance), therefore following high standards in what you output to the world.
• Doer not talker: Too many people talk about what they want to do but never act on it. It's hard to be a talker in an environment of doers.
• Overconfident and self-critical: If you are not overconfident, you will not achieve greatness; if you are not self-critical, you will not improve. Da Vinci, Djokovic, Musk, Jobs, Altman... all share this trait.
• Humbleness: Treating people around you with respect. Realizing that no one has it all; you can learn from anyone in some way.
• Curiosity and openness: Always learning, not afraid of training new skills from scratch and being a beginner again, constantly updating your opinions and way of thinking.
• Creativity and imagination: Being able to increase your temperature of thinking and letting this flow into your craft. Producing a lot of ideas and having the taste to stick with certain ones (simplicity).
• Lateral thinking: Zooming out from your point of reference to see the whole system.
• Speed of thought: With some people, you can cover five topics in-depth within 30 minutes (synced clockspeeds), with others not even one.
• Doing the right thing: Allocating your resources into things that one truly wants to see in the world.
• Based and authentic: Being yourself instead of trying to play someone else. Goes together with staying true to your beliefs even if it goes against the norm.
• Mentor: People who see your higher potential, even before you do.
• Spiritual and transcendent: Not in a strict religious way, but in the sense that you think that the universe and your life on earth are meaningful. "Spirituality" as the practice of regularly reminding yourself of this.
• Self-discipline: Respecting your own goals and beliefs. Holding yourself accountable.
• Truth-seeking → first-principle-thinking: People who do not build their opinions on analogies (concepts that other people came up with), but on their own chain of thought.
• Obsessed: Being so immersed in your craft that its a core part of what makes yourself, not some "external hobbies".
• High energy: A result of all of the above, a kind of aura which inspires everyone around you.

The pattern I value in one person (e.g., an almost toxic high bias-towards-action) can be what challenges me and lets me grow, but would be draining without people around me who have orthogonal (not opposite) traits.

Another example: I like to be around both "ADHD-generalists" and "focused-specialists," but would go crazy if my circle consisted of only one of these types.

So it's not about maximizing the same patterns in all of your close friends: High variance of personalities is key, especially when growing a team or community](alexandria-lab.com).

*These are character traits I look for in friends. Traits of romantic or family relations largely overlap but have different key focuses (unconditional love, emotional warmth, aesthetic compatibility, the art of living, relationship resilience (relationships are antifragile — your parents usually go through lots of lows during your childhood and teenage years with you, that's why your bound is usually stronger — it gained form from disorder).