Our friends have a huge impact on our performance. Really huge.
Thank the next happy friend that you think of. Each happy friend increases our chances of being happy by 9%. An extra $5,000 in income only increases our chances by 2% so each happy friend we have is worth about $22,500 
And check your profile picture on Facebook. People who smile for their profile picture have 15% more close friends than the rest.
As my mother says, smile and the world smiles with you, frown and you’ll frown alone…
The research shows that the ‘degrees of separation’ effects weaken to nothing after three or four levels (so your friends, their friends and even the friends of your friend’s friend are likely to have an impact on you) – that’s a whole bunch of people you’ve never even met!
So: Who are your closest friends?
You are my friend. Please don’t stop posting. I love them all.
Christakis has done a lot of research on this – you can see a talk of his on social networks (and how obesity could be contagious) in a talk on TED.com
What utter rubbish, some of the financially poorest people I know have the most friends, work that one out genius
thanks for your comment, Stephanie, I agree with you.
If you can read the article that I posted, you can note that I report the research finding that shows the relationship between happiness, money and friends. We are happier when we have happy friends. In fact, each happy friend that we have increases the chance that we will ourselves be happy by about 9%.
The same research study found that increasing your income by $5000pa increased the chance that we ourselves would be happy by about 2%.
Without taking into account the diminishing rate of return on additional income (that I think we could expect to observe were this to be tested), having a happy friend will make you more likely to be happy. Specifically what I was attempting to communicate was that having that one happy friend would increase the likelihood of you being happy by 4.5 times more than having an extra $5000 income – ie $22,500.
I hope that’s made it clearer for you
Thanks, Barry! It’s great having friends like you, too!