omething goes right. Genuinely right, the kind of thing you would have told them about without hesitating five years ago. You bring it to the people who have known you longest, and the room does not do what you expected. There is a beat of silence, a change of subject, a joke with an edge on it. You leave wondering whether you imagined it.
You did not. Andre Norman walked into that exact room and describes it precisely.
In my mind, this was a great thing. I walked in, my best friend for 14 years looked at me like I had nine heads because it didn’t register in his mind that this was possible. So, he shut it down and shut me out.
Fourteen years of friendship, and the response to good news was not envy. It was a failure to compute. The news did not fit any category he had for the person standing in front of him.
because it’s not who they know you to be.
What the reaction is actually about
The instinct is to read the cooling as jealousy, which is both unkind and slightly self-flattering. His reading is more interesting and considerably more uncomfortable.
They said if he can change and he can become successful, what’s our excuse?
Because if he can sit in prison for 14 years and come home and have that level of success, then it was always here for us.
That is the whole mechanism. Your climb is not taking anything from them. It is removing an explanation they were using, and the explanation was load-bearing. As long as the thing was impossible, nobody had to account for not having done it. You proved it was available. Now the room is holding a bill nobody asked for.
None of which, and this matters, makes them bad people.
But, team dysfunction aren’t bad people. They just maybe haven’t lived the life that they were supposed to.
That sentence is the reason this note exists. It is very easy to write a piece about outgrowing people that flatters the reader and quietly writes off everyone they came up with. Andre refuses to do it, repeatedly, and the refusal is the most useful thing he says on the subject.
The correction almost everyone gets wrong
Told that their circle is holding them back, most people reach immediately for subtraction. Cut, distance, outgrow. He does not teach that, and he is unusually direct about it.
I still have my friends from where I grew up. my family. They just can’t help me with this thing.
Two claims in one breath. He kept them. And he stopped taking a particular kind of counsel from them, which is a different act entirely. The person who has loved you for twenty years and the person qualified to advise you on this specific mountain are frequently not the same person, and there is no betrayal in noticing that.
So I’m allowed to have two sets of friends. I’m allowed to have two sets of friends.
He says it twice, which in a transcript usually means he is arguing with somebody. The second set is not a replacement. It is a room you did not previously have access to.
Doesn’t mean that you don’t have your old friends, but it means you get to meet people who love what you love and will talk about it for hours.
The part that feels permanent and is not
The reason people avoid the second set is the interval, which from the inside feels open-ended. His estimate of its length is comic and deliberately so.
You might be alone for point 2 seconds, but once you walk across the room, walk out of the team dysfunction room, walk down the hall into the locker room for team success, there are people in there.
The loneliness is real. It is also almost entirely an artefact of standing still in the corridor. The other room is occupied, it has been the whole time, and the people in it are not doing anything more mysterious than talking about the thing you have nobody to talk to about.
The part he had to accept
There is one more turn, and it is the least comfortable, because it is about the fantasy of bringing everybody with you.
And when I made it, I wanted everybody else to make it. But that’s not the reality of the world.
So I don’t try to be other people. I’ll engage with them.
Engage, not rescue. You can stay in someone's life without appointing yourself the person who fixes it, and the distinction is what allows the friendship to survive your success rather than being quietly converted into a project.
So the answer to the awkward dinner is not a script and not an ultimatum. It is addition. Keep the people. Change who you take counsel from. Go find the second room, which is nearer than it looks and takes roughly a fifth of a second to cross into.
Where to take this next
This tends to surface at the same time as two other things: the strange flatness after you get what you were aiming at, which is its own problem with its own fix, and the aftermath of a setback nobody has explained to you, where the move is getting the reasoning rather than the verdict.
Andre works through the people problem across Sessions 4 and 6 of the seven. Start here to hear the case in his own words.