What’s the best way to meet people in a new city?
Not an uncommon question. It can be a huge struggle when you’re moving into a new city trying to find your community. Some of the best advice I’ve heard is you have to do the stuff and find people who are interested in the same thing and invite them to it. If you build a community around the things that you like, then you will naturally appeal to people interested in the same thing.
My first six months in the city of Austin were hard in some ways. I got connected very quickly, but I didn’t have any deep connections like I had in other places. It was hard. I “knew” a lot of people, but it was so hard to get to a deeper level of friendship.
I tried a lot of different ways to meet people, but not many of them the orthodox way of doing it…whatever those ways are..I don’t know, going to a bar or something?
One of the ways was taking my Spikeball net to the park and inviting random people to come and play with me, another way was playing pickup sports, another was saying yes to almost any event I was invited to.
The last, maybe most unorthodox way of meeting people was knocking on doors. Literally, I went to random people’s doors in my friend’s apartment complex and met them. The reason being that we wanted to care for the neighbors and see if there were things we could pray for, but I was also genuinely interested in getting to know these people and hearing their stories. After meeting several of them, we exchanged numbers and have continued hanging out to this day.
Honestly some of my best friends in Austin.
When people say that they can’t meet new people they clearly haven’t tried very hard. Just put yourself out there. Knock on some people’s doors. 95% of them may be weirded out or tell you to get the heck away from them, but for that last 5%, you might start a friendship that lasts a lifetime.