• 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, Ronaldo, 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.

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, vulnerability, etc.)