Hoboken Man Is A Third Of Way To Goal Of Making 10,000 Friends

HOBOKEN, NJ — Rob Lawless has met 3,164 people across the United States in the last three years, and he doesn’t plan to stop until he reaches his goal of 10,000. Then he wants to teach college courses to other adults about how to form connections.

The 29-year-old Lawless, who moved last summer to Hoboken, New Jersey, after living in Philadelphia and Los Angeles, began the effort in 2015. He has received enough media attention that he's been able to get free flights and guest rooms in order to keep meeting people across the country, with each encounter lasting an hour.

But he says he hopes this year to meet more people from certain parts of the world and in certain demographics.

The effort began in earnest after a job layoff in 2016. “I grew up in Norristown, Pennsylvania, and attended Penn State," Lawless said in an interview last week. "After graduating in 2013, I lived back home for two years while traveling a lot for my consulting job with Deloitte … I started my project in November of 2015 and then took it full time in July of 2016 after being laid off from my tech job.”

He met a lot of people in passing but didn’t really get to know them. And he missed the kind of closeness he's had with college peers.

"I started the project because I wanted to get back to the sense of community I felt as a student at Penn State and wanted to meet new people without any agenda," he said. "I also wanted to create my own path in life and, having a passion for people, thought that trying to connect with 10,000 of them would be the coolest way to go through life."

So he began his project, dedicating a block of time to each person. He first met them close to home in Pennsylvania so the project wasn’t a drain on his resources.

He estimates that he has met around 2,000 people in the Philadelphia area, around 700 in Los Angeles and about 400 so far in the New York City region, including his new hometown of Hoboken. Their stories and background have varied.

He spent time with a 98-year-old woman named Eva DiAddezzio from Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, who was married to a World War II veteran. DiAddezzio is the oldest person he’s met. He also walked around Philadelphia with a man named Chris Gellenbeck, whose legs had been chewed up by a boat engine when he was a teenager. Doctors gave him a 15 percent chance of survival.

Lawless said he has learned a host of lessons as a result.

“I've met multiple people who are younger than me who've lost loved ones like parents or siblings,” Lawless said. “I make it a point to really be present and enjoy my time with my family when I'm around them, because I'm fortunate to still have them in my life.”

Lawless has learned other lessons as well. “No one really knows what they're doing with their life,” he said. “Understanding that everyone has uncertainties and insecurities, no matter what their age or level of success, has served me really well in terms of being able to push forward with my own goals.”

People have surprised him. One was Gellenbeck, who fell off a boat into the Hudson River when he was 16.

"After pulling him back on board," Rob wrote on Instagram, "the other guys left him to run and hide a bottle of alcohol before the ambulance came. When help did arrive, Chris had lost five of his six liters of blood and technically died."

Though Gellenbeck survived, doctors believed there was only a 12 percent chance he would walk again. Today, he works as a hotel concierge.

"You’d never know it unless you took the time to get to know his backstory,” Lawless said of Gellenbeck's past struggles.

Lawless has met rappers and immigrants, activists and writers. He has some groups he still wants to meet.

"As the project grows, I always hope to make it more diverse in terms of race, age, gender [and] sexual orientation," he said. "I'm proud of the vast array of people I've met so far, but the project is definitely more representative of the demographic using Instagram. With the help of recent press pieces like 'The Kelly Clarkson Show' [and] New York Post, I've been able to start diversifying more. I'm encouraged by the fact that I'm only 31 percent of the way through the project because I believe it will open up a lot more.”

In today's society, people continually add "friends" on social media but don't know their history, backstory, fears and dreams. Lawless thinks he can help people make better connections.

"I hope to start sharing my lessons learned with universities and corporations through speaking, to help impact the ways they see connecting with strangers or colleagues," he said. "Ultimately, though, I'd like to start teaching a freshman seminar focused on human connection. I'd like to create a class in which students could connect with each other one-on-one in order to develop the skills of expanding their perspective, practicing active listening ... [and] creating bonds that could lead to future relationships, friendships [and] business partnerships."

He has formed bonds with people he met and even went on dates with a few women, but nothing serious.

"Towards the end of my project, I could definitely see myself writing a book similar to Brian Grazer's 'A Curious Mind,' because I think it'd be interesting for people to read about the backstory and logistics of how I actually went about meeting 10,000 people," he said.

But he noted that it may take him 10 more years to meet everyone.

Lawless can be reached through his website or social media, where he posts the stories of the people he meets.

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