Meta CTO Says to Treat Your Relationships Like Investments

Manage your relationships like you manage your stock portfolio.

That’s the advice that Andrew “Boz” Bosworth, the CTO of Meta, gave in a blog post this week about what he described as managing your “emotional economy.”

“Imagine each person in your life as a publicly traded security,” Bosworth, who has been at Meta since 2006, wrote. “You’re heavily invested in a few — your parents, your partner, your manager. You hold small positions in many others, like coworkers or acquaintances. And then there are people you have no stake in at all — strangers on the street, commenters online, passing critics.”

Bosworth said how much influence someone has over our sense of self-worth should be proportionate to how much we’ve emotionally invested in them.

“When a guy on the street insults your shirt, it shouldn’t register any more than a stock you don’t own crashing,” he said. “But most of us don’t run our emotional portfolios so rationally.”

Bosworth said most of us grant others “emotional equity” in our lives that they haven’t earned. Instead, he said, we should be putting emotional investments into relationships that actually deliver returns.

He wrote: “Manage your emotional economy like any other portfolio: diversify wisely, invest intentionally, and don’t panic when the market dips.”

Bosworth, who regularly shares advice on his personal blog, said his goal is to share what he’s learned over his career, and that most of the lessons he learned “the hard way.”

Bosworth did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Meta reported Q3 earnings on Wednesday, with its stock declining 9% in after-hours trading following the call.