Qian Mu's explanation: When you make friends, you have seen it before. If you are too cumbersome, you will be humiliated or neglected. Or ask for intimacy with your friends, so as to force them to be cumbersome, and they will also be humiliated or seen. If you say righteousness according to the teaching, you will be humiliated and find a way out if you say that you have worked hard before your friends, or if you say that your friends are short and not.

Li Shounan's explanation: Friends, both monarch and minister, are combined by morality and must be treated with courtesy. If you don't obey the three admonitions, you will go, and if you don't go, you will call for disaster. Not only is it not enough to remonstrate, but it is also necessary to see it in time, not cumbersome, otherwise it will inevitably call for humiliation. Making friends is different from serving a gentleman, and it is tedious and not humiliating, but it will tend to alienate

The ancients, including Zhu Xi, explained that this sentence paid great attention to the meaning of "admonishing a gentleman but not three", while Qian Mu and Li Shounan had a comprehensive meaning, which can be regarded as a good explanation.