“How important to your success do you think is being around the right people?”
This a question asked in a group I am in by the host of the group, listen up because this has changed my life and I know it will change yours. Here is the answer I gave…
This is the most important factor.
Environment is everything and this is proven over and over and over again in society.
Everyone has heard “we earn the average of the 5 people we most hang around”.
And it is used a lot and we can often turn our minds of to this because it is used so often but when you sit and think about it it’s blindly obvious that this does change our behaviour.
If you look at some of the worlds most successful people, I don’t mean successful just in the case of money but I mean success in all different ways…
Business
Sports
Service to others
Relationships
Physical
Health
Emotional
Spiritual
They always all have the exact same pattern of environment.
Take recently Kobi Bryant who tragically died.
When you look back at his career and how he became successful it was environment. Actually he created the environment which his team mates adopted by default if being on the same team.
And the reason it is so important is because no external success will ever drive you to continue even when you feel like stopping UNLESS you have worked on the internal success.
Unless you’ve done the internal work and won the personal challenges, the personal wins before you tackle the external wins.
But the desire to work on the inner game is born from environment.
Now there is always an exception to the rule of course, there are some people deeply blessed with the ability to focus on the inner game and then the outer game.
I do question sometimes though, could these people have others around them that they don’t recognise as being diligent but actually are very diligent people that help them to understand what diligence looks like?
Diligence is something you learn through environment.
Read think and grow rich and he talks about how the success of years ago rockafella, JP Morgan and others used to meet and talk business.
They didn’t nessecarily call it a “mastermind” back then.
Nor did they probably even think this is nessecary for success, they may have just thought it was a good idea and wanted to see if it could help them
Grow their businesses.
Nevertheless, it was environment.
It’s no surprise that universities like MIT or Harvard often have the top CEOs and scientists of their fields having studied in them places previously.
Environment pushes us to behave differently without us really knowing we learnt through how we feel and this learning is longer lasting then any intellectual learning.
How we feel drives us.
How we feel changes us.
But it’s important that the feeling is a feeling of love otherwise no manner of success will ever be enough or really drive you to do good in the world.
Doing good through your business is really why I’m
In business.
So I guess I’m saying YES! The people you hang around define who you become, it’s a slow defining, it’s not obvious but it changes you.
Pick your friends carefully that you create the right environment for whom you want to become ?. I have literally the most amazing friends and I KNOW they are the reason I am the person I am today, their example keeps me on a path of success in many many differnet definitions of success not just money.