Choose Your Environment

Today I thought I’d write about the importance of your environment. Now I’m not talking about the grass and trees in your neighborhood, I’m talking about the people you have around you on a consistent basis – your social environment.

I’m sure you know the old saying “birds of a feather, flock together.” Well that saying is true to a point, but it’s incomplete. It should be something more like “birds of a feather, flock together – and so do the other birds that are in the same tree.” I know it’s not as catchy, but it gets to the heart of the point I’m trying to make.

Have you ever noticed how when you are around someone who is really happy, you get happy too? Or if you are around someone who is really sad, your mood starts to drop as well. Well this doesn’t just happen with your mood, it also happens with how you look at everything in your life. Who you hang out with determines what your paradigm is. It effects your level of ambition, sense of self-worth, how optimistic or pessimistic you are, and even your beliefs and values which as we all know is what all of your decisions in life are based on in the first place. So why would you hang out with people who aren’t the highest caliber, most successful, respectable, all-around good people that you can find?

Pretend that you could actually measure how closely a person is to living up to their ultimate potential, and then score it on a scale from 0 (not at all) to 10 (completely living up to their full potential). Now I know that you couldn’t be at zero or else you’d be dead, and you couldn’t be at 10 either because there’s always something else you could improve on, but this is just a hypothetical so bare with me. Now, say you are at level 7 right now. If you hang out with people who are only at level 4, then what’s most likely going to happen is that you will eventually (but still pretty quickly) match up to each other’s level and end up all being somewhere around level 5. You will bring them up a little bit, but it is much easier to be negative, irresponsible, lazy, and pessimistic than it is to be positive, responsible, energetic, and optimistic so your level will go down a lot faster than the level of the people you hand out with will go up. The amount of people also matters, but still follows the same basic rule. If you hang out with a bunch of people (say old friends from high school) who are at level 4, and a couple others (say at work) who are at level 8, then your level will still go down, just not as quickly or not as much. The amount of time you spend with the different people also matters in the same way, so the more time you spend with specific people, the more quickly and higher or lower your level of living up to your potential will be. So obviously this could turn into a pretty complicated calculation if you hang out with a lot of different people who are all at different levels, and for different amounts of time. But thankfully, the concept is simple and easy to understand, so there is an easy solution to determing what you should do. I bet you can figure it out! …..Exactly!