SPEND YOUR TIME WITH THE RIGHT PEOPLE
One study shows that if your close friend becomes obese, your risk of obesity increases by 57%. Another survey shows that the #1 reason people took a Covid-19 vaccine in 2021 is because people around them were taking them. One experiment tells us that when seven people say they see something, the eighth person conforms on average 33% of the time, saying they see it too, even if the exact opposite is the truth. The admixture of social compliance and peer pressure causes humans to radically alter their behavior.
As social creatures, we live our lives under the influence of our peers. Tell me about the people you spend your time with, and I’ll tell you your future. To put it simply, who you spend your time with can elevate you as much as it can bring you down.
If your five best friends are multimillionaires, and the majority of your neighborhood are multimillionaires, and the only people you have conversations with are multimillionaires, can you believe you wouldn’t become one very soon? Of course this is the theory, but that’s just to help you understand the importance of your environment and the people you spend your time with.
Mindsets are contagious, so tread with extreme caution when choosing the people you hang out with.
If you wish to be extremely knowledgeable or healthy or rich, spend your time with people who are already what you want to become. As you know, everything radically changed for me when I started to regularly meet owners of 8- and 9-figure businesses. That’s when I realized that business up there wasn’t done the same way as it was done by me and the people I knew at my low 6-figure level.
Everything changed even more when I started to spend more and more time with them, when I allowed myself to be influenced by them in a number of ways, such as my state of mind and the whole execution of my business strategy. I can’t emphasize enough how being led by people who have been there for a long time and done it many times over has changed my life. The only thing I do regret is that I didn’t find these very high performers earlier in my life. As humans, we influence our environment, and the environment influences us. That’s it for the theory.
In practice, very few people influence their environment, but everybody is influenced, more or less, by their environment. Nobody is 100% unaffected by their environment. Some literally become their environment. Let me give you a fresh example: a few years ago, a friend of mine moved into an affluent area—an expensive bohemian neighborhood in the middle of the city. My friend was a spirited, convivial, down-to-earth man. However, after a short while, he adopted, quite accidentally, the same snobbish attitudes to conform to his new group. Just after a few months, I found him riding bicycles, doing yoga, and eating vegan food. Not that there’s anything wrong with those per se. But I couldn’t believe such a quick change. He also went even further and embraced—consciously or not—his new group’s political ideologies and views on society, in order to be accepted and liked by them.
Take another example: I myself was in danger of becoming like the people I surrounded myself with when I hung around some ruthless and greedy private equity guys in New York. I actually already started to become one of them, before cutting them off, leaving the industry and moving out of this area. Knowing that your environment is shaping you is one thing; what you need to do is shape your environment to one which is conducive to the person you want to become.
Lastly, let me tell you the story of my friend Jimmy. He was my neighbor, and we grew up together in a blue-collar town in a suburb of Paris, called Montreuil. We grew up in the middle of housing projects, and our problems began at around the age of twelve. Girls, video games, drugs, robberies … easy money. It was hard to avoid these traps, but at least I had my parents who were always there for me.
Jimmy was raised only by his mother, but she was often gone for the whole day, working hard to make ends meet. Needless to say, our lives as students were very short-lived, as I dropped out of high school, and Jimmy got excluded from his technical school because of behavior problems. As a result, he ended up spending more time on the streets and away from home.
To give you the whole picture—and I make no apology for being blunt here, as it’s real life we’re talking about—two of our friends got shot in the head during drug trade disputes (one of them miraculously survived); two of our neighbors ended up in jail for rape; another one turned out a pimp; one of my friends died after playing Russian roulette; not to mention all the theft which happened around us on a daily basis.
Statistically, Jimmy was supposed to end up in jail as well, or at best, become someone with hard social problems all his life. Fortunately, he somehow managed to change his whole paradigm, and surrounded himself with people who had values—most of whom were entrepreneurs. He decided to move far away. To Florida, actually, where he started from scratch with no money, no degree, and no connections … but NEW surroundings. That changed everything. Today he’s a successful real estate broker, owns his company, has employees, and builds his own real estate assets. His vision changed because he replaced the toxic people around him with valuable people.
You may also have lifelong friends who are fun to hang out with, but who have failed to grow or change since you were kids. Remember your roles and goals from the first section: if the people you spend your time with aren’t in your plans, you’re wasting your time. If they don’t bring you closer to your goals, they put you further away. Nobody’s neutral.
I’m not saying you should get rid of your poor and middle-class friends and only hang out with millionaires. What I’m saying is you must filter the people you spend your time with, because they have a huge influence on you. They influence your standards, your talking, your thinking, and your behavior.
Jimmy moving to Florida sounds like a radical move, but not everybody is in this kind of situation. In your general day-to-day life, you may not have to deal with the kind of toxic people that we had to deal with during our teens. Most of the time, you just have to deal with people with fewer or modest goals and values. These are the kind of zombies, or Non-Player Characters, whose lives revolve around eating, working, and sleeping, with some kind of low-level passive entertainment in between. Be careful not to become one of them. Again, I’m not talking about their wealth, salaries, possessions—or lack thereof.
Start building your network of high performers, your own world. Don’t let anybody or anything enter YOUR world or drag you into another world you’ve NOT consciously chosen to be in. Don’t let anyone tell you how YOU should live. Toxic people always have a thing from their world they’re trying to bring into your world, which will derail you from your grand vision if you’re not careful. It might be the usual suspects, such as easy money, sex, games, alcohol addiction, drugs; or more pernicious time-wasting addictions such as movies, social networks, TV, spectator sports, video games.
Remember the Orson Welles rule. YOU, as the director, choose who can play a part in the movie of your life. It’s about saying NO to the people who didn’t land any role in there (most people). Now, if you’re in a toxic environment with dangerous people, and life brings you attractive offers (such as drugs, robberies, easy money) on a daily basis, that makes your role of director much harder, because there are people who haven’t been cast in the movie of your life that threaten and delay the completion of your final cut.
If nothing else, I can’t emphasize enough the powerful effect of relocation. It’s radical. Sometimes, moving just a few miles away is enough, depending on the problems you want to solve.
There are two different parts to the process: (1) building a network of high performers around you, and (2) getting rid of toxic people. To get closer to something, you have to move away from something else. I believe you can find and approach valuable people anywhere in the world, but are you able to get rid of the negative people if you don’t move?
It takes more courage and energy to cut out the negative people in your life WITHOUT moving. It’s extremely difficult to rethink and redo your whole schedule by staying in the place where all your bad habits have their roots. How are you going to say no to toxic people? They’re still there; you have your habits; and you think you can change everything all of a sudden? It’s possible in theory, but extremely difficult in practice.
Remember the movie Carlito’s Way? It’s the story of an ex-mobster who aspires to a quiet life after getting out of prison but goes back to his old neighborhood. Mission: impossible. Even Ethan Hunt wouldn’t be able to do that. If you need a radical change in your life, change your environment. This is the only way.
When you change your environment and free your mind from temptations, all you have to do is to start building your network of high performers. No need to worry about old bad acquaintances anymore. Ask yourself where you want to be in five years, and look for the people who are already there. Go where they go, whether online or physically, and get inspired. As soon as you don’t respect or admire someone around you, don’t spend time with them. Spend your time with the people who are already living the life you eventually want to lead.
One topic that I like to address with business owners, especially those who are more than sixty years old, is REGRETS. There’s a commonality in what they tell me. There’s one thing you’ll regret for sure: it’s all the time you’ve spent with the WRONG people in your life. The reality is that if you DO what you KNOW you should be doing, you’ll have no regrets. And now you know … Whether you heed the warning or not is up to you.
Sometimes, you might get the feeling that some rich people look down on you, or consider those who are financially below them as Non-Player Characters. Don’t hold it against them. At least, not all of them. There are idiots, but most of the time, it’s just that they evolve in their own world, the one they have built.
In a nutshell, as shocking as it seems, they might look at everyday people and wonder why they are not rich as well … because the way to get rich seems obvious to them!
Instead of getting upset, think about it. There’s a hint—the real wealth is there: being able to grow a company fast with 100% certainty. That’s the ability I want to convey to you. Once you’re trained, you don’t look at businesses the same way. You see things that you didn’t see before and that others can’t see. When you get it, nobody can take it away from you. You get IN, and you never get out. This is a whole new world: the 8-figure world.