[important]This post was inspired as a follow up to: Mind Your Surroundings, if you haven’t read it, I highly recommend you do![/important]
“Your friends are like buttons on an elevator, they can take you up or they can take you down.” I don’t know who said that, but it’s a quote I’ve seen numerous times throughout my life.
Something I remember hearing about 10 years ago was that if you take your best friends and average the amount of money they make, that’s about where your income level will be as well. It was something I had a hard time believing as a 19 year old.
More recently I’ve had the pleasure of getting to know someone who’s far ahead of me on a path to self-actualization. After spending time with him I’ve begun to understand why it is that people who are successful ALWAYS associate with other successful people or at the least associate with others who want to be successful and are working toward that goal.
It really comes down to what you spend time around affects you, if you spend your time around negativity and idleness then that’s what you’ll produce more of. If you spend time around activity and high-achievement you’ll naturally be influenced to produce the same.
Watching talks from TED and most recently (earlier today) I watched The Future We Will Create on Netflix and the idea was driven home even more. The people presenting were talking backstage about how they were getting job offers and collaboration offers like crazy.
Thinking about this makes me realize how important it is to have friends and a network of contacts to be successful.
Specialization is what has allowed us as a species to rapidly improve our quality of life over the couple hundred years. We as individuals don’t need to know how many of the things our life revolves around work or are done. We can focus on what is important to us, what interests us. By doing that we gain greater insight into the thing that interests us, which in turn advances the understanding of the thing for everyone around us (assuming we share what we know).
This specialization does as I implied, lead to an ignorance of other things, that’s where it become important that we have contacts with people who know how to fill in the gaps in our understanding. It creates an absolute need for interdependence among people on one another. I’m not talking about dependence but interdependence. A symbiotic relationship with one another, a situation where both sides are contributing to something that most often becomes greater than the sum of it’s parts.
This ability we have as humans is simply awe inspiring to me, at the same time I’m left baffled by the lack of understanding by and large in the world about this concept.
I want you to pay attention to what you find yourself doing when you’re spending time with your friend and your family, what do you feel like like? Do you feel energized? Are you active?
Think about your talents and strengths, what projects are your friends and family working on? What can you help them with? If you don’t know what they’re working on, now is a great time to find out!
Link to this post!
No related posts.
