Mind Readings: You Become the Company You Keep

A man is known by the company he keeps. This is, of course, from Aesop of Aesop's Fables, 2,500 years ago. And a whole bunch of motivational speakers and gurus and stuff have picked up various versions of this over the years and put their own spin on it. The one that you'll hear most often these days is something from you hear a lot from the sort of the tech uh bro crowd. You become the average of the five people you hang out with the most, right?

The five people you surround yourself with the most. And the advice that people give frequently is if you want to be more successful, hang out with more successful people. If you want to be happier, hang out with happier people, and there is some truth to that. Um certainly if you you know, financial success is something that's important to you by default, if you're hanging out with more successful people who financially, you will probably see and hear uh things from them that would give you ideas or practices or processes that you could use in your own life to um to improve your your financial standing. You know, you hang out at the bar and your friends get into a discussion about cash flow analysis and you know how positive cash flow is everything.

If your your cash flow is positive, then you know you're you're you're on your way to wealth. If your cash flow is negative, it doesn't know how much money you have, you will eventually lose it all because that's the way cash flow works. However, that advice that you become the the average of the five people you hang out with most is often accompanied by very pat um almost casual advice that can be very difficult and disheartening for people. And that advice is um well, you know, if you're if you're not hanging out with successful people, get rid of them, get them out of your life. Uh you know, if you're hanging out negative people, get them out of your life.

Uh, you know, cut those people out of your life. And again, there is truth to that. If you are have friends who are very toxic people, it probably wouldn't be a bad idea to spend less time with those folks. However, and this is the challenge with this advice, not everyone's circumstances allow them to make those dramatic changes, at least not quickly. Particularly if the person or people that you have in mind that are creating challenges for you are people that you actually care about.

You know, a parent, a child, a sibling, um, a dear friend from from years past, to uh just run with that advice blindly and say, yeah, you're out of my life, you're out of here. Uh is not necessarily all that practical. So here's a slightly different spin. Instead of focusing on the five people you hang out with the most, right? And and the company that you keep, think about who you listen to most.

Who are the five people you listen to the most? And again, if those five people are people that are putting a lot of less helpful stuff in your head, listen to different people. And I don't mean you know, remove them from your life. I mean this lovely device here contains the voices of millions, if not billions of people, right? On Twitch, on YouTube, on the podcast app of your choice.

There is so much good free content from people that probably you would like to emulate, probably whose success you would like to have for yourself, whatever success means, whether it's better relationships, more money, um, more free time, better health, you name it, whatever success means, there's voices on this device that will help reprogram your head a little bit and give you more ideas, give you a different way of looking at things. So instead of worrying about the five people you hang out with most, think about the five people you listen to the most. And if the majority of time that you spend listening to folks is folks who are not helping you achieve whatever success means for you, open this thing up. Find that person or those people on YouTube and their podcasts and their blogs or whatever, and listen to them more. Find a meditation teacher if you're stressed, find a yoga teacher if you're not feeling flexible, find whoever.

And use this technology, use those voices to start changing how you want your world to work. And you can do this without again having to make dramatic changes and you know, telling your mom, ah, you're out of here, you're you're useless. Um, but listening to the people that will reprogram your head and put more and better materials in your head. And again, you don't have to go hang out with them, right? You don't have to buy their $599 course or whatever.

If they've got a message that they've got probably a ton of free content, take your greatest hits, the stuff that means the most to you, download it, put it on your device, put in your earphones, and and listen. Feed your brain with that stuff. And the change that you're looking for will happen over time. It might not happen as fast as like if you know you just got rid of all your relatives, but the change will start to happen as you get those different points of view, as you get those different inputs into your head. So a person is known by the company they keep to some degree, but a person becomes the company you listen to most.

So if you want more of something in your life, listen to more of that in the on the channel of your choice. Thanks for tuning in. If you like this video, go ahead and hit that subscribe button.