FREE NEWSLETTER
MOTIVATIONAL SPEAKER Jim Rohn said, “You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.” His contention: We should carefully pick the folks who surround us because, over time, we’ll become more like them.
Recent research offers some support for this idea. For instance, if we have a close friend who becomes obese, one study found we’re 57% more likely to become obese as well. If that’s so, we might also want to cozy up to skinny friends who count exercise as fun recreation.
We don’t always get to choose the people we spend time with, especially in our early years. Families have an enormous influence on who we become, in part because we spend so much time with them. If we’re lucky, and come from good people, we’ll learn to be like them. The opposite is true as well, however.
Steve Jobs of Apple fame was influenced not by his birth family, who gave him up for adoption. Instead, he was strongly influenced by his adoptive father, with whom he spent much time.
His adoptive father worked on cars. He bought and sold them to supplement his income. He would take Steve with him on rides when he went searching for his next car. He’d describe to Steve the beauty he saw in the design of cars he wanted to buy. As he described the lines, the shape and the flow of the metal, Steve grew to appreciate good design.
This influenced Steve later when it came to Apple products. He always believed a product’s design was as important as its function. The elegant simplicity of Apple products made them appealing to millions of buyers.
We’re all influenced by the people in our lives. I hope, though, that we can choose which people to adopt as an influencer—and which to drop. We can copy the things we admire in some, and steer away from the deficiencies we see in others.
That’s been the case in my life. My desire to complete my college education came after witnessing the struggles my father endured by not completing his degree. My mother’s focus on saving money helped me pay attention to future needs, and not just to today’s material desires.
I’m always amazed at people who overcome their impoverished upbringing. The rapper Jay-Z, for example, used to sell drugs in Brooklyn—and that’s where he learned how to run a business.
Others who are born into poverty will blame anyone and everyone for why they are who they are. Their influencers didn’t help them, but rather limited their potential. If they saw family members who never made it, they might assume that they couldn’t make it, either. For many, a negative influencer holds a stronger grip than a positive one.
We don’t always get to select the people who are in our lives. We do, however, get to decide how much we want them to influence us. The choice is ours to make.
I’ll also add from my own experience that I’m trying hard to NOT be like my parents’ example when it comes to money. My father was awful with money—overspent, threw it around when he couldn’t afford it to impress people (things like buying everyone a round at the bar on a Friday night), borrowed money from everyone in sight (including my maternal grandmother, who loaned him money behind my mother’s back and then subtracted it from my mother’s inheritance). Eventually it led to bankruptcy and my parents’ divorce.
My mother is not a spendthrift, but for an intelligent woman, she was too negligent about trusting my father with their finances. She had no idea what was going on until it was way too late. Even now, in her 80s, her much younger partner manages her money and she has very little knowledge about it. He seems trustworthy and prudent enough, but in a very real sense, you’d think her experience with my dad would have made her more involved and vigilant the second time around.
I am like neither of them. I’m anxious almost to a fault about overspending (one of my husband’s favorite lines to me is “We can afford it”) and I’m the one in our marriage who handles the money. My husband is a tax lawyer and certainly could handle things if he needed to, but I’m never going to be ignorant about my own finances.
I just started reading Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book, Revenge of the Tipping Point, in which he’s revisiting the ideas he published in his breakout book 25 years ago. I’m not that far into it, but so far this is exactly the argument he’s putting forward: People become like the people they’re most closely around. He uses the term “epidemic” to describe some of it—in other words, people’s examples are “contagious.”
Not everyone born into poverty blames others for their situation. They only know what is around them, and they don’t think there is an alternative. You only know what you know. Many of the more fortunate who grow up not in poverty think poverty is a choice, and say poor people are lazy, that everyone can go to college, etc. That is easy to say when you do have those opportunities, but that does not exist for everyone. Many rich kids who grow up with swimming pools, maid and butlers, summer vacations abroad, think “doesn’t everyone have this?”
I agree, Dave, with the importance of the people who surround you. Just this week, in an incident with my teenage grandson, it was brought home. I hope he follows my advice about who to avoid. In my own life, I’m now making more conscious decisions to let certain “friendships” die, even a few of 50 years duration. The length of a relationship doesn’t always relate to its quality. If I feel angry or upset after contact with someone, what’s the point if there truly is nothing I can do to change the situation? I’m not talking here about listening to a dear friend who is going through a rough time. I’m talking about someone who tears you down or brags about their misdeeds.
Dave, you had me at “You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.” At the risk of sounding judgmental I have often said that one of our greatest challenges is to educate the children of uneducated parents. I too am amazed at the people who defy the odds and break out of the cycle.
Great article but Easier said than done. In our family our kids are strongly influenced by my wife and I and the great circle of friends we’ve had and still have. I hope that they too set great examples to influence their friends that spend time with them.
Very thoughtful post 🤔