“The Law of Association says that you are the combined average of the 5 people you spend the most time with, are you okay with that, what does that say about you?”
This applies to you and everyone around you. They are either helping you get better or they are holding you back; this is commonly called influence. Most people talk about influence exclusively as a positive impact, but it is important to realize that influence can also be negative. For example, young Johnny will be influenced by the people around him, either he will buy in to his parent’s morals and values, his friend’s morals and values or the local drug dealer’s morals and values.
This has happened to you all of your life and it will continue to affect you. The 5 people you spend the most time with are going to have the most effect on your life. You will talk how they talk, think how they think, do what they do, eat what they eat, read what they read, go where they go, spend time how they spend time and personally develop yourself the way that they develop themselves.
So the first question to ask yourself is, who am I around? Think about the past week and ask, who was I with? At home, family, work, school, neighborhood, bar, restaurant, etc. How much time did I spend with these people? Make a list and identify the 5 people with whom you spend the most time.
What do we do together?
What are they doing to me?
Are they positive, looking to the future, helping me grow, supporting me and uplifting me? Or are they negative, stuck in the past, holding me back, squelching dreams and not interested in their own achievement?
How do they affect my personal life and my professional life?
Where do I rank among the top 5 people in my life?
Once you answer these questions, you have to decide, if this is okay or not?
If you are at the top of your 5, be afraid, over time you will become more like your associates, which means you will degrade.
Generally, you want to be at the bottom of your top 5 and have them pull you up. This will happen over and over, you will progress and grow, and then need to seek out new relationships and connections to continue to grow. The people around you move at their own pace, you cannot control their actions. If they want more, they will have to go through the same process as you. Some will move faster, some will move slower, but you need to focus on how you improve yourself and that means spending more time with people that are more advanced than you.
If you are okay with where you are and the progress you are making, then maybe you just need to focus on personal development, things like mindset training, success fundamentals and building skills, and not change your associations at this moment. But if it is not okay, then you have to actively make a change and there are a few methods you can implement:
1) Limit your time
Only full-time relationships deserve a significant amount of your time; this means you have to limit part-time relationships to part-time time. It is not necessarily their fault, maybe they are not trying to be purposefully negative or drag you down, maybe they do not know what they are doing, but this is about you, not them.
2) Disassociation
You have to identify the destructive, negative relationships in your life and remove them from your circle. You know when you are watching a movie and the main character is making lots of bad choices, and as the audience you know that his best friend is leading him down the wrong path and the whole movie surrounds how they get into trouble. The whole time you are thinking that he should stop being friends with this guy. Now take this critical view and look upon your own life, who is taking you down the wrong path? Who causes trouble in your life?
Now a real quick comment about the two steps above, if you have never done this before, this will be difficult. You will ask yourself, why am I leaving my friends behind? How can I do this?
But let me point out, what you do is your choice, what they do is their choice. You choose to grow and get better and be positive and look for opportunities. They can grow with you, but you are not staying with them. The fact of the matter is not every person you spend time with will choose to grow with you.
3) Expand your associations
You need to spend more time with people that lift you up and help you become a better person, a better parent, a better entrepreneur, a better leader, a better networker, a better thinker, more positive, more hopeful, and more powerful.
But there is a catch 22 here – successful people are aware of the Law of Association, and if you are less successful than them, they want to limit their association with you, so how do you connect and spend more time with people that are more successful than you or have more knowledge than you in a specific area?
Often you have to be creative and maybe even start small. One of the steps I took was reaching out to selected persons in my life and asking if they would assist me as a mentor. It is only about an hour or two per month, but they have knowledge and success that I want to emulate, so it is worth it for me.
Another step, down the creative path, is virtual assistance. At different times, I have counted leaders such as Jack Welch, Jim Rohn and Zig Ziglar, among my top 5. Not because I knew them, but because I read their books and listened to their audio recordings over and over again.
Including virtual development in the form of books, audio programs and training & education systems in your top 5 can be a very powerful step to improving yourself, developing your skills and fostering a positive mindset.
Also note that approximately, every 90 days of your life the 5 people that you spend the most time with will have the opportunity to change. Someone will move, someone will get married, someone will get divorced, or have a kid, or get a new job, and somehow the dynamics will change. When that happens choose carefully who fills that spot. Every 90 days you have the opportunity to improve your Top 5.
On a final note, here is an excerpt from The Slight Edge, by Jeff Olson:
If you want to raise the quality of your life, hang out with people who have been there and done that. If you want to be a great public speaker, hang out with great speakers. If you want to be a success in business, hang around successful business people. If you want to be a terrific parent, spend lots of time with men and women who have mastered parenting. Do you know why birds of a feather flock together? Because they’re all going in the same direction. They share a common vision. If you’re after a goal – any goal – go find the people who have achieved that goal, or who are well along the path to attaining that goal, and be with them, hang out with them, camp on their doorstep.
This also falls closely in line with the teachings of Napoleon Hill:
Whenever two minds connect, a third mind is created, patterned after the stronger of the two – for better or for worse. Many successful people can trace their success directly to the time they began a close association with someone who possessed the positive mental attitude that they were able to copy.
So, my challenge to you, is to identify your top 5, determine what adjustments you need to make and commit to including personal development and continuing education as part of your daily decisions, because if you improve your associations, you improve yourself.
