Associating Yourself

A huge lesson I had to learn. But a quick & easy one to explain

Association is important in life & in business. We are products of our environment, meaning that our natural personal traits come from those people & places we surround ourselves by or grew up around to a deeper degree.

Sometimes, it can be difficult to feel like the underdog, I know that from experience. I started with nothing, so it was difficult to recognise when I first started out in business, especially being surrounded by people who had already made a lot of money in their life & had what I believed at the time to be success.

Years have passed since then & this is what I've learnt from it all. In a nutshell, if you surround yourself by people who you believe are better than you and you can accept that you are working towards their level of achievements, then the attributes of those individuals can brush off onto you & you will endeavour to become a better person yourself. The added benefit of doing this, is you will learn a lot of the ways not to do things and new ways of doing things too. An old expression, 'pick the traits of those you most admire & dispel of those you don't, only then will you become your own success'. I genuinely learnt a lot from the people that looked down on me on my way up.

On the flip side of this, if you surround yourself by people who you believe aren't as well achieved as you, then you will have no measure to better yourself by or have any attributes to recognise to work towards - in fact, you'll probably hit a plateau in your achievements and begin leaning back towards these 'environmental' factors.

It's fine when you have reached the peak of your achievements to say that you're happy with where you're at in life, but if you want to be a better person you must first surround yourself by better people. Strive is contagious, but so is complacency & negativity. If you find yourself around people who don't want to try to be a better person or by people who are on a downhill voyage, you will probably end up being sucked down the same path. However, if you surround yourself by people who are willing to achieve or who have achieved, you will likely aim the bar higher & higher.

Successful people surround themselves with successful people for a reason. So learn the lesson I never recognised until earlier this year & cut ties with people who are keeping you down.

You're better off climbing the ladder alone, than carrying added weight of others up it with you.

This isn't to say you shouldn't help others who are willing to put equal effort in too, but be wary of people who don't want to help you either - its easy to slip off or get kicked off the ladder when you're around the wrong people.