"If you are the smartest person in the room, you're in the wrong room"
This was the first piece of advice that I was ever told that had anything to do with self help outside of my immediate internalisation. As we grow, we form alliances with those around us from probably an evolutionary means for surviving as a pack. When we start out, we make friends with just about anyone. Generally, we don't stay friends with people from primary school and eventually the same goes for high school and university, with a lower probability of losing them as we go.
This happens because as humans we learn and adapt. You're not the same person in primary school as you were in high school. You also may have been separated from those friends and struggled to maintain that friendship. This is just life; and it's different for each of us.
What we fail to realise as children and teenagers is how much our environment has an impact on who we are. We firmly believe that we are in complete control of who we are and that we are the only ones in control. Yet, we can't help but scoff at some of the nuances of those younger than us. Some of the outrageous or silly things they say or do, at one time, we did ourselves. I'm sure there are a bunch of factors involved but the key one, in my opinion, are the people you surround yourself with; your friends.
Have you ever seen someone you don't like all too much, and you also feel similar energy about the people they appear with? Have you ever seen someone you really admired and you look at their friends and you feel similar energy? Have you ever looked at yourself and wondered how much like your friends you are?
Motivational speaker Jim Rohn famously said once that,
"You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with."
Take a second to reflect how much you share in common with the five people you spend the most time with and see if you can identify any similarities you share with them. It's a bit weird how true it is, hey?
"If you're the smartest person in the room, you're in the wrong room"
The advice was on my mind for weeks. I went from exploration of the literal to seeking ambiguous or alternate meaning. It was advice that once I registered, I saw with people I knew; primarily relative to lifestyle problems. I have had friends who surround themselves with drug dealers and criminals. I have friends who surround themselves with people who are content sitting around all day and crave to understand why their dreams fall through. Are you starting to get the idea?
What does the quote mean? Could it insinuate that being you should ostracise yourself from people who aren't smart? Fuck no. The word "smartest" is totally up for replacement. Once you realise this you will start to comprehend that this quote is about growth. If you want to grow in any particular way, you should be surrounding yourself with like-minded people. This is very dynamic, however. Say for example I had a less knowledgable friend, I still care about them and I'm not just going to cut them out. That person might actually have habits that they dominate my other friends in, such as empathy or optimism.
There is no need to overthink this one. There is no crazy strategy of chopping and changing friends situationally. The point is blunt, plain, and simple: If you are surrounding yourself with people who are holding you back, you are going to remain being held back; or it is going to be much more difficult to propel forward.
Now this quote, albeit a good one, doesn't provide gravity to the importance of what I'm getting at; it just provides a fragrance. So instead, I want you to focus on another quote I first heard through American businessman, Dan Peña:
"Show me your friends and I'll show you your future"
Read that again.
Read it one more time.
Slaps a bit harder, doesn't it.
The people I keep close to me in my life know very well my opinion on the quality I expect of the people I associate with. I set a bar. I some how attract a lot of people who don't really meet my expectations of a baseline, and a majority of them blast me with: "Your standards of people are too high", "No wonder you have no friends", "You're too intense".
You're going to be met with criticism when you do this. People are not going to understand and it's alright. I don't hold anything against the people who said those things to me because I know I still have a handful of great and loyal friends, and those comments are from a place of pain or a lack of understanding. We can reason that by the fact that there are people around me, the bar I set by applying these principles is achievable.
To hang around with the wrong people is of jeopardy to your future.
I can assume if you're reading this article, you have ambition or standards of yourself that you want to refine and expand on. If that is the case, I encourage you and maybe even implore you to ponder who you surround yourself with and cultivate an elite and loyal team, a Mastermind Group.
I first encountered the idea of the Mastermind Group - the culmination of everything we've discussed and more - through Napolean Hill's "Think and Grow Rich".
Now, Napolean's understanding (which he developed from Andrew Carnegie) of a "Master Mind" is more objectively focused, however we are going to extrapolate on the concept as a philosophy. He defines the Master Mind as a:
"coordination of knowledge and effort, in a spirit of harmony, between two or more people, for the attainment of a definite purpose"
He goes on to explain what he refers to as the "psychic phase" of the Master Mind:
"The psychic phase of the Master Mind principle is much more abstract, much more difficult to comprehend, because it refers to the spiritual forces with which the human race, as a whole, is not well acquainted. You may catch a significant suggestion from this statement:
'No two minds ever come together without thereby creating a third, invisible, intangible force which may be likened to a third mind.'
Keep in mind the fact that there are only two known elements in the whole universe - energy and matter. Matter may be broken down into units of molecules, atoms and electrons. There are units of matter that may be isolated, separated and analysed. Likewise there are units of energy.
The human mind is a form of energy, a part of it being spiritual in nature. When the minds of two people are coordinated in a spirit of harmony, the spiritual units of energy of each mind form an affinity, which constitutes the 'psychic' phase of the master mind."
From this I derive more so of the mentality of a Mastermind Group; that is to say, mental synergy: like-mindedness. The people you surround yourself with are not only people you can benefit from, but through their strong values, you begin to combine and cultivate a more refined you.
This same idea is echoed in James Clear's Atomic Habits. James writes:
"We pick up habits from the people around us. We copy the way our parents handle arguments, the way our peers flirt with one another, the way our co-workers get results. When your friends smoke pot, you give it a try too.
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As a general rule, the closer we are to someone, the more likely we are to imitate some of their habits. One ground-breaking study tracked twelve thousand people for thirty-two years and found that "a person's chance of becoming obese increased by 57 percent if he or she had a friend who became obese." It works the other way, too. Another study found that if one person in a relationship lost weight, the other partner would also slim down about one third of the time."
What James helps us see here is that the effect our social circle has on us can have more scientifically evident ramifications in our behaviours (in this case, habits) and not just an exploration of something as metaphysical (as explored by Napoleon) or emotional subjectivity (as explored by me in my lack of formal education).
Some quick experience for you.
The time I began to realise and practice this way of thinking was around university, before I ever discovered the mentality. I was with a group of people who would play trading card games and video games day in and day out. This was my group because I accepted what I had, and like many people, wanted a place to belong. I loved these things, don't get me wrong, but this was unregulated pleasure. I assessed that if I remained with these people, doing these things, my future would somehow lead to tolerating an existence I despised; content with being trapped in an endless cycle of cheap thrills void of exploration and passion. I made my choice; and despite starting as a lonely one, I don't regret a single thing.
Another time I wrote a small PowerShell script to type my passwords into games that disabled pasting text, I was so excited I went to share it in a group chat so that my friends could use it if they wanted. There was a particularly talented engineer in that chat who immediately pulled my personal success down, brushing it off as a waste of time. This is an example of despite being around a smarter person, he was not at all a better person for me to grow from; so I promptly took care of that.
It's time to assess who you are friends with. What would your future - in your one time to exist - look like if you stay with who you are with now? Are there changes that need to be made or have you fortunately accumulated some brilliant, like-minded people?
From here it's up to you to consciously make an effort to foster the values you want to live by.
You are the product of your environment.