When I was a kid I never really understood why my parents hated some of my friends so much. They would try to stop me from seeing some of them and say things like. “they just aren’t good kids”or “I just don’t like them”. I on the other hand thought they were great and hung out with them because I thought they were fun. I didn’t know any better. I relied on my own internal judging mechanism to help me decide what was right and what was wrong. What I did not realize, is that my conscious was being formed by what I was comfortable with. The more I was around things like drugs, the more comfortable I was with them. Its just basic human nature, the more exposed you are to something the more accepting you become of it.
I remember being SO against smoking that i would flush my mom’s cigarettes down the toilet. I’m not kidding I did it and got my but beat for it too! I would leave pictures of nasty lungs around the house for mom to find and gave her dirty looks when she lit up. By the time I got to High School I had a lot of friends that smoked as well. We would hang out, go to Denny’s and stuff and I got used to having friends that smoked. Eventually I tried and started smoking in High School because all my friends did. You can imagine when my mom found a pack of Marlboro Lights in my room! It was an awkward moment for sure.
I was 19 and in a Business meeting the first time I had someone actually spell out why that happened and explained the word association to me. I was told in no uncertain terms that I am who I hang out with. This guy was trying to teach me a little something and told me that if he wanted to learn who I was, all he had to do was spend 5 minutes with 5 of my closest friends and he would know more about me than he could learn by spending all day with me. It was like a ton of bricks falling from the sky. I got it! It made perfect sense. It explained a lot.
At 19 years old armed with this knowledge i must have went out and got rid of all of my negative friends right? WRONG! I just tried to change them and make them more positive and supporting and the kind of people I wanted them to be. Well, obviously that did not work. I began to seek out new positive relationships to begin to change some of my associations. Not the easiest thing to do for me at 19 but I tried. Not super easy to find a bunch of new friends that were around my age that were motivated and positive so I floundered a bit. Several years later I was able to find a group of guys that were just that. Successful, motivated and most important willing to associate with me. I learned a lot about business and how the world works. I learned stuff that I was never exposed to before in school. I learned about Capitalism and how to make money, how to work smarter and not just harder and how to leverage myself instead of just trading hours for dollars.
Now this is quite a bit of knowledge and I picked it up quickly but I still mainly associated with people who just did not get it. You see association is not just about who you hang out with. It is who you hang out with MOST of the time. Just because I was spending a couple hours a week with these business men was not enough. It was no match for the hours and hours I was spending with my “friends”. It was like digging a hole in the sandy surf at the beach. While I was digging a hole was made , when I stopped the hole filled pretty quickly. It has taken me the better part of 20 years to figure out how to turn the balance of the scale to lean in the direction of my positive associations. I have worked very hard to only allow access to the important parts of my life to people that have want in those areas. I still have friends and hang out with many different people but I do not allow many people to influence me. I mostly associate with people that are on my level or above and have the life that I desire. I have weeded out the negative associations in my life or at least limit the time I spend with them. The same way I picked up smoking for a time, I am developing successful habits and starting to see the fruits of my work and associations.
Its pretty simple really, you want to be successful? Hang out with successful people not bums. You want to run a Marathon? Hang out with runners not couch potatoes. You want to be a better parent? Hang out with parents that have great relationships with their kids not single people that don’t even have children. You are who you associate with. Period.
Association. Another core curriculum at Hard Knocks University. Enroll today!
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