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I hope everyone had a good time for Halloween last week (if you’re in a country that celebrates it). This was the first year the Noble family split up for Halloween. The kids are getting old enough that they have preferences to go out with their friends. It’s fun to see them branch out, even though it’s bittersweet to have them grow out of an old tradition. Thankfully my youngest still needs our supervision, so my wife and I went out with my daughter and her friends. I was pretty good in avoiding candy, but I did partake here and there. I made big progress in my home office this week! I hung my whiteboard and backlit it with LED lights, finally removing the two moving boxes it had been resting on. I put two rugs on the floor to encourage my dog, Pax, to come hang out with me. We moved a large built-in cabinet out, and I hung up a framed photo of family. There’s still some more work to do, like getting blinds on the windows. I taped construction paper to the window to block out direct sunlight on a call last week 🤣 Enjoy your week! A Quote Three Things1 – 🖥️ Sidebar.com – I found this interesting company last week. They connect you with a “personal board of directors” in twice-monthly 90-minute calls with a cohort of people. It seems like bi-directional mentorship. You tell the service your bona-fides and your goals, and their service sets up the cohorts. It’s not listed on their site, but it turns out the service is $300/month. That’s about $100/hour for business group therapy, which is a lot cheaper than a dedicated coach. I signed up before I encountered the price and have an interview in 10 days. I’ll let you know how it goes. 2 – 🪪 Apollo Robbins on Tim Ferriss – The link here is to a subset of the interview with Apollo Robbins, a “master thief.” What this guy is capable of boggles the mind. The link I sent is to an anecdote that was really memorable from the conversation. I recommend the full thing if you’re interested in hearing more. 3 – 🌳 GoRuck Basic – My wife and I did this event last week. It ended up being seven miles of rucking during a four hour event. I enjoyed the whole thing, but the most memorable part was fishing out a tree trunk from Lake Austin and then doing squat cleans and push presses with it together as a group. The next level event is the Tough, which is 12 hours and 15-20 miles. I’ll be on the lookout for the next one they run in Austin. Deeper DiveYou are the average of the five people you spend the most time with. You may have heard the common quote, “show me your friends and I’ll show you your future.” Or, as David Goggins put it in Never Finished: Who you hang around and speak to on the daily matters.
– David Goggins, “Never Finished“
Today we’ll explore what this concept is, some principles that explain it, and how to apply it positively. We influence, and are influenced by, the people we spend time with. It then follows that the people we spent the most time with will have the most influence on us. The five people you spend the most time with are consciously – and often unconsciously – influencing the way you think and act. Below is an anecdote illustrating this idea that comes from author, Shane Parrish. Shane grew up in Canada, and his friend group started pushi ng the boundaries of legal behavior – and Shane followed suit. This happened slowly over time. One day his friends came over and asked Shane to come out with them. Shane declined (long story, but essentially he had a book he wanted to finish), and those friends ended up robbing a house and getting arrested for it. Shane says that if he had gone with them, he absolutely would have robbed that house, and his life trajectory would have been fundamentally altered. The people you spend time with are a powerful force!
Coming back to the main idea, you can think of this as having a personal board of directors. A CEO leverages the expertise and experience of their board to guide the future of their company. A individual person can do the same thing with their life. Choose people whose standards you want to adopt. Becoming like the people around you means that over time you come to adopt their standards. If all you see are average people, you will end up with average standards. But average standards aren’t going to get you where you want to go. Standards become habits, and habits become outcomes. Few people realize that exceptional outcomes are almost always achieved by people with higher-than-average standards.
– Shane Parrish, “Clear Thinking“
While the people you spend the most time with are often physically present, or at least alive and over the phone or video calls, your personal board of directors can also be asymmetric, virtual, or deceased. For example, I’ve listened to a large percentage of Tim Ferriss’ 700 podcasts. Same for Ryan Holiday of the Daily Stoic. Over several years that’s in the thousands of hours I’ve spent with them – even though they’ve never heard of me. I’ve also read a lot of work by Marcus Aurelius and Seneca. Both of these people have been dead for 2,000 years, but their written content live on. I haven’t spent as much time with them as with others, but by exposing myself to their ideas repeatedly over time, they’re influencing how I think and act. Although my framing so far as been with a business lens, this idea applies to any dimension you can think of. Exercise. Habits. Religion. Kindness. Hobbies. Diet. Clothing. The list is endless. It’s a little weird, but true – your behaviors and traits are subtly guided by the people around you. Let’s explore some concepts from a variety of disciplines that inform this. I’ll share three; the Overton Window, Social Proof, and Reversion to the Mean. Overton Window: This is a political science term that describes “the range of policies politically acceptable to the mainstream population.” More abstractly, it’s the window of what’s acceptable. As applied to today’s topic, the people you spend the most time with establish the boundaries of the window through their actions. Do your friends all go to the gym five times a week? What kinds of vehicles do they drive? How kind are they? These set your Overton window. Social Proof: This term comes from psychology and says that “people copy the actions of others in choosing how to behave in a given situation.” It’s the idea that when you encounter something new, you look for signals from those around you under the assumption that other people have likely been in this situation and know what to do. Have you gone to a very fancy restaurant after not going in a while? You’ll probably look around to see how the other diners behave and mirror it. Same applies to the people you spend time with; you’ll watch how they behave and start to mirror it. Reversion to the Mean: This is a statistical term that essentially says that a lot of things follow a normal distribution, so if you experience an outlier, the next instance will likely be closer to the average (mean). The people you spend time with establish the distribution on some topic. If you err too high or too low you’ll become the outlier and are likely to revert back to the average of the group. Now that we’ve brought these concepts forward, let’s see how they can be applied to improve outcomes for you on any dimension you care about. We’ll look at three examples and close with the a call to action. Example 1, Cooking: Want to be a better chef and use better ingredients? Find people who exhibit those behaviors to shift your Overton window out. Use social proof to watch how they behave at the store or in their kitchen and then mirror it. If they make all make homemade dinners 4-7 times per week, you’re likely to be closer to the average of those numbers. Example 2, Hiring: You can also use this in hiring by finding people who are better then you in areas you want to develop. These new hires will help pull you and everyone else up on that dimension. Example 3, Your Boss: When looking for a job, work for a boss who you are inspired by and admire. You’ll be spending a lot of time with them and their behavior will have a heavy influence on you. As Shane Parrish says in Clear Thinking, “if you work for a jerk, sooner or later you’ll become one yourself.” We unconsciously become what we’re near. If you work for a jerk, sooner or later you’ll become one yourself. If your colleagues are selfish, sooner or later you become selfish. If you hang around someone who’s unkind, you’ll slowly become unkind. Little by little, you adopt the thoughts and feelings, the attitudes and standards of the people around you. The changes are too gradual to notice until they’re too large to address.
– Shane Parrish, “Clear Thinking“
This is a powerful force you can wield with intention in your life. Let’s talk about taking action this week. What’s your vision for your future self? Take a moment to get some clarity on that. Now, who do you spend the most time time? Are the people you spend time with pulling you in the direction you want to go? If so, great! If not, make progress toward an incrementally better future state starting this week. Find someone who levels you up and start spending more time with them. Ask them to coffee. Download their podcast. Read their book. I’d love to hear about your intentions for yourself and how you applied these ideas this week. Reply back and let me know! Kevin
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