The Five People You Are REALLY The Average Of
What Entrepreneurs Like Tim Ferriss Got Wrong
Do you know the favorite quote that entrepreneurs love to live by? It’s from motivational speaker Jim Rohn: “You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.”
It’s such a popular quote in the entrepreneurial world, Tim Ferriss even said he would put it on a billboard.
It’s a good quote. And it’s true. You are greatly influenced by your environment. You will pick up the characteristics and tendencies of those you spend time around. Their energy can drive you, or their apathy can slow you down. And it goes much deeper than behavior: Have you noticed that you start picking up the speech patterns of the people around you? Even their eating behavior will rub off on you.
This quote is used by entrepreneurs as motivation for surrounding yourself with high achieving, fully optimized people who have already gotten where you want to be. People who have a morning routine. People who journal every day. People who perform self-experimentation to fully optimize all aspects of themselves.
The thinking is, if you surround yourself with people who have great habits, you will pick up these habits, too.
But what is most important about this quote is that it reveals an even deeper truth, one that’s not apparent on first glance. It’s a truth known by psychoanalysts for the past century: You are the average of the five people you spent the most time with.
I’m talking about your family.
There are at least five people in your past who have already laid down the foundation for your habits, for the way you view success, and, most crucially, the ways you get in the way of your own success.
Most of what you know about the world, you learn in the first five years of life. You internalize messages from the culture via your family, and you model your own habits after those you see in your parents.
What is your parents’ attitude toward work? Toward success? Did they expect you to stick to a safer, more traditional path? To avoid taking risks? To make yourself small because there’s something shameful about standing out?
Many young, professional people struggle with the messages they’ve internalized from their families. Your parents conveyed these messages to you, and chances are, they unconsciously underlie and influence the way you move through the world. You’ve internalized the habits of the first five people in your life.
So, what do you do about these five people who have implanted self-limiting messages in your mind?
This is where therapy come in. Therapy is a process of excavating your past to figure out: Where did my foundational beliefs about the world come from? How did I learn how to relate to other people? Why do I keep sabotaging my success because I’m unconsciously locked in a battle with my father (or mother)?
Sure, you can change the five people you surround yourself with now, but there’s a limit to how much you can really change if you don’t examine the five people that already determined your habits.
