How to Control the Subconscious Influence of Your 5 Closest Friends

Episode 2: How to Control the Subconscious Influence of Your 5 Closest Friends

Welcome to episode 2 of the DeskCussions podcast. I just wanted to use this one as a another little introduction to explain to you where I'm at in my entrepreneurial journey, so that as we learn from this podcast we can learn and grow together.

So about midway through this year I had a spinal fusion surgery and I was in bed for one month after that. As a 28 year old man I started playing Fortnite again. Because I couldn't leave my bed, I was kind of out of options, but that kind of is a checkpoint for me because after that it's been going really hard on the Desk Clarity business.

So I like to think of myself as having six months of product development, writing three books and creating online courses, and then six months of trying to grow the business, which is the customer journey, the branding, the social media marketing and the digital advertising etc.

And I'm right at the beginning of it. I'm early on in my ramp up of sales so plenty of improvement left, and ready to learn.

What I hope to get out of this podcast is not just lessons from what people have done, which will help spark ideas for me, but I also want to get just some general inspiration. I firmly believe that when we surround ourselves with positive people and big thinkers and successful people, our brain is going to become in tune with theirs and we're going to have no choice but to think more positively, think bigger and think more optimistically.

This ties me into a discussion I had with my best friend lately. So I'll listen to motivational speakers, and I guess TikTok equivalents of that, and I firmly agree that our circle of five friends is our net worth.

So your network is your net worth, and probably if we took the bank account of our five people we spend the most time with, ours would be the average of that. For a lot of people this would apply.

Because I see it happen all the time with diet, with gym and with fashion. Your mates will give you a little bit of a hard time if you do something too incorrect with the trajectory of the group.

So for example, when my friend spoke about eating KFC too many days in a row, I just instinctively replied, “That that doesn't sound like you, you never do that.” And then when I was wearing the wrong shoes he pointed out to me that I need to fix my fashion because I was looking a bit dorky.

And it made me happy, I said I have got to be really thankful for this because if he hadn't ripped on me, I mean and it kind of hurts for like five minutes when you realise you've made a mistake, but having a good group of friends to correct you like that is so important because now I'm probably more attractive now that I've changed the shoes.

It's because my friend gave me that little bit of a course correction, and then he's probably eating healthier because I give him that slight course correction away from KFC for example, and I wonder if that applies to all aspects: business, family, positive thinking etc.

I'm sure it does, so I had to think to myself, I do fully agree that hanging out with more positive and more successful people will benefit me, but how do you do that?

It's such an uncommon thing, someone actively going out to hang out with more positive people, but I thought I'll give it a try, so for example I had I had this app idea in the back of my mind that I've got an MVP (minimum viable product) created for. It's far from functional, but it's a techie idea and I know that there's a local Innovation Hub Tech Hub, so instead of working from home that day, what I did was I said today I'm going to go and surround myself with tech entrepreneurs and successful people who've created their own businesses.

So I went to the Gold Coast Innovation Hub and it was awesome. Someone came and sat with me we spoke about their new brand that they're just about to launch. They invited me to lunch with them and I was at lunch with three guys from a successful start-up.

And I was thinking, it was great to listen to them because the way these tech guys were speaking about getting funding so things that a lot of us would think would be impossible getting a million dollars funding or more. They kind of just make it sound like part of the process: you come up with an idea, you test it in the market, you take that to angel investors and you've got your funding… and you just repeat that through the different stages.

And a lot of us think that's impossible to come up with an app, we think that's like winning the lottery, but they just make it sound like it's day-to-day business. So I was really in impressed that it was so rapid and so quick, all I did was drive to the Innovation Hub and rent a casual desk for $30, and a couple hours later I was at lunch with people that had changed my thinking completely.

I went home thinking, if they're going to develop an app and it's that easy to then take to investors, I've done that first step, I did my small amount of app development.

I could just take this to investors, whether or not it succeeds… I haven't calculated the probability of that yet, but that's what I could do.

I could just do that next step, which I hadn't thought of before and none of my close friends are in the tech space so they wouldn't have sent me that direction.

And I wonder how far you can push that idea of surrounding yourself with more successful, more positive people. I'm very lucky that I have an incredible group of friends that are still my same best friends from high school, so I can't fathom the idea of not hanging out with them anymore, but I wonder if supplementary to that I just make time in my week to spend more time with my new friends in the tech industry and explore some other industries.

So that's one idea, go to your Innovation Hub… and if I just brainstorm now, my usual trick, if you move to a new city, I'd tell someone to join some sports teams and join some Meetup groups, so I might check out some Meetup groups and see who hangs around the investing and finance circles.

I've already done the tech circles, but I'm sure there's other business owner/business founder type circles and I think it's that easy.

I'll test it out and report back with if it works or not, but I can't argue with the philosophy that we are probably all the average wealth of our five closest friends, and I'd like to extend that out to health and other things.

I can't help but to have the urge to see if I can increase that, increase that influence I'm getting from my surroundings, and who I am obviously as well.

So I challenge you to think about if you're hanging out with the right people. Obviously it's super hard to give up close friends, and I don't even recommend that, especially because I can't fathom giving up my incredible friends, but maybe if you've got some bad friends that you know are dragging you down, feel free to allocate your hours in the week that you have to hang out to more successful people.

And then, as I said before, how do you find those successful people? Just brainstorm… Google it and come up with something. And test it out, if it doesn't work, try the next thing. And thanks for joining me for episode two of DeskCussions. Please give us a subscribe so that we can bring you some more content.