I love Jim Rohn, and you should too. You can listen to him here. His tracks are a positive trigger for me to keep on track and fired up. Plus his cadence, delivery, and humor provide an amazing example of delivering presentations that all leaders could learn from.
This particular quote so often repeated is about self-assessment and understanding who you are. This is a constant challenge for me and many other people I’ve worked with. We tend to have blindspots and face difficulty accurately assessing ourselves, either being too harsh or slightly deluded. In fact, there’s the 360 degree feedback which has attempted to help with this very thing…among numerous other attempts in the business world to shape effective leaders.
So let’s get down to it:
You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with. -Jim Rohn
It’s a simple way to assess who you are by looking at others around you.
Beyond a heuristic, there’s some cool science behind the quote. For example, smoking as well as obesity tend to be prevalent among social circles. The more friends someone has that are smokers (obese), the more likely he/she is to be a smoker (obese)–please remember correlation doesn’t equal causation here though. But perhaps your parents were onto something when they restricted you (or at least tried to) from hanging out with the “bad kids” and signed you up for Boy Scouts or a Church Group or the like. (I love Boy Scouts, they’re just an easy target here)
The idea is that if you don’t like the five people you spend the most time with, you should probably change that and find those you do admire.
But consider taking it one step further, the “you” in Rohn’s quote is the demonstrated accumulation of actions and behaviors. Each action, each behavior can be identified and broken down.
You are the average of the five….
- foods you eat the most
- websites you read the most
- clothes you wear the most
…and the list of behaviors goes on.
Looking at the people you spend the most time with is just a shortcut to identify the behaviors. It works. But really dig into it more to understand your behaviors and how to effectively replace the ones you don’t like with ones you do.
You can look at yourself in the mirror and see in that moment what behaviors and actions you are demonstrating. But, who you are is not defined by a single reference point, it’s based on the continual process of your life. (Although we start going down the philosophical rabbit hole of “well then is a thief always a thief, or only one once he/she has stolen, and should that determination that was based on one action follow that person for the rest of his/her life.”)
When I look in the mirror, some things I assess are: am I healthy and am I a hard worker.
I’m not healthy just because I ate a kale salad for dinner. It could be that I ate it because I spent the last four nights binging on barbecue.
I’m not a hard worker just because I stayed up late finishing a paper. It could be that I procrastinated to the last minute and rushed through it.
But if I consistently eat healthy, consistently finish tasks no matter how long they take me into the night, then I do become labeled as healthy and a hard worker.
All too often we take a snapshot view of our life to define us. It is much like looking just at a balance sheet of a company. (Yes I’m going there.)
I encourage you to dig deeper and inspect the income statement and cash flows of your life. For over time, you’ll get a better assessment for who you are.
Are you increasing your retained earnings or decreasing? Is cash flow going in or coming out of investing and operating activities? Are expenses legitimate or excessive?
How many servings of vegetables did you eat over the course of the year–not just over the course of the weekend? How many hours of studying did you put in over the semester–not just during finals?
The beauty of this approach is that you can redefine yourself based on the accumulation of behaviors and actions you take, and at any moment you can shift your behaviors and start that as the beginning of your reference period (your fiscal year).
So I challenge myself and any reader who cares to consider:
What are the five things you do most that affect the behaviors in the categories that matter to you?
For then you will have a better understanding of who you are. Assess not just the balance sheet, but the other financials as well. If you don’t like it, change it starting now. And look around. If it’s being influenced by someone, it may just mean having to fire one of your people you have spent the most time with and finding new friend.
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