The-Slight-Edge

invest in Yourself 153
The reason “birds of a feather flock together” is simply that they’re all going
in the same direction, headed for the same destination. Look at the people with
whom you flock, the company you keep: what destination are they headed for?
And is that where you want to be headed?
Look at the people around you. Are they more successful than you are? Are they
people who live the kinds of lives you aspire to live, or the kinds of lives you hope to
leave behind? On what side of the Slight Edge are they living—on the success curve
or the failure curve? Is the Slight Edge working for them or against them? Where will
they be in twenty years? And are they pulling you up or dragging you down?
This is a pass or fail test: there is no “maybe” about it. Remember, there is
no standing still: we’re all going in one of two directions, either up or down. Your
association with each person you know is either empowering you, or it’s not—
taking you up the success curve or down the failure curve.
How can you tell? One way is to go back to the business of future and past,
responsibility and blame. When you and this particular friend get together, are
your conversations about responsibility, aspirations and taking initiative? Or do
they often seem to work their way around to blame or its cousins—envy, jealousy,
resentment and irritation?
Do your conversations focus more on the future or on the past? It’s only
natural, when you share a common history and set of experiences, to enjoy
reminiscing over fond memories; that’s not what I mean. What I mean is, does
your relationship have a forward-looking, positive feeling to it, or do the two of
you get together and always seem to end up circling events of the past, like a cat
endlessly turning round and round before it can settle down to sleep?
If your relationship with someone has a theme of blame and feeds on the
past, it’s disempowering. If it has a theme of responsibility, self-reflection and
change and feels like something moving into the future, it’s empowering.
We are all either building our own dreams or building somebody else’s. To put
a finer point on it, we’re either building our dreams—or building our nightmares.
There may be some people with whom you’re now spending two days a
week, where you might decide you need to take that down to two hours. There
may also be people with whom you’re spending only two minutes, where you’ll
realize you need to spend far more time with them—two hours or two days.
And you will find times when what you really need to do is simply disassociate
yourself from someone; that’s a part of the Law of Association, too.
For many people, I think this can be a tough aspect of the Slight Edge to
understand and accept. Most everything else about the Slight Edge, as you
already know, is easy to do—but disassociating yourself from people who do not
empower you can be a sad and difficult thing to do. Especially if you love them.
Especially if they are old friends or dear family.