How I Transformed My Life By Deliberately Choosing My 5 Closest Friends

Success isn’t about talent or luck – it’s about the influences you allow into your mind.

Even as a kid, I knew I was different to my peers.

I had a higher level of ambition. A drive to chase something bigger. I wasn’t wired to just go with the flow – I knew I wanted to create something great.

I knew I had a lot of potential, but I had absolutely no idea how to harness it.

I had such big dreams, but I had no idea what to do with them or how to leverage them. What steps would I take to actually achieve these big aspirations I knew I had?

I was clueless.

All that motivation and potential, but no direction on how to use it.

When I was 24 years old, it finally hit me.

I had a terrifying realisation that finally made me realise I had to do something.

I looked around and realised that I was completely surrounded by people who had given up on chasing more. They had settled. Content with ordinary lives, drifting through each day as it came.

My coworkers' idea of ambition started and ended with nothing more than getting to work on time.

If you asked about their dreams, they’d tell you that the greatest thing that could happen to them would be moving a rung up the corporate ladder. Getting that role as manager or team lead. Maybe even getting their next 2% pay raise.

I wasn’t much better myself.

I’d let my mind be consumed by meaningless distractions. My attention was scattered, lost in the noise of trending topics, pointless Twitch streams, and hours of YouTube content that left me with nothing to show for it.

The thought of becoming like them scared me to death –

and I could see myself slowly slipping down the same path.

Preserve What Makes You Rare

Everybody is granted unique God-given gifts.

Now, if what I wrote above resonates with you, if you feel as if you have a higher ambition and bigger aspirations than your peers around you - you’ll need to take this into account.

Remember above, I mentioned that success isn’t found in your skills or in luck, but in what you allow to influence your mind.

The moment I looked around and saw everyone becoming content with being average, I began to realise that:

• To be genuinely ambitious and willing to work hard in the pursuit of greatness is an incredibly rare skill. Everybody wants to be successful. Not many people are willing to put in the work to achieve it.
• It won’t be a quick process. You won’t just wake up one morning and suddenly realise you’re living an incredibly mundane, ordinary life. It will be a matter of slowly drifting and ever so slightly lowering your standards over a prolonged time period. So discrete you hardly even realise it.
• You must do everything in your power to protect the unique brilliance that God has bestowed upon you. If you aren’t intentional about protecting it, you’ll fall into the default; mediocrity.

I felt as if I was on the right track in being able to identify these key ideas.

But there was still something vital that was missing.

I’d come to my senses. These pivotal realisations were now crystal clear to me. But how could I transform my current reality and redirect my life toward the path I was meant to be on?

Show Me Your Friends And I’ll Show You Your Future

If success is defined by what we allow to influence us, then the people we surround ourselves with are the most important catalysts.

Think of any successful person you know.

It’s easy to look at them and assume that they made it to the position they’re in by individual merit. By the hard work they put in themselves.

The reality is that nobody ever achieves success on their own.

Behind every brilliant individual, is a pivotal foundation of the people that helped them get there.

• The supportive parents that facilitated an environment for professional athletes to thrive in growing up.
• The group of friends in high school that forced each other to get better, to strive harder so that they’d beat each other.
• The wise mentor that had been on the path before them, giving them foresight into the exact roadmap they’d need to follow in order to find success.

“The key is to keep company only with people who uplift you, whose presence calls forth your best” - Epictetus

If you find yourself on a path leading toward mediocrity, the single best move you can make to steer away from it is to surround yourself with people on the pursuit of greatness.

Finding Your Tribe

We’ve identified that keeping company with people pursuing greatness is the most valuable action you can take toward moving yourself onto a path of success.

In theory that sounds like a great idea.

But to actually do it, is a lot harder.

Like I said, I was in this same position, and I know what it feels like.

If you’re sitting in an environment right now drawing a blank on any people you know who are chasing their potential, what can you actually do?

Before you even start asking yourself that question, there’s something more important you need to consider.

To surround yourself with ‘successful’ individuals – you first need to define what a ‘successful person’ even looks like to you.

What Kind Of People Should I Surround Myself With?

The first step involves some introspection on your behalf.

You need to sit down and genuinely identify what it is that your goals are. Where do you want to head?

You don’t need to have it completely mapped out, but you do need to invest time into finding some sense of direction. You can’t get to the destination if you don’t know what it is.

While mapping out your main core goals, another incredibly valuable task is to create a list of the what main values and characteristics you want to inhabit would be.

Clearly define the type of person you’d want to embody.

How would they act on a daily basis? What character traits would they be known for?

By defining:

• Your overarching goals
• The personal character traits you want to embody

You now have a perfect foundation for going out and finding the exact type of likeminded ambitious people that will match you.

Judge Them By Their Fruit

We know the phrase “Show me your friends, and I’ll show you your future”.

Wouldn’t that mean that the single best way to determine whether an individual is worth surrounding yourself with, is to look at what their life is like currently, and ask whether you’d want to be them in the future?

The best determinant in identifying somebody’s nature, is to look at the fruit they are bearing.

Do they have flourishing relationships with others? Are they physically in good shape? Are they doing well financially?

Reflect back on the list of characteristics you wrote down you wanted to embody.

Does this person align with those? Are they seeing the results in their lives from what somebody illustrating those attributes would gain?

Using this technique as a checklist should make it fairly clear who could be seen as valuable, and who is doing nothing more than making it through the week.

“Surround yourself with humans who create their lives. People who change, more than they complain. Create, more than they consume. Live actively, instead of accepting life as it is. Find people chasing down their potential.” - Zach Pogrob

Your Inner Circle Doesn’t Have To Live Next Door

It’s important to remember that we live in a digital age.

30 years ago, you would have been fairly limited in the distance that you’d be able to search for people to surround yourself with.

Today, you could find an ambitious person with the same interests as you on the other side of the world purely by stumbling across their social media profile or some piece of content they created.

What’s the catalyst here, though?

Social media.

It’s both an incredible blessing, and a weapon fighting against us.

Our success is defined by the influence we allow on our minds.

You must be absolutely relentless in making sure the content you consume and the people you follow are on brand with the characteristics you wish to embody, and the overarching goals you want to achieve.

Do an audit on everybody you follow. Every platform you consume media from.

Be real with yourself. Is this person adding value to your life? Are they genuinely moving me in the direction I want my life to head?

I’m not saying that you should unfollow every single auntie and friend from high school that you follow.

What I’m saying, is that if you’re following girls purely because they’re pretty, accounts purely because they’re entertaining, memes for no other reason than a good laugh – you’re fueling your mind with unnecessary noise.

You must realise that this entire system is set up to be a perpetual distraction from you achieving your aspirations.

There is a war on your focus. You need to increase your agency to take back control of it.

If you use it right, you can create an incredibly powerful arsenal of the most relentless, hard working and talented individuals on the planet.

I guarantee you that if you surround your mind with that over a long enough time period, it will start to rub off on you.

Role models.txt

Create a list of your role models.

One of the most valuable practices I’ve ever implemented was to create a note on my phone containing a list of all my biggest role models and people who inspire me.

If there’s anything you take from reading this, please do yourself a favour and start one today.

It doesn’t have to be big. Just start with a few people that come to your mind. Think of your biggest sources of inspiration in the different areas of your life. The people you aspire to be like.

Maintain it. Each time you think of somebody else you aspire to be like, add them in.

Having this document on hand has brought exponentially more value to my life than I ever imagined when I began curating it.

It’s easy to think you can remember your role models in your head, but the ebbs and flows of life will inevitably cause you to forget certain people and their characteristics in future seasons.

Having an outlined set of the people that inspire me and the reasons why they are valuable served as a foundation I could always return to, and a north star I could always follow during times where I felt lost.

In the times when I felt completely lost in which direction to head next, by reviewing this hand curated list of people I individually admire, I was able to get a clearer overall grasp on who I look up to, what they are aspiring to do, and what I need to do to move closer toward aligning with them.

The most powerful thing that comes from this document for me now, is when I come across new problems in my life.

Inevitably we’re going to face new problems as we venture into different seasons of our lives. With that comes different questions you’re going to seek answers for.

Say for example I all of a sudden need advice on starting my own business, or how to be a better parent.

Now that I have a tangible list of role models I highly respect and know are producing good fruit in these areas of their lives, I can actually use them as a foundation for seeking answers.

It gives me an endless source of reputable information and wisdom in areas of life I didn’t even think of, for topics and problems I didn’t even realise I’d run into.

Useful Tip:

• In scenarios like this where I want to find whether there are any resources from the people in my role models.txt notes, I’ll create a comma separated list of individuals who I’d like to seek advice from, and throw it into perplexity or chatGPT (web search), asking it to find any related content from any of these role models. 9/10 times I’ll find something valuable.

Practical Ways to Find Ambitious Peers:

Social media is valuable, but there is something irreplaceable about surrounding yourself with genuinely ambitious people in your real day to day life.

I want to run through some tangible ways you can actually surround yourself with people who are of high value.

Before I list them though, I need to strongly reiterate why this is so important.

Remember, if you want to be successful, you’re not going to be able to achieve it on your own merit. (we saw this by looking at any successful individual you know of, and thinking of the environment they grew up in).

You are a result of the individuals you surround yourself with.

As you read through these ideas below, realise that they aren’t silver bullet answers that are going to be exactly what you need to do to find a circle of geniuses to hang out with.

They’re ideas to get your brain churning on approaches you could take, right now, today, to actually make the step out toward surrounding yourself with people you want to become.

Gyms

• You’ll notice a direct correlation between people who are successful in their careers, and people who are disciplined in training their bodies.
• Making the investment of joining a non-commercial gym with a dedicated community is a perfect incubator for running into highly disciplined, ambitious people.
• This goes for regular weight lifting gyms, as well as gyms training Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, boxing, or MMA.

Meetups / Hackathons / Co-working Spaces

• For everything you’re interested in, you’ll find others out there who are too.
• Because of this, realistically any career, topic or skill you’re curious about will likely already have established communities of people frequently meeting together.
• Take some time to look at event organising websites such as meetup.com or Facebook groups.
• Curate a list of upcoming events that look interesting to you and look as if they’d attract other likeminded ambitious people in that field.
• There are also paid co-working spaces such as WeWork or other open office spaces, which offer opportunities for you to stumble across talented people working on interesting projects.

Online Communities with In-Person Meetups

• Online communities are one of the most effective, and straightforward ways to get into a concentrated environment of individuals that all have a shared interest.
• If you’re curious and passionate about learning SEO, there are numerous Discord servers, Skool communities, Subreddits, and Communities on Twitter which all attract minds that are similar to you.
• Some of these communities organise in-person meet ups on a regular basis, and these are some of the most valuable events you can attend for forming valuable connections.

Masterminds and Workshops

• The most valuable place to find connections to well established, successful people is to attend paid masterminds or workshops on a particular niche.
• Masterminds are usually a matter of “pay to play”. In other words, they contain the most value, because they require a genuine investment.
• If you want to find a concentrated group of the most successful individuals on the planet in a particular field, a paid mastermind or private group is going to be the single best place to find them.
• This is obviously the most extreme of all the ideas I’ve spoken about, but the mentality you should approach it with is that although masterminds tend to be expensive, the value you’re going to get back from the knowledge gained and connections formed exponentially outweighs the price tag.

Consider Moving to a High Energy City

• The reality is that certain geographic areas just aren’t going to have as many opportunities to bump into successful people of a particular domain as others.
• You’re not going to find as many tech founders in Omaha, Nebraska as you’re going to find in San Francisco.
• If you’re serious about finding a tribe of highly driven peers, moving to well known hubs for ambitious people in your niche will inevitably bring you closer to achieving that.

Remember – for any of these opportunities you participate in above, it isn’t an instantaneous ticket toward finding highly driven, valuable friends. The idea is to simply put yourself in an environment that increases the odds of you serendipitously establishing friendships with other ambitious people who have shared values with you.

What Do You Bring To The Table?

You could have all the opportunities in the world to mingle with some of the greatest minds in any field, but if you have nothing to show for yourself, you’re wasting your time.

Nobody valuable wants to affiliate with somebody who isn’t going to provide some form of reciprocated value.

Before you step foot into any community, you must first put in the work necessary to be a valuable individual yourself.

Ask yourself:

• What unique skills or experience do I bring to the table?
• What valuable characteristics and habits do I inhabit myself that are of value?
• What credibility or results do I have that I can display to my peers?

If you find yourself unable to give reasonable answers to any of these questions, dedicate the next season of your life toward gaining tangible, real life skills and experience in some form of money making skill.

“You are paid in direct proportion to the difficulty of the problems you solve.” - Elon Musk

Your skills define your value.

You gain skills by learning and applying what you’ve learnt.

Learn, Build, then Network.

Adopting The Right Mentality

Surrounding yourself with the right people is incredibly influential in defining the outcome of your future.

They say that you become the result of the five closest people you spend time with.

I’ve heard someone go a step further, saying that you become the result of the lowest of the five of the people you spend your time with.

Finding ways to increase your chances of being surrounded by likeminded individuals in the pursuit of greatness is incredibly important.

Make the time to intentionally sit down and plan how you’re going to do it.

“If you go out looking for friends, you're going to find they are very scarce. If you go out to be a friend, you'll find them everywhere.” ― Zig Ziglar

In any environment you’re in, you’ll find far more success by going in trying to be the friend (trying to be the one providing value to others), rather than being the one desperately searching for valuable friends.

To summarise:

• Firmly establish the type of people you want to surround yourself with
• Make sure you have value to provide to others first, before diving into environments with ambitious people
• Put yourself in as many circumstances as you can to meet self-disciplined, hard working, valuable humans.
• Invest time and effort into establishing and maintaining deep relationships with these people, and leverage your combined skill sets to build something great.

We live in an abundant age, full of more opportunities than mankind has ever experienced.

Don’t waste it by letting your talents and skills deteriorate into mediocrity purely because of the environment you’re living in.

Form a tribe of likeminded individuals who are relentlessly unlocking their potential and pursuing greatness.

- Cole

If you’re interested in escaping from a traditional 9-5, leveraging AI to build a future of your own, and capitalising on the digital renaissance, subscribe to my weekly newsletter.

You can also follow me on twitter @cole_mccon