"You're The Average Of The Five People You Spend The Most Time With” - Jim Rohn

Embedded in the quote is the view of how powerful one’s environment is to a person’s development in the nature vs. nurture argument. I imagine it’s a staged development that starts with nature but nurture takes greater effect as a person enters into an age of formed consciousness.

I imagine as the individual gets more influenced by the environment he finds himself in that he will soon become desensitized to things that made it unique. To reiterate, the oddities of your crowd become so obvious to your daily life that you no longer cite it as the thing that makes your group unique compared to others.

This would be the case when I ask people from other countries about cultural nuances in their home countries. This exercise is easier for the immigrants in Canada as there is a ‘compare and contrast’ that is possible. But when I ask natives in their own country, they are rather shocked when I point out the oddities I see.

Similarly, it’s a rather wasteful exercise to ask someone what makes them unique because they will, more likely than not, overlook the obvious (and material) factors that make them unique. That is to say, this will be the case in the absence of the individual having spent a significant amount of time on introspection.

When I worked at an investment fund, I thought my consulting background made me unique but turns out my colleagues thought it was my fluency in Korean. In consulting, I thought it was my powerlifting that made me unique but rather it was my ability to read financial statements (many didn’t know how surprisingly).

This will be the case for this mastermind group of close compatriots one assembles. I imagine those in the group won’t really know what makes them unique compared to when an outsider looks in.

We’ve all heard the value of constantly reading. Furthermore, investors especially would do well to read more business biographies than investing books as the latter is a fool’s errand to get rich quick. I digress, I love reading investing books and that’s how one starts but after learning the foundations, one would do best to study great businesses of the past and present. For that is at the crux of how many investors invest.

Now, reading about the great leaders of history may achieve one thing of inspiring the reader and giving them perspective. I’ve found this perspective into their journey extremely valuable. The reinforcing lesson being, every journey is filled with guaranteed hardship, and it’s only perseverance that matters regardless of the environment.

But something else that comes to mind is the desensitization from reading. It’s about the characteristics and mindsets you want to make so obvious and normal that it ceases to take up any energy to reinforce within the self.

If one is surrounded by highly ambitious individuals with huge dreams and visions it will not feel weird that one does. Naturally, if you are the only entrepreneur among a group of management consultants obsessed with getting MBAs and joining big brand firms, one will feel out of place and inadvertently question the self and her personal views/goals.

“If I am to avoid doing ‘unusual’ things it is difficult to see what chance I have of being more than an average person.” - Sir Winston Churchill

In some ways, in order to save oneself from the mediocrity of the average world, one needs to surround oneself with unusual people. The more one surrounds oneself with the weird and unusual, the more that will become the norm for the individual and one need not look over her shoulder every now and again.

You see….it’s to forget that what you are doing is weird and unusual so that you can proceed onwards without worry. I can’t emphasize how under-appreciated and important this is in striving to design a life that suits the individual.

For example, a person who is glued to the news or the segments of Twitter that are filled with internet trolls is more likely to think that the world is filled with negativity and assholes. But that’s how such businesses are incentivized to operate.

This is also the case if one’s best friends are obsessed about getting into brand name companies, they will do the same.

When I entered university, though I was in an accounting program…I did not know there were designations for accountants. Nor did I know about the existence of the Big 4 accounting firms. I only went to the program to learn accounting, not to be an accountant. But, all my closest friends, the city kids of Toronto, were well-versed in this world and educated this naive ‘country kid from Vancouver’. That’s the only reason I became a Big 4 accountant. My friends and the school system made it clear the best went there so I just strove for it.

If one surrounds oneself with intellectually curious people who are obsessed with reading and learning every day, then that will become the norm. I thank Buffett, Munger and the investor community they helped create (I think unintentionally) for making this the obvious thing for me. I’m sometimes reminded that most people aren’t constantly reading and actively trying to become better at reading and learning in general. Boggles the mind.

Though I didn’t have close friends who were obsessed with investing, I busied myself with podcasts and books of these people. This was a way of forming the artificial circle of influence that made more and more of what I wanted to do acceptable. Simply, it made decisions to journal daily, read daily, not sleep late, etc… all the easier to apply in my life.

The exposure one has to one’s social media community, the books one reads, the podcast one listens to, the amount of time one spends with family. They are all spheres of influence.

As much as such spheres of influence are well considered to be beneficial in how one learns, it’s equally or even more important in what becomes the defacto mindset one embraces. For that, it is quite imperative one deliberately selects the influences one has on his life.

Though the outside perspective can be valuable….it can be downright toxic and lead one to a path that is not her own. In some ways, a diversity of opinion might be only truly valuable to someone who can already formulate their own thought and have the ability to look at a different opinion and merely look at it objectively without taking it personally. Something I find rather difficult and imagine it will take a long time.

It’s true that in the context of investing I wonder if I’ll be able to discover a ‘diamond in the rough’ kind of business if I’m only used to studying the great companies of the past and present.

How would I know it is special if I haven’t been exposed to a lot of trash companies? This is figurative as waste management companies tend to actually be amazing businesses.

Maybe this won’t matter. Maybe, because I’m only used to studying great companies when I see one that has similar traits, that’s all the validation I really need to dig deeper. Especially given ~80% of companies out there are not worth investing in, there may not be any need to waste any time looking at them.

This would seem to be the case for people. The connected world gives us access to so many people and so many opinions. Naturally, 80-90% of these people are not worth my time. But it’s an iterative process. At least for those I meet in real life. There’s no data-driven process...just one that is purely introspective and intuitive.

It’s easier for what one should read. Trendy self-help authors won’t be the best people. Rather, people of action…those that have been revered by the ones that 'professional quoters’ (including your writer here) like to quote are probably the ones you should surround yourself with.

There is a bit of a curation element here too. Personal taste is a big factor as that touches back to the ‘nature’ of who we are. Can’t forget that.

This has been a long way of thinking through the idea that the quality that makes one’s circle of influence important is the set of default behaviours and mindsets it embeds in you.