One of the many things that define whether or not you’ll be successful is who you surround yourself with. This is one of the most important things any true artist or industry professional should reflect on. I heard one person say it once, “In life, you only go as far as the people you choose to surround yourself with.”
Let me give you an example by using myself and my own experience with this. In my late High School years and early college years, I wasn’t always around people who wanted to do what I wanted to do, or who were as serious about it as I was. Sure I wasn’t ever really the type to roll around with idiots and fuckboys, at least not always since I could be a fuckboy too, but it was clear to me at one point that those who I considered friends and so forth weren’t really helping me get to where I was going. It was clear that most of my friends, though some of them were pretty smart, lacked any form of similar ambitions to myself or any real drive.
Now, they weren’t all bums, some were pretty decent human beings, but the more I hung out with them, the more I knew I was wasting time. The more I wanted to talk about music and the production and art behind it, the more I felt lost since they would all stare at me like I had five heads. I realized that to get to where I want to someday, I have to be working at my craft constantly. I couldn’t be wasting my time hanging with people who weren’t really going to help me better myself overall.
Now I’m still friends with most of these people, but we don’t hang around as much anymore, and I don’t really try to initiate contact with them very much either, because I’m too busy building my own dreams up. Too many people waste their lives chilling with the wrong crowd, or chilling too much within the crowd that they forget to work on themselves and in the end, years pass and when they stop to look back they realized they haven’t done much at all, if anything really. Don’t be that person.
Take some time out for yourself, plan your career, whether you’re trying to be an artist, manager, producer, or whatever. You’ll be alone for a while, you’ll be uncomfortable for a while, but the more you build yourself within your passion, and the more you work towards your goals. The more joy you will get from them, and you will inevitably meet good people, who will become good friends who you can hang around with. The best part is these people will be in the same field as you or have the same drive so you won’t ever feel like you’re wasting time. Time spent together will more than often be constructive whether you’re trying to make it happen or not.
When you start surrounding yourself with the right people, you will see a huge change in your life. When you hang out with fellow upstarts, or with businessmen, millionaires, billionaires, and other successful people, whoever they are, things will start happening. You’ll begin to think like them, talk like them, walk like them, act like them, and eventually you will be like them. If they are fellow upstarts, than you will push each other to be better, either on purpose or out of sheer competition with one another.
All that I’ve listed above are reasons why surrounding yourself with the right people mean a lot, especially when it comes to success in this industry and in life in general. Surround yourself with the wrong people, and your energy will be drained, time wasted and you’ll get distracted. Surround yourself with the right people, and your energy will be amplified, you’ll spend your time wisely, and you will get better in your craft and go farther in your career.
And don't be afraid to cut the wrong people off 100%!