The translation, for our purposes, is “Bad company brings Bad habits”

The literal translation is “Who goes with a cripple leans to limp”

The great Dr. Rob Gilbert, a professor at Montclair State University, tells this to his students;

“If I compute the average the GPA’s of the three people you hang around with most I will come up with your GPA”

It’s partly what we do in order to be in rapport.  We seek sameness and make adjustments to be more like the people we like and that’s OK; in fact I teach that in sales seminars.

But it’s also about stored standards and warping yours in accordance with faulty examples.  If all of your immediate contemporaries have put on 35lbs since college, your stored standard, the mental image you have for a person your age, adjusts to include the 35lb weight gain and you secretly congratulate yourself for only gaining 25 because you’re better than the standard. 

There is tacit permission to be less than you can be when the people you spend the most time with are less than they can be.  We humans constantly do self-to-other comparisons and generate inner dialog based on what we see. 

I do have to wave a caution flag here.  There is another, unhealthy, side to all of this. We sometimes look at the fabulous lives of others on FB, or Instagram, and think everyone is living the dream except us. We see the perfect physique of the guy modeling our brand of underwear and curse our inherited body type.  Those comparisons are not what I’m talking about. That’s jealousy and envy based on projected images that do not tell the whole story.  It’s never about comparison to be like another; instead, it’s about looking for inspiration to see what’s possible for you.

 In 1937 Napoleon Hill wrote Think and Grow Rich; a main stay in success literature.  Hill said that successful people form Mastermind Groups.  In other words they intentionally schedule time with people who can challenge them to be better.

By governing who I spend time with I can avoid some of the contagions so rife among the all too common, complacent, masses and instead use the positive energy, examples, and encouragement of the people in my mastermind group to be an improved version of me.

Own Your Sales Gene…