Welche Freunde man aussortieren sollte

0:00bad friends. So if you want better friends, get used to seeing them less. Better friends are busy friends. So I remember when I started working more and some of the friends that I had were a little bit more ambitious. I started realizing that the people that I liked the most, I actually didn't spend as much time with. And the people that were always available were the ones that I didn't want to become more like. Here's five questions you should consider when thinking about whether to keep a friend in your life or cut them. Question number one is, if someone told you that you're a lot like your friend, would you take that as a compliment? Second, are you truly fulfilled by the friendship or is it just someone to keep you from being lonely? Third, are you able to be unapologetically yourself or do you feel the need to act differently to please that friend or to be around that friend?

0:50Fourth, do you like who this friend is right now today? Or do you like the idea of the friend and who they could be someday? And then finally, five, would you want your future or imagine child to be friends with someone like this person? And I think it's a really wonderful litmus test because it forces you to take a look outside of yourself in order to have perspective from a third-party angle on the true quality of that person. But the reality is that rare people are by definition rare. It's normal to have fewer of them. And so if you only have a few friends or one good friend, then that's normal if you want rare and exceptional friends. If you have many friends, it's far more likely that the bar for your friendship is too low. And to give you a filter that I actually used for the most important friend in my life, Ila, I like to think, does this person have the same scale of goals that I have? So, it doesn't mean that they have to have the same goals as you, but it has to be the same level of goals as you because at least you're going in the same direction. So, that's number one. Number two is, do they have the same level of dedication and commitment to those goals? Because I don't know about you, but I had plenty of friends who were like, I want to be an NFL player. I want to be a really rich tech entrepreneur. I want to be a a touring musician, right? And they had these goals, but I'm like, dude, I see you just playing Fortnite 4 hours a day and you you practice guitar once a week.

2:17Like, what do you really want that or do you just like saying it because it makes you feel good? And so, I wanted people who walked the walk and I wanted people who would keep up with my pace. And if you are someone who's ambitious, and this is me just talking specifically to you, because there's only a few people who are watching this who really are, and you'll know that if it's you, you have to get used to being alone because there are seasons where you'll basically transition from one group of friends into another. And it's not even a group of you'll usually transition from a group of friends into no friends and then you'll find one or two people who are at a new level. And then sometimes those people introduce you to some of their friends. And if you keep walking and you keep outpacing, then that group will then start retiring past you. and then maybe one person stays with you, maybe no one does, and you'll have another lonely period. I'm saying this because I used to think that there was something wrong with me when in reality I just didn't understand what the nature of being exceptional meant. And so I'm saying this purely from a definitional perspective. To be exceptional means that you are the exception. It means that you are not normal. And so it's normal for normal people to find you abnormal if you do things that are not normal. Don't let people who have mediocre goals deter you from taking actions that make you great because it makes you different. Realizing that I thought most people actually made no sense. They say they had these goals, but they took no action. And they called me work obsessed. They would tell me I should take time off and they're like, "Hey, you're not you're not you're not as cool anymore. You're not you're not hanging out with the boys. was like, "Why aren't you participating in the fantasy league? Why aren't you watching football on Sunday with us?" And for me, I actually used to love watching football uh with my friends. It was actually one of my biggest things that I look forward to. But the thing is is that like I needed that Sunday cuz I had to prep workouts. I had to prep the music list for the next day. I had to run billing. I had to do all this other work. And the thing is is that like I looked at that football game and I was like, "My goals are more important to me than this." And so I think that a lot of people don't actually look at themselves in the mirror and say like one year from today will I will I remember this football game or will I remember the fact that I'm not where I said I wanted to be. And to me that was significantly more painful. Now this is an uncomfortable fact for a lot of people.

4:30Your ability to delay gratification is actually a function of intelligence. And so your ability to learn at a longer and longer delay is something that comes I mean we're talking from primates all the way up. And so basically if you want to teach a monkey how to do something you have to say hey do this thing and then immediately give them a reward. And the longer that period goes on the less trainable they are. The sign of intelligence is that you can actually expand the reinforcement window and they can still abstract it back to the original action. If you want to practice intelligence, then being able to actively delay your need for a result or reward from the work you do will make you a more intelligent person because your rate of learning will actually increase despite the fact that your reward rate will decrease in the short term. And so to give you full transparency on what 2025 might look like if you accomplish your goals at the end, you might have a different friend group or no friends at all for a season because you don't become like the people you admire. You become like the people you want to impress. Harvard made this, you know, wonderful study years ago about the best predictor of someone's long-term material success was what they called their reference group. Now, this has been misqued in places by the five people you spend the most time with, but it's actually the five people you compare yourself to, and that's a very big difference. Now, I want to take it a step further because I think to myself, what are the things that affect our behavior? And so, it's really about the people that you want to impress, not necessarily even who you compare yourself to, because it's the people whose voices you hear when you're about to make a big life decision. And so when you make a big life decision, you don't listen to the people closest to you. You should listen to the people closest to your goals. And some of them may not be in your neighborhood or your city or your state or your high school or your college. They might just be people you follow on the internet. And you have to abstract what would that person think about this decision? Not my mom, not my homie, not my uncle, or that person at church. And so I think this is a great transition of thinking through instead of necessarily even having mentors, having heroes and transposing what you think their decision-making calculus would be onto your life. And so it's interesting is that I will have conversations with entrepreneurs and they'll say, "Hey, here's my current condition. This is my desired state.

6:57This is what I perceive my obstacle to be." And I say, "Okay, well, what do you think?" And they're like, "Well, I think you're going to say I should do X, Y, and Z." And I'm like, "You're right. Why aren't you?" They're like, "Well," and the thing is is that basically what they answer with after that well is in essence other people's opinion who aren't at the place they want to be. Real quick, if you're a business owner and you are not growing as fast as you'd like, I'd like to give you a free gift.

7:21So, my team and I put together the $100 million scaling roadmap, which is basically 200 hours of us looking over all the portfolio companies we've had and what stages of growth they went through and more importantly, where they got stuck and how they got past it. And so we broke it in these 10 stages and we made this little kind of quiz thing where if you put in your business information, it'll tell you where you're at and the most important part for you, what to do for each of functions of the business across product, marketing, sales, customer success, recruiting, IT, human resources, and finance. And so no matter what you're struggling with, someone else has already struggled with it and solved it. And so I'd like to give you this thing absolutely free. You can go to acquisition.com/roadmap, plug in your business information, and if you want us to actually help you deconrain the business and you're trying to scale, we'd love to help you out on the thank you page. You can just book a call with my team and we will look at the business, see if we can help, and if we can, we'll invite you out to Vegas and we'll do this in person live.