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There is a saying I wish I had understood much earlier in my life:
"You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with." — Jim Rohn
When I first heard it, it sounded almost too simple.
But the older I get, the more I realize how much truth there is in it.
The Average of Five
The people around you influence what you believe is normal. How you speak. How you treat people. How you treat yourself. What you tolerate. What you dream about. What you do when nobody is watching.
And sometimes you don't realize how much your environment has shaped you until years later.
When Something Feels Normal Long Enough
In my early twenties, I surrounded myself with people who didn't have a strong value system.
There was a lot of drinking, smoking, lying and cheating. At the time, I didn't look at it and think, This is changing me.
I just thought this was life.
When something surrounds you long enough, it starts to feel normal. And when something feels normal, eventually you start participating in it.
I picked up habits and ways of thinking that weren't really the person I wanted to become. Some of those decisions ended up costing me a lot later in life.
It took me years to understand that.
Becoming Conscious
Around the age of 34, I started becoming much more conscious of my life.
I started looking backward.
Why had I made certain decisions?
Why did I behave certain ways?
Where had some of my habits come from?
Who had influenced the person I had become?
That awareness changed something in me.
And as I started changing myself, the people entering my life started changing too.
One of those people became someone I don't really know how to describe anymore.
Calling him a friend doesn't feel like enough. Best friend doesn't quite capture it. Brother probably comes closest.
What makes our relationship special isn't that we had everything figured out when we met.
Quite the opposite.
We were both fighting our own demons.
We were both trying to understand ourselves.
We were both trying to become better men.
And somehow, we started growing together.
We talked about the things that weren't working in our lives. We challenged each other. We did exercises together. We questioned our thinking. We had uncomfortable conversations. We even started a podcast called Staying Uncomfortable because, in many ways, that was exactly what we were learning to do.
The two men who started that journey are very different from the two men we are today.
And today, September 7, is his birthday.
So I've been thinking about his transformation.
Sugarcane
There is an image that keeps coming to me.
Sugarcane.
You can put sugarcane into water, but the water doesn't suddenly become sweet.
The cane has to be crushed. Pressed. Broken down. It has to go through a process before its sweetness can come out.
Transformation is often like that.
We love talking about becoming better versions of ourselves, but we don't talk enough about what becoming actually requires.
Sometimes life crushes you before it reveals you.
I've watched my friend go through things that could have easily hardened a person.
Losing his parents back to back.
Trying to navigate grief while continuing to function.
Feeling misunderstood.
Dealing with the brutality of the corporate world.
Feeling alone even when people were around him.
And grief itself doesn't follow instructions.
Some of us feel it immediately. Some of us don't feel it until years later. Sometimes we think we've moved through it and then one ordinary day it returns without warning.
There is no clean timeline.
But through everything, I watched him continue.
Not perfectly.
Not without pain.
But he continued.
And that's what I admire.
Hundreds of Small Decisions
Because transformation isn't one giant moment where you suddenly become someone new.
It is hundreds of small decisions.
One conversation.
One book.
One workout.
One apology.
One boundary.
One uncomfortable truth.
One decision to try again.
Repeated long enough, those decisions become a person.
And this is why I have become so careful about the people I surround myself with.
Your environment is not separate from the life you're trying to build.
Your environment is part of the life you're building.
If you're trying to change your life, maybe the first question isn't:
What do I need to do?
Maybe it's:
Who am I becoming around the people closest to me?
Look at your friendships.
Look at your relationships.
Look at the conversations you have every day.
Look at what the people around you normalize.
Look at what they celebrate.
Look at what they tolerate.
Look at how they speak about other people when those people aren't in the room.
And then ask yourself:
If I continue living in this environment for another five years, am I becoming the person I want to be?
That can be a painful question.
I know because I've had to ask it myself.
But awareness is where transformation begins.
The Ingredients of a Life
I think of building a life almost like making a nourishing bowl of food.
You can't throw lettuce into a bowl and expect it to nourish you completely.
You need the right ingredients.
- Your environment is an ingredient.
- Your friendships are ingredients.
- Your relationships are ingredients.
- Your habits are ingredients.
- The way you speak to yourself is an ingredient.
The books you read, the places you spend your time, the conversations you participate in and the people you allow close to your heart are all ingredients.
Eventually, they become the life you are eating every day.
So choose them consciously.
To My Brother, on His Birthday
And to my brother on his birthday:
Thank you.
Thank you for staying in the arena with me.
Thank you for the uncomfortable conversations.
Thank you for continuing to work on yourself.
Thank you for allowing me to watch your transformation while you watched mine.
You owe this growth to yourself.
You owe it to your children.
You owe it to your wife.
But most importantly, you owe yourself the opportunity to discover the man you are still capable of becoming.
The life you want cannot be designed by anybody else.
Only you can build it.
And you have.
One decision at a time.
One difficult season at a time.
One transformation at a time.
Another birthday means another year to write stories we haven't written yet. Another year to grow. Another year to laugh. Another year to make mistakes. Another year to become better men.
I can't wait to see what the rest of this life holds for both of us.
Happy birthday, my brother.
May God continue to bring devotion, beauty, joy and abundance into your life and your family's life.
I love you.
