There is an old saying: Show me your friends and I’ll show you your future. Of course, your friends do not necessarily determine what happens to you, but there is something important worth considering. The people we spend our time with help shape what feels normal, what we pay attention to, which behaviours we repeat, and what opportunities we encounter. Over time, this heavily influences the kind of life we have.
We tend to think about self-improvement as an individual project: diet, exercise, education, goal setting, managing our finances, trying to develop better habits, etc. We spend considerably less time thinking about the social environment surrounding all of those efforts.
That may be a mistake.
Your friends help define what feels normal
Imagine that most of your closest friends exercise several times a week. Someone is always talking about a new hiking trail, signing up for a race, suggesting a weekend bike ride or asking if you want to go to the gym. Nobody has to give you a lecture about fitness, exercise just becomes part of the group culture.
Now imagine another social circle where nobody exercises and every attempt to become healthier is met with some version of, “Come on, skip it tonight.” The behaviour being encouraged is different, but the underlying mechanism is similar.
The U.S. Surgeon General’s advisory on social connection describes social norms as the unwritten expectations established within the groups we belong to. Those norms can encourage or discourage behaviours, including behaviours related to health. The advisory cites research showing that people are more likely to be physically active when their peers and friends exercise. It also notes that people are more likely to stop smoking when members of their social network stop, while close connections with smokers can make quitting more difficult.
This does not mean we mindlessly copy everyone around us, but it does mean our behaviour develops in an environment, and other people are part of that environment. The same idea can extend well beyond health. If your friends regularly go to concerts, you will probably hear about more concerts. If several people around you are building businesses, conversations about entrepreneurship become common. If your friends read, travel, cook, volunteer, make art, play sports or learn new things, you are repeatedly exposed to those activities. What we encounter repeatedly begins to feel less unusual.
Other people can change what seems possible
For decades, runners had tried unsuccessfully to run a mile in under four minutes. Some people believed the human body simply wasn’t capable of it. Then, on May 6, 1954, British runner Roger Bannister ran a mile in 3 minutes, 59.4 seconds, becoming the first person to officially break the barrier.
What happened next was remarkable. Just 46 days later, Australian runner John Landy runs it in 3:57.9. On August 7, 1954: Bannister and Landy both run under four minutes in the same race, held in Vancouver. By May 1955, several more runners accomplish the feat.
But was it really a psychological barrier? Partially. The popular motivational story suggests that nobody could do it because nobody believed it was possible. Once Bannister proved otherwise, the mental barrier disappeared.
That’s an oversimplification. Elite runners were already getting extremely close. The previous world record was 4:01.4, set in 1945. Serious athletes knew breaking four minutes was within reach, and Bannister wasn’t the only runner actively pursuing it. There were several advancements in training, pacing, and running conditions contributed to faster performances.
However, the psychological effect is plausible. Once somebody demonstrates that a difficult goal is achievable, other people may become more confident in pursuing it. The story is a useful illustration of how perceived limitations can influence performance, even though it doesn’t prove that belief alone caused the subsequent records.
I think the strongest lesson is that seeing someone accomplish something can change what other people believe they’re capable of attempting. That’s a powerful idea in entrepreneurship, athletics and personal development alike.
As it pertains to those we surround ourselves with, there is a meaningful difference between knowing intellectually that something can be done and knowing someone who has actually done it.
You can read that people run marathons. You can know that adults learn new languages. You can understand that people change careers at 40. Then a friend quits a comfortable job, trains for a marathon, while learning a new language. It’s no longer theoretical, you are witnessing it firsthand.
Someone who once seemed fundamentally different from you has become a reference point. You have seen the frustrations, uncertainty, and ordinary decisions that existed behind the finished result. That can make an ambitious goal seem less abstract.
Friends can also expose us to interests that would never have appeared in our lives otherwise. One person gets you skiing. Another introduces you to Ethiopian food. Someone convinces you to take a pottery class. A friend recommends a book that changes the way you think about your career. Someone else brings you to a neighbourhood, community, hobby or event you would never have discovered on your own.
This is one reason relationships can be such an important part of personal growth. Other people expand the number of doors we can see.
Your social network is also a source of knowledge and opportunity
Researchers sometimes describe the resources available through relationships as social capital. Those resources can include information, advice, introductions, emotional support, mentorship, and practical assistance.
The Surgeon General’s advisory notes that diverse social networks can help people find employment opportunities, build useful skills, and gain access to information they otherwise may not have encountered. It also highlights research suggesting that relationships across socioeconomic groups can be particularly important for economic mobility. None of these relationships guarantees anything. But they increase the information, experiences, and opportunities moving through your life.
A good circle should not become an echo chamber. If everyone you know knows roughly the same things, goes to the same places and sees the world in roughly the same way, there are limits to what can move through that network. This can make your world smaller rather than larger.
The Surgeon General’s advisory distinguishes between relationships with people similar to us and what researchers call bridging social capital, connections with people from different backgrounds, ages, professions, life experiences or social groups. It notes that diverse relationships can expose people to different perspectives and contribute to creative thinking, problem-solving and better decision-making.
You don’t have to engineer a perfectly optimized social circle, but you want to be mindful of accidentally building a world that is too small.
It’s important to note that self-improvement advice sometimes turns the idea of social influence into something rather ruthless: eliminate anyone who is not sufficiently successful, motivated or useful, and surround yourself exclusively with “high performers.”
That is a poor philosophy of friendship. A friend does not need to increase your productivity to deserve a place in your life. Friendship involves affection, history, humour, loyalty, generosity, trust, and companionship. Someone can be profoundly important to you without helping you make more money, run faster or accomplish another goal.
Friends can reinforce the wrong things too
Highly cohesive groups can create strong pressure to conform, and those pressures can sometimes reinforce unhealthy or harmful behaviour. Groups can normalize excessive drinking, reckless spending, cruelty, prejudice, cynicism or unhealthy attitudes toward work, relationships, and health. The same desire for belonging that helps people adopt positive behaviours can also make people reluctant to challenge damaging ones.
This is another reason the phrase show me your friends and I’ll show you your future should not be interpreted as a judgment of individual people.
The better question is about the collective environment.
- What behaviours does your circle reinforce?
- What gets celebrated?
- What gets mocked?
- What kinds of conversations happen repeatedly?
- When someone tries something difficult, do the people around them become curious and encouraging, or immediately search for reasons it will fail?
- What happens when someone changes?
Those patterns may matter more than whether any particular friend is conventionally “successful.”
Friendship is not just a cure for loneliness
Adult friendship is often discussed primarily as a solution to loneliness. Social connection is strongly associated with physical health, mental health, resilience, and overall well-being, which we’ve covered extensively in other posts such as The Rise of the Loneliness Epidemic and The Unexpected Decline of Community.
The right person can introduce you to an experience you never considered, encourage a version of yourself that has not had much room to develop, teach you something, challenge you, support you when things go badly or simply make it easier to do something you have wanted to do for years.
Your friends will not decide your future for you, but the people you allow into your life will inevitably become part of the environment in which that future is created. If you want your life to become bigger, more interesting or more adventurous, expanding the circle of people around you may be a very good place to start.
Maybe self-improvement should include friendship
Most people who are serious about improving their lives eventually audit some part of them. They look at how they spend their money, examine what they eat, track how they use their time, reconsider their careers, routines, and habits.
It may be worth occasionally looking at our social lives with the same degree of intention. That may mean adding people, joining a running group, taking a class, attending an event, volunteering, talking to the person you keep seeing at the coffee shop, saying yes to an invitation, asking someone to teach you something.
Meet people from different generations, professions and backgrounds. Become the beginner in a room where somebody else knows more than you do. Your existing friendships can remain exactly as valuable as they were before. Your world just becomes bigger.
