The Big Five

If you hang around five confident people, you will be the sixth.

Knowing who to hang around is important because we all need each other to face life. It doesn’t matter what stage of life you are currently in right now. You have to understand that you are the one that is in control of you. When you hang around confident people, their energy will rub off on you and make you want to be more confident within yourself. If you know that you can do the job better than someone else, then make sure you are representing the best version of yourself to others so they can see the good in you and not the bad. I am not throwing shade at anyone here; I am only making a point. The more confident you are over yourself, others will soon notice and say things like, hey, I noticed that you had changed a bit.

When you hear someone mention that you have changed a bit, take this as a compliment and keep moving forward. All change is not bad, and most times, having those bad changes can be the best thing you need at that time. So hanging around five confident people is where I will keep reaching for because I know that I will be the sixth with extra confidence to share with others.

If you hang around five intelligent people, you will be the sixth.

I take pride in knowing that I am intelligent, but at the same time, I am not too proud to see that I can be retaught a thing or two. Part of being wise is knowing when to go back to being a student. Instead of wanting to be the teacher all of the time, this is part of your growth. You can not grow if you are not able to go back to being a student again. Life is always about teaching us lessons, and if we keep checking out of the classroom, what is the point of going to school in the first place. I am using a metaphor here to make the point, and I know that we all are intelligent in our way, but to be the sixth person with intelligence, you have to surround yourself with five other intelligent people.

Please do not pretend like you know everything because I will be the first to tell you that you don’t know everything. There are some situations in life that I have never been through, and that’s okay. So when I encounter someone with an issue that I have never gone through, I only listen because this is all that I can do: listen to help the other person feel better and come up with a plan for themselves to get through what they are facing.

If you hang around five millionaires, you will be the sixth.

Now I am not a millionaire yet, but I am working on it. Now when you first think of the word millionaires, you think of money. However, I am not thinking of only money when I say this; I think of everything that money can’t buy or replace, like peace of mind—having a job that I can go to every day to support myself and my family.

If you hand around five idiots, you will be sixth.

Most of us go through life thinking that the idiots that we hand around are smart, not even realizing that they are way off track. You can not get stuck in the sack of these kinds of people because they are not correct in their thinking. So, the next time someone comes to you with something that doesn’t make sense to you, take a breath and look at the other idiots that they have surrounded themselves with, and you will soon find out that you will be the sixth idiot if you do not change your way of thinking and live your own life.

Be Smart.

“Denzel Washington.”