Adnan Rafique M.D.
“People inspire you or they drain you, pick them wisely”- Hanse Hansen
When it comes to building a successful life and achieving outstanding results, most people believe all they need is willpower, motivation, energy, knowledge, and hard work. The most powerful factor that creates all of the above, is the environment you grow up in like people you spend time with.
Law of Conformity
You become the environment you grow up in, people you hang out with, media you watch, and books you read. In other words, what your eyes see and ears hear, it shapes up your thoughts and thoughts become action and action determines your future. That is the simple rule of human development.
It's true that you cannot change many things in your life, your family, politics, weather, traffic, and other natural disasters but you can change your friends, the environment you live in, people you listen to, the TV you watch, books you read or don’t read. When you spend most of the time with a group of people, you subconsciously start thinking like them, talking like them, dressing like them, watching the kind of movies they like, and so on and on. The ultimate result will be, you become who you hang out with most of the time.
Evaluate yourself and your friends, see what you all talk about daily or weekly. If these people cause you to believe you have limited options and growth, if they want to play as a victim of their circumstances and blame others for their mediocre life, you will be another victim full of self-pity and self-doubts about yourself and your future. If you want to have a different kind of life full of opportunities and good luck, you need to change your friends and environment as the first step towards success.
“Great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events and small minds discuss people"- Eleanor Roosevelt
Parenting and Household Environment
If you are someone with young kids, never tell your child he or she is a loser or a failure, stop yelling at them with negative phrases like “ You can’t do anything right”. “you are a disappointment or a failure”. These toxic and discouraging statements from authoritative figures like parents or teachers leave a long time memory in your kids' subconscious mind and slowly but surely they start believing in you and Not believing themselves. Give your kids an environment to thrive, help them find good friends, and remove them from a discouraging and suffocating atmosphere.
“It's not the size of the house and your bank balance that guarantees the success of your future generation but your positive mindset, encouragement, respect, and actions you practice in front of kids that shape up your child’s personality. It's not just what they hear but more importantly what they see you doing impact their outcome.”
How to Create Change
Most of us live life without any planning and goal setting. When we go on a trip or vacation, we plan in advance, we decide where we want to go and how to get there but when it comes to spending our entire life, there is no planning, no one knows where they want to go, even if they do have an idea, they don’t know how to get to their destination. This kind of thinking just doesn’t pop up in your brain, humans take influence from their surroundings, we absorb the information and energy from our environment and the people we are surrounded with. The biggest part of human success or failure is the mindset or thought process. Humans are the only species who have a choice, God created humans with immense ability to control our thoughts and make choices, no other species have the freedom to decide what kind of life they want to have.
If you don’t intentionally control your thoughts, your mind will operate in its default mode. The default mindset is negative and very risk-averse. An empty mind takes you to safety and security mode because it promotes fear and self-doubts. As a result, people resist change and never grow economically.
Try to be intentional when it comes to controlling your mind and have positive thoughts. These thoughts determine what kind of life you are creating for yourself. There is not a single soul on this planet who doesn't have doubts and fear, but there is a way, you can learn how to become stronger than your fear and build a positive self-image about yourself.
There are several factors that help you or destroy the way you control your thoughts. The biggest factor is your environment and the information that you put in your mind. If you live in a very negative household with lots of commotion and complaints, there is a chance you start blaming others for your difficulties and failure in life. If you hang out with people who lack self-respect and motivation to change the way they live their life, guess what, you won’t have any reason or energy to create an opportunity for yourself.
We have all heard the sayings from various motivational speakers about your friends and environment:
“IF YOU HANG OUT WITH FIVE LOSERS, VERY SOON YOU WILL BE THE SIXTH.”
“IF YOU HANG OUT WITH 5 ALCOHOLICS, VERY SOON YOU WILL BE THE SIXTH.”
“IF YOU HANG OUT WITH FIVE MILLIONAIRES, VERY SOON YOU WILL BE THE SIXTH.”
The choice is yours.
Environment for your Soul
Just like our body requires food and water to grow, our minds require their diet. The mind’s diet is all the information that you put in your brain by reading books, media you watch, social media you follow. You put crap in your mind, the outcome will be similar. There is another kind of diet for our soul. Faith and spirituality is the diet for our soul. Being around people who practice faith, also gives you hope, strength, and purpose in life. Without meaning and purpose, life is very materialistic and unfulfilling.
Don’t underestimate the value of faith in your life, spiritual connection gives you hope and power when you face the biggest challenges and obstacles in life. Another advantage of spiritual connection is the peace and calmness in life which you cannot buy with money alone. Being grateful for all the blessings in our life keeps us humble and connected. Humility is one of the biggest signs of real success. Without humility, whatever success you achieve will be shallow and joyless.
How to Change your Environment
There are things in life which you and I can not control so don’t worry too much about the things you can’t change, stop complaining about the weather, your family, your height, your complexion, ethnicity, your country’s resources, etc. What you can change is your attitude, your thought process, your mindset, your negative friends, books you read, news channels you listen to, the amount of time you waste watching TV shows, wasting time on social media, and other worthless activities. All of the above accounts for your environment and you can definitely change most of these factors which are playing a key role in your mediocre life. You don’t need to break away from your family if they are the reason you are not able to achieve your goals and dreams. Love your family, but don’t heed to their nagging and complaints. Choose your friends wisely, this is definitely in your control. Time is irreplaceable, make sure you spend this precious asset with people or activities that add value in life and give you strength and motivation to grow.
Many underachievers often feel satisfied spending time with people like themselves because they don’t feel threatened with their small ideas and lack of success. This comfort zone is the reason they never feel challenged and never feel the need to change anything in their life. This is typical of a poor mindset where a group of people shares the same belief system which discourages them from trying something new or taking risks to succeed, they believe in the status quo and blame the whole world for their problems. In order for you to break away from this thought process, you must break away from these kinds of negative people in life. Good friends are those who pull you up and who help you achieve your wildest dreams without envy and backstabbing. Once you break away from this state of mediocrity and challenge yourself with risk-taking and accepting failure, you will see how you create opportunities in life. Allowing yourself to fail and rise again and again will make you the strongest person who finally wins big.
“Cost of not trying is much bigger than the cost of failure”
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