It's WHO we know that matters in our personal growth

Many years ago when I worked in sales, I used to hang around with a certain type of person. This person was actually one of my closest friends at the time. We would chat and joke during work, occasionally play pranks and generally have a good time. It helped that we were both top salespeople. We would often go to a pub or bar at lunch and drink lots and occasionally come back to work late. However, we were never seriously disciplined because we were both top salespeople. At the weekend, we’d hang out with our other friends who worked in mundane but relaxed office jobs, chatting about women, drink and football what parties we planned to go to. We had money in our pockets and spent it freely, be it on takeaway food, DVDs, drinks at the pub or bar or general going out. Life seemed great and easy.
Then I started feeling slightly more and more sick each time I’d come back from a late night out. At first it was an enjoyable feeling of intoxication, a liberated feeling where you could be the person you always wanted, fearless and talking with everyone and anyone. Even falling asleep on the train one time and staggering home, not quite knowing where I was felt funny at the time!
But slowly and surely, the drink took its toll. I would go to bed so late that I’d need twice the amount of sleep normally required to make it out of bed. This affected my getting ready for work. When I joined my first company as a sales executive, I was regularly at my desk by 8.30 am. Now, I was getting into work around 8.50. I was still arriving on time, but everything was rushed as a result of my late nights and oversleeping. 8.50am became 8.55, then 9.00am then 9.05, 9.10, 9.15, 9.20, 9.29, 9.40, then finally 9.50. A whole hour late from the time I was arriving at when my hangovers weren’t yet a major problem. The times mentioned above were all actual moments when I got into work.
The result was that I came in disorganised, unfocused and full of excuses for my poor sales performance, from blaming the trains I travelled on, to everyone I spoke to on the phone being ‘not nice’ to me. My sales figures dropped and for the first time in as long as I could remember, senior management started showing signs of concern.
They shouldn’t have been the only people caring however. My health was affected too. I put on weight, approximately a stone or just over that in about a month. My binging with my friends on all sorts of food, from fried chicken, to subway sandwiches, Chinese, kebabs, fish and chips and fry-ups at a café nearby to work, all started to add up. I felt bloated and my legs started to hurt badly, just from slowly climbing the stairs. This couldn’t be – I was a martial artist only a couple of years earlier and I also played football and basketball, though my pursuit of money took over from health. All this wasn’t right, but I just carried on regardless, always believing it could be solved with just waking up earlier one morning or resisting my fatty favourite foods for one day. Then things would change, after all, I had willpower didn’t I?
I went two and a half months without a sale and was on a final warning, not just about that, but my persistent lateness. It didn’t make any difference. One week later I was at home, flicking through the papers and surfing the net for a job. I had an exercise bike which I hardly used and I decided to get on it and pedal for a good hour. I was on the bike for nearly two hours and when I finished and showered, I sat down and thought carefully through how the last year and a half could have turned upside down for me. It was at that point that I realised the uncomfortable truth that I dared not admit to myself; my associations with my friends, had slowly become the ruin of me. At that point, I decided that from then on, I would no longer spend so much time with them, chatting about triviality, eating or drinking at places where I would only get a fat stomach, hangovers and a lighter bank account. It was time to become a different person, for the better.
Contrary to what some people might have thought, I didn’t totally cut my friends out my life completely – that would have been a bit drastic. However, I did make a big effort to distance myself from them and surround myself instead with people who would enhance my character. I went to the gym, more for working out rather than any healthy cardiovascular exercise. I learnt a hell of a lot about a balanced diet and fitness training. I applied these and have continued to do so since then. I went to business networking events and met people who were good with money; those already had ‘been there and done that’. I kept looking for those already successful and slowly I stopped seeing the fun in just ‘having fun’ in my old friend’s eyes. I started making goals and thought a lot about the future. I began to take my life seriously. Interestingly, I felt so much better after all that. I created a worthwhile purpose.
You see, the relationships and associations we have with people of good or bad moral/social standing affects us so subtlety that we aren’t even aware that the faults we repeat like bad habits, are a possible consequence of our, associations with the wrong type of people. We must always fight vigilantly, to make sure our minds are filled with positive visions and that we choose the right people to provide us with those messages. I did and I haven’t looked back since.