The Company We Keep

Why "surround yourself with successful people" may be the wrong advice

I never chose my friends.

Not really.

I generally made friends by proximity.

The kids who lived on my street.
The girls who lived across the hall in college.
The coworkers I saw every day.

This isn’t a complaint.
It’s not even a regret.

You find yourself near someone often enough. You like each other well enough. You laugh at the same things and survive the same cycle. You start sharing little bits of your actual life in between the official parts.

And then, one day, you’re friends.

There’s something beautiful about that. Some of the great loves of our lives come through the side door. We don’t audition them. We don’t create a rubric. We don’t say, “Excuse me, before we become emotionally attached, could you tell me how you handle disappointment, success, conflict, beauty, money, tenderness, and the existential terror of being alive?”

Some people just bring out the best in us and some people don’t.

It doesn’t mean there’s anything inherently right or wrong about any specific person. This is about fit and timing.

Some people will never be a good fit for you, and some will only be a good fit for a particular period.

But when the fit is right - really right - something else happens entirely.

The best relationships are the ones where we reflect a person’s own light back at them - and when they reflect ours back on us.

We are permeable creatures.

We absorb tone.
We absorb what is treated as normal.
We absorb what counts as success and what counts as failure.

And if you spend enough time around people who are frantic, cynical, performative, superficially jolly, constantly bracing for disappointment or measuring themselves (and you) against external expectations, your light tends to dim.

Not because they are bad people.

But because we are permeable.

We like to imagine ourselves as these sealed containers of character and preference and free will. As though we simply decide who we are from the private headquarters of our own minds.

But we are not sealed containers. We are relational creatures.

We are shaped by the rooms we sit in, the conversations we repeat, the stories we hear over and over, the assumptions nobody questions, and the version of life that gets treated as realistic.

This is where the conversation usually becomes about ambition and success.

You’ve heard some version of it.

“Look at the five people you spend the most time with. You are likely to fall within the average of those people. If you want to be successful, surround yourself with successful people.”

There is truth in that.

But there’s also something about it that has always felt a little thin to me.

Because if we only surround ourselves with people who are successful in that impressive way, but who make us feel constricted, small, or masked, we’re likely to build a life that looks good but feels hollow.

What if instead, the five people who we surround ourselves with were actually happy?

Not sunshine and unicorns happy.
Not “good vibes only” happy, which is usually just emotional suppression in groovy shoes.

I mean people who have enough inner range to see the darkness and still find light.

People who can sit in the hard thing without becoming the hard thing.

People who notice the moon.
Who send the ridiculous text.
Who can say, “This is awful,” and five minutes later laugh so hard they have to put down their drink.

People ready to understand that we can be content without using contentment to hide from whatever is calling us forward.

But you can’t get there - to any of it really - when you’re performing.

I’m so deeply tired of performance culture. My heart is weary from living inside a society constantly auditioning for its own worth.

It’s why the groups I run exist. Because something really does happen when we stop performing for each other and start reflecting each other instead. The growth isn’t just internal. It’s a living thing that moves between us.

I have been in enough rooms with impressive people to know that impressive is not the same as free.

And I have been around enough ordinary-looking happiness to know that ordinary is not the same as small.

I wrote recently about the common ache of wanting more than an ordinary life. I understand that ache. And I don’t think it is something to shame or outgrow.

But I also understand that part of evolving is realizing that the ‘more’ we long for is not always what we’ve set our sights on.

Sometimes it’s more presence.

More beauty.
More ease.
More room to breathe.
More honest laughter.

More people in our lives who remind us that being alive is more than just something to manage.

Choosing happy people is not trite. It doesn’t mean choosing a smaller life.

It’s one of the most disciplined choices we can make.

Because cynicism is contagious.
But so is wonder.

Scarcity is contagious.
But so is abundance.

Fear is contagious.
But so is love.

And when you begin to notice that, you start paying attention differently.

You start asking different questions about the people closest to you.

Do I feel like myself around them?
Do I become more honest or more edited?
Do I leave their presence more open? More tense? More alive? More contracted?

Does my light grow brighter because of them?
And just as importantly, does theirs grow brighter because of me?

Because the people around us become part of the atmosphere we grow inside of.

We will always have longings and grief and weird family dynamics and bad moods and aging bodies.

There will always be darkness and fear.

But so too, does the light exist. And that light grows exponentially the more it is reflected.

Whose light are you reflecting, and who is reflecting yours?

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This is part of what we practice inside Liminal: creating the atmosphere we’re growing inside, finding the truth about what no longer fits, and building a runway for the version of us that is trying to emerge.