I Was Competing With The Wrong People

When I first got serious about personal development, one piece of advice kept coming up everywhere: “You become like the people you surround yourself with”.

It made sense to me. Your environment shapes your thinking, your habits and your expectations for yourself, so it was clear I had to be intentional about surrounding myself with higher quality people.

That became my main focus: find rooms where people think bigger, earn more and live life on their terms.

That choice shaped the next few years of my life.

When I lived in Miami, I joined multiple paid networking groups.

My logic was simple. If there’s a paywall, the people in that group have the mindset and willingness to invest in themselves.

Those rooms exposed me to possibilities I didn’t know existed. They stretched my vision and forced me to think bigger.

But there was a side effect I wasn’t expecting.

Being around people with more money, more success and more status started to create pressure within myself. A feeling of resentment for my journey because I was somehow “behind and lacking”.

That pressure stayed with me for a long time and even now it still shows up occasionally. It wasn’t until one particular event where I understood my relationship with that pressure.

There was a dinner planned for entrepreneurs running seven-figure businesses.

I didn’t have the business track record to attend but my friend did and he was kind enough to invite me. He was the one hosting the dinner after all (lesson in there 😉).

This was the type of room I used to dream of being in.

I got a chance to talk to everyone at the table and by the end of night a realization hit me out of nowhere: I wouldn’t trade places with any of these people.

Not because they weren’t impressive or because they weren’t successful.

But because I realized how much I value MY journey.

I still want to be rich and I still have big goals.

But that night made me question why I was rushing to live like someone else when I wouldn’t trade my life for theirs.

It helped me accept that I need to walk my own path instead of trying to replace it with someone else’s.

The lesson was simple:

Use proximity for inspiration, but never let it make you abandon your own story.

- Johnny