You are also someone's environment

There is a piece of advice going around the internet that looks like science: stay away from losers, because a Harvard study showed that 99% of failure comes from spending time with people who are going nowhere. The advice is half true. The number isn't true at all.

The number that doesn't exist

The line is usually attributed to psychologist David McClelland. But there is no study of his with that result. The version that shows up is in self-help books, such as Brian Tracy's Personal Success, which speaks of "as much as 95%" of what you become and does not cite the research (O'Reilly). From book to book and from video to video, 95 became 99.

A round number without a source is a reason for suspicion, not for memorizing.

The half that is true

Your environment matters, and that can be measured. James Fowler and Nicholas Christakis analyzed 20 years of data from a network of thousands of people followed by the Framingham study, in the United States. Happiness forms clusters and spreads up to three degrees away: the friend of a friend of a friend. A friend who lives nearby and becomes happy raises your chance of being happy by about 25%. A next-door neighbor, 34% (BMJ). Other researchers urge caution in reading this as direct cause, but the pattern is clear: we come to resemble the people around us.

But the research says more than the advice. Influence doesn't run in one direction only. If the mood of those near you reaches you, yours reaches them.

You are also someone's environment.

Learning and lifting

The advice to run from losers mixes two things that need to be kept apart.

One is who you learn from. That choice is yours and has to be deliberate. Nobody needs permission to seek out those who are ahead. A book is the cheapest conversation with someone who has already reached where you want to go. Training puts you near people who demand more of you than you do of yourself.

The other is who you lift up. That isn't solved by distance. The friend going through a bad time, the athlete who hasn't yet understood the training, the colleague who complains about everything: not all of them are anchors. Some are just waiting for someone with direction to come close.

Spending time with people who are down is not the problem. The problem is letting them set your bar. You can sit at the table with anyone, as long as you leave it with your own direction.

On the mat, the black belt trains with the white belt. He doesn't drop a level for it: he brings the white belt up and learns by teaching. What he doesn't do is train only with white belts.

The healthy don't need a doctor

When Jesus was criticized for eating with tax collectors and sinners, people everyone there would have called losers, he answered: "It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick" (Matthew 9

).

He didn't take on the standard of that table. He brought his own to it.

Choose carefully who you learn from. And don't be afraid to be, for someone, the environment that lifts them up.