How to curate your friends and why quality is more important than quantity

When it comes to quality versus quantity, we usually don't think about that in terms of curating our friends, but as Jim Rohn quotes, "you are the average of the 5 people you spend the most...

Full Transcript of The Video

Eric Siu: Hey. Today, we're going to talk about how to curate your friends and why quality is more important than quantity. My name is Eric Siu. I'm the CEO of a digital marketing agency called Single Grain and if you want more videos like this, just keep watching and we'll give you more.
Why do you need to curate your friends and why do you need to keep auditing your friends? That's the first good point. Jim Rohn said that you are the average of the five people that you spend the most amount of time with. I truly agree with that because when you think about hanging out with negative people, the negative people that are down all the time, the people that try to hold you back, they don't want you to do that well, these are the people that drag you down, so you have to keep auditing your circle of friends because these are the people that you hang out with most.
Now, in one of my other videos, I talked about the importance of joining a mastermind or forming a mastermind. For example, I'm an entrepreneurs' organization and these are 10 of my brothers and sisters. Once you have family and you have a wife or you have a husband and you have kids for example, it becomes really difficult to keep in touch with your friends. When you have a group like this, these are … I've spoken to many people in my group, the EO forum. These are their group of friends. These are their best friends. For me, I'm still fortunate enough to hang out with my elementary school friends but over the years, I've learned that it's really important to curate my group of friends also because again, there's people that aren't going to want to move at your level so you have to create your own values, what's important to you.
For me, first of all, they're nice people. You don't want to hang out with assholes. Second, I want to make sure that they're growth oriented, that they're pushing towards the same direction, they're trying to get better all the time because I'm trying to get better all the time. If I see someone else trying to get better all the time, they're learning new things or teaching me new things, also they're going to motivate me too because I'm a really competitive person so I want to keep pushing. You have to be empathetic about what other people are going through and also, the type of business that you start is really a reflection of you. Is it all about just making money? I know that if I do what is going to make an impact in the world, then the money will take care of itself.
There's learning as well. What are you reading? What blogs are you going through? What kind of podcasts are you listening to? I want to keep getting better, so growth oriented, that's one thing. A subcategory in there would be around learning. You want to establish your core values first, so a question to ask yourself is what are your core values? You want to write those down. What are those four, five, six things? You don't want to do too many things. Four, five, six things max that you care about most that really define who you are and kind of where you're trying to go to, so that's really important.
Then, you're going to start to set who you're hanging out with. With my business, we have our core values and that's really a extension of me at the end of the day and that allows us to filter for who we want and who we don't want. It doesn't matter how skilled you are. You can be really skilled but you can be an asshole. We don't want to work with you. Keep it in mind, your core values start at the top and you go down further and then you're able to decide who you want to hang out with most.
When you're curating your group of friends, who are the people that take away energy from you? When you hang out with Suzy, how does Suzy make you feel? It's not about what Suzy does all the time. You're not going to remember all that. It's what does Suzy make you feel? If Suzy makes you feel like, “Uh, I don't really like hanging out with Suzy because she's kind of a downer,” you probably need to cut her out versus if you hang out with Stephanie, for example. Stephanie's really uplifting. She motivates you. She's always bringing something new to the table. This is the type of person you want to hang out with. You want to hang out with more Stephanies, more Stephanies, less Suzys.
Final thing I’ll end on is celebrities, for example. They have a lot of friends or acquaintances but they only have a few deep connections. Humans can only have so many deep connections. Think about, Google Dunbar's number. That's 150 people. These are your circle of 150 people that you're going to be able to remember, interact with, things like that. Everyone else is just really an acquaintance. You have to keep auditing your circle over and over and over just like the people that you work with. You want to work with A players. Well, your friends, you want to work with A friends. If you want more videos around entrepreneurship, productivity, more videos like this, just subscribe and keep watching. We'll see you in the next video.

We help great companies grow their revenues

Get Your Free Marketing Consultation