Your Friends Make You Fat. Can They Make You Successful, Too?
Posted by Lewis Schiff in UncategorizedEXTRA! EXTRA! READ ALL ABOUT IT: Your friends are making you fat.
Your friend catches a cold, you catch it. That makes sense. But is obesity catching? According to a new medical study recently published in The New England Journal of Medicine, social networks can spread more than just germs—they can spread lifestyle habits.
The study, conducted over thirty-two years, from 1971 to 2003, and incorporating most of the town of Framingham, Massachusetts, 12,067 people, considered the network effect on bad habits, specifically obesity. The network effect—the spreading of anything, from ideas to disease—is the object of fascination across many disciplines of study. From physicists to psychologists, studying how things spread has emerged at the crossroads of mainstream and academic interests. As one indication of this concept’s enduring popularity, the popular book about how ideas spread, The Tipping Point, has been on the best-seller list for years.
The curious results of this study makes me wonder. If bad habits can spread among social networks (friends, communities, etc.) can good habits spread, too? Advisors typically have three goals and I wonder if achieving them is as simple as socializing with others who have done the same.
Those three goals are:
- To find more wealthy clients
- To run their businesses better (more smoothly and more profitably)
- To become wealthy (or at least well-off, if that’s a worthwhile distinction) from their efforts and the risks they take.
Plenty of ink has been spilled over the years examining strategies that advisors deploy to realize these goals. For the most part, these strategies are thoughtful, logical, and action-oriented, and advisors who try to follow them faithfully will likely get closer to reaching these goals.
However, it’s hard to ignore the fact that ideas can spread simply by being in their orbit. We always knew that smoking was bad for us but many of us finally quit only after everyone else around us had. Perhaps we should think about putting ourselves in the midst of others who have done what we aspire to do.
Want to lose weight? Spend time with skinny people who exercise and eat right.
Want to run your business better? Network with successful business people.
Want to become wealthy? Socialize with wealthy people.
When I was school-age, we used to joke about putting the text book under our pillow so the words would drift to our head through something magical we would call “osmosis.” This approach, orbiting around people who reflect your goals, seems like a more practical version of that.
Perhaps the next action-oriented strategy we should undertake is targeted, purposeful “networking.” If so, how would you do that? I look forward to sharing your ideas.
Entries (RSS)