I heard this statement once.

Your income is the average of your 10 closest friends.

I’m not sure if it’s true but I do believe that it has a ring of truth to it.

Think about it. You reflect your friends and their behaviors in many ways. Are your friends stoners or drunks whose only desire is to get wasted all the time? If you hang out with that kind of person how are you able to separate yourself from their behavior?

From the other side of things do you have friends who are financially sound? Do they have good jobs? Do they have income producing assets like real estate, businesses, etc?

You see when you hang out with your friends you tend to talk about the topics that you have in common. If your friends are successful people who are constantly working to improve their life, their finances, their business, their family, their relationships with others… Then you will tend to be effected by this. You’ll be more inclined to be involved in those same activities.

Are your friends the kind of people who have had a lot of financial issues? Are they always complaining? Are they always blaming others?

Perhaps you need an example.
One example from my own life is I have been talking to my wife about buying a private plane and taking lessons to get my private pilot’s license. The license costs $6000-$9000 and the planes I have been investigating range from $80,000 to $135,000.

My wife hears that and freaks out. You see she grew up with blue collar parents who never made a lot of money. They did invest their money. They paid off their bills. They bought assets like stocks and bonds and mutual funds. However being that they never made much money in their life they tended to think in terms of “hording” their money.

I on the other hand tend to think in terms of producing more and more money. Investing money into assets that produce further income.

You might say, how can you do that with a private plane?

Simple. You lease it out to a flight school that rents the plane to students. Around here you can rent a plane for something like $40-$50 an hour.

It’s a paradigm shift. The wealthy think differently than those who have never been wealthy. If you hang out with wealthy people then you learn some of the tricks and strategies the wealthy people use and then that helps you increase your own income.

Does that make sense to you or do you think I’m way off base here? I’d love to know what you think!

- Ben Fitts

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