Why do some friends and family members try to discourage your ambitious goals? What can you do when the people closest to you aren’t in your corner?
Success requires more than just hard work and determination—it demands a supportive environment. The wisdom found in The Boron Letters (Gary and Bond Halbert) reveals why certain relationships might be holding you back and offers guidance on surrounding yourself with people who believe in your vision.
Keep reading to discover how to build a network that elevates your goals instead of diminishing them.
Avoid People Who Don’t Support You
The authors of The Boron Letters warn that, if you’ve set an ambitious goal, most people will protest and try to discourage you. This includes your family and close friends, and it’s true especially if your goal is to make a lot of money. The more great things you accomplish with your life, the more likely it is that people who don’t support you will feel bad about not accomplishing as much.
(Shortform note: What can you do if you find that you’re the one jealous of your friends’s success? One potentially helpful tactic is to ask yourself what you can learn from them. If someone is a success, they’re doing something right. If you have the chance to study their strategies and systems, you can use their success to help yourself, turning it from a problem into something to celebrate.)
To avoid getting discouraged, be ruthless in cutting unsupportive people out of your life. Many people feel a sense of guilt or obligation to indefinitely maintain their close relationships, even if those people continuously make life harder and less pleasant. This will make it much more difficult to motivate yourself to succeed and will generally make life less fun. When cutting people out of your life, don’t purposefully try to hurt or offend them, but don’t feel bad about spending little to no time with them, either.
(Shortform note: While the Halberts recommend completely eliminating unhealthy relationships from your life, other experts might call this rule unnecessarily strict. In Set Boundaries, Find Peace, Nedra Glover Tawwab warns that people who cut off relationships too readily often lose friends that otherwise would have brought them joy and are more likely to end up lonely. Instead, if you learn to set and enforce consistent boundaries with the people in your life, you can prevent them from being a negative influence on you without cutting them off completely.)
Instead of nurturing unhealthy relationships, the authors recommend spending time with ambitious people with aspirations similar to yours, or people who have already achieved success. You’ll be much more likely to succeed if your friends are a constant source of encouragement and are willing to help you reach your goals.
(Shortform note: In Build the Life You Want, Arthur C. Brooks and Oprah Winfrey warn that if you surround yourself exclusively with friends who can do something for you—for instance, offering professional connections or career inspiration—you risk building a social life that seems healthy but is emotionally unfulfilling. It’s typically impossible to be your fully authentic self in these transactional relationships since such vulnerability would mean risking the professional help you need them for. In contrast, Brooks and Winfrey argue that the people who add the most fulfillment to your life are useless to you: The only thing they have to offer you is their friendship itself.)
