Brain Food #571
The people that enable you to be your best
Thoughts of the day
A short thought for today, and one that crosses my mind often, is that your input determines your output. What you choose to read and watch, who you choose to listen to, or spend your time with, determines who you are as a person.
The famous idiom goes, “A man is known by the company he keeps.” Focus on creating a life in which you have access to the people that enable you to be your best: someone to rely on, someone to motivate you, someone to challenge you, someone you can learn from, someone to look up to.
A 2012 exhibition at MoMA explored the ways in which artists may have influenced each other throughout their careers. Similarly, a more recent study on the relationships between artists revealed that their likelihood of success increased not due to their talent, but because of who they knew.
The diagram below shows the intricate interconnections that the paper revealed between artists. Each colour represents a different nationality. The dreaded -for many- word ‘networking’ comes to mind. A better alternative is diversity, paired with open-mindedness, which allows someone to be exposed to ideas from different cultures, and incorporate them into their work.
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