The Tribe of Five Friends?
It’s impossible to avoid this truism/rule/heuristic: you’re the average of your five closest friends, or the five people you spend the most time with.
The saying seems obviously true, or is accepted as such. I’m skeptical. I’m skeptical that this retains much value beyond a certain age or that it provides more predictive signal than correlative noise.
The saying is claimed by many promoters but is usually attributed to Jim Rohn, an entrepreneur and motivational speaker. It’s notably recommended for financial success as much as for enhancing one’s character or mood, swaying political beliefs or dietary preferences.
Research, rock-solid, peer-reviewed, we-can-stand-by-this, research, is sparse. The cleanest research relates to early teenagers around 13 - 14 years old. Beyond that, evidence tends to fall into correlations about teens who are already similar - they play video games or chess competitions, they’re temperate or they’re boozy… before they find each other or while discovering, but less of this highly-publicized falling in with the right or wrong crowd.
We might be the average of our five closest friends, but it skews more toward a descriptive designation than a self-improvement trick. You can’t join an exclusive yacht club until you have the funds and invitation, nor can an obese person walk onto the cross-fit quad; we have to be that person to add those personalities to our “tribe of five.” It’s more likely that people who become wealthy from around the world will find themselves in Monaco for the Grand Prix, Venice for the Biennale, or backstage at Paris fashion week, simply placing us in categories, not predicting anything or hacking self-improvement.
It’s more likely that we maintain friendships with people with whom we forged strong bonds at impressionable times, people around the corner - or both.
Here’s a change of direction - from a famous study conducted at MIT ages ago in the 1940s, and replicated in many ways since: looking at college dorms, researchers identified that the most popular students were….. simply those who lived by the stairs. They were merely seen more often. And 42% of students listed their best friends as their direct neighbors.
Those friends are more likely to be random associations of proximity than self-help curation. And becoming friends with your neighbors sure seems like an odd way to predict much about a person that we wouldn’t already know by their school and broader demographics. Sure, those neighbors will influence each other, but will they fall in line with artistic or gastronomic taste, academic grades, values - maybe, sort of?
What do you think?