Are you with the right friends | ATCF | Episode 12

Vance Crowe [00:00:00] As the crow flies on the Vance Road Podcast, welcome Back to the podcast. I'm glad you're here. On Fridays, I sit down to share some thoughts, philosophies, and concepts that can help you become a tangibly better communicator. And I just returned from the Arizona Farm Bureau where I was giving a talk on how to respond to disruption, how to be prepared for the things that you didn't know life was going to throw at you. And one of the things that I talked about during this speech was the concept that you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with. Now, that's not my idea. A man named Jim Rohn, who's an incredible thinker, talks about that all the time. And I think that most people, when they hear it, it feels pretty satisfying. It feels like it describes something really important. And you look around at your friends and you say, am I pulling their average up or am I pulling their average down? Where do I fit in this mixture? And I thought about this for quite a bit of time after I'd given the talk because sometimes when you're on the stage, you say something and it really clicks in with you. And as I was flying home, I started thinking about the different groups over my life that would've represented the five people that I spent the most time with. When I got to high school and I was 14 years old, I was involved in all sorts of organizations. I was a boy scout and I played football. I think my freshman year I was in the choir and even was involved in speech team. And each one of these groups introduced me to lots of people that had new ways of expressing themselves and new skills that they were trying to build.

Vance Crowe [00:01:31] But the whole time I was with these different groups, I always felt kind of embarrassed. And then embarrassment came from the fact that I knew that the people that I was hanging out with weren't cool. You know, they were the ones that were doing straight laced things and they went over to each other's houses where their parents would supervise them playing board games. And when I looked out at the world, that just didn't seem exciting or interesting to me. So all of my friends in these groups, they were good people. I enjoyed spending time and hanging out with them, but I always dreamed about something else. And as a 14-year-old, I looked up to my older brother, Dan, who is two years older than me, and he was one of the coolest guys in our school. He drove a Pontiac GTA, and he hung out with even the older kids than him. And those are the kind of kids that would have parties out in cornfields, or when somebody's parents went outta town, they'd all get together. I would see the way that people interacted with him and they wanted to be around him. And I thought, man, I just wanted to be a part of the cool kids, but my brother and I at the time didn't get along great. And for better or for worse, he did not want me at the parties that he was at. So if I was gonna be one of the cool kids that got invited to parties, I was gonna have to find a different route than my brother. So I looked around the world and I don't know that I was this calculated about it, but I took up smoking. And as soon as I did that, I now had a key that would allow me to get into groups that I wasn't really welcomed in before. You see, the kids that were off smoking or partying were not involved in the things that I was involved in, so I wasn't really connected with them.

Vance Crowe [00:03:04] But once I took up smoking, now I could go with a group of guys that were gonna cross the street during lunch and go hide behind an apartment building and smoke cigarettes. Now, if you're imagining that this talk is going to be me saying how terrible it was that I smoked, or how much I regret it, that is not this conversation. It was stupid that I smoked. And if I saw a 16-year-old now smoking the way that I did during high school, I'd probably laugh at them realizing just how silly and stupid they looked. But smoking actually did something really important for me. Hanging out with this network changed everything about what I did with my time. Instead of going to organized activities, we would go out to my friend Jack's house, climb to the top of the silo and throw bowling balls down on objects, or we'd take his big truck out and go mudding and learning how to drive in conditions that were wild and untamed. And then when I went away to college, I was now hanging out with all the people that would stay up late and go try new and different things. That pack of cigarettes became a powerful passport for me, and that was hugely amplified when I went into Latin America on the ecotourism shift that I was a deckhand on, or later when I went to Africa as a US Peace Corps volunteer, suddenly I had this object that would allow me to connect with dock workers, with security guards, and even police officers that were looking to shake somebody down for a bribe. Now, I had this thing that allowed me to meet people and start conversations that if I didn't have cigarettes, I don't know what I would've used. I mean, all of us are creative and there are lots of people that do pretty edgy travel that don't need cigarettes, but for me, it was a passport and it helped introduce me into networks of people that I could not have gotten to with the skills that I had.

Vance Crowe [00:04:43] But then I came back to the United States. I do a variety of jobs, and over time I've just become that person that is a smoker. And I didn't really think too much about it. It was just kind of who I was and what I did. And it wasn't until I went home for a visit. Now, my dad is an avid book collector. I think one time we figured out that he has a larger book collection than Thomas Jefferson did at Monticello. So he really deeply cares about book recommendations. Who's giving you good ideas? What books should he be reading? What ideas are you learning about? So one time I'm visiting home, he asked me a very simple question, Vance outta the people that you smoke cigarettes with, which ones of them give you good book recommendations? At first, I thought that was kind of a puzzling question, and I thought maybe it was a poke and him wanting me to quit smoking. But he never said that directly. He just asked this question. And I found myself realizing slowly that of all the people that I was spending all this time with smoking cigarettes, none of them gave me good book recommendations. And it wasn't that they were bad people for smoking or that they weren't reading good books or whatever. It just turns out that the people that I had been smoking with when we, we were younger, the people that had decided they were gonna go into the underworld, the ones that could get out, did get out. So they quit smoking. And that passport that they had, they left behind. But I hadn't done that. And the passport that was that pack of cigarettes became an anchor holding me into the underworld.

Vance Crowe [00:06:16] Now, most of the people that I spent most of my time with were people that could not let go of a bad habit in order to go back up to the regular world and be a person that can participate in regular activities. I smoked for another two years, and over time I began to realize that the people I was spending all this time with smoking cigarettes were not an average that was pulling me up and helping me to become a better person. So when I did finally quit smoking, I realized that my network got much better. And it wasn't that all of a sudden, all of my friends were intellectuals giving me great book recommendations and helping me find the right movies or the right inspiration to make changes in my life. Now, I look around at all times and I try and say, am I spending the right time and energy with the people that are going to help pull me up in this world? I'm proud to say that I have excellent friends and they have continued to push me on and on. But if you are sitting and thinking about the five people that you spend the most time with, and you begin to realize that perhaps the reason you're spending time with them is that they're the one that always answers the call on your drive home from work, or they're the one that always lets you have an excuse about why you didn't get out and exercise, or why your work situation isn't all that it could be, well then you may want to start thinking about how can I change my network? How can I improve it? Then I recommend you sit down and write a list of the five most impactful things that you read, watched, listened to, or experienced in the last year. Try and write down five things, and if you're struggling to write down five things, then spend a little more time with it.

Vance Crowe [00:07:51] And if after you've spent some more time with it, you still realize that you don't have five things that have really impacted your life, then I would recommend really concentrating on that. And maybe you only have one or two things that have really impacted you. Once you establish what those one or two things are, then look at who it was that recommended them to you, who gave you those ideas, who prompted you to do a little bit of work to read a book, or to take the time to go look up a podcast. Whoever that is, they are adding to your life. They are helping you get better. And one way that you can cherish that relationship is by sitting down and writing them a thank you note. Write down exactly what they prompted you to do when you heard them say it, and then what it changed in your life. You can think about the experience of receiving a letter, an email, a text message, or a phone call from somebody that you didn't really think you had made that big of an impact on saying, Hey, you got me to read this book and it helped me make this change in my life, and I just wanted to say thank you. That will have a tremendous impact on them because they're gonna know, Hey, this is what I did. That was good, and now I can go out and do more of this. But even more so, it can help you to look around your network and say, who are the people that are helping me get to a place that I want to go to, and how can I make sure that they know that I'm as open as possible to the ideas that they have? After you write a letter, the nature of your relationship will change. It will get stronger, and you will have inherently spent more time with the type of people that are pulling you up and making your average better.

Vance Crowe [00:09:24] So my hope for you is that you actually take this week of Thanksgiving and do this. Write down the five things that impacted you. Figure out who exposed you to those things, and then write them a letter and watch what happens. It will be something truly important. I am certain of that. I write thank you notes all the time, and if you haven't gotten one yet from me, and we're close friends, I'm sure you will soon, because I'm always trying to sit down and think about how was I influenced and how can I make sure the best influencers of me know what they've done well, so they can keep doing it? I'm gonna sign off for now, but there's two pieces of information that I wanna let you know about. Number one, next Wednesday, I'm gonna be releasing maybe the most emotionally impactful podcast I have ever done. It's with a woman named Kristi Beck, who is a PhD soybean breeder with a fascinating understanding of soybeans. But even more than that, she is a fascinating human being who discovered that she had cancer during a really routine surgery, and then went through the path of trying to eradicate it completely so that she could be around for her children in a way that her mother was not around in her life. It is an impactful and powerful conversation, and I hope you tune in on Wednesday to hear that conversation. The second piece of information that I wanted to share is that on November 26th, Jared McDaniel and Dwayne Faber and I will be at Aggravation Canada's largest livestock show, and we are going to be taping a podcast called The Three Brothers Road Show.

Vance Crowe [00:10:56] We'll be talking about some of the most controversial issues in Canadian and US agriculture. So we're gonna head up there and record a podcast, and we hope that people can show up live, have a few drinks at the bar and hang out with us afterwards. But if you can't make it know that Jared and I are doing our best to record the entire event, both on video and audio, and we have agreed that we're going to both publish them on Ag Uncensored and the Vance Crowe podcast. So if you can't make it to Regina Saskatchewan at 4:00 PM in the John Deere sales arena at aggravation, then tune in to hear how that whole podcast went down. It's gonna be a fun time. Thank you so much for joining me, and I'll see you next Wednesday during that conversation with Kristi Quebec. Ah.