The ninth of March. You always knew it would be, didn't you? I always knew this day would come. said to me at some point, it's going to be the ninth of March and I'm to have to choose my circle wisely. And today we're talking about choosing your circle wisely, which is the longly, the long anticipated follow up to Tuesday's with Morrie. Nice. Very good. You found that funny that I think everyone else. Very good. Today is our friend, Marcellus Rufus, one of the wisest men.

I'm one of the lesser talked about stoics. Where's he been? We've been waiting for him all year. He's very stoic about it. He's not a big deal. I'll tell you what he said. Please. From good people, you'll learn good. But if you mingle with the bad, you'll destroy such soul as you had. Now, how do you feel about this? So this is the idea of if I surround myself with good people, good friends, a good circle, ambitious people, whatever it may be, I should automatically become like them.

Do you agree or disagree with that as a sentiment? So I'm kind of in the middle on it and what I'll get off the fence. No, I've got splinters in my ass. What I will say is there's a phrase isn't there that you become an amalgamation of the five people that you hang around with the most, which I think is powerful. And I think that actually you should have mentors, whether they're whether they're actually mentoring you or mentoring you from the sideline. But you should have people that you look up to and admire.

But I also think it's important to have people in your life that bring a little bit of that black and white. Like it can't all just be positive. I think you learn so much more from people that might be different because that will, one will inspire you and one might motivate you to say, actually, I want to be that. And I know that I don't want to be that. So I think keeping people in your circle from a variety of walks of life is powerful. Yeah. And like, if you, we could take this in two ways. If you think about the Buddha, the reason he became the Buddha,

Is he grew up as a rich Prince, but in it behind the palace gates. And one day he left the palace gates and saw there's suffering everywhere. There's poor people. There's all these things that I didn't know. All these terrible things. And actually seeing the worst of mankind, the worst suffering that we can go through made him then want to become a better person. And the stoics used to do it as well. You know, the stoics that there's a story about Marcus Reyes as a child, walking around, seeing people fight in or.

being reactive or emotional in the street. And he didn't see that as that's something that I now should become. His teacher told him, no, that's that's a lesson. And when you see the worst of it, you see things you don't like. You should remind yourself that's what you don't want to become. Yeah. So it's probably an argument to be made for both. I imagine things like this can be quite tough on people, especially maybe salespeople who are in a business. They're seeing sales as a career. They're ambitious, but they look around. They're not seeing that from their team.

And then they're thinking, I'm in the wrong place. But you can also see being with the wrong people as, what can I learn from them about what not to be? So I don't think people should be hard on themselves about, don't have like the perfect mentor and Richard Branson's mobile number in my mobile. Yeah. think that, I think the question to ask is whether there is no good nor bad, whether they're, your circle is motivated and inspirational or not motivated and coasting is what is the lesson that I can learn from this?

Something I've been doing recently and I'll share with you because I think it is very interesting. I think that salespeople can do this as well. So it's probably a bit of a technique, but I'm also going to bring tech into it because it's the year of AI 2025. We're talking about AI. What I do in the mornings is I journal. Okay. So I voice record and I'll talk about the day before some of the highs, lows, some of the calls that we had, maybe some of the discovery calls, maybe some of the clients, maybe some of the things with the team.

I think salespeople can do this at the end of the day. We get our team to do a report so they can reflect on it. And what you can do is you can look back and reflect on the day. So journaling is so, important. The Stoics spoke about it. But what you can now do is you can be really, really smart. You can take the transcript that you've recorded. You can put it into a piece of AI. So I use Notion. You can use ChatGPT or Claude or other AI providers are available.

Then you can get them to start giving you the feedback. So based on what I've said over the last week or yesterday, what was the biggest problem? And then we can start to say, right, who are the mentors that if I could choose, I would have in life. So I might choose Derek Sivers. You might choose Tony Robbins. You might choose Chris Voss or Kenan. And what you can do is you can say, imagine you were this person based on the problem that I'm having in sales. What advice would you give me? So all of a sudden.

You're tapping into these brains that you admire and these mentors and they're cheering you on from the sidelines, but actually you're not taking up any of their time or their resource and you're solving your problem. Well, give me something that you've learned them from doing that. That was something you maybe didn't spot automatically. So one of the things I was over overthinking at the start of the year was my morning routine. And I go in and out of this kind of battle of like, want things to be perfect, but I know that also life isn't perfect that actually mid January, you've got a crying baby and sometimes it isn't always possible to wake up. So I was talking about that a lot. And I thought, I have this belief that sometimes the morning, like the Stoics had the morning routine, if it wasn't perfect, it would ruin my day. Now that is a belief that isn't useful and it isn't true. So what I did is I got Mark Manson to give me some quite hard hitting advice and just said like, you, you,

You've run in a business, you're running a podcast, you've got a baby, you've got a party, you've got all these things and you're worrying about like the morning routine. It's like, give yourself a break. And what you could do is you could tap into like, okay, based on meditations or letters from a stoic, give me advice, but make it so it's layman terms. So you can be really, really clever. If you're big into your stoicism, you can use stoicism to help fuel you and solve your sales problems. Beautiful. Very, very actionable advice there.

And you're quite a bright light, aren't you? I sometimes try. And I was thinking when you say that about your circle and you think about like emotional people and like, there's no, no, no truer word than like the people that you work with, spend most of your time with. like there's that beautiful graph that you must've seen that when your child's a certain age, you spend time with them. And then after that, it depletes your parents, your friends, and it's just going down and down. But the graph that goes up is your work colleagues, but you don't actually have a choice.

I, and it might surprise the viewers, I choose to hang out with you. What? What? but I choose, like we, we have a choice because we enjoy each other, but actually your, your work team, your, your teammates, you don't, you don't have that choice. There are going to be people within that team that maybe aren't motivational or inspirational. So do you have any stories about that from kind of your, your history? Yeah. So there was a guy that used to work in my office who and this is a thing, isn't it? You've got to be aware. taught me quite a lot of being a bit more finger on the pulse. Cause this was often happening when I wasn't in the room. Um, he'd kind of given up on working the business. had done its course and sales jobs do don't they, you know, there's typical like two year, you kind of starting to think maybe there's something else, but rather than just having that as a internal dialogue with himself to like, maybe I need to start looking at something else to do. He almost started venting that frustration on the rest of the team.

And he was saying things like, it's really hard to hit target in this business. And then that became, it's impossible to hit target in this business because he was struggling. But interesting thing happened where you look and thinking, why is everyone really struggling all of a sudden? What's going on? No one was really saying much, but there was like a real feeling of like, everyone's really struggling. I don't really understand what's happening. And then when he did leave the business, everyone told me that had been going on. And first things first, you're like, I need to apologize and make sure I'm a bit more.

on it of spotting these things that happen in the office. But the interesting thing that happened within about a week, everyone's numbers shot back up because he wasn't in the office perpetuating that idea that wasn't useful and wasn't true. Strike the shepherd and the sheep will flock. I believe that's what they say. And it reminds me of the four minute mile. Nobody could do it. And then one guy did it. And then all of a sudden everybody was doing the four minute mile. I think there's a real key lesson there of like, whether you say you can or you can't.

You're right. Wow. Thank you. I've been Jack Frimston. I've been Zach Thompson. Remember you will die. Beautiful neck.