Everyone gets fired up about carbon bar ends, disc wheels and stealth hydration systems. But what if your fitness and speed wasn’t a function of what you were able to purchase, but who you associated with? In other words, what if choosing the people that surrounded you was equally – or more important – than what you owned?
According to a recent published study at Harvard Business School entitled the Dynamics of Personal Influence: “although a person may be connected to other people by six degrees of separation, he or she is influenced only by those up to three degrees away.” Translation: The people closest to you have the biggest impact on you.
Example 1: Having a poster of Craig Walton on the wall is all well and good, but it’s your spouse who has a bigger impact on whether or not you’ll be successful.
Example 2: Buying a book on proper nutrition is a good idea, but having a family that eats well is more likely to impact your food choices and body composition.
Example 3: Wanting to get faster is nothing more than a pipe dream if everyone around you is slower than you are.
We see this phenomenon all the time on the Team here at Endurance Nation, but it’s worth reviewing. At some level, most prospective athletes are considering Rich or myself when they look at EN: How many IMS have they done? Have they qualified for Kona? Who do they typically coach? This is a direct reflection of how the triathlon coaching market works…and couldn’t be _less_ relevant with Team EN.
Whether or not I wrote that particular workout has zero impact on how you execute it, how hard you push yourself, what you believe you can do when you toe the line. All of those factors are determined, in large part, by your teammates who have come before you. After all, if Susie from Rochester, NY, can have a big 5k breakthrough in week 8, why can’t you? If everyone else is nailing their AM workouts…you are more likely to. If people are analyzing their power files to get more from them…you will too (or you will learn by default).
This effect is part of our Team Coaching approach. Since everyone is working off of a similar suite of training plans, the cumulative knowledge and fitness gained is actually MORE than an individual plan that has you training/living in a silo. As one of us learns something new, we all learn it. As one of us has a breakthrough, we all share in that feeling of accomplishment. Improvement and upward trends become a part of our psychology, a part of our shared expectations.
Together we can achieve much more than any single one of us could on our own.
Buying speed is a great high, but the gains are as limited as the equipment. Wearing an aero-helmet is really only good if you stay in the aero-position, for example; and disc wheels have more of an impact the faster you ride. If you want to get faster, train with faster folks. Want to learn more? Hang out with smarter folks. Looking to eat better? Involve the whole fam-damily in the project.
Next time you are faced with a big choice, remember that more often than now, throwing money at the problem is nothing more than a stop-gap solution. Take a good hard look at the people around you — and who you are around. After all, what type of influence are YOU creating?
Related Note: Team EN is running a huge recruiting special for February, with a 30-Day FREE Trial and membership discounted to $79/mo (from $99). I couldn’t think of a nicer, fitter, smarter group of people to team up with for a great 2009.
Hi, I'm Patrick McCrann. 
