Do you think I am messing with your head? Do a search for “Dump Your Friends” in Google and see what happens.

It is not a coincidence that most of the websites that show up will suggest that if you want to make your life better - the first move is to dump your friends. Not all of them, but for sure, MOST of them.

Yeah, I didn’t believe it either. “I’m true to the heart!” “I am down for my boys!” or whatever I was saying while popping my chest. I learned the hard way like pretty much everyone else. And like everyone who has learned that lesson the hard way, I am going to try and convince you by showing you the wisdom of “Dumping Your Friends”.

• You are in the “Learning Phase”.

Are your friends rich? Now by rich, I mean they live in a house that they own outright (no mortgage), they have no credit card debt, they work for themselves, and they have at least $1,000,000 in the bank for each member of the family. This is a very basic definition of what is rich. The more money you make, the more you will realize that the person that fits this profile is simply upper middle class and not rich at all. But it is a good starting point. You need to surround yourself with people who have something they can teach you.. You want to be rich or t, at the very least, be successful and financially stable. Any of your friends that do not fit this profile will become one of three people upon your growing success.

• The Hater - this is the friend who will start to put you down. They will see that you are motivated and fill your head with poison. They will crack down on any of your ideas or make you out to be a fool to others. I had plenty of these. They would call me up to come out to the bars and I would decline. I would tell them that I am working on something (which they always would refer to as a “Get Rich Quick Scheme”). I know employ some of these people.
• The Player - this is a friend who will listen to your ideas and wait for you to invest time and money into research. You are excited about your new prospects and want to share with your friends. The Player will secretly covet the attention that you receive and will attempt to take your ideas and research and try to duplicate your efforts on the side. They will often employ The Hater to distract you and draw your attention away from your project so that they can get in first. Sometimes The Player will want to be your partner, and ride their way to success trading on your friendship.
• The Leach - this is a friend that sucks up all your time with their problems. See, to them, you have your act together. You know what is going on. You are making something of yourself. They want that too. This is a friend who calls you because they need help. The help might be financial, the help might be physical - whatever it is, you don’t have it to give. The problem with Leaches is that they are parasitic. That means they can only survive by sucking out your resources and leaving you with nothing more than what they have.

Now there are a hundred other reasons and types of people who will stand in your way of succeeding. They can’t help themselves. Ultimately, in my experience, there is one core reason. People lie to themselves.

Yeah, we all know that we lie to ourselves about a lot of things - but think about that. Put yourself in the mind of your friends. Your life sucks. You work hard, you are a smart person and if you only had a break, won the lottery - whatever, you could be rich too. You know that only the lucky get rich or only if exploit another person can you get rich. Maybe you are black, white, red, yellow or brown and that means no one will cut you a break. You KNOW this to be true. These are the only reasons why you aren’t successful.

Then along comes your friend. He/She is in the same financial position that you are in. Maybe you grew up in the same neighborhood. Maybe they are even related. All of th sudden, they are reading a lot. They are listening to tapes or cds on self-improvement. Maybe they are taking night classes at the junior college. You know they are wasting their time because they can’t get ahead. They have no money, they have all the same problems that you have. They WILL NOT succeed.

But, if they do… then everything you know to be TRUE is suddenly not true. This means that the only thing stopping YOU from being wealthy is YOU. That is a jagged pill to swallow for anyone. Who wants to be faced with the fact that you haven’t lived up to your potential or that whatever problems you have in your life are your own fault?

Most people can’t so they lash out in some way. Each person is different and the way they respond to this realization (even if they don’t recognize their own deficiencies) is by sabotaging your efforts.

So…. what do you do?

Dump them. It sucks and most people can’t do it. And you don’t have to dump ALL your friends. But you will likely have to dump 90% to 99% of them. What I did was I just stopped being available. I stopped hitting the bars all the time. I cut down on my weekend recreation. Not only did it save me money, it cut loose the “Kinda Friends” from the “Real Friends”. Next is start to focus on your income projects. Soon you will realize that those people who you thought were “Real Friends” will stop calling. I found out that from the dozens of people that I considered “Real Close Friends” that only about 2 of them are still my friends today and they are “Great Friends”.

Now You Know How, Why?

Look, it has been proven that your income will always be within 10% to 20% of the income of your friends. This means that if your friends are all making $15,000 a year - you will likely only make it to $18,000 a year. There are fluke, but these numbers have been pretty consistent. If you start hanging out with people who have the same goals as you, you have built a “Wealth Network”. These are people of varied skills looking to make money. Maybe you can do something that one of these new friends need to make a million dollars.

Have you ever heard the saying… “It’s not WHAT you know, it’s WHO you know”? This is what that means. You might know everything about construction just like all your friends. But what if you knew someone who knew everything about flipping houses and they knew a real estate agent? The three of you could make millions.

Or, you can stay home drinking beer with your buddies talking about what you would do if you could only catch that break.

If you don’t believe me ask Rhianna or Yahoo or AskMen