How to Remove Negative People from Your Life & Become a Better Person

You're going to do best when your business life and your social life work together.

For instance, some of my closest friends, Kevin Hutto, Ryan Magin, are all online marketers or online entrepreneurs or entrepreneurs in general. So all of my close friends, for the most part, work in similar verticals as me.

When I want to be social and we go out to dinner, we're still talking business the whole time.

What you don't want to have is, I got my business friends and then I got my fun friends or I got my business friends and I got my party friends, my drinking buddies. You don't want to have those two things.

What will happen is you're going to start to resent the drinking buddies because when they hit you up and want to hang out, they're taking money away from you.

So when my friends who are in business hit me up, I'm excited because I know we'll have fun, we get food, we'll have good wine but we'll also talk ideas and business and what's going on in industries and stuff like that.

So I don't want to say balance, the word I'm looking for isn't balanced, it's integration. How can you integrate both of them so they feed each other.

So what's your goal? Let's start there.

The reason I ask that is because, if the goal is, Hey, let's just make a nice six figure salary where we're our own boss. Or say, you want to get to a hundred or 200 or 300 grand a year, you want a good business, get a good BMW, get a good house in a good neighborhood, and play golf a lot or whatever you guys do for leisure.

If that's the goal, you can hang out with them. You guys can play beer pong, throw things at each other, say shots, shots, and take shots for whatever reason. You can do it all.

If your goal is to make ten million, a hundred million, maybe a billion, you're not going to have time for that. It's just not possible.

So what I always recommend is that you need to edit the relationship the same way that you would take a video on QuickTime or iMovie and you'd edit that movie to the way you like it. You need to edit the relationship the same way and what you can do is get them at their best.

The bad thing is if you spend time with them, that's gonna rub off on you. Have you ever heard, one bad apple ruins the bunch?

I'm a huge believer in energy and environment, what I’m allowing in the world. So, if you let them in your world, it's going to be to steal money from you. It's just going to happen.

For instance, there's certain people that I don't want to talk business with because their beliefs are ridiculous and based entirely on secondhand information that they've heard. They have no real-world experience so I don't want to talk to them about that.

Maybe they're in a bad mood most of the time so you don't want to hang out with them, but maybe they're in a really good mood when they're watching football games on Sunday. Getting them at their best is a really good strategy to work your way around that.

To me, people are not their behaviors so this person may have a great heart, just bad conditioning and uneducated about money and business. That good heart is rare, that good attitude is rare. So I don't want to just cut off the cord and I never see them again. I just can't continue to hang out with them if they continue to carry all this negative energy with them.

I'll give you a personal example, Ryan Magin, who you may know, about five years ago, was partying too much, drinking too much, just acting, not like Ryan and I hit him saying, “man, I can't hang out with you if you're going to be like this. We can't talk as much, etc.”

We were best friends but we didn't talk for almost a year, then I saw him after a year for the first time and I didn't even recognize the guy.

Like what happened? He goes, “dude, you and Elliott stopped talking to me so I came to a conclusion”. Elliott Hulse, who is also a very good friend of Ryan’s, and I both did it at the same time, not on purpose, but we both did ironically. We came to the same conclusion.

That was a huge motivator for him and Ryan actually turned his whole life around as a result of that. He started dressing better, taking care of his health, stopped partying, started reading books, started taking action, started learning and doing all the things he's supposed to be doing and his whole life transformed. If we hadn't given him that gift of “sorry, we can't be friends right now”, he may never had the motivation to actually change.

What’s crazy is that Ryan knew he was messing up. Other people know they’re messing up deep down as well. They just don't want to admit it because no one wants to be seen or see themselves like that, which is understandable. Sometimes they need that kick in the ass.

How many people need a kick in the ass today? Yeah, a lot of people, right? Our legs would get exhausted from doing all the ass kicking that would be needed. It's that easy!

Talk soon - JC