 Hey, John Cristani here. And in this video, I'm going to be going, this is not about cats. This is actually about one of the hardest decisions that I've had to make continually in the process of being an entrepreneur and really being successful and being in control of my time and creating luck on my side, which has been dropping my loser friends. Now that may not sound obvious, but I'm going to go into detail a few stories of my life where I've had to do this and it's been the most momentous thing in my life to surround myself with a high net worth group of people so that I could move forward in my business and my career, in my family, irregardless of even if I was doing the right things. And that's by curating a really good social circle. Now curating a good social circle is nice, but again, the most difficult and the real work around that is actually getting rid of the negative influence. Again, this video is part of my series about taking back control of your time, and I'm going to be going into how I was able to drop my loser friends and why and why I believe so firmly that dropping your loser friends or family members even is going to be one of the most difficult, yet one of the most important decisions you ever make in becoming successful. Prepare for some hard, deep work in this video. See you in a second. Hey, John here, and I like to sit out here and just look at the beautiful shadows across the Santa Monica mountains. Sometimes at night, this is where I hang out and just kind of enjoy stuff. Sit out here, play with my daughter. Sometimes I jump from up here into the pool right there, all sorts of stuff. But the reason we're here is because I'm going to tell you a little bit about why dropping loser friends is so important. Now to back up a little bit. I've been teaching folks, you know, for five years now, and I've seen tens of thousands of students come through my courses and most don't succeed, some succeed on a stratospheric scale with the same exact content. Now, for me, it's been really fascinating why given the same input, different people react different ways and understanding that and kind of cross-referencing it with my own success. I believe is at the meat and the heart of education. It's not just about understanding what makes people successful. It's about understanding what doesn't make people successful. Now curating a really good social circle has been just monstrous for my own success. Let me give you an example. You know, I surround myself with outgoing people generally, but where this came into, you know, a big problem was during college is winning in college was being seen as popular. And unfortunately, you know, well, not unfortunately, whatever, but I got caught up in kind of the frat, fraternity, sorority seen in college. And really how important you were was determined by popularity. What parties you went to, who you were dating, all that sort of stuff. And also, you know, in the fraternity sorority scene, there was a lot of drugs, a lot of drug use. And I got caught up in that a little bit. And I fell into a crowd of people basically who had rich parents. This is when I went to school at Southern Methodist University in Texas. Basically people with rich parents who did a lot of drugs. And that wasn't really helpful for getting ahead in life. It wasn't helpful at all. What I did was I ended up actually quitting school after two years because I went to a local community college in Los Angeles. But the problem was I saw that I was in a social scene that wasn't good. You can't continue improving in that life. The end goal of that game wasn't a good game, right? It's just go to more parties, whatever, get a job, get married, you know, brown nose to the people at the top of the fraternity to get a good job at a good firm or something. So I got out of that. And I devoted myself to working and curating myself a better social circle. I stopped doing drugs for six months. I stopped doing anything. But the issue was, was that these were still the friend group that I'd curated over the last, you know, one and a half years before I stopped doing, you know, any sort of substances, they were still people I knew. They were still people I saw every day. So I wanted to cut off my self from the possibility of falling back in with people that were negative influences on my life. And that's the issue with friends or acquaintances or family members is you're stuck with them, usually for your entire life, whether, you know, usually there's a lot of interwoven social dynamics that go on. So I needed to make a clean break. And what I did when I moved to Los Angeles was I started surrounding myself. I started going to meetups and events. You can't really do that right now, but I started going as many meetups and events as I could because in my mind, I said, I'm going to surround myself with people who are making money on the internet. This is going to be my new social circle. And every single day, I would drive two and a half hours away. I'd drive all the way to San Diego, which is very far. I mean, if you know Los Angeles and San Diego, it's very long way in traffic and it can be three and a half hours. But I would drive super far once I was done with my day job to meet people so I could surround myself with a social circle of folks that weren't moving. We're ambitious. You know, we're making money online. And through repetition, through doing this for a year or so, a year and a half, I started creating for myself a social circle of folks that were in the internet business or, you know, people that were trying to do real estate and stocks. I didn't know that many very successful folks, but I started surrounding myself with people that had intentionality. If you're watching this, I would suggest, you know, what you may take away from that is if you want to be successful in something, surround yourself with movers and shakers, people have intentionality. So I did that and that helped me out a lot. I actually got my first real, I'd say internet job and also mentor from this process. Somebody I'd met, I was trying to run my own business. I was being a medical guinea pig and, you know, I was taking test drugs and getting paid a lot of money. I stopped illegal drugs, but I started getting paid to take drugs as much as like six, $7,000 a month to take experimental drugs from the big drug companies. You know, that funded a lot of failures in my business. It didn't work out, right? I'd say part of the reason is I didn't have a mentor. So through the process of curating myself a social circle, you know, I was able to find a mentor, I got my first job. That's where I learned how to do pay-per-click advertising. And from then I started using that, combining that with the affiliate marketing that I was already trying out. You know, I made a millions, you know, at a very young age. This is like 20, I think four I made my first million by. Let's get back to removal. So there have been multiple places where I've had to remove negative influences from my life. I find myself with a lot of folks that are negative influences, but they look a lot different. They're more successful. They are, you know, they're straight edge. They're, yeah, they're a different degree of success. But what they're looking to do is suck my time and suck money from me. And oftentimes it's sucking time from me. I'd say it's probably the biggest type of negative influence that I've in my life. There are a lot of people who want to suck my time from me. There are a lot of people who want to speak with me one on one. There are a lot of people who want me to personally mentor them and train them and they'll move out to Malibu and they'll come to my house every day. I get a lot of proposals for people who say they'll do anything, you know, to, to learn marketing and have me as my mentor or whatever. Now, after I'd started being successful in business, I was living in Santa Monica, it was pretty cool. I had a really cool apartment at sixth and Broadway. So we had a big, big deck just like this one. We had, you know, beer pong on it. We could walk to the most, you know, the Third Street promenade, which is kind of like an international tourist attraction, walk to the beach. It was really cool and chicks dug it. We had bars all around us, really fancy restaurants. It was fun. But one of the issues that I came into living in Santa Monica was that, you know, on one hand, I located myself there because everybody wanted because people would come to me as opposed to me having to go if I wanted a social life, me going to them. But the downside was that we had, you know, we were in a really, I was in a really sick spot and lots of people love to come over and party and pregame at our place. So we were kind of like this central hub for social activity, you know, because we're in our young or mid 20s. So we had a really cool spot to be, you know, we're in the hip, hot part of town in LA. This caused some issues because you fall into these, I want to call them traps, but you fall into this kind of like social routine where, you know, suddenly you have all these weekly events you're doing and suddenly you have people coming in and out of your place, you know, because your roommate invites them over because I invite them over because, you know, you fall into this social routine of activity and that doesn't really service. It's comfortable, but it doesn't really service the hunger. Doesn't service the ability to be single-mindedly focused on being successful. One of my solutions to that oddly enough was traveling. Traveling provided me a reset, provided me that time to just isolate myself almost and focus on solving the issue at hand, which was creating ads that had a high conversion rates, high ROIs so I could make a lot of affiliate commissions. So in a sense, I'd say I almost ran away, right? I'd say that was kind of, you know, what I did during college when I surrounded myself with the wrong social scene, you know, in Santa Monica, you know, when I was successful, I didn't fully run away because I'd always come back and my friends, who have been my friends since I was in high school, the friends I still hang out with from high school are all multimillionaires now, which is pretty neat. So we've kept up and Los Angeles has just been an absolute hot bed of economic activity. So for people who are motivated, it's very easy when you're in a place like Los Angeles to make a lot of money because you're in the right place. Again, you proximity is power. So if you locate yourself in a place that has monster wealth creation already as an engine that's turning, you're going to have a lot better chance of being successful or lucky if you are there than if you are in Kenya, for instance, right? And I'd say the third way that I've actually practiced removing loser friends from my life is slightly different than what you'd expect. It's removing really loser people that work with me from my life. Now, when you're running a business, you almost become friends with the people you work with, or you do become friends with some of the people you work with, whether that's good or bad. I don't know. I'm a horrible manager, right? I'm not good at managing people. That's why I run an internet business. But I do work with a number of people now, contractors, people that work for me full time, etc. Because we're growing and, you know, I've started getting a substantial business, which is really exciting. But how my business started was I would find people that would want to work for me for a relatively reasonable rates, okay? And I'll just bring on anybody who wanted to work with me, right? So I'd say, yeah, you know, you're motivated, you're excited, you want to make it, let's go work for me. Unfortunately, that attracted to me what I call opportunist. I'd consider many people watching kind of videos on how to make money online. I'd consider them opportunists, right? People that change their mind on what business they're in from week to week, from month to month. People who always have ideas, people who are always talking about what the next crypto is, right? I've heard a lot of these conversations, yo, which Bitcoin are you investing in? Which crypto? That's what I call opportunist talk. And I attract a lot of those people, right? Because I'm teaching how to start an online business and I would end up hiring or working with or contracting out or outsourcing work to folks that approach me like that. I always appreciate people who just pulled outreach and say, hey, John, I have an idea. I can make you a lot of money. I'm like, cool, thanks. I love people with ideas to make the money. Now we start working together. But now I don't go about it that way. What I've done to take back my time is I've had to remove a lot of these opportunist folks because the issue with opportunists in my mind is a great way to make a little money. But ultimately, if you have an opportunistic mindset where you're just really just excited about the opportunity and bouncing around, I found those people don't work as well at long-term in a company, an organization that is trying to do bigger and better things. Does that make sense? So opportunists don't do that well in jobs. And surrounding myself with folks that, playing for themselves, which is fair, I'm teaching folks how to play for themselves and make money, doesn't work within a company environment. It doesn't work to build bigger and greater things. I also believe this is why one of the reasons why a lot of teachers like myself in the what we call the business opportunity market, you know, the grand cardones, the Tai Lopez's, the, you know, you name it, don't end up building monstrous world-changing companies. They end up building popular mastermind programs and seminars, you know, multi-level marketing organizations, et cetera, but not multi-billion dollar sorts of concerns that actually don't just help the world in an incremental way, but help the world in a zero to one type of a way. And I needed long-term folks with very sharp minds to help me get to the next level in my business. So I had to drop a lot of the people that came to me that even became friends that started working for my organization in the beginning because they're too opportunistic. They weren't thinking big picture. They didn't work well in organizations. They couldn't think about systems like that. That's been very difficult process. That's been a very difficult process for me. It's been a sad process. I'm not altogether happy about it. And it's something that's really happened this past year where I've dropped a lot of people from my company that have worked with me and I've brought on people, folks who have a bigger vision who are smarter or more capable and who ultimately are gonna go on to do bigger and better things. It's sad when you drop friends. It's sad when you lose a friend and that's gonna be a normal part of the process. It's gonna be sad. It's gonna push you. Some of the people you're gonna have to drop are gonna be family members. That's gonna be really hard. Talk about that in another video. But you don't necessarily have to not like lose your family members as much as you're just not responding to every invitation they give you to hang out with. And that can cause a lot of strife. That can cause a lot of family strife. It can cause you to be the black sheep. It can cause people to talk badly about you. But some of these things are gonna be necessary if you wanna get to the next level in your life. It's difficult. It's meant to be difficult. But my homework for you, if you're playing along is identify right on a piece of paper. And I write down, you know, just put a line down the center and write down what people are positive influences that are gonna help you become more successful in your life and your career. And write down people that are negative influences. Write down a bunch of people you know that you interact with. I remember doing this and there are some people, some of the most successful people I was not interacting with because I was scared. I didn't think that some very successful person would wanna talk to me because I was still, you know, not making enough money. And I still think that way today. You know, I was on a phone call today with a man who sold his company for over $100 million. And I still get nervous about asking him questions or talking to him sometimes because I'm not yet at that level in my life. I have this kind of mental thing going on where I think to myself, I'm not good enough. That goes way deep. My therapist says it has something to do with, you know, I was adopted at birth so it has something to do with like prenatal smells of mothers and stuff like that. But that's been a long running kind of thing. I'm not good enough and it's some internal self-talk. I've told myself and I still think it to this day when I'm interacting with more successful people it's something I have to consciously try to break through. I kept myself away from the most successful people and I'd relax and go back to the easy people, the drinking buddies, right? The drinking buddies is the best way I call it. That's one of the things I stopped doing. I stopped hanging out with the drinking buddies as well. I stopped hanging out after soccer even, you know, we play soccer with my friends and I wouldn't always go drinking afterwards because I was trying to stop myself from getting into this drag where I get into too comfortable of a place and I stopped putting the pedal to the middle of my business. So I'll give you those things to think about your homework is identify the winner friends, the winner acquaintances that you should be interacting more with and also identify which friends or family members you need to drop to become more successful in your life. I hope this helps you out. Drop a like on this video, leave a comment if you have a question or if this has been helpful. Make sure you subscribe and make sure you hit the notification bell. Once again, this video is part of a series of videos where I'm going to be talking about how to get back your time essentially, how to get back your time because the stats I've looked at are 99% of folks that watch my YouTube videos on methods to make money online, don't do anything. But I'm being a little bit of a contrarian here is I'm going to focus on the 99% of folks that do nothing. And I want to help you get back more time in your life. So when you make the decision of where you spend your time you have an abundance of it to do stuff with. Thanks for watching, talk to you soon. Bye.