How To Surround Yourself with GREATNESS | 14 Minutes

Surround your mind with greatness.

What's up, Believe Nation? It's Evan. My one word is believe, and I believe that you have the ability to do something special that will change the planet. And so to help you on your journey today, we're going to learn how to surround yourself with greatness.

You will move in the direction of the people that you associate with. So I— it's important to associate with people that are better than yourself. And actually, the most important decision many of you make, not all of you, will be the spouse you choose.

And, uh, you really—

you want to associate with people who are the kind of person you'd like to be. You'll move in that direction. And the most important person by far in that respect as your spouse. I can't overemphasize how important that is. And you're right, the friends you have, they will form you as you go through life. And make some good friends, keep them for the rest of your life, but have them be people that you admire as well as like.

How can you help the human race? How can you help the human race, the human species, progress? I'm not joking either. This is something I think we all have to be aware of. At the end of the day, the human animal is a social animal. And our very survival depends on our ability to form communities, to form cultures. What's a community? What's a culture? It's a group of people with a common set of values and beliefs, right? What's a country? It's a group of people with a common set of values and beliefs. What's a company? It should be a group of people with a common set of values and beliefs. When we're surrounded by people who believe what we believe, something remarkable happens. Trust emerges. And make no mistake of it, trust is a feeling, a distinctly human feeling. You know, we all have friends who are total screw-ups, and yet we still trust them, right? Trust is not a checklist. Simply doing everything you say you're going to do does not mean people will inherently trust you. It just means you're reliable. We need trust, right? We need trust. When we're surrounded by people who believe what we believe and trust starts to emerge, and we trust them and they trust us, we're more willing to take risks, we're more willing to experiment, which requires failure, we're more willing to explore and go somewhere that no one has ever gone before with the confidence that if we fail, if we trip over, if we turn our backs, that those within our community, those who we trust and who trust us, will look after us while we're gone, will pick us up when we fall over, will help us when we're hurt. Our very survival depends on it. We're not good at everything. We're not good by ourselves. You know, if I send you out to go fight a saber-toothed tiger by yourself, odds are tiger 1, you 0. It's not going to go very well. But if you go out as a group, we're pretty damn amazing. And the reason is, is because we all have our strengths and we all have our certain weaknesses. And the goal is not to fix your weaknesses. The goal is to amplify your strengths and surround yourself with the people who can do what you can't do. But it's not just based on skills and application and experience. It's based on what you believe. It's based on what you believe. You see, simply being good at something and having somebody else being good at what you're no good at does not mean you will trust each other. Trust. The sense of trust comes from the sense of common values and common beliefs. I can prove it. How many of you are from New York? OK, a bunch of you. Are you friends with everybody in New York? Why not? Why not? But when you go to Los Angeles and you meet someone from New York, you're like, "Hey, I'm from New York!" And you're best friends.

Right?

And when you go to France, there you are on the Paris Metro, minding your own business, and you hear an American accent behind you, and you turn around, and you say, "Hey, where you from?" They say, "Los Angeles." You're like, "Hey, I'm from New York!" And you're best friends. Because when you're surrounded by people who don't believe what you believe, when you're in a strange environment where you don't feel comfortable, you look for anyone who may share some of the same values and beliefs that you have, and you start to form a very real and very intense bond with them, simply because you know that they have a basic understanding of how you grew up, of the things that you care about, of the life that you live back home. Well, the same is true when we go to work. Do we want to go to work with people who understand us, who believe what we believe, who have a similar view of the world that has nothing to do with their opinions and the differences that we share? That's good, that's called diversity, that's called advantages to problem solving, which is we can all look at the same thing from a different angle and come up with solutions. What I'm talking about is why should you help each other in the first place? What are you in pursuit of? Now the question is, is what creates that sense of values and beliefs? What creates that sense of trust?

Right?

Our very human instinct. We know how to find people who believe what we believe. Our survival depends on it. We're biologically gifted with this idea. If I ask you to go out in the street and find all the people who believe what you believe, you know exactly what to do. You're going to strike up conversations. You're going to start talking to people. And either you'll have a good feeling about them or you won't. Either you'll have chemistry, whatever that means, Or you don't. Sometimes it's quick, sometimes it's slow. But we know how to do it. It's called making friends, it's called dating, it's called networking. We have the innate ability to do it.

Where did you get that business sense? Because you surpassed everybody in boxing and sports and everything in general. I'm watching you, it's like you bigger than the NFL franchise. Just my team. Me believing, you know. I'm gonna be honest, me and a lot of my guys, a lot of my— I'm saying, I have a team also, but you know, my team don't get in there and go to war like I go to war, but they go to war on the outside. My team go to war. I'm on— I'm on— I'm very, very tough on my team. Um, I, I want my team to be the best that they can be on the outside. And but as far as on the outside, You know, Al Haymon. That's the OG right there. That's the OG, a legend, a legend. A very shrewd businessman. Leonard Ellerbee, master degree, you know, in business. So, you know, when you surround yourself with people like this, just being around certain individuals, like even being around Don King, being around Bob Arum, being around just different people that's been in the game a long time. And, you know, my billionaire buddies, you know, every time I got around my billionaire buddies, I was more like, um, it's cool to come over your house, but I need a house like this. Yeah, it's cool to ride on your yacht, but I need a yacht like this. It's cool to ride on your jet, but I want a jet like this. And I said, no, I don't want to ride on yours, you show me how to get it. You can't be my friend if you can't show me how to get it, because once they show me how to get it, then I can install it in my children, then it goes, it goes down.

It's a bloodline thing.

Yes. So it's about wealth, you know. I'm no longer rich, I'm wealthy. Right.

You know, what gives me strength all the time is to be able to have formulated a group of people around me that are my friends and my family. You know, those two words are meshed in my opinion, but it's given me a grounding that, as insane as my life can be sometimes, is always refreshing, and they're always so honest with me, and I'm so thankful for that.

Everybody successful lays a blueprint out. You laid the blueprint out. You know, I can go down a list from comedians to actors to entrepreneurs to self-made moguls. You look at Russell Simmons, you look at Jay-Z, you look at Tyler Perry, you look at Puff. I mean, you're looking at people that start off with a small vision, and that vision manifested into something beyond expectation. So what I did was, from the people around me, my mentors, Eddie Murphy, Chris Rock, Prince, Prior.

Who are all on the walls.

All on the walls.

Yeah.

All on the walls.

So you surround yourself with that.

I surround myself with a constant reminder of who's great. Constantly. I come down these steps every day, I look at Richard. Oh, he's great.

I see Eddie.

He was great. I see Chris Rock. He was great. It's a constant reminder. What am I trying to achieve? I want to be great. So that motivates me. So what separates me is my drive. My drive is other people's success.

But does that look like your group? No, it doesn't look like your group. I mean, in no way, shape, manner, or form. You know, maybe if we had a bunch of bunny rabbits running there, uh, or, uh, it's unbelievable. But again, you are who you hang around with, you know. And as Oprah Winfrey says, and which I, I talk about a lot, is that you want people with a like mind that are better than you, smarter than you, more intelligent than you to get on your bus. And don't be so concerned about what you're going to do with those people, but you want to, you know, the joint brain is, you know, there's nothing the joint brain, collective brain or brains can't overcome. And I give the example of the atomic bomb, Manhattan Project, and they were put together And they were told, we need to develop a weapon of mass destruction, which they didn't call it that back in those days, in the middle '40s, to end the war in the Pacific. And they did. They didn't know if it was implode or explode, but they did. But if your team doesn't look like that, then you should— I won't say you should give serious thought. You should just fucking change.

Right now, I'm standing in the middle of my library. This is my favorite place. Do you know Earl Nightingale said if you surround your mind with great of greatness, some of it's going to rub off. Well, hopefully some of it has rubbed off on me. I have maybe 3,000 or 4,000 books here on the shelf. They're all in alphabetical order by author. They're all catalogued. So I know where to find something just like that. I go by authors more than the title of the book. Do you know that when I started studying these books, I really didn't know very much about anything. I had 2 months high school. I was 26 years old. I had a bad work record, a bad attitude, and and virtually no experience. And you know, in a relatively short period of time, my income went from $4,000 to $175,000 a year. Then it went over a million.

The most important is to what I like to call surround yourself with, with your dream team. Um, I call it Josh Altman's dream team.

Yeah.

Uh, and it consists of a, of a good amount of support from people that I trust, uh, value their opinion and, and who I surround myself with. I always say that you are the average of 5 people that you surround yourselves with, right? You ever hear that before? Yeah, yeah, I totally did.

Jim Rohn said that too.

You didn't say it.

I just made that up right now. So I think it's super important to do that. So in real estate, for example, I have the best mortgage broker who's available 24/7 for me. And we've worked our way up in the business together. I have, you know, everybody from the best title guy and escrow guy and all that. So I surround myself with this team of people who I can trust they can guide me in the right directions of whatever I do. So that's one way, obviously, in any business is just surround yourself with some, with people who support you.

How do you stay grounded? How do you do it?

Well, I've got a, I got a wife that kicks my ass, first of all, kids that tell it like it is, you know, that to me is love right there when your kids you know, "Dad, you're being a jerk," you know. I love that. That's what helps me a lot. Family certainly does that. I think the guys in the band too. We all keep each other in check. Like, you know, "Dude, is that limo a little too long? Come on." I mean, you know, just goofy things like that, you know. We try and keep each other real. So I think not surrounding ourselves with yes-men too, which can really just totally distort your reality.

Right now you can do anything, you can be anything, and yes, obstacles will come along, but once again, we are living in a whole new world. Some people are making a living of just making videos. One of my favorite YouTubers, Jenna Marbles.

Genius.

Just a short video every single week, but she's creating abundance. What about Michelle Phan, right? Makeup. She started way back in the day, but now she's created something for herself. And once again, there's, there's always gonna be obstacles, right? This ain't Paradise Island out here, right? You're in the jungle. In the jungle, you don't know what to expect.

Expect.

There's all kinds of creatures. So you gotta ask yourself, am I surrounding myself with people that actually are encouraging me to follow my vision and my dream, or am I surrounding myself with what Kanye West calls— these are the dream killers, right?

Thank you guys so much for watching. I'd love to know, what did you think? What was the clip that resonated the most with you? What was the most important lesson that you learned and how are you going to apply it to your life or to your business? I'd love to hear your thoughts if you wanna leave a comment down below. I also wanna give a quick shout out to Christina and Sam, woo, my video editing team. Thank you guys so much for picking up a copy of my book and sharing it on Twitter. I really appreciate the support, guys, and I'm so glad you enjoyed the read. So thank you guys again for watching. I believe in you. I hope you continue to believe in yourself and whatever your one word is. Much love.

I'll see you soon.