You're the result of who you follow online

A twist to the common phrase

In the past, all of our lives revolved around our physical relationships with other people, specifically the ones we most spent our time and hanged around with, influencing to a higher or lesser degree our general behavior and viewpoint towards the world. By being in a group of people, we slowly acquired their own perspective, activities and even goals, even coming to the point of doing things just to fit in that particular "tribe". That's why, depending on who were the friends of someone, you could assume if they would get far or not, because of the ideals and definitions of success that represented the values of the group. By trying to explain these in a short and sweet sentence, the phrase "you're the average of the 5 people spend the most time with" made mostly popular by Jim Rohn was invented. However, in a different age, where more and more people seem to be influenced in a higher regard from social media, we can give a spin to that old phrase and confidently say that nowadays, you're the average of the 5 people you spend the most time watching. Let's delve into It a little bit further.

What does this mean?

What I try to convey with this, is that as your day will surely be spent in a higher degree with communications and interactions via social media platforms than what you will do in face to face communications, you will be prone to watch a particular type of content, fitted to your tastes, beliefs and personal preferences, content that is probably provided by a lot of creators that want to make you a part of their audience. It would be tiresome to watch them all at any moment they upload, so you usually reduce the amount of people you follow in that particular field to a handful amount, usually to the ones whose posts/videos/podcasts most resonate with you. As any good or bad group of friends, this can be advantageous and at the same time make you more miserable in life. So let's pick up on the advantages and disadvantages of what this rephrain points out.

Advantages

One of the many advantages of picking up a select group of people to follow, is that If their content is really good, productive and even didactic, It can get you incredible skills and at the same time make you more prone to learn them as you get a better understanding of the concepts the particular content creator explains due to being used to their cadence, way of portraying things and particular method of teaching after watching them for a certain time.

Another one of these useful characteristics is the fact that If you have the goal to be in the same place where they are, by listening to their advice in that respective discipline you can avoid all the traps and twist-and-turns of having to learn all the things they teach by yourself, saving you much more time and energy, so no better way to get to be a master than to have one first.

Disadvantages

However, the main inconvenient of following people and watching all their stuff is the fact that you can lose the personality traits that make you unique, replacing them with a cardboard version of those that make the particular influence you follow so compelling. In this way, you're left not only with a sense of being uncomfortable, as many of those characteristics you portrait are unnatural to you, and to compare everything you do with what they have achieved, only making you more and more mad the fact that you can't get to where they are, even If your situations are different.

I hope that with the information provided in this article you can get a better grasp of how you're defined in the digital age, and how following the right people can really make the difference between a successful and unsuccessful people, so better be mindful of It. Thank you for your support and good luck!