On your road to success you may lose a few friends…wait no let me rephrase. You will lose a few people you thought were your friends. There will be people who, under the guise of friendship, will not want the best for you. They will not want you to progress, they want you to stay where you are because they fancy themselves to be better than you when in fact that is not true. They will encourage you to skip work, they will be reluctant to help you when you ask them for it, they will not congratulate you when you are performing well and even if they do it will be the most begrudging, lackluster congratulation in existence. You shouldn’t be afraid to let these people go. You shouldn’t hold on to something so negative because that “friendship” will affect you in that way.

Letting go of the negative will allow you to actually see the positive ones who want the best for you, who encourage and challenge you to do better. Those good friends want you to be better and may sometimes create healthy competition between the two of you where if one of you does something great then the other will also want to achieve the same thing. Those sort of friendships build better people.

I had some friends who were happy with me being mediocre and when I finally woke up and started applying myself they started telling me that I had changed and they didn’t like the person I was becoming. They called me self-righteous and pretentious which was a complete surprise for me. All I wanted for our friendship was so that it developed us into better people, I wanted it to be more than mediocre, I wanted us to push each other to achieve more but I realized that I was the only one with that idea. I left those friendships behind in the best way I could. I instead focused on the friends who pushed me to study harder, to put in that extra time to be better than just good enough, who gave me that high five when I did something well but also made sure I did better the next time.

My point is that you should encourage your friends to escape mediocrity and to be more and ask for the same in return. Keep pushing each other even when the other doesn’t look like they want to be pushed because sometimes all someone needs is a push to get going. Elevate each other to be enterprising in everything you do, to be better than average because mediocrity is a place that can become so comfortable that once a person has been there for long enough, they forget how to be anything else.