Growth Depends on Who's Around You

There's an old saying that you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with. Maybe you have heard, maybe you haven't, but in principle it means that the people around you affect you. In professional growth that deserves a much closer look — because who you work next to every day has an enormous impact on who you become.

The Natural Current of Growth

When you're surrounded by people who are smarter than you — who know more, who have gone deeper, who have seen things you haven't seen yet — something almost effortless happens. You grow. Not because anyone is forcing you. Not because you've enrolled in a course or set a development goal. You grow because the environment itself pulls you upward. It's like being a newbie in a raft with other experienced white water rafters, or living in Spain trying to pick up the language, or working out with others who are stronger than you.

Being around people who know more than you gives you a reason to know more. Their knowledge becomes a constant, quiet invitation. They mention a concept in passing and your mind snags on it. They solve a problem in a way you wouldn't have approached, and you find yourself replaying their approach later, trying to understand why it worked. Every conversation carries a thread you can pull. Every meeting leaves you with something to look up, research, and pressure (good pressure) to learn and become smarter.

It gives you encouragement to be more than what you are now. When the people around you are operating at a higher level, that level stops being abstract. It becomes visible, reachable, real. You can see what deeper knowledge looks like when it's applied. You can watch how a truly expert thinker frames a problem. And something in you rises to meet it.

Growth, in this environment, isn't a project necessarily. It's a byproduct. It happens to you while you're doing the work because the people at your surrounding you create an environment that encourages and needs growth.

The Still Water

Now compare that to an environment where everyone around you is at the same level of knowledge as you — or lower. The results are very different.

These people are be kind, hardworking, good at their jobs. But the water is still. There's no current pulling you anywhere. The questions your brain naturally asks don't have anyone nearby who can answer them better than you can answer them yourself. The problems you face don't have anyone nearby who has already faced harder ones. It's like floating peacefully in a pool float in calm water.

In this environment, growth doesn't happen naturally. It has to be manufactured and self driven, especially when that is your naturaly drive and desire. You have to self-direct your learning, seek out challenges on your own initiative, and find external sources of the stretching that your environment isn't providing. That's possible — people do it — but it's a completely different experience. It's the difference of floating on a raft in calm water versus white water rafting.

For many people, this environment is fine. But for others, it feel like a struggle to achieve and contribute and to do "more".

Two Kinds of People, Two Kinds of Water

Here's where the distinction really matters, because the same environment that stifles one person is exactly what another person needs.

The first kind of person naturally wants to know more. They love learning on a deeper level, not just acquiring facts but understanding systems as a whole and all the details inside. They naturally think strategically — they look at a situation and see the layers underneath it, the implications beyond it. They want to be more than they are now, not because they're dissatisfied, but because growth itself is the point and a natural desire. It's how they're wired.

For this person, being in an environment where others are calling them to a higher level of knowledge isn't stressful — it's energizing. It gives them a better sense of being alive, of thriving, of becoming who they're created to be. Every day holds the possibility of discovering something. Every conversation might open a door. They lean in. They keep pace. They feel, in the truest sense, at home.

But put that same person in an environment where everyone is at their level or below (for one innocent reason or another), and something deflates. It "takes the wind out of their sails." It feels stifling — like being a runner with nowhere to run, an engineer with nothing to engineer. They have all this drive to grow and nowhere to direct it. Movement becomes hard, effortful, discouraging. The very trait that made them thrive in the first environment — their hunger to know more — becomes a source of friction in the second for them and others.

The second kind of person grows as they need to. They take learning as it comes. They come up with ideas and innovation mainly when they see a need for it — not before, not speculatively, but in response to a real problem in front of them. That's a nice rhythm for some. Their growth is need-driven, not hunger-driven.

For this person, being surrounded by people at a higher level of knowledge is often stressful — even straining, especially for long stretches of time. The constant expectation to reach, to stretch, to keep up becomes exhausting rather than energizing. It's like being asked to sprint through an ultra-marathon. They can do it for a while, but not indefinitely, and not without cost.

But put this person with others at their same level or lower and they feel more at ease. They can take their time. They can grow together with their peers (when and if they peers grow), at a pace that feels natural to them. And since there's no real pressure to grow, they feel content. Settled. For them, this isn't stagnation — it's comfort, and comfort is what they're looking for.

Neither person is wrong. Neither environment is wrong. The problem is always the pairing.

Personality Placement

The real, important distinction is personality placement. People need to be in a place that matches their personality.

A growth-hungry learner in a room full of higher-level thinkers will flourish. A need-driven grower in the same room will burn out. A need-driven grower among peers will feel at peace. A growth-hungry learner among those same peers will feel empty, like no real movement is happening. Same rooms. Opposite experiences. The variable isn't the room — it's the person in it.

Now, this is much easier said than done. Most of us don't get to hand-pick our coworkers. We take the job we can get, on the team we're given, in the environment that exists. Personality placement is a goal, not a starting condition. It's a nice "plus", but most companies can't hire just off of this and move employees to different departments based off this either.

But that doesn't make the awareness useless. Far from it. It's genuinely valuable to identify which type of work environment you're in and what your personality actually is — because once you understand yourself, you can understand your experience. The frustration you've been feeling at work? Maybe it's not because you're failing. Maybe it's because you're a current-rider sitting in still water — or a steady swimmer stuck in a rapids. Knowing that doesn't fix it overnight, but it converts a vague, personal sense of wrongness ("something must be wrong with me") into a specific, addressable mismatch ("this place doesn't match how I'm built"). And from there, you can make adjustments, even if just little adjustments.

Getting Creative Where You Are

While it certainly isn't easy for everyone to change jobs — and for many people, it isn't realistic — you can get creative and adjust what you can.

If you're a growth-hungry person in a still-water environment, you can build your own current. You can learn and research topics that interest you outside of work, on your own time, at your own pace. You can find communities online where the higher-level conversations are happening. If the environment is overstimulating rather than understimulating — if you're the need-driven grower in a room of relentless strivers — you can take your lunch break in a quiet place, gather your thoughts, and give yourself the recovery time that your rhythm requires.

The point isn't that the adjustment fully replaces the right placement. It doesn't. But it keeps you moving while you figure out what's next and try to enjoy what you have.

What It Looks Like in Practice

For me personally, it has always been a huge assist to work with others who are smarter than I am — people who know more about technology, who can answer the questions my brain naturally thinks of. That's not a small thing. My brain generates questions constantly, and when there's someone nearby who can actually answer them, every answer becomes a foothold for the next question. The loop feeds itself.

Many times, I've written down tech concepts in the middle of a conversation — just a word or a phrase, scribbled quickly — so I could look them up later on my own time and learn more. Half of my education is a list of things I overheard smarter people say and then went and researched myself.

I've even sat in on webinars about database management — a subject I knew nothing about at the time — purely to learn something. Not because a project required it. Not because my role demanded it. Because sitting in a room where people were talking about something I didn't understand, and leaving knowing slightly more than I did when I walked in, is one of the best feelings I know.

It's exactly like what people always say about learning a language: living in a place where people speak the language helps you learn the language better. Immersion does what study alone never can. That's why I like immersing myself in the world of tech stacks — surrounding myself with people who speak it fluently — so I can better learn the world I'm interested in. The environment does half the teaching.
A friend of mine recently told me how much smarter everyone is at his new job — and how much more he gets to learn because of it. He wasn't intimidated by it. He was lit up by it. He'd spent long enough in still water that he'd forgotten what a current felt like, and now that he's back in one, he's moving faster than he has in years.

The Workout Principle

There's a reason gym trainers tell you to work out with people who can lift more than you and run farther than you. It pushes you to lift more and run farther. Not because they lecture you or coach you — just because you're standing next to them. Their level recalibrates your sense of what's normal. A weight that felt heavy last month feels like a warm-up now, because you've watched someone stack two more plates on the bar every week. A pace that felt fast now feels sustainable, because you've been chasing someone who runs it as a baseline.

Being surrounded by people who know more than you works the same way. Their knowledge recalibrates your sense of what's knowable. Their depth redefines your ceiling. And if you're built the way I'm built, you don't resent the stretch — you want it. That's what I want. That's what makes me feel like I'm actually going somewhere.

Bottom line

Growth is not purely an internal act. We like to think of it that way — discipline, willpower, self-improvement as a solo journey — but the truth is that growth is heavily environmental and the people around you are a huge part of your environment. Put a growth-hungry mind in a room of experts and it will expand, stretch, and thrive. Put that same mind in a room where the need to grow is very little or not at all and it will feel stifled.

And put a steady, need-driven grower in a room of relentless experts who are pushing the edge of what can be done, and they will become overstretched and exhausted, especially overtime.

The answer is placement — the deliberate, honest work of matching who you are to where you are. That means knowing yourself well enough to name what you need: white water rafting in a current or still calm water, immersion or ease, the push of people ahead of you or the peace of people beside you. And it means being honest enough about your environment to admit when the match isn't there.

When you find it — when the room you're in calls you to exactly the level you're hungry to reach, or gives you exactly the pace you need to live — you'll know. It feels truly enjoyable and like you are making progress. Less like struggling and more like becoming.

Find the room that makes you more of who you are. And if you can't find it, build what pieces of it you can, and keep looking. Because the company you keep isn't just an old saying. It's the water you swim in every day — and it will shape you, one way or the other, whether you notice it or not.