Yaro Starak offers a great piece of advice on achieving your dreams.

Yaro Starak is more than just a really awesome-sounding name. He’s a blogger and personal development master. He’s smart, informative, successful, and a very friendly guy in my dealings with him. In fact, if I could ever pull down an interview with him, it’d be solid gold.

In the meantime, I just read his blog, Entrepreneur’s Journey. And while you think you would have nothing to learn from it, since you are a 9-to-5er, you’d be surprised. A few days ago, he wrote a fantastic post entitled, You Are As Good As The People Around You. In it he discusses how surrounding yourself with people that share the same values and ambitions as you goes a long way towards helping you achieve your dreams:

This is why it’s critical that you surround yourself with people you regard and aspire to be like. If your peer group are negative, they don’t support you and don’t aspire to great things themselves, then they will hold you back. You may not notice it directly, but the impact they have on your mindset is dramatic. That’s why it’s so important to disassociate yourself from people who are not supporting your dreams.

This isn’t an easy concept, and he goes further to explain the different types of people you associate with, such as role models, colleagues, and peers. But it is extremely important that the people that surround you are encouraging you to keep going. Otherwise, when you hit a roadblock, you have nobody that can help you push through it.

Any thoughts out there?