The Three Times I Cut My Circle

When I was fourteen, fifteen years old, almost everybody in my class drank alcohol. We would get drunk. Alcohol is the polite part of what I could tell you about those years, so imagine the rest.

It's not because I was a bad kid. It is what happens when a country puts all of its effort into destroying a society, and mine did, deliberately, as policy, for years.

I have moved up three times in my life. Every single time it cost me a friend group, and every single time the bill came before the promotion. That is the whole of this book, and it is not a book about loyalty.

I grew up inside a communist education, under a party that hated religious people. Some of you have parents from Eastern Europe who will recognize what I am describing. The logic is simple and it is not even hidden. They don't want you to worship God, they want you to worship the communist party.

So if they cannot make you worship the party, the next best outcome is that you worship nothing at all. And the way you produce that in a teenager is not an argument. It is supply.

They spread degeneracy. Alcohol, drugs, whatever moves fastest through a school. Does it make sense? Alcohol is the one I can describe to you politely, so take it as the floor rather than the ceiling of what went through that classroom. By fourteen I was in a classroom where drinking was simply what everyone did, and nobody in that room understood themselves to be the target of anything. That is the part that took me years to see. A fourteen-year-old cannot tell the difference between a culture and a campaign, because both arrive as what everybody is doing.

Almost every fourteen-year-old in that classroom was drunk most weekends. Whose failure was that?

Nobody's, in that room. Not the kids, not their parents, not a generation that had gone soft. It was procurement. Somebody decided a population was easier to hold if it was numb, costed it out, and supplied the means, and it worked exactly as designed. I spent years thinking I had been a bad kid. I was a statistic inside somebody's plan, which is a worse feeling and a more useful one, because a plan has an author and a character flaw does not.

At sixteen I started realizing that was not the life. I started reading religious books. I stopped drinking, and I started practicing my religion.

Then the people I had grown up with went to work on me. They made fun of me, constantly. They applied the pressure a group applies to anyone who stops doing what the group does, which is not argument either. It is ridicule, and it is relentless, and at sixteen it is close to unbearable. They always put pressure to bring me back to their circle. Not once did anybody argue with me about religion or about drinking. That was never the instrument. The instrument was making me the joke in every room I walked into, until coming back was simply the cheaper option. That is the part worth hearing twice, because nobody was trying to hurt me. They were trying to retrieve me.

So the choice I had to make at that age was this. On one side were the friends I had known my whole childhood, drinking, smoking, in the clubs all day long, becoming useless. On the other side was me, wanting a different life and having no evidence yet that a different life existed. And what I realized is that maybe this is the cost. Maybe they are not my friends, and maybe I need to give up.

Sixteen years old, every friend I had pulling me back, and no proof at all that the other road went anywhere. What did I have to go on?

Nothing. No evidence, no example, and nobody in that town doing what I was about to do. What I had was a suspicion, and a willingness to act on it before it was confirmed, which is all anybody ever has at the start. So I made the call. I gave up entire my childhood friends. Not drifted, not saw them less. I isolated myself from them totally, and I was sixteen.

Today I look back at that and it is one of the best decisions I have ever made. It was also the loneliest year of my life, and I want both of those in the same sentence, because the people selling you this usually leave the second one out.

You have heard that you are the average of the five people closest to you. It is repeated so often that it has gone soft, so let me sharpen it into the form that actually predicts things.

It is not one average. It is at least three, running at the same time, and they do not move together. There is a spiritual average. There is a professional average. And there is a financial average. I want you to remember that every single time, wherever you are on the social ladder, you are going to have very similar people with you.

That third one is the one nobody says out loud. Every single time, wherever you sit on the social ladder, you will be surrounded by very similar people. When I was earning $126,000, almost my entire circle was somewhere between $100,000 and $150,000. I did not have one single friend earning a million dollars a year. Not one, and I had not decided that. A little below me, a little above me, and that was the entire spread of everybody I spoke to in a normal week.

That pattern held at every income I ever had. Is that a story about the friends I chose?

No, and that is why it matters. When I was making $30,000, I didn't have any friends who was making $120,000. I was not excluding anybody and nobody was excluding me. It's very interesting. It is not bad and nobody in it is doing anything wrong. It's just what's happening in the society, and it is kind of realistic once you stop arguing with it. Your income is not only yours, it is the room's, and the room regenerates its own average whatever any individual inside it intends.

The second time was 2008, a few days after I arrived in the United States. My community was having a big party and they said, you are new, come join us.

I went for exactly the reason you would go. I had nobody here. Everybody says network, connection, you have to have network, so I thought, fine, I need to develop a network, and I showed up to build one. This was the land of opportunity and I had been in it for four days.

There was whisky and there was alcohol. People were laughing very hard at jokes that were not funny, and I remember sitting there judging it and feeling bad about judging it. Then they started introducing themselves. One man said he had been in the United States eighteen years. I asked what he did. He delivered pizza. The next had been here twelve years. Pizza. The next, eight years. Pizza.

Three men, eighteen years, twelve years and eight years in the country, all delivering pizza. What did I decide in that moment?

Not that they were lazy, and not that the work was beneath anybody, because it is not. What landed was the math of time, and I will say it the way I said it then. In twelve years you can start a company. In twelve years you can build something in a country that hands you the chance, and if twelve years have gone by and nothing has compounded, then the room is doing something to the people in it. So I made a decisive action not to involve myself with those people, and I have been in a different place ever since. I want to be careful here, because this is the decision in the book that sounds worst out loud. I did not decide they were lesser. I decided that a room can hold a person still for twelve years while everybody in it is working hard, and that I could not afford to find out whether it would do the same to me.