Oh my word Jake is blogging now.
The People Around You Are the Invisible Architects of Your Life
What a chef’s sharp advice from his dad taught me about the most important decision you’ll ever make.
Jake Humphrey
Apr 13, 2026
I’ve been making notes for over 20 years. Every week, something lands: a quote, a conversation, a moment. It goes straight into the notebook. This is where I open it up.
The first thing I wrote down this week was a name: Marcus Wareing.
Marcus came on High Performance a few years ago, and there was a line he shared, a piece of advice his dad gave him when he was young, that has stuck with me ever since. It was blunt, it was a little crude, and it was completely, utterly true.
“Marcus, if you hang around with shit for long enough, eventually you’ll start to smell like shit.”
That was it. That was the whole lesson. The people you choose to have around you are absolutely vital for your success in life.
Why this landed differently this week
I had a really good week. I recorded two interviews for The Room Where It Happened at our studio on Regent Street in central London, the kind of conversations that leave you energised and thinking hard on the drive home. Sitting with that feeling afterwards, I kept coming back to Marcus’s dad’s quote. I think the reason the week felt so good was precisely the people in the room.
We started recording High Performance back in 2019, me in Norwich, Damian in Manchester, both of us on Zoom, figuring it out as we went. Since then we’ve grown steadily, moved into proper studios, and now we record in a beautiful building on Regent Street called Fora (Latin for a meeting place, which I love). What that journey has taught me, more than anything about production quality or audience numbers, is that who you’re in the room with changes everything.
Epictetus knew it. Now science does too.
“We become what we give our attention to.”
Epictetus said that. And attention is contagious. There is real, proven evidence that the people around you shape your behaviour in ways you barely notice. If you hang around with people who drink a lot, so will you. Spend time with people who are overweight, and statistically you are more likely to become overweight. Smokers attract smokers. Spend time with the disciplined, the curious, and the kind, and their habits quietly rewrite your own.
Spend enough time with the bitter and you will start tasting the same poison.
That’s just how human beings work.
In 2009, Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler published Connected, a study of 12,067 people tracked over 32 years. They found that behaviours spread through social networks up to three degrees of separation. If a close friend becomes obese, your own risk rises by 57%. If a direct connection is happy, you are 15% more likely to be happy yourself. The influence doesn’t stop with the people you know directly. It travels outward, quietly, through people you’ve never met.
So what do you actually do about it?
I’m not going to tell you to go and cut people out of your life. That’s easy advice to give and a lot harder to live with. But I do want you to do something.
Think about the five people you spend the most time with. Not who you’d like to spend time with. The actual five, the people in your messages, on your commute, around your dinner table. Now ask yourself honestly:
- Do they make you feel more capable, or less?
- Do they challenge you, or keep you comfortable?
- Are they building something, or pulling things down?
- When you leave them, do you feel good about yourself?
I think you already know what you need to do.
Your circle is one of the few things in life you actually get to choose. Choose carefully.
This week’s notebook
- The people around you are the invisible architects of your life.
- Attention is contagious. You become what you give your attention to, and so do the people you spend your time with.
- Spend time with the disciplined, the curious, and the kind. Their habits quietly rewrite yours.
- Audit the five people you actually spend the most time with.
- Steady, organic growth beats chasing shortcuts. In business and in life, build the right room first.
That’s the notebook for this week. Send it to someone who needs to hear it.
Jake x
@Kenny As you are one of those five people then I'm afraid your audit is coming up this week, I have no choice, sorry. I expect your report on my desk by 9am on Wednesday for review.
