Trimming The Fat

A couple days ago a friend of mine and I were talking about trimming the fat. Not the fat people eat (got rid of all of that a long time ago), but rather the fat as in the excess people we sometimes keep around that don’t further our lives in any way. We all have people like this in our circle, especially those of us that work in any form of entertainment. You don’t have to be in entertainment, however, to be in need of some trimming. Everyone’s got at least one bad karma person in their life, the trick is figuring out which person, or persons, that is.

Step one for me was seeing who was really driven to make it in this world. I’m a person who works his ass off and if I see someone around me whose work ethic doesn’t match mine it’s trimming time. It still amazes me how many people I know from school who earned their degrees and haven’t even attempted to create a career out of them. I can respect paying the rent, that’s a noble thing and you gotta do what you gotta do to get that done, but at one point in my life I was working a good paying gig that I hated to pay the bills while freelancing at a newspaper and a website. Why work three jobs? Because I knew I didn’t want to get stuck in the mud of being in a job I didn’t like and not having any other skills on my resume. So yeah, I understand if you need to pay the rent, but working one full time job still leaves a person plenty of time to follow their life’s goals. I’ve proven this myself in the past and have friends right now who are working multiple jobs, one is even working multiple jobs while going to school. It’s all about making sure you’re in drive rather than neutral. Notice how neutral and neutered look a lot alike? That’s not a coincidence. If you’re keeping yourself in neutral you’re essentially self-neutering your own life.

Step two involves weeding out the negative vibes. No matter how long you’ve been cool with someone they can end up a negative vibe person. The negative vibe person is usually one of those aforementioned folks who never bothered attempting to go for their goals and is constantly miserable because of this. The guy who made it to A ball is always better to be around than the guy who never even tried out for the team. A negative vibe person can usually be heard complaining that life isn’t turning out the way they had hoped, all the while doing nothing to change that. Having negative vibe people around you can affect your own aura and your own personality. Remember, friends are great, but if you’re always the one making your friend feel better, or giving your friend confidence, is he / she really your friend, or are they just someone who’s sapping your energy? That energy they’re sapping from you could be used on something more productive than attempting to build up a full grown person. As my boy Conscious said “it’s not my job to try to give confidence to a full grown man.”

Step three involves lifestyle. For me the lifestyle vibe is a pretty big one and it involves working out, self-improvement, and massive amounts of fun. If someone isn’t down with these things I have to cut them out. I know this seems kind of harsh, but if a person’s lifestyle is anti your own it will lead to negative vibes. A health nut hanging out with someone who doesn’t treat their body well will only lead to the health nut not wanting to see the slob and the slob resenting the health nut’s physical achievements. A reader hanging around a non-reader will get bored very quickly as conversation will run dry quite often, eventually leading the reader to feel the non-reader is boring and the non-reader to feel the reader is a snob. Again, it all goes back to the vibe factor. If you keep all the vibes around you positive ones you’re far more likely to succeed because success is a positive thing that requires positive moves and positive vibes. No one ever made it by being negative.

Step four is looking at yourself and seeing the ways in which you can better yourself as a person. Just as much as you’re trying to trim away some of the bad vibes other people may create around you it’s equally important to make sure none of those bad vibes are coming from you. If you have a list of qualities that are important to you make sure you have those qualities yourself! Nothing’s worse than the person who stars in the anti-drug ad only to go home and sniff a few lines. If you want the good vibe people around you your own vibe has to be one that matches the one you’re looking to attract.

Have I had to trim some people out of my life? Yes. Was it fun? No. But sometimes the things we have to do aren’t fun. I can tell you this, though, after trimming out the people that were essentially using me as a confidence crutch I have a heck of a lot more time for the positive driven folks I want to be around, network with, and potentially work with and that has led to ultimately better vibes and ultimately a better me.