Metcalfe’s famous law of networking states that the value of a network is directly proportionate to the amount of users connected to it. The more nodes in the network, the more valuable, useful and powerful it is. The rule applies to computer networks, telecoms networks and human social networks. There is a strange phenomenon at work all around us every day that, although being a slow-burning mystery, is incredibly powerful and inspiring. If you look closely you can see it at work everywhere you go. It follows me and every other person I know who acts to do more with their life than just struggle 9-5 for 70 years.

The company you keep determines your composition and how you feel. You’re naïve to think that your surroundings don’t influence your state of mind and quality of life. It’s not exactly brain surgery or complex physics – if you hang around with “friends” who are absurdly negative, apathetic, miserable or just plain unlucky, you’ll end up catching their disease slowly and start to feel the same way. If you generally hang around people older than you, your maturity develops at a faster rate and you learn to appreciate what they appreciate.

In turn, if most of the company you keep is full of positive, energetic, interesting and inspiring friends, you end up feeding off them and adsorbing their qualities, becoming a much brighter human being. If most of your social network is composed of people younger than you, then your own spiritual and personal development is retarded and grows inward. You can go or get bigger, but you can’t go back or get smaller although you can reach down to be with them. So we can surmise that the worst possible “friends” to have are miserable kids, and the best are older, more positive people who inspire you. Personal coaches teach you to visualise speaking to someone who inspires you and you admire (almost always someone who is dead as it happens) in your mind’s eye when you need to know what to do or how to be.

So here’s the exercise. You look around you and see who these people are in your life and what they are like, because you’re going where they are. Your life moves in the direction of your most dominant thoughts, so translated that means what you think about the most controls you and your future. The things you own end up owning you. What consumes your thoughts controls your life. The people around you are your doctors and nurses, and if they’re sick, you’re going to get ill whether you like it or not. Your pearls may be being thrown to swine, or as they say in LA, check ya people, biatch. The choices we make to who we allow to care for us affect us all the way through our lives.

I’ve banished scores of these mood hoovers and mental vampires from my life unceremoniously thanks to my innate lack of any discernable tact. I used to look for the best in everyone, but there came a time when I finally lost my patience and was a bit more ruthless. You can’t change anyone, they have to want to change themselves. Most are so content to swallow in their own self-pity and drown in the circumstances they refuse to get themselves out of that they deserve to rot there. Its you or them, and they’ll drag you down to keep them company if they can. They certainly won’t be heading in your direction.

But I digress.

Something strange happens to people when they spend time with others who have found something they are looking for, have achieved what they wanted and have a higher purpose. Most magnetically gravitate to them. We call them leaders, figureheads, strong-minded inspiring individuals or just those with a palpable lust for life and all it has to offer. Some just seem to have all the luck whilst the rest suffer. It’s not luck. I’ve said this several times. Its years of struggle, blood, sweat, tears, pain putting what you’ve learned into action and some very smart thinking. If someone tells you it’s luck, write them off immediately and move on.

The vast majority of the population spend their lives doing one thing to pay the bills, like working in a factory or office block, but long to do, or have done something else. If you ask someone what they love, what they dream or what they are passionate about, 99% of the time it will be nothing to do with what they do day to day. Its not that they don’t want to do it, it’s that they don’t know how and don’t think they can. Of course, we all know that’s crap as you find out, and if others can, you can too. The only thing that holds you back is the way you think. Which is why changing your thinking is the most powerful and deadly force you can imagine.

So you see these people’s lives, and you’re pleased for them. It gets you thinking, very slowly at first as you don’t notice. You invisibly contrast your lives with them and begin to think about what you’d like to do and how good it must feel to be them. You enjoy their direction and purpose and wonder what yours is. You start to get frustrated and work becomes more and more empty. As you spend time with them, their composition wears off on you, you start to talk and think like them. The world begins to look different and become more polarised. You start to believe you can do it too, but you don’t know how at all. What you want starts to look closer and your appetite ramps up. Work is getting more and more boring and you’re noticing your lack of purpose or direction. The future appears more and more hopeless and uninspiring.

I’m lucky enough to be one of those people who inspire others. I say that because I’m told it every day and everywhere I go. It’s not a label I put on myself or even recognise as my life is such a slapstick comedy of errors and happenstance that it isn’t even worthy of 10% of the praise. But I’m told that’s who I’ve become. All I know is that I just do whatever the fuck I want, and I’m strong willed. I won’t take no for an answer, I won’t be told something’s impossible, that it’s too late, that it can’t done or that it’s not worth it. I have my own mind and I believe in the miraculous and impossible. Learn now as you read this that you will never, ever be able to convince me otherwise. Don’t even bother. I believe in the inconceivably massive capacity of the human spirit to conquer any obstacle that faces it. It’s what built empires and separates us from chimps.

We do this because we can. We do it because it makes you go wow, makes you smile and puts us in the history books. I do it to show everyone that anything is possible in this life if you will it so, so you will know you can do it too. So you will read this and understand why when I’m dead. All you need, as Kaiser Soze so rightly says, is the will to do what the other guy won’t. You need belief in yourself, the world around you and the people on the journey with you. You don’t get to tell me what to do, what to believe, where I am and am not allowed to go, whether I am right or not or whether I am justified or realistic. I know my own mind and I know where I am going, and through me, you will know where you are going to. What I am doing is no threat to you, it’s for you. It’s so you will know you can do the same and have permission to do it.

Our legacy will be a generation of people who live in a new world order and have to survive in an economy that is not certain; the dynamic they inherit is one where they must fight for their place and make their lives, money and history rather than taking it for granted that it will be available. Where we live and the way we live is changing. It’s no longer enough to have a job, you have to find other ways of making your income. The centralised government of our own independent country is slowly giving way to federal power in Brussels. Change is life’s mechanism, and those who survive it will be those who are the ones who adapt the fastest and most effectively.

We have to learn the lessons of the collapse of industrialisation – the north was decimated under Thatcher’s rule and its children suffer now in a vacuum that impoverished their parents and controls them today. A reasonable quality of life is becoming more and more unobtainable, our population is growing and reducing the available living space and companies are becoming more ruthless in their pricing. A cycle like that is unsustainable, and a crash is inevitable. We are living on borrowed time with a financial system that is driven entirely by consumer debt. What goes up must come down, and we march blindly into the abyss on the same philosophy that makes the credit card usury business so lucrative – borrow now, pay back later.

Your identity is becoming a commodity, your privacy is a laughing matter that you’ve been convinced you don’t need and the divide between rich and poor has become do wide that we are coming close to needing a new social classing structure. Our industries and careers are computer-based and need mental dexterity and knowledge 24 hours a day rather than strength in our limbs. To succeed in the coming storm, we need to re-equip our minds so they are programmed as a powerful tool to seek out information and use it in a way that makes us stronger, more vital and able us to give our own children a future.

During the war, the reason we survived was everyone was united in a common cause and resolute in its purpose. We know no such sureties now, and there are masses of individual people drifting along with no ideas, no direction, no purpose, and most importantly, no idea how to get it. We exist to show you, so take our example. Cast off your programming and take the step because there will be an outstretched hand to help you up and dust you down. If you don’t try, you will never know. If you don’t risk failure, you’ll never get the standing ovation. The hardest battles give the greatest spoils. No-one who ever gave everything they had to something ever regretted it.

Smell the smoke in the breeze, as we are at war until you’re free.