Walking Each Other Home
Photo by Supradoc
Discipline matters, but so does your environment
Some of the hardest problems in life are not technical problems. They are relationship problems.
We like to think success comes from discipline, skill, and effort. And those things matter. But over time I have come to believe that the people around us shape far more of our future than we realize. They influence what we believe is possible, what risks we are willing to take, and whether we keep going when things get difficult.
That is not an excuse to outsource responsibility. Whether you are building a company, a team, or even a side project, your circle is part of the system you are building whether you plan for it or not.
The Invisible Influence of the People Around You
Every group has a default setting: what success looks like, how much risk is acceptable, whether ambition is admired or treated with suspicion. Spend enough time around people who are learning, building, and iterating in public, and those behaviors start to feel second nature. Spend enough time around people who dismiss your goals, see you as competition or treat change as naïve, and that influence accumulates too.
Most of this happens without drama. Not in one big argument, but in hundreds of small interactions: a shrug when you solve something or mention a new idea, a joke about "yet another startup," praise for playing it safe, silence when you share something you care about.
Research on social networks backs this up. Work by Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler on the Framingham Heart Study social network showed that behaviors and outcomes, including happiness and health-related patterns, spread through connected groups in ways individuals often do not notice. You are not a blank slate walking into a room. You are a node in a network that nudges you, constantly, in directions you may never consciously choose.
The practical lesson is simple: culture is not what is written on the wall. Culture is what people around you reward, ignore, or ridicule every day.
Your Circle Becomes Your Culture
If you are a founder, tech lead, or product manager, you are not only choosing friends. You are choosing early signals for how your team will behave.
Google's research on team effectiveness in Project Aristotle found that psychological safety, dependable teammates, and clarity of work mattered more than individual pedigree. Teams perform better when people can say "I do not know," "this requirement is unclear," or "I think we are building the wrong thing" without social penalty.
That safety does not appear because you bought the right tooling. It appears because the people closest to you normalize honesty, curiosity, and follow-through. The same dynamic applies before you have a team at all. The friends, mentors, and peer groups you bring into your orbit set the tone for what you will later tolerate down the road.
In regulation-heavy domains like software as a medical device (SaMD), the pattern shows up quickly: one person treats traceability as bureaucratic busywork, and the whole team starts treating evidence as a checkbox. One person treats docs as part of shipping quality, and the team starts linking requirements, risks, and tests without heroic spreadsheet merges. People set defaults. Defaults become culture. And as the famous saying by Peter Drucker goes: “Culture eats strategy for breakfast”.
The Need to Feel Understood
One of the loneliest parts of meaningful work is pursuing something others do not quite see yet. Not because they are against you. Often they simply do not share your context: the nuance, the tradeoffs, the emotional weight of the goal that keeps slipping.
When you cannot talk openly about what matters, ideas stay trapped in your head. Challenges become private. Doubt gets heavier than the work itself. Eventually, you stop sharing altogether. Not because nobody cares, but because explaining the journey becomes more exhausting than carrying it alone.
Anthropologist Robin Dunbar's work on social brain limits is often summarized as "Dunbar's number," the idea that humans maintain stable relationships in layered circles of increasing size and decreasing intimacy. You do not need fifty close allies. You need a small inner circle that understands the journey and a wider ring that exposes you to useful perspectives.
That often means finding:
Peers who understand the pressure and the sacrifice, not just outcomes
Mentors who have pushed through ambiguity and hardship before
Communities where asking "dumb" questions is normal and knowledge is shared, not hoarded
Feeling understood is not a luxury. It is a basic requirement. It keeps you in the game through the eventual problems long enough for discipline to matter.
Support Beats Better Advice
It is easy to think you need a better framework, a better template, a better tool. Sometimes you do. More often, what you need first is someone who believes the problem is worth solving.
The right people do not always fix your issue. They do three things that are easy to underrate:
They protect your belief that the goal is worth it
They help you recover momentum after setbacks
They give you perspective and alternative points of view without hijacking the decision
That maps cleanly to how good teams work. The best colleagues do not always have the answer. They help you stay in the problem long enough to find one. They celebrate progress instead of treating ambition as a personality flaw. They make wins feel shared instead of lonely. And when the game seems stacked against you, they will be there to help you push through together.
Choosing Your Circle
Being intentional about how people influence you is not the same as cutting people off because they disagree. Diverse perspectives give you more options and help you understand the whole better. The goal is to control what shapes your default behavior, not to build an echo chamber.
Sociologist Mark Granovetter's classic work on the strength of weak ties explains why outer networks matter for new information and opportunities and why inner circles matter for resilience and identity. You definitely need both, but you should not confuse them. Your inner circle should not feel like a jury that votes on whether your goals are allowed.
Practical signs your inner circle is helping:
You leave conversations with more clarity, not more worries
Hard feedback is specific and caring, not vague and cynical
Progress, even small progress, gets noticed
You can admit uncertainty without losing respect
Practical signs your environment is draining you:
You hide work in progress because "it is not ready for comments yet," forever
You rehearse defensiveness before sharing updates
You shrink goals to avoid awkward questions
You feel relief when certain people are not in the meeting
Be honest about those signals. Then adjust accordingly.
A Simple Routine for Curating Support (Without Overthinking It)
You do not need a manifesto. You need a repeatable check-in, similar to how good teams run retrospectives. For example:
Monthly:
Who gave you energy this month?
Who drained you without adding useful friction?
Did you share real work-in-progress with anyone who could help?
Quarterly:
Are you one step closer to people who understand what you are building?
Do you need a mentor, a peer group, or one honest friend more than a new productivity app?
What meeting, chat, or community should you leave, join, or renegotiate?
When you are hiring or partnering:
Ask about how they handle disagreement, don’t just evaluate their skills
Look for people who can find clarity under stress
Prefer teammates who treat devotion to quality and shared knowledge as part of the process not as a necessary evil or a punishment
These are small actions, but they compound over time the same way negative social cues do.
Success Is Also a Relationship Problem
It is tempting to treat success as a straight line from effort to outcome. In practice, it is a lot messier. It includes planning, learning, recovering, and continuing, often for years.
Part of that journey is relationships. People who encourage your growth. People who share your values enough to keep you honest. People who challenge you to improve while still treating you as a person, not a project or a burden.
Whether you are building a dream, a house, a product, or an ambitious side project, the practical work is hard. The social environment around that work can sometimes be harder and can make the effort either sustainable or suffocating.
Conclusion
Discipline and skills matter, but so do the people around you: design your environment, your team culture, and your inner circle with the same intention you bring to your product architecture and processes. Because it matters just as much or even more.
Surround yourself with people who believe what you are trying to build is worth the attempt. Not because they guarantee success, but because the right community makes the pursuit clearer, less lonely, and far more likely to continue when motivation fades.
That is how you simplify the hardest part of the work, the part no tool can fully replace, and amplify the impact of everything else you are trying to accomplish.
Looking back, some of the hardest projects I worked on were not difficult because of the technology, regulations, or market conditions. They were difficult because I was trying to or required to carry them alone. We all need people who help us keep going when the road gets difficult. People who can offer practical assistance, remind us what matters, challenge us to grow, and at the end of the day, help walk each other home.
References
The Spread of Obesity in a Large Social Network over 32 Years - Christakis & Fowler, New England Journal of Medicine (2007)
Understanding team effectiveness - Google re:Work (Project Aristotle)
Social brain hypothesis and Dunbar's number - Dunbar, Science (2005)
The Strength of Weak Ties — Granovetter, American Journal of Sociology (1973)
