Positive Spillover - The Unsurprising Yet Often Ignored Way to Get Better Results in Business

I just read a study I can’t stop thinking about, and it relates to this old adage, “You are the company you keep.”

That idea traces back to the Greek tragedian Euripides who died circa 406 B.C.: ”Every man is like the company he is wont to keep.” It makes an appearance in Cervantes’s novel Don Quixote in 1605: ”Tell me your company, and I will tell you what you are.”

Motivational speaker Jim Rohn spread it among modern audiences: “You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.” Or maybe he said, “Show me your friends, and I’ll show you your future.” (An original source eluded me. Interneting is hard.)

99.9% of the world’s parents warn their kids about bad influences, so let’s approach this idea with two minutes of seriousness. How profoundly do our closest relationships shape us? And what role does a person’s broader environment play?

Look up neural synchronization, Social Comparison Theory, and mimetic theory (a la René Girard). Wade through all the multisyllabic rigamarole and erudite backflips.

You’ll confirm what your own experience has shown you: The children of smokers are more likely to smoke. If your friends are sedentary gamers, you’ll gravitate toward couch potato. If they’re athletes, you’ll join teams.

We adopt behaviors, both beneficial and destructive, from family and close friends. Duh.

Now, academic types get derailed here trying to suss out whether this phenomenon is causation or merely correlation. Does the gamer kid become a gamer and spend time with gamers and reinforce a sedentary lifestyle because he wasn’t a natural athlete—causation? Or could he have gone either direction and happened to spend more time with gamers first and got everything that came with that—correlation?

I understand the pushback on this sum-of-five-people thinking. Some people overcome steep adversity without much help from their environment. No matter how well positioned other people are, they still have to put in the effort.

That’s true, and yet that debate is less interesting to me than questions like these: How can we make being inspired easier on ourselves?

How can we deliberately create an environment where an invisible hands pushes us onward and upward?

People who achieve remarkable results inspire other people near them to do the same. This is true in everything from video games to athletics to what grown-ups call “work.”

High performers create “positive spillover.” Yum. I’ll have three, please.

Researchers Michael Housman and Dylan Minor analyzed more than 58,000 hourly service workers at 11 well-known tech companies and published a Kellogg School of Management study. Their research found that sitting within 25 feet of a high performer improves employee performance by 15 percent.

The result of that “positive spillover” was $1 million in additional profit each year.

I’ve written before about the importance of finding positive and negative mentors, and those of us who aren’t 9-to-5 employees sitting in close proximity to high-performing co-workers need to get more creative to harness positive spillover.

One concrete example of that is a private, paid community like Freelance Cake Community. When I first founded it, I knew I wanted to create a dedicated space for seasoned pros operating at a more advanced level.

Freelancers have many free communities to join, and some of them cater to folks earlier in their journeys. But where’s the place for advanced freelancers who, like all of us, need a place to unpack about problems peculiar to our level of sophistication and share our victories, too?

I ask members who don’t want to brag to share their wins with other members. Why? Positive spillover.

For example, a member sent me this DM in January 2025:

Here was my response:

“If/when you're willing and have bandwidth, I'd love to read a post here in the community about that $50K project: how did you find out about it, how did you pitch it, what was your mindset like, what did the sales process look like. There's some good research that backs up the idea of ‘positive spillover.’ We're more likely to achieve more if we're surrounded by high achievers.”

When a friend and peer who you know, like, and trust has a personal best does that annoy you? No. It’s inspiring. It reminds them of what is possible.

Who is helping you think bigger right now?

In an interview venture capitalist Ann Miura-Ko talked decades later about the impact of seeing a female executive at HP:

“And I came back from that with my mind completely blown. I met Ann Livermore who was an executive and I’ve never seen a female executive in my entire life. And here’s someone who I can look at and see and I can see that people around her respect her. It was just a life-changing moment.”

My youngest watched his older brother go across the monkey bars and told me, “I don’t think I can make it all the way.” I replied, “Try, because you just never know. And I’ll be right here.”

You should have seen his face when he planted his feet on the bar on the other side. Incandescent.

Real-life examples matter, and so does fostering a positive mindset. The research in Shawn Achor’s book, The Happiness Advantage, shows that our brains in a positive state are 31% more productive that ours brain in a negative, neutral or stressed state.

Yet, freelancers excel at negativity. Many of us are paid to catch other people’s mistakes and avoid making new ones, so it’s no surprise that we fixate on what’s wrong.

Add to that negativity bias, which is a fundamental part of being human, and maintaining a positive outlook can seem like baking a cake from broken glass.

Though I don’t think it’s healthy to be positive all the time—looking at you, Toxic Positivity—I see only benefits when you surround yourself with positive, growth-minded people focused on achieving their next personal best whether that’s a ~$50K project or eating a salad three days in a row.

Who’s in your Positive Spillover Crew? Who’s helping you reconsider your limits?

Freelancing can be lonely and isolating, so bring high performers into your environment on purpose:

• Organize a mastermind.
• Do a co-mentoring session once per month.
• Join a private community for advanced freelancers.

As tough as freelancing can be, we need concrete examples and kind reminders of what’s possible.

We still need to say to ourselves, “Why not me?”

P.S. The Freelance Cake Community is for advanced freelancers who want to keep growing without burning out. It’s $79 per month, and it can change your life. Click here to get the full details and apply.