"Show me your friends and I'll show you your future" -Dan Peña

This is one of Dan Peñas most famous quotes of all time. The quote goes on to say that you are the average of the five people you spend most of your time with. And it makes sense, as humans, we are bound by the law of conformity which states that humans hate being the odd one out so, if you hang out with 9 highly motivated, positive, and outgoing individuals, you're going to become the tenth inevitably. But the problem here is, unless you come from an elite background, go to a highfy private school, or somehow know Bill Gates, your friend group probably doesn't have 9 of the next Elon Musks in it. Especially if you don't come from a first-world country, that would make it even harder to find such a group. Frankly speaking, we can not control who we meet, and if you try to go out there and genuinely change your friends to become that person, more often than not you'll be faced with criticism, lack of motivation, no effort from their side, and so on. but what many people overlook here is the law of role-playing which describes how we may tend to play out as having different personalities with different people and sometimes these roles can become so real that you may permanently start to shift into that personality. More interestingly, these roles can be manipulated by a third party. Here's an example, let's say you meet 2 identical persons who have the same skillsets. You go to the first person and say "Oh you're so beautiful, I love your sense of style" and then you tell the second person, "Hey, you know, you're really smart" and you keep complimenting the first person for his beauty and the second person for his brain and over time, the first person would start radiating more confidence when he's around you while you might find the 2nd person being more knowledgeable about things. Which means that you can manipulate who your friends become. So the theory is, what if you find a group of 5 friends and assign each of them a different positive characteristic, theoretically, over time, all of you should be able to advance in each of those characteristics while fully mastering the one you've assigned to yourself.

However, while theoretically, this may sound right, the theory is actually wrong, can you guess why?

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