As a child, my mother often encouraged me to befriend the smart kids in my class. According to her, the more I spent time with the clever bunch, the smarter I would get. I never really took her advice until high school and it was then that I decided to see for myself if indeed the mechanism worked.

For a term, I sat next to the top students in my class, spent my prep time revising with them, spent class breaks talking to them and even did my assignments with them. It wasn’t long before I had acquired genuine interest in my classes and not to mention my grades improved.

My mother was of course happy to learn that her advice that I had initially refused to take was the reason I had progressed academically. Which is why over the past one month a number of experiences couldn’t help but remind me of this particular piece of advice given to me earlier in my life.

Many successful people today often like to share the different reasons why they are where they are and as much as you will find most if not all coming down to basics such as hard work, discipline and integrity, I think the issue of company is worth looking into.

It is natural for people to be influenced by their surroundings as well as the people in this surroundings. On a recent encounter with a number of brilliant young people at Klab in Kacyiru, I was led to inquire what these young minds thought of this notion. One of them quoted an American author and entrepreneur, Jim Rohn saying "you are the average of the five people you spend most of your time with.”

The influence of the people we often surround ourselves with can sometimes seem too small to be considered significant when it should otherwise be taken seriously. The environment we have around us has a lot to do with the kind of lives we lead. I would like to believe that having landed the top students in my high school class as friends enabled them to directly influence my academic life. It is through spending time with them that I learnt how to do certain things I didn’t quite grasp on my own.

At the time, the task at hand was only performing academically but it gets a lot more serious when it comes to succeeding in life. It is very true that friends are an important part of life, they share in your joys and happiness.

They also share in your disappointments and trying times.

As much as this is very true, it is important that you choose your company carefully taking in to consideration the kind of person you want to be and what you want to achieve.

When you think about it, the most successful people aren’t those with friends that belittle their ambitions instead, they have people pursuing bigger and more ambitious projects than theirs hence encouraging them to be better.

This then puts a lot of emphasis on the need to invest in the right friendships and by this I don’t mean money.

I mean spend your time with the people in whose company you are able to learn something. If you think that for some reason you are failing to reach your God given potential, please look in to the company you keep. The experiences I gathered shows that it is important to surround yourself with the kind of people that have the same direction as you and the importance of positioning oneself to learn from those that have succeeded after all the company your keep is a reflection of who you are and who you want to be.

The author is a student at University of Rwanda, College of Science and Technology