How to Find Your People: Creating a Personal Support Group

This article is an excerpt from the Shortform book guide to "Someday Is Today" by Matthew Dicks. Shortform has the world's best summaries and analyses of books you should be reading.

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Do you surround yourself with people who support where you’re going in life? Are they willing to speak up when you get off track?

If you want to achieve extraordinary things, you must find a group of people to support you. In Someday Is Today, Matthew Dicks explains that your own personal support group will help you progress toward your goals by holding you accountable and providing encouragement and feedback.

Learn how to find your people and why it’s so important to do so.

Why You Should Find Your People

Before discussing how to find your people, Dicks explains what difference a support group makes. First, it’s much easier to give up on your goals when you’re the only one holding yourself accountable. On the other hand, sharing your goals with others makes you more motivated to reach them because you want to meet others’ expectations of you and avoid seeming like a failure.

Second, Dicks explains that creative projects are meant to be shared with the world: Therefore, it’s important to get feedback from others as soon as possible. However, sharing incomplete versions of projects with just anyone can be difficult because you don’t want the world to judge you based on half-baked iterations. This is why having a support group is important—you can trust them to give you constructive feedback without judging you.

Finally, sharing your work with your support group will help you solve problems faster than you would on your own. Dicks notes that each member of your support group will likely have a unique knowledge base, and they’ll bring perspectives and solutions to the table that you wouldn’t have come up with alone.

How to Find Your People

To create your support group, choose the people who love and support you—avoid people who might envy your success, as they might undermine you. Further, share your work, goals, and deadlines with these people so they can give you constructive feedback and hold you accountable for completing goals.

How to Create Effective Support Groups

In Never Eat Alone, Keith Ferrazzi reiterates the importance of recruiting people to help you succeed. He specifically recommends connecting with four different archetypes of people, each for a specific purpose. Here’s how they compare to Dicks’s recommendations, and how to recruit them:

1) People to help you reach your goals. This archetype’s purpose is to help you identify your goals, create plans to reach them, and hold you accountable for following through. It fulfills Dicks’s first reason for creating a support group: to hold you accountable and give you the motivation that comes from knowing someone’s checking up on you. Recruit people in this archetype by picking two or three people you trust—for example, friends, family, or coworkers.

2) Mentors. These people should have expertise in the discipline you’re pursuing, and their role is to provide professional advice, skill-development techniques, insider information, contacts, emotional support, and inspiration. This archetype fulfills Dicks’s second and third reasons for creating a support group: to provide you with constructive feedback from a safe, trusted person, and to help you overcome problems using their unique knowledge base. Recruit mentors by looking for official mentoring programs, asking friends and family for mentor suggestions, or approaching strangers who you think might be a good match.

3) Super-connectors. These are people who have dozens to hundreds of contacts they can introduce to you to help you progress. Dicks doesn’t discuss recruiting people for this purpose, but Ferrazzi argues that having good connections is crucial for achieving success. Recruit people in this archetype by looking for high-profile people like headhunters, politicians, high-class restaurateurs, or journalists who are bound to have numerous connections. Convince them to help you out by offering them something in return, like an introduction to someone else in your network (such as introducing the journalist to the politician) or help toward their cause.

4) Prominent industry leaders. This archetype’s purpose is to help you gain credibility in your discipline or industry. For example, if you want to be a comedian, make friends with a popular comedian and people will flock to your shows assuming you’re just as funny as your counterpart. While Dicks doesn’t mention using your supporters in this way, Ferrazzi asserts that you must boost your credibility to succeed. Meet and recruit these people by engaging with organizations they support, like charities, and hobbies they enjoy, like golf.

How to Find Your People: Creating a Personal Support Group