Succes and <Friends>

Wow! I can relate.

I lost more of the fake friends dragging me down.
But I gained a few more real friends who enjoyed the friendly competition, and encouraged/challenged each other to move up.

Fewer people at the top.

 

It's not really about who is fake or not / dragging you down or not.

It's only natural that the friends you made back in high school / college are going to fade away once you (or they) develop themselves and find a different way of life.

Connections are made strong by sharing struggles and victories. Having common goals. When your goal stops being about alcohol / partying / drugs / wasting time and starts being about something different, then of course those relationships will start to weaken.

 

Yeah, lost contact with those friends from school too, not that they were fake, or dragging me down.
I guess we lose friends for many different reasons.

My story for the OP is... I had a group of friends I've known for years, and decided to take a test to get a professional certification to help us further our careers & increase our pay. So I lead the study group, and we were all helping each other out for months on end.

In the end, we took the test. I was the only one who passed. After that, they all stabbed me in the back. Threw me under the bus. Discredited me. Slandered. Disrespected. Character assassinated. Spreading lies & rumors. Looked for witnesses to testify against me, claiming I cheated somehow. Then, they went and took the test 2, 3, 4 more times. They still didn't pass.

Meanwhile, I moved up into management, and even created new job positions for them to move up into. None of them qualified, because they lacked that certification.

The very person who could've helped them, they completely ostracized. Needless to say, I don't hang out with those guys anymore. So, yeah, be prepared to lose some people on your journey.

 

That's interesting that you ask that. Coz, this was years ago, before I even heard of NoFap.

But, my answer would be: Yes. I was doing NoFap during that period of studying before the qualification test, before I knew it was called NoFap. I was completely engrossed with studying, and taking practice tests, coz it was so challenging, that PMO was the last thing on my mind, if even.

 

You may also want to qualify for the particular type of excellence. Success in material wealth, career etc. is respectable in its own right, but holding a streak and actually clearing your head means jack sh1t to a lot of people in the world. Never mind that you may then contribute to the recovery of a lot of people, on one hand there are those who don't care because it's not their struggle and on the other hand those who don't have the attention span may never look at that information in any detail.

Or, it doesn't agree with peoples simplistic view of human nature, addiction and the world so they don't think more than a brief passing thought about it.

 

i stopped putting up with toxic people.. so yeah, a few have 'dropped' by the weigh side (and... to be honest it feels great not to have to put up with other people's shit projected on you)