Culture is defined as the quality in a person or society that arises from a concern for what is regarded as excellence. It is simply the interactions you are surrounded by on a daily basis that result in you acting in the way you do. Culture is powerful, something which can shape the entire rest of your life if you let it; however it can be manipulated to work for you instead.
If culture involves naturally becoming a part of the environment to which you expose yourself, then you can make culture work for you by surrounding yourself with positive, successful environments. Surround yourself with the people you want to become, and becoming one of them is inevitable. Success becomes extremely simple.
People often comment that successful people have the best network, as in; they have access to high powered successful people, like them. This isn’t a coincidence.
If you surround yourself with something, it starts to become a part of you to a point that it will dictate the way you act, perform and react to situations. If everyone in your office is lazy, non-engaged, and self destructive, that can engulf you to a point that you become that way, regardless of your intentions or values.
Therefore, one way to be successful is to surround yourself with people who are smarter, more connected, and more successful than you are, because becoming one of them is inevitable. There are many ways to expose yourself to the people who you want to become, and some of the best include: working in an environment in which you are surrounded by people that you idolize, finding friends who live the life that you want to live and joining organizations and doing volunteer work for causes that align with your goals.
The idea is to immerse yourself in a culture so deeply that it starts to become a part of you. Taking these small steps as a form of insurance of your future will lead to exposure to a culture which is conducive to success. From there you let culture reform your habits, values and network so that you can be the person you set out to be in the first place, or rather that your culture causes you to be.
As the world gets figuratively smaller, the rich will get richer and the poor will get poorer more quickly. Which group you end up in depends on the environment you are surrounded by.