Sean’s recorded a podcast mini-series called Finding Community, and the first part (of five) just published today.

Below are some highlights, takeaways and quick wins from the recording (in case you’re more into reading than listening right now):

Everyone needs a supportive community.

Why does community matter, and why do you want to focus on finding community?

A supportive community is rocket fuel for:

- Finding your people, your audience, your tribe.- Starting or growing your own business.- Being financially supported by your creative passions.- Getting support when you’re stuck.

Every time Sean has leveled up in business, it was because of a relationship, not just information.

As helpful as information can be, you need context to apply it to your own situation.

That’s where community comes in.

Community can’t survive negativity.

A negative attitude destroys communities. We’re not talking about critique or constructive criticism: you know true negativity when you encounter it. Negativity pulls you down… and keeps you down.

When you have a negative voice in your life, you might want to pull that person up, help them let go of that negativity. And it’s great to want to help!

But negativity has gravity on its side.

It’s easier for a negative person to pull you down than for you to pull them up into positivity.

You have to cut negativity out of your life. We’ll talk about how to do that in a minute.

Negativity will kill your passion.

Negativity is a breeding ground for scarcity mindset. We talk about this a lot:

- When critical resources are scarce, you get desperate.- You’ll do anything to acquire those resources (usually money).- You take on jobs you shouldn’t.- You work with bad clients.- The negative people alongside you complain and enable this.- Pretty soon, your passion, the reason you wanted to make a living this way… it’s gone.

This story is too common. You quit your job to pursue your creative passion, and pretty soon you’re mired in scarcity mindset.

The opposite of scarcity mindset is abundance mindset: choosing to see the world as full of opportunity and the resources you need to survive as being widely available.

The tricky thing is, you need to think in terms of abundance even when you’re in the middle of circumstantial scarcity.

Even when your bank account is almost empty… you have to believe you can make ends meet.

You have to defy what you see and make decisions based on a mindset of abundance. And you can’t do that when you’re surrounded by negativity.

You can’t afford to be surrounded by negative people.

You can’t afford to be around these types of people:

- People who don’t believe in you.- People who aren’t achieving what you want to achieve.

We’ve all heard that you become the average of the people around whom you spend your time. Whether that’s a good or a bad thing depends on who you’re around!

If you’re surrounded by people who are lazy, complaining, negative, not driven… you’ll tend to be like that as well, try as you might not to be.

You need to cut the negative inputs out of your life.

But it’s not enough to just cut the negativity out of your life. There’s another step that you’ll hear about soon in Part 2 of this series.

To keep this short, here’s your homework:

- Cut negative people out of your life wherever you can.- Cancel events where you’re hanging around negative people.- Miss that party.- Skip that conference.- Ditch that happy hour where the team from work sits around complaining.- Unfollow and unsubscribe from negativity online.- Unsubscribe from negativity in podcasts, YouTube channels, and email newsletters.- Unfollow negative people on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.

In a couple days, you’ll hear about what to do after you’ve cut out negativity—but you have to start here.

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