If you want to improve yourself and live a better life than you do now, you could try to do it all yourself. Eat right, exercise, follow your passions… whatever the doctors are recommending these days.
And you might succeed. But it’ll be a daily uphill struggle.
If you want an easier (but no less-effective) way to grow, take advantage of peer pressure.
“What? Peer pressure? Isn’t that the gravity-like force I heard about in school responsible for my thinking that every other teenager was out to try and force me into smoking, drinking, doing drugs, and having illicit sex?”
Oh good, you’ve heard of it. Well, yes, that’s peer pressure. But it turns out your teachers were only giving you half the story.
Peer pressure is the mechanism by which we tend to do what the people around us are doing. Without realising it. If they’re doing bad things, so will we. If they’re doing good things, so will we.
So if you want to get fitter, make friends with some people in good shape.
If you want to a better banjo player, make friends with some good banjo players.
I could go on, but I think you get the point.