If: You become like the five people you spend the most time with (or something remotely like that) The people who are most extremal in good ways tend to be highly successful Should you try to have 2-3 of your five relationships be parasocial ones with people too successful to be your friend individually?
I've had a similar idea. For a while when I was in college, all the people I spent the most time with had beliefs and values that were very far from my own, and I felt I was absorbing too much from them. Partly for that reason (and partly for entertainment), I listened to about a zillion hours of Rob Wiblin interviews. It definitely helped.
The flip side is that if I consume too much good stuff, I end up with an inferiority complex. But maybe the issue there is just relating too intellectually and not enough socially.
Even if 1) were true, it may be the strategies those more successful people are using won't work for you or are, indeed, sub-optimal for you based on your skill-sets.
At any rate, I think the main benefit of social relationships is reciprocity, which para-social relationships lack entirely.
I've always thought of this effect as the effect of "active coaching," more or less. That is, you internally are working on some aspect of yourself or your external life (consciously or unconsciously), and you create a feedback loop by looking at more successful people on that metric, where you use their success techniques as the feebdack and benchmark for your own progress on that front.
Obviously, the quality of this can vary enormously, for internal or external reasons - but a parasocial relationship will weight pretty heavily on the external. With a "real" friend, you not only get more data and details via time spent and proximity, but you can also literally ask them about things and get specifically tailored insights to help you overcome a hurdle, in a way that would be a lot more difficult with parasocial relationships.
I still think there's probably value in it, but I'd personally weight it about 20% compared to a "real friendship." Then again, if it's something you're *consciously* working on, it's pretty easy to find somebody more than 5x as successful at whatever it is than anyone you can find in real life, too, so a parasocial attachment may be net positive with explicit intent.
Perhaps, though I think that the effect would certainly be weaker than if you surrounded yourself (or found yourself surrounded) by such successful people in more direct ways. Some of the benefits of absorbing the personality traits of highly successful people are going to translate into success much more readily in contexts where those traits are valued (which is where you are going to find the highly successful persons).
Think about it like this: if I were an economics major at a small state school, I may develop a "beneficial" parasocial relationship with Tyler Cowen. While Tyler Cowen's traits translated to success in the field of economics, that was also in the context of his educational environment (George Mason and Harvard), where certain innovative ways of thinking are rewarded. For me at the small state school, iconoclastic ways of thinking may be met with unwelcoming attitudes from my advisors (or would otherwise not be supported in a way that would allow me to flourish, as the faculty at my small state school may not be equipped or eager to foment the types of theories that someone with the idiosyncrasies of Cowen would develop).
I've had a similar idea. For a while when I was in college, all the people I spent the most time with had beliefs and values that were very far from my own, and I felt I was absorbing too much from them. Partly for that reason (and partly for entertainment), I listened to about a zillion hours of Rob Wiblin interviews. It definitely helped.
The flip side is that if I consume too much good stuff, I end up with an inferiority complex. But maybe the issue there is just relating too intellectually and not enough socially.
Even if 1) were true, it may be the strategies those more successful people are using won't work for you or are, indeed, sub-optimal for you based on your skill-sets.
At any rate, I think the main benefit of social relationships is reciprocity, which para-social relationships lack entirely.
I've always thought of this effect as the effect of "active coaching," more or less. That is, you internally are working on some aspect of yourself or your external life (consciously or unconsciously), and you create a feedback loop by looking at more successful people on that metric, where you use their success techniques as the feebdack and benchmark for your own progress on that front.
Obviously, the quality of this can vary enormously, for internal or external reasons - but a parasocial relationship will weight pretty heavily on the external. With a "real" friend, you not only get more data and details via time spent and proximity, but you can also literally ask them about things and get specifically tailored insights to help you overcome a hurdle, in a way that would be a lot more difficult with parasocial relationships.
I still think there's probably value in it, but I'd personally weight it about 20% compared to a "real friendship." Then again, if it's something you're *consciously* working on, it's pretty easy to find somebody more than 5x as successful at whatever it is than anyone you can find in real life, too, so a parasocial attachment may be net positive with explicit intent.
Perhaps, though I think that the effect would certainly be weaker than if you surrounded yourself (or found yourself surrounded) by such successful people in more direct ways. Some of the benefits of absorbing the personality traits of highly successful people are going to translate into success much more readily in contexts where those traits are valued (which is where you are going to find the highly successful persons).
Think about it like this: if I were an economics major at a small state school, I may develop a "beneficial" parasocial relationship with Tyler Cowen. While Tyler Cowen's traits translated to success in the field of economics, that was also in the context of his educational environment (George Mason and Harvard), where certain innovative ways of thinking are rewarded. For me at the small state school, iconoclastic ways of thinking may be met with unwelcoming attitudes from my advisors (or would otherwise not be supported in a way that would allow me to flourish, as the faculty at my small state school may not be equipped or eager to foment the types of theories that someone with the idiosyncrasies of Cowen would develop).