Are you a chicken or an eagle?

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Here’s a short parable that I can’t get out of my head:

A man found an eagle’s egg and put it in a nest of a barnyard hen. The eaglet hatched with the brood of chicks and grew up with them.

All his life the eagle did what the barnyard chicks did, thinking he was a barnyard chicken. He scratched the earth for worms and insects. He clucked and cackled. And he would thrash his wings and fly a few feet into the air.

Years passed and the eagle grew very old. One day he saw a magnificent bird above him in the cloudless sky. It glided in graceful majesty among the powerful wind currents, with scarcely a beat of its strong golden wings.

The old eagle looked up in awe. “Who’s that?” he asked.

“That’s the eagle, the king of the birds,” said his neighbor. “He belongs to the sky. We belong to the earth—we’re chickens.” So the eagle lived and died a chicken, for that’s what he thought he was.

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When people ask about the biggest turning points in my career, I always say:

“Interning at beehiiv and working with Noah Kagan.”

Why? Not for the money or prestige, but because they opened my eyes to new levels of potential.

Simply observing how quickly the beehiiv team responded to customer feedback, shipped new features, and created hype around their product launches helped redefine what “moving fast” meant to me.

Observing how Noah Kagan approached promoting his new book Million Dollar Weekend and growing his email list altered how I think about marketing.

If you’re early in your career, the #1 piece of advice I can give you is to surround yourself with people who expand your sense of what’s possible.

Apprenticing underneath someone who’s living the life you aspire to have is one of the only “skip-level” techniques I know to accelerate your career.

Because just like the eagle who grew up around chickens—you can’t operate at a level you’re unaware of. As Psychologist Carl Jung said, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”

James Clear put it simply: “In general, we imitate the habits of three groups: The close (friends/family), the many (crowd/society), and the powerful (those with status).” The people around you have a tremendous impact on the actions you take and the limits you set for yourself.

This past week, I attended a photoshoot with a few fitness trainers and amateur bodybuilders. Seeing firsthand how they trained and handled their routines was a priceless experience.

Paul Graham said it best: “Ambitious people are rare, so if everyone is mixed together randomly, then the ambitious ones won’t have many ambitious peers. When you put them together with others like themselves, they bloom like dying plants given water.”

That’s the secret: Seek out those that inspire you.

People who challenge you to think bigger, act faster, and push boundaries you didn’t know existed.

See you next Sunday,

Jay “Seek out the eagles” Yang

Ps. If you can’t physically surround yourself with greater-minded individuals, go online. Read books, follow educational accounts, and take courses. Reverse engineer what inspires you.

That’s how I learned how to write for the internet: I collected the top pieces of content that captured my attention, studied them, and then turned them into templates.

And soon, you’ll be able to access those same templates to elevate your writing like the top digital writers.

Click here to register your interest.

Top Tweets of The Week

The fastest way to show the world you lack an abundance mindset is to resent others when they succeed.

Incredible feeling when your friend asks for help and you say, “Oh, I know a guy who can help with that.”

Deeeeep.

I’ve found this to be true.

Step one: Figure out what actions make achieving your goal more difficult.

Step two: Avoid them at all costs.

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