Ever rolled your eyes at “You are the company you keep”? Same. But research (and real life) says proximity changes performance. In this solo episode, Austin digs into the research behind peer influence — from Greek philosophers to modern management studies — and shows how freelancers can use positive spillover to their advantage.

Learn how intentional community gives solo freelancers leverage: more focus, better systems, smarter strategy, and less burnout. Hear stories from the Freelance Cake Community and learn why joining the right group might be the best business move you make this year.

Key Points

• Positive Spillover is Real: Sitting near a high performer can increase your own performance by 15%.
• Community as Advantage: When you’re surrounded by people taking action, you’ll find it much harder to stay stuck or spiral into overthinking.
• Advanced freelancers need peers, not pupils: Once you’ve mastered the basics, you need people who challenge you—not just those asking for your advice.
• Freelancers can’t rely on osmosis: Without coworkers or office proximity, you have to choose your environment deliberately.
• Beginner vs. Advanced Needs: Free groups often serve beginners. Paid, private communities curate advanced freelancers who value time, accountability, and quality conversations.
• Beyond Advice — Real Momentum: The right group saves you from “meta work” (research paralysis) by giving you proven tools and templates so you can act faster.
• Bias Toward Action: When peers share wins, you’re inspired to take imperfect action too — and that’s how real growth happens.

Notable Quotes

• “You’re in the splash zone, so make sure what you’re getting hit with is motivation, not mediocrity.”
• “Deliberately create an environment where invisible hands push you onward and upward.”
• “Who you surround yourself with matters. Your environment matters as much or more than your habits.”
• “Communities aren’t just about leads — they’re about leverage.”

Resources Mentioned

• Kellogg School of Management Study on Positive Spillover
• Phoebe Dodds’ 100 Connections Challenge on Substack
• ‍Creator Science Lab
• Web Designer Pro

If you’re an advanced freelancer ready to trade burnout for momentum, join Freelance Cake Community to make better decisions, faster.

Transcript

0:39: Today, I want to talk to you about peer pressure and specifically how some freelancers harness it. Did your parents ever say, you are the company you keep? Mine certainly did, and I'm sure you've heard someone say that you are the sum of the 5 people you spend the most time with.

1:00: Am I the only one who finds it irritating when people throw out these little platitudes? It's like every middle school guidance counselor ever telling Johnny, who's been getting into trouble lately, Johnny, who used to be such a nice kid.

1:17: Johnny, those boys may seem edgy. They may seem cool right now, but they're bad news. They're going to lead you down the wrong path. When you're Johnny, the young know it all, you ignore that boring lady in her ugly cardigan with cats on it, because she doesn't know what it's like to be you. And then much later, you find out the hard way that maybe frumpy McGrumpy pants wasn't a total idiot. It turns out she was right.

1:49: Research backs up the idea that you're more likely to do it, whatever it is, if you're surrounded by people who also do it, smoking, to alcohol abuse, to obesity, you name it, if people around you do it. You're much more likely to do it too.

2:13: This idea is really old. The Greek tragedy and Euripides, who died around 406 BC wrote, every man is like the company he is wont to keep. Euripides isn't the only writer to bring this up. Cervantes in his novel Don Quixote, which first came out in the year 1605, writes, Tell me your company and I will tell you what you are.

2:43: If you have some time on a rainy Saturday afternoon, you can explore why this phenomenon happens. Here are some keywords you can search for neural synchronization, social comparison theory, memetic theory, ala Renee Gerard. You're welcome.

3:03: Now, what's more interesting to me is the idea of positive peer pressure. If we tend to adopt the behaviors, both beneficial and destructive of our family and close friends and coworkers, then can we use that to our advantage? Can we use environment as a tool to make it more likely that we'll make better choices and develop better habits? I bet you already know the answer. Of course, this is the case.

3:35: Earlier this year, I came across a study from the Kellogg School of Management. I'll put the link in the show notes in case you're interested. Anyway, in the study, what the two researchers did was analyze more than 58,000 hourly service workers at 11 well-known tech companies and listen to one of their main findings. Sitting within 25 ft of a high performer improves employee performance by 15%. These researchers put a name on this effect. They called it positive spillover.

4:18: We're all in the splash zone, so to speak, so you'd better make sure that what you're getting hit with is extra motivation to put forth your best effort and not little Johnny's sudden indifference to academics. These researchers could have just called this the college roommate effect.

4:41: Think about it. If your roommate in college worked out and partied all the time, what were you more likely to do? If she skipped class to play video games, what were you tempted to do? If she was always joining study groups and heading to the library. What effect did that have on you?

5:05: The result of positive spillover or college roommate effect in the study was higher productivity, and that higher productivity translated into an estimated $1 million in additional annual profits.

5:25: But what about you and me? We don't work at large tech companies. We're not showing up at offices. We can't choose to sit next to Rachel, who is brilliant and funny and optimistic and inspiring, and let the positive benefits of proximity to her. Spur us on to greater accomplishment. So how do we get the benefits of positive spillover if we work solo?

5:54: I'm going to share the single easiest and most obvious way to do this after a quick anecdote. Back in July, I met up with my friend Josh Hall for coffee. He was nice enough to meet me at my favorite pastry shop in Columbus, and we were comparing notes on our respective communities. His is called Web Designer Pro, mine is called the Freelance Cake community. And if you couldn't tell by the name of Josh's community, he talks to a lot of web designers. Web designers have the same struggle as other types of freelancers, finding project leads, for example.

6:34: That struggle can be discouraging and confusing, especially if you don't have a background in marketing and don't always know how to put yourself out there. So, Josh was telling me that he'll listen to a web designer talk about how leads have been coming in inconsistently, and he told me he always asks the same question, quote, What communities and networks are you a part of? Usually the web designer answers: Well, none, or if they are a part of an online community or Slack channel, they aren't very active.

7:15: And so get this out of the dozens of marketing strategies and legion tactics that Josh could recommend, he told me that his first recommendation is always get involved in communities. Now, are community members going to start passing you all the leads you could ever want? No, probably not.

7:39: What they will do is share what's working for them with outreach, marketing, follow up. You get to be in this on demand mastermind group where you learn what's working for other people while it's working for them.

7:56: For example, just last week in my freelance cake community, a member named Meg heard about a challenge called the 100 Connections Challenge. A strategist named Phoebe Dodds had written about it on Substack. I'll put that link in the show notes. What did Meg do? Well, she showed up in the community. She wrote a post about this challenge. She said, hey, check out this post. I'm committing to this challenge. I've already created this tracking template you can use. Does anyone want to join me? Several other members chimed in in the comments. Great, count me in.

8:37: Maybe you'll occasionally pick up a project lead inside of a community, but more often, the benefit is, like I said, positive spillover from members like Meg, who find a promising strategy, find a challenge, find a new way to start conversations, and then they inspire other members to do something that they wouldn't have done otherwise.

9:03: I promised to tell you the single easiest and most obvious way to reap the benefits of positive spillover as a freelancer working solo, and I've already kind of let the cat out of the bag.

9:17: Here it is, just in case you missed it, join a private paid community. Deliberately create an environment where invisible hands push you onward and upward.

9:30: Those invisible hands are other talented, motivated freelancers who are trying new things, taking risks, running experiments, doing challenges like that 100 connections challenge Meg brought into my community.

9:46: Being a freelancer is hard sometimes. Sometimes an anchor client cancels a retainer without any warning. You find yourself on the verge of panic. You post about it in your community, and then other members, they ask thought provoking questions. They remind you to find the opportunity in the midst of disappointment. They share feedback, ideas. They bring perspective that makes your strategy, your pricing, your offer so much stronger. In fact, they keep you unstuck, they keep you from spiraling.

10:25: You don't spend nearly as much time overthinking, second guessing, procrastinating, and let's be honest, wallowing in self-pity. You're less likely to get overwhelmed because you're less likely to overcommit. Let me back up and double click on something. I recommend that ambitious freelancers join a private paid community.

10:50: Why private and paid? There are a bunch of free communities to join, so why wouldn't you just join one of those and not pay anything? My answer is, maybe you should. Most of those free communities cater to freelancers who are just getting started. Maybe money is tight for you right now. Maybe you're figuring out how to deliver a service, any service right now, how to run your business. Maybe in that community that's free, they're talking about the problems that you're facing at your current stage. I remember those problems well. I had them too.

11:33: I was a clueless poet who knew more about iambic pentameter, and Charles Dickens than I did about bookkeeping and sales. We've all got to start somewhere, and I'm really glad that communities for inexperienced freelancers exist. But what about more advanced, more established freelancers? They battle a different set of problems. They're thinking less, do I have what it takes, and more, hey, is this business sustainable? Maybe not. I'm making good money, but now I need to figure out how to make more money in less time. Who can I ask about that?

12:14: Advanced freelancers need a place where it's safe to show up and be vulnerable about their problems and talk openly about their struggles and get high quality advice quickly. Once you start making 6 figures as a freelancer, it's not like all of your problems suddenly vanish, they just change shape.

12:35: If you're a more advanced freelancer, you already know how to solve beginner stage problems, and if you're active in a community full of mostly beginner freelancers who are several steps behind you, you tend to become the resident expert. You're the one who always gets asked for advice. And that can get old.

13:00: Along those same lines, advanced freelancers often want and need tools and resources quickly, and the resources and tools they find in a lot of free communities are too basic. Those tools aren't very helpful for them at their more advanced level.

13:23: That brings me to one of the traps that more advanced freelancers face. Once you know how valuable your time is, you know how costly it is to spend hours on research and prep while you look for a tool or try to create a tool, instead of using that same amount of time to make meaningful progress.

13:46: I have been guilty of this so many times, gathering the PDFs, putting together the ideas, assembling all of the process, odds and ends, yet after spending 2 or 3 hours on this prep work, I'm no close to solving the freaking problem. The research and resource finding is metawork, not true momentum, and it's one of the biggest time sucks in business. It's one that a lot of us don't talk about. The right community helps you avoid that situation by giving you access to a solid resource library that can save you, at least in my experience, hundreds of hours spent on metawork. You put time into solving the problems and building momentum you can feel, not in coaching beginner freelancers, or trying to find, filter, wade through irrelevant information until you can land upon the one tool that will actually serve you.

14:54: Case in point, when I was finally ready to upgrade my studio setup, I didn't do a bunch of Google searches. I had learned my lesson. I knew that I would be wasting my time going on YouTube and reading about specific camera lenses. I am not a photographer. AV isn't one of my strengths, so instead, I popped into Creator Science Lab, which I paid $2000 a year for, and I invest in that membership for scenarios exactly like that. I needed someone who knows more than I do to just tell me what to do, to give me a tool, to give me a resource.

15:38: So I sent the founder, a friend named Jay Clause, a message. I asked for his gear list, he sent it to me, I saved it, and I didn't waste all that time on analysis, paralysis, wondering, am I buying the right lens? I'm not sure.

15:57: Before I end, I'll share one last example of positive spillover. My youngest son was watching his older brother go across the monkey bars, and he said, I don't think I can make it all the way. I replied, try, because you just never know. And I'll be right here.

16:19: He did try, and you should have seen his face when he made it all the way across and planted his feet on the bar on the other side. His face was incandescent. He was so proud of himself. His brother showed him what was possible. He attempted more than what he thought he was capable of, and he surprised himself.

16:46: Who you surround yourself with matters. Your environment matters as much or more than your habits. If you aren't getting the results you want with your freelance business, change your environment. Join a paid private online community. Harness peer pressure. Put positive spillover to work for you. Remember what your guidance counselor said all those years ago. Maybe you're not the sum of the 5 people you spend the most time with. But the people you spend time with have a profound effect on the results that you get.