When I read the book “The Magic of Thinking BIG”, chapter 7 “Manage your environment: Go First Class”, a thought emerged into my head: friends are like genes.

When a baby was born, it is a product of genetic combinations of both the parents’. The differences between the parents’ genes will produce a brand new one. If, for example, the parents are siblings or close relatives (just for the sake of demonstration), and their children also continue to mate and give births, their children are very likely to have high risk of gene disorders. It is because doing so keeps narrowing down the gene pool or gene diversity.

I think making friends also have the same effect. If you keep making friends with the same type of people, same thoughts, same perspectives, you are narrowing down your thought pool. Making friends with different people will make you see things differently. But it’s important that you must be the one who choose which kind of thought or perspective that can add to your pool.

2026-05-17

Reading this post again, I found that a term may relate to this: an “echo chamber”.

Quoting from Wikipedia:

In the context of news media and social media, an echo chamber is defined as an environment or ecosystem in which participants encounter beliefs that amplify or reinforce their preexisting beliefs, by communication and repetition inside a closed system and insulated from rebuttal.[2][3][4] The echo chambers function by circulating existing views without encountering opposing views, potentially leading to three cognitive biases: correlation neglect, selection bias and confirmation bias