Like Attracts Like: How to Attract People to Your Work

Like Attracts Like: How to Attract People to Your Work
Photo by Krista Mangulsone

While you will often hear the phrase “like attracts like” when it comes to dating, this concept can be just as prominent in other areas of our lives.

There’s a famous Jim Roth quote that goes “You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.” Who do you want these people to be? More importantly, who do you want to be?

In my list of some of the best life-changing books to read, I noted that the books in my list can change the course of your life whether you’re in high school, college, or you’re deep into your twenties, thirties, and beyond. To relate this to the law of “like attracts like,” it can be said that if you want to become the sort of person who reads the types of books on this list, you need to start reading them yourself. (Similarly, if you don’t want to become this type of person, you may wish to skip them.)

In this article, I’m going to explore how you can use the law of “like attracts like” to help draw people to your work, regardless of what you do for a living—whether your craft is sales or sailing, marketing or masquerading, or engineering or astronautics.

Like Attracts Like Meaning

The phrase “like attracts like” means that people who are similar to each other often attract one another. This can be in a romantic sense, within friendships, or in our professional lives, with people with similar ways of thinking with regard to business, politics, or other factors coming together.

The opposite of the theory that “opposites attract,” the law of “like attracts like” is the reason why hobbyist groups thrive around the world, why cable news has become so polarized, and why there are over two million subreddits in existence.

To put a finer point on this, in Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah, author Richard Bach notes:

Like attracts like. Just be who you are, calm and clear and bright. Automatically, as we shine who we are, asking ourselves every minute is this what I really want to do, doing it only when we answer yes, automatically that turns away those who have nothing to learn from who we are, and attracts those who do, and from whom we have to learn, as well.

How to Attract People to Your Work

The law of “like attracts like” exists at every level of our lives, including with our work. In order to attract the right people to your work, you need to...

...develop your core values
...increase your productivity
...be strategically impatient
...develop a morning routine
...learn to overcome laziness
...get your character in check
...learn to delay gratification
...develop a thick skin
...read the right books
...develop self-reliance
...make your priorities a priority

...and finally, you need to figure out your life purpose. When you do all of this, you will begin to attract likeminded people to your work in droves. Your work will speak for itself.


Attracting people to your work is easy when you recognize that like attracts like at every level of our lives; you just need to know how to leverage it.

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Benjamin Spall

Benjamin Spall

Benjamin Spall is the co-author of My Morning Routine (Portfolio). He has written for outlets including the New York Times, New York Observer, Quartz, Entrepreneur, Business Insider, CNBC, and more.