Although college students are often told, “this is the best time of your life,” it really shouldn’t be. A young person’s first experience with independence is possibly the most important time of his life, but it is a sad individual whose life peaks at 20-years-old.

The almost 7,000 new high school graduates descending on the UTK campus to begin their freshman year are beginning a process that will likely shape the remainder of their lives – and very quickly. Not because of what they will learn in their accounting, engineering or music appreciation classes, but because of the people they’ll meet in their newly formed circles.

Jim Rohn is often credited with suggesting that a person becomes the average of the five people with whom she spends the most time. I’m not sure that is absolutely true, but there is a lot of truth in it. We all have the ability to be intentional about the people with whom we associate, although luck sometimes places people in our paths. As a UT freshman in the fall of 1981, I was assigned a roommate; he and I still talk almost daily. I lived, played, ate, studied (sometimes) and shared communal showers with him and a small group of friends who influenced my developing views about work ethic, expectations, boundaries and prioritization.

With the clarity of 43 years of hindsight, I realize I could not have selected a more positive group of contemporary influences. Without exception, my close college friends have all become the kind of adults I hope my own children are becoming.

In the few years following college, I made a handful of similarly close and positively influential friends, although I’m not exactly sure how. Some of those friends also became heroes of mine – a blessing that too few people experience.

In the past 40 years, I have lost more friends than I made –all of them at ages that were way too young.

There are different ways to cope with the death of a loved one – and lately I’ve had way too much experience with it. In the past 200,000 years, a little more than 100 billion people have died, so you’d think we would be better at saying goodbye, yet it seems like this in one area where humanity hasn’t made much progress.

It’s sometimes difficult to distinguish between the role of luck and that of self-selection in developing healthy friendships. But on the outside chance self-selection plays a role, if you know any of the 3 million college freshmen heading to campuses across the U.S. this fall, consider encouraging them to be intentional about the friends they make. Those friendships might be the foundation for something that lasts a lifetime.

David Moon is president of Moon Capital Management. A version of this piece originally appeared in the USA TODAY NETWORK.