Certainly it makes sense to hang around the successful in order to be able to "model" their success but I'm oft reminded of what Dan Kennedy says about hanging out with the successful is that you find out that they aren't any smarter than you are and many times they're less so, but they've managed to find one area (usually one small area) they've managed to make money in and then they simply repeat the process over and over and over again.

The point being that one shouldn't be intimidated by someone else's success because many times those folks are not superior to you.