Your Environment Is Always Training You

(Transcript edited for clarity.)

Hi, I'm Wes. Welcome to Your Environment Is Always Training You.

This is something that took me years and years to figure out.

The most common thing I'd heard about environment related to success was that you're the sum of the five people you spend the most time with.

If you want to make more money, hang around with four people who make more money than you. I've also heard it the other way: if you don't want to struggle, don't hang around with four or five people who struggle all the time.

Those examples are really about your environment.

When I was younger, I ignored a lot of the environment stuff. I thought, "It doesn't matter. I'm independent. I think for myself."

Those things were true, but in those examples the environment was the people you spend the most time with.

I think there's something to that, but I don't think it's a 100% hard-and-fast rule.

I want you to think beyond the people you hang out with or spend the most time with.

When you think about environment, it can be anything you're immersed in: the things you watch, the things you read, the things you do, the things you work on, and the things you think.

Those are all types of environments in addition to the people you spend time with.

As I've gotten older and learned more, I think it's important to recognize that your environment affects a lot of what you do and, more importantly, what you think.

Your environment is always training you.

Your goal or your job, the same as my goal or my job, is to intentionally choose what you want your environment to do for you.

So here's the question: What is your environment training you to do right now without thinking about it?

That's the danger.

The real danger when we talk about environment is if we've built or put ourselves in an environment that's training us to automatically think things or do things without thinking them through.

I'm a huge believer in thinking for yourself, and I've been this way for most of my life.

I'm very independent. I think for myself.

I don't believe something just because somebody says it.

I don't believe it just because a book says it or because I see it.

I don't even believe many things just because everybody's saying them.

Even though I intentionally work on not blindly following, every once in a while I still stop when I'm thinking something and think, "Well, I'm not sure that's true. Why do I believe that?"

The more often you can do that, the better, and you have to train yourself.

This isn't something that comes naturally to me or anyone else.

You don't naturally question everything.

In fact, our minds often try to find things and put them into routines so we don't have to think so much about them.

So we have to fight against that so we're thinking for ourselves.

When you start thinking for yourself more, you can start thinking about how your environment is affecting what you think and what you do.

Once you get to that point, you can start intentionally creating an environment to help you achieve what you want to achieve.

That's a big part of what I talk about with Your Life Systems.

The systems that work best for me are the ones I've intentionally put in place for intentional reasons.

If they're not working as well, I try to intentionally tweak the systems and make them better because the systems are supposed to support what I want.

I chose the system.

So if a system doesn't work well, it's my fault, but it's also my responsibility to figure out why and improve the system.

As I go through the rest of this, keep in mind what is in your environment now that makes you automatically think or do something you haven't thought through.

If you could identify one thing and correct it, it can make a huge difference in your life.

What you repeatedly see, hear, reach for, or tolerate quietly becomes normal.

Your environment is never neutral.

Never neutral.

I think that's a big breakthrough for many people.

We get in a habit, get lazy, let our minds get lazy, and go for the status quo or the normal.

We fool ourselves into thinking that when things are like that, we don't have to think about them, that our environment is neutral.

Your environment is never neutral.

It's either helping you or hindering you.

It's either working for you or working against you.

Your environment makes some actions easier and others more difficult.

The question is whether your environment is making the actions that help you easier or making the actions that hurt you easier.

We want to make the things that help us easier and the things that hinder us or hurt us harder.

We can intentionally create and work on our environments to reach those goals.

Willpower has to fight whatever your environment makes easy.

So when you create the right environment, you don't have to rely so much on willpower.

Repeated cues shape behavior before you consciously decide.

So be careful what you repeatedly say, repeatedly think, repeatedly watch, and repeatedly do.

Make sure anything you do over and over again is working toward where you want to be instead of pulling you away from it.

Small changes to your surroundings can change what you do every day.

I've talked about this a time or two before, and I won't cover it in depth here, but it fits this really well.

I learned when I was writing full-time that my environment was very important.

When I had to do deep work, my environment was either helping me or hurting me.

For example, and this sounds like common sense, you need to turn the ringer off on the phone if you have to do deep thinking work.

So when I had to do deep writing work, I would go into a room by myself with the phone off, the door shut, and nothing else there to bother me.

It was a simple environment.

Instead of working at the kitchen table where there were all kinds of things going on that could distract me - the dog, one of the children, my wife, or even the mailman coming up the driveway - I removed those things from my environment.

I shut myself in a room with no noise.

I controlled the environment.

That's a simple example, but think of that in any type of environment.

Let's go back to one of the things I led with.

Have you ever heard the advice that you become like the five people you hang out with?

Let's think about that.

If you always hang out with five people who are always complaining about how tough it is, how nothing ever works, how they can't get ahead, and everything else, that can affect the way you think.

But if you always, or more often, spend time with five people who are entrepreneurial, always hustling to do better, making big goals and big plans, striving to get ahead, and trying to figure out how to get ahead, you're more likely to start thinking more like that.

In those examples, one environment means you're feeding your mind negativity.

The other means you're feeding your mind growth or positivity.

You might be able to resist trending those ways for a short time, but the more often you feed things like that into your brain, the more likely you are to start drifting that way.

So the question is: Do you want to create an environment where you're feeding your brain positive things - growth, progress, building, creating - or do you want to create an environment that tears all of that down?

That's the choice you have to make.

I'm not telling you to go out and fire all your friends who don't think like you.

But I want you to be aware of what you're consistently putting into your brain.

Your environment affects what you do and what you accomplish, and what you put into your mind matters because your mind controls a lot of what we're talking about.

Most of the time I'm talking about success in some way.

You probably aren't watching this if you haven't thought about success in some way, because that's what this is about.

That's what Your Life Systems is about: success in one way or another.

You define what success is.

I try to help you figure out ways to use systems to get that success.

So you want to be very careful about what you put into your mind, because your mind is directly related to reaching the success you want.

Your environment - everything in your life - is already training you.

You need to make sure it's training you to help you achieve the success you want instead of keeping you from achieving it.

Start training your environment today to support the success you want.

Start training your environment today.

Make one small change to your environment, whatever that is.

You don't have to fight the same surroundings every day.

You can change them.

You can intentionally design an environment that makes better actions feel normal.

Imagine you wake up in the morning and automatically do the top three things that are going to bring you closer to the success you want.

Then compare that to waking up and having to mentally fight through willpower and find the motivation to do the three things that are going to bring you closer to the success you want today.

One way, you've created an environment where you automatically do those three things.

The other way, you have to fight through something to do those three things.

It's not simple if right now it's a struggle to get the two or three most important things done every day.

It's not simple to immediately switch from that to a different environment where you automatically do it.

But if you're not intentionally trying to create the automatic situation, you'll be stuck on the wrong side and it will continue to be a struggle.

So intentionally do one thing today that can help you get closer to automatically doing the things that bring you closer to your success.

I'm Wes. This is Your Life Systems.

Thanks for being with me.

Please like and subscribe.

I'll see you next time.

What's Next?

·        Identify one repeated input in your environment that is quietly becoming normal.

·        Ask whether it is moving your thinking or behavior toward what you want.

·        Remove or make harder one environmental cue that works against you.

·        Add or make easier one cue that supports the behavior you want.

·        Create a physical space that supports your most important kind of work.

·        Reevaluate your environment regularly instead of assuming it is neutral.

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