If I changed the environmental situation, the fate of the cells would be altered. I would start off with my same muscle precursors but in an altered environment they would actually start to form bone cells. If I further altered the conditions, those cells became adipose or fat cells. The results of these experiments were very exciting because while every one of the cells was genetically identical, the fate of the cells was controlled by the environment in which I placed them.
—Bruce Lipton, MD
In 1979, Harvard psychologist Dr. Ellen Langer and a group of graduate students designed the interior of a building to reflect 1959—twenty years prior. There was a black-and-white TV, old furniture, and magazines and books from the 1950s scattered about. This would be the home to a group of eight men, all in their seventies or eighties, for the next five days.
When these men arrived at the building for the study, they were told they should not merely discuss this past era but behave as if they actually were their prior selves, twenty years ago.
“We have good reason to believe that if you are successful at this you will feel as you did in 1959,” Langer told them.
From that moment on, the study subjects were treated as if they were in their fifties rather than their seventies. Despite several being stooped over and having to use canes to walk, they were not aided in taking their belongings up the stairs.
“Take them up one shirt at a time if you have to,” they were told by the research assistants.
Their days were spent listening to radio shows, watching movies, and discussing sports and other “current events” from the period. They could not bring up any events that happened after 1959 and referred to themselves, their families, and their careers as they were in that year.
The goal of this study was not for these men to live in the past. The goal was to trigger their minds and bodies to exhibit the energy and biological responses of a much younger person.
What happened?
In short, these men got younger.
They literally got taller. There was noticeable improvement in their hearing, eyesight, memory, dexterity, and appetite. They gained weight, which for these men was a good thing.
Those who had arrived using canes, and dependent on the help of their children, left the building under their own power and carrying their own suitcases.
By expecting these men to function independently and engaging with them as individuals rather than “old people,” Langer and her students gave them “an opportunity to see themselves differently,” which impacted them biologically.
How you treat other people influences how they see themselves. How people see themselves influences their mindset and emotions, yes. But it also impacts their biology. This truth has extreme implications. To adapt a quote from Goethe, “The way you see [a child] is the way you treat them and the way you treat them is [who] they [will] become.”
As human beings, we generally default to the roles of our social environment. It takes extreme intentionality and decisiveness not to default to an expected social or cultural role.
As men in their seventies and eighties, they probably didn’t expect to have to carry their bags by themselves. Their opinions hadn’t mattered for many years. They likely forgot what it felt like to be stronger, younger, and more confident. But absorbing themselves in a new context and then acting out the role of that environment transformed them.
Putting yourself in new environments, around new people, and taking on new roles is one of the quickest ways to change your personality, for better or worse. Fully take on the roles you assume, and you’ll change from the outside in.
By this point, I hope I have convinced you that your personality is dynamic and ever-changing, largely based on the roles you play and the situations in which you find yourself.
The word “personality” comes from the Latin word persona. In the ancient world, a persona was a mask worn by an actor in a theater. It can also mean a character played by an actor. When you put on a different mask or play a different character, you portray a different persona. As William Shakespeare wrote, “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players: they have their exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts.”
Think about this for a minute: Are you always the same person?
That may seem like a strange question, because internally, you always feel like you, right?
Or do you?
Do you really feel like the same person in all situations and circumstances? Of course not. In some situations, you may be bored, awkward, or shy. In others, you’re on top of the world. The “you” that shows up is very different depending on the situation.
If your house was being robbed, you’d be different than if you were sitting on an airplane or at work or at a rock concert. Around certain people, such as old high school friends, you may reflect a younger and less mature version of yourself. Sometimes you’re more introverted and sometimes more extroverted.
But here’s what’s interesting: As a person ages, they tend to stop engaging in new situations, experiences, and environments. In other words, people’s personalities become increasingly consistent because they stop putting themselves into new contexts. Indeed, the philosopher and psychologist William James believed that a person’s personality basically became fully formed and fixed by age thirty, because thereafter a person’s life often becomes highly routine and predictable.
Although the culture is rapidly changing, there are still similar patterns. By the time a person reaches their thirties, they stop having as many “first” experiences. In their childhood, teens, and even twenties, there are a lot of experiences: First kiss. First time driving. First job. First big failure. First time moving to a new city. But at some point, we “settle down.” We stop engaging in new roles and new situations that bring out new and different sides of us.
Because people’s lives become highly routine, both in their social roles and their environments, you begin to see very predictable behaviors and attitudes. This is one of the core reasons why personality is viewed as stable and predictable over time. It’s not that your personality itself becomes stable but rather that your routine environments and social roles lock you into habitual patterns.
According to Stanford psychologist Lee Ross, “We see consistency in everyday life because of the power of the situation.” Ross further explains that ultimately it’s the situation and not the person that determines how the person consistently shows up. “People are predictable, that’s true. . . . But they’re predictable because we see them in situations where their behavior is constrained by that situation and the roles they’re occupying and the relationships they have with us.”
Research on the Big Five personality factors—openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism—show that as people age, they become increasingly less open to having new experiences. They stop surrounding themselves with new types of people. They stop engaging in new roles and in new environments. They stop taking on new challenges. They stop experiencing new emotions.
People become old far too fast.
The more psychologically rigid a person is, the more they see themselves as and even attempt to be the same person in every situation they are in. This narrow approach lacks recognition that in different situations, not only should you be a different person, but in different situations you can’t help being a different person.
From a Western perspective, this may not make a lot of sense. Westerners tend to view the world from what is called an “atomistic” viewpoint, which assumes that something (or someone) can be understood regardless of context. Fundamental to this view is isolating and abstracting things from their context and attempting to explain them for their “innate” traits.
This atomistic worldview is why we as a culture obsess about individual characteristics like “habits” and “hacks.” It’s also why we view personality as fixed and unchanging, and it’s why we love our personality tests.
A more accurate and scientific perspective would be to view the world “relationally.” From a relational worldview, nothing can be understood outside of its context. In fact, it is the context or “relationship between” that determines the meaning of the thing.
If you were to lose a person you love, you wouldn’t just lose that person but also the person you were when with them. All loss includes a loss of yourself. And conversely, meeting new people or entering new relationships leads to the creation of a new self.
The relationship between my wife, Lauren, and me makes each of us who we are. Who Lauren is, from my perspective, is far different from who she is from someone else’s perspective. You change Lauren’s context, you change Lauren.
Likewise, you as a person can only be understood in context. If you had grown up at a different time and in a different place, you’d be a different person. You’d have different memories, connections, and beliefs. If you had lived two thousand years ago in a different culture, you wouldn’t be addicted to your cell phone. You’d have different interests in clothing, people, entertainment, and goals.
Undeniably, your personality is shaped by what surrounds you. Culture is often ignored because it seems invisible, but it shapes identity, behavior, relationships, and personality. If you find yourself in consistent environments and consistent social roles, then your personality will show up as stable and consistent over time.
As an example, there is a vast amount of research showing that your peer group powerfully influences your behavior and choices. Specifically, research shows that peer and social groups influence:
Academic achievement
Choice of university and degree
How productive you are at work
Whether or not you cheat in school and other life domains
Whether you’re likely to do extracurricular activities and go above and beyond the call of duty
Whether you engage in risky behaviors such as smoking, doing harmful drugs, and using alcohol
Your likelihood of engaging in criminal behaviors
The financial decisions you make and how well you ultimately do financially
Your chances of becoming an entrepreneur
Your social and peer groups shape your identity, how you see yourself, and who you become. You engage in behaviors that match the culture of your group. You come to develop a role and identity within your peer groups. Your peer groups shape the choices you make, the goals you set, and how well you do in life.
When Lauren and I were dating, we spent some time with a particular group of my old high school friends. She saw a side of me she didn’t know existed and, frankly, didn’t like. Trust me when I say that Lauren and I would never have been high school friends, let alone sweethearts.
With my old friends, I immediately shifted back into the role, identity, behavior, and even language patterns I exhibited in high school. Lauren saw me go from the Ben she had been dating to high school Ben in an instant. All due to a quick change in context and role.
While we were driving home that night, Lauren told me she did not like the Ben she had just seen. She was stunned. It became extremely obvious to both of us that my present and former selves were two very different people, but that the former could return quickly if the role and context facilitated it. I let her know I was committed to my future, not my past.
Not surprisingly, then, research has found that how you score on a personality test is heavily influenced by situational factors. In different cultures, the Big Five personality model doesn’t even work the same way as in the Western and American culture where it was developed. People from different cultures view personality differently, and thus respond differently to the test.
What’s more, research has shown that the specific conditions the personality test is taken in also dictate the results of the test. In one study, participants were given the same personality test at two different times. Half the participants were given the test by the same person at both times, whereas the other half were given their personality test by two different administrators. According to Dr. Christopher Soto, one of the psychologists running this study, “The most surprising thing to me was if someone was interviewed twice by the same interviewer then their responses across the two tests were pretty consistent. . . . But if they were interviewed by two different interviewers then their responses were often completely unrelated to each other.”
You see yourself differently and act differently based on what surrounds you.
The purpose of this chapter is to help you become more strategic about your environment. Until you become intentional and serious about your context, you will never be able to become who you want to be.
Although it is common for people to be the mere products of their environment, you must learn to make your environment match your desired outcomes. When you do, your personality will organically follow suit.
Specifically, this chapter will teach you three fundamental strategies of environmental design:
Strategic remembering
Strategic ignorance
Forcing functions
Consider the apocryphal story of the American artist James Abbott McNeill Whistler, who once painted a small spray of roses. It was admired by many other painters and collectors of the time. Other painters who saw the work were inspired by and envious of it. It seemed as though Whistler had been touched by the hand of God in the creation of that painting.
Collectors yearned to buy the painting. But Whistler refused to sell his finest work. Instead, he kept it near him at all times as a continuous reminder of what was possible for him. As he once stated:
Whenever I feel that my hand has lost its cunning, whenever I doubt my ability, I look at the little picture of the spray of roses and say to myself, “Whistler, you painted that. Your hand drew it. Your imagination conceived the colors. Your skill put the roses on the canvas.” I know that what I have done I can do again.
Whistler was strategic about his environment. He was strategic about how he wanted to feel and what he wanted to remember. That piece of art sitting near his work desk served as a continuous reminder of the type of work he wanted to do. It inspired him to see himself from a different perspective. It lifted his spirits when he was depressed or frustrated.
Like Whistler, you need to be strategic about what you remember. You need an environment that continuously calls to mind your future self. If your environment doesn’t continuously bring your future self to the forefront, then your environment is activating a different you.
Despite the fact that we sometimes remember our most traumatic experiences for years or decades, for the most part human beings are incredibly forgetful. We can forget where we parked our car. We can forget that we promised our child we would take them to get doughnuts in the morning.
We can forget what we truly want in our lives. Life gets busy and sometimes the routine of keeping up with the bills can take over. As Meredith Willson wrote in the Broadway hit The Music Man, “You pile up enough tomorrows, and you’ll find you are left with nothing but a lot of empty yesterdays.”
James Whistler was not the only one to design his environment for strategic remembering. The author and podcaster Tim Ferriss keeps a copy of the book The Magic of Thinking Big facing outward on his bookshelf. Tim read that book at a formative time and it changed his life. Consequently, the book now serves as a trigger for thinking and “playing” bigger for him. All he has to do is see the cover and he experiences an immediate shift in mindset, emotion, and identity.
A memento can also be used to warn or remind you of what matters. Author Ryan Holiday has a coin he keeps in his pocket that says on it Memento Mori, translated as “Remember Death.” Holiday keeps this coin on him to trigger feelings of his own mortality, which keep him focused on his priorities rather than being distracted.
To strategically remember and live the identity I most want, I recently had a “Culture Wall” created by the culture design company Gapingvoid. A Culture Wall is a collection of twelve or more of your most important beliefs or aspirations that are then illustrated as individual artworks installed on a wall in a grid format. Culture Walls are immersive symbols that become a “shrine of ideas.”
My Culture Wall, which I had installed in my home, displays many of my highest ideals, which I want not only myself but also my children to be continuously reminded of. It’s fun to see my kids repeating phrases from the Culture Wall they see several times every day in our home. I hear them say things like:
“Do what is right, let the consequences follow.”
“Better prolific than perfect.”
“You make or break your life before eight a.m.”
“100 percent is easier than 98 percent.”
“Expect everything and attach to nothing.”
“The measure of intelligence is the ability to change.”
“Assume the feeling of your wish fulfilled.”
“You can’t be free without uncertainty.”
“What got you here won’t get you there.”
“Never be the former anything.”
“Embrace your future to change your past.”
“Gratitude changes things.”
“Good timber does not grow with ease.”
“Nothing happens until after the boats are burned.”
These are the beliefs I want to instill in myself and my kids. Every time I walk by my Culture Wall while heading upstairs, I look at the images and am reminded of the person I want to be, which I can sometimes forget to be in the busyness of life.
Your environment should be full of strategic reminders of who you want to be, helping you to become your desired future self.
For Whistler, the picture of his roses was more than just a picture of roses. It became a symbol to him of deep meaning and significance. He could look at that picture, and his identity and emotions would immediately be changed. He could go from lacking confidence to being activated and capable. In a quick blink, he felt the power of his future and goals. His emotions were changed and he could create art from a more empowered identity.
That’s the power of strategic remembering.
If you’re going to create a life of meaning and growth, you need to proactively design your environment with transformational triggers. This is opposite of how most environments are designed. Most environments are filled with negative triggers that create undesirable and unresolved emotions.
Instead, you want to create triggers that click you into your future, not your former, self. Think of it: You’ve strategically designed your environment to remind you of your future. Remembering doesn’t need to only be about the past.
Open your eyes and look at the environment you have created around you. Are you still hanging on to concert posters from college? Do the artwork, photos, and other symbols you display activate your future self’s mindset and behaviors? Does your environment push you forward or pull you back?
If you are going to really become your future self, you need an environment that reminds you of that future self, not your former self. Goals don’t become realities without constant reminders. This is why people write down their goals every single day. They need to remember where they’re going, just like an airplane needs to constantly update its trajectory as it gets pushed off course.
Don’t make this too complicated. For instance, you could put a Post-it note on the steering wheel of your car, or on your bathroom mirror, to remind you of something you don’t want to forget. Like, “Tell your wife you love her.”
Change your computer password to a phrase your future self would use.
Move your television so it is no longer the centerpiece of your home. Better yet, get rid of it and replace it with something better.
Remove all of the social media apps from your phone.
Look at your closet and get rid of anything that your future self wouldn’t wear.
You could fill your entire environment with reminders of your highest aspirations and goals. And you should.
Your input determines your outlook. Your outlook determines your output, and your output determines your future.
—Zig Ziglar
There is a lot of garbage out in the world. Most of the internet is low-level distraction or filth you simply don’t need or want to know about.
Most movies are useless.
Most of the news is irrelevant to your situation.
Most people aren’t aligned with your future self.
There are seemingly infinite options in the world today. With increased options come increased choices. This may seem like a good thing, but for most people it is not. More choices mean more decisions, and as we discussed before, decision fatigue can lead to you getting stuck in negative cycles. A lot of the choices you encounter on a daily basis are endless rabbit holes to nowhere. Instead of keeping the door open to more choices, you need the discernment and confidence to close most doors so you’re entirely unaware of them.
Does this add to or take away from my future self?
It’s too costly for your mind to be focused on the wrong things, once you become serious about success and change. In the book The Paradox of Choice, psychologist Barry Schwartz explains:
We assume that more choice means better options and greater satisfaction.
However, choice overload makes you question the decisions you make before you even make them.
Choice overload leaves you in a perpetual state of FOMO—the fear of missing out—always looking over your shoulder and questioning the decisions you’ve made.
This puts you in a constant state of stress, always feeling like you’re falling short, always questioning the decisions you’ve made, always wondering what could have been.
Having options is a good thing. Without options, you can’t make choices. However, the best decision-makers in the world purposefully avoid almost all of the options available. Jason Fried, the founder of Basecamp, once said, “I’m pretty oblivious to a lot of things intentionally. I don’t want to be influenced that much.”
It takes confidence and boldness to say, “I’m going with this decision. This is what I’m committed to. This is what I’m serious about. Consequently, I’m closing the door on everything else right now. I need to focus. I can’t be distracted by everyone else’s noise and agendas.”
If you’re serious about achieving goals and intentionally moving forward in your life, you must create an environment that shields you from most of the world.
Strategic ignorance is not about being closed-minded. It’s about knowing what you want and knowing that, as a person, you can be easily swayed or derailed. Rather than putting yourself in stupid situations and being forced to rely on willpower due to lack of planning, you simply avoid stupid situations. You even avoid amazing situations that you know are ultimately a distraction to becoming your desired future self.
You create boundaries.
You live your priorities and values and dreams.
Peter Diamandis, one of the world’s foremost experts on entrepreneurship and the future of innovation, has said, “I’ve stopped watching TV news. They couldn’t pay me enough money.” From his perspective, it’s easy to be seduced by the negative and the new.
Diamandis is right. The news is not objective, but a point of view based on selective attention. When you watch the news, you see a story, a subjective view into the world. You can choose to buy into that story, but if you do, your identity and goals will be limited by that view.
Diamandis is strategically ignorant. He’s created an environment to shield himself from the distractions and negativity of the news media, while staying informed on the topics he cares about through careful and deliberate research.
Being a successful, creative person requires selective ignorance. Another example is Seth Godin, who purposefully doesn’t read the comments on Amazon about his books. He used to do so, but it only left him feeling horrible and questioning himself. So now he has stopped.
Godin is selectively ignorant to what the trolls say, and he’s better off as a result. He doesn’t need that crap coming into his psyche, confusing his identity and purpose.
Selective ignorance is not the avoidance of learning. It’s not the avoidance of getting feedback. It’s simply the intelligence of knowing that with certain things and people, the juice will never be worth the squeeze. It’s knowing what to avoid.
Without question, Godin gets feedback on his work. But he gets feedback from valued sources that help him create better work. He gets feedback that will ultimately move him forward, not feedback intended to destroy him.
Diamandis clearly knows about current events and what is happening in the world. It’s essential to the work he does as a futurist and someone trying to create global change. But he gets his information from valued sources. He has designed an environment where only the best information gets to him. He’s strategically unaware of everything else.
Selective ignorance is something that must be applied if you’re serious about becoming your future self. Your input shapes your identity, biology, and personality. When you change your inputs, all of these change.
Psychologically, if you don’t know about something, you probably won’t be tempted by it. If you see a plate of cookies on the counter, you’re no longer ignorant of them. If you haven’t made the decision beforehand, the situation will beat you. If, on the other hand, you simply keep cookies out of your environment, then you won’t have to deal with decision fatigue and willpower depletion. You won’t have to waste your time thinking about something you already know you don’t want.
As it relates to opportunities, it is smart to have systems in place so you don’t have to weigh every decision. For example, my assistant and I created rules for opportunities that are presented to her. If they don’t meet my criteria, she doesn’t present them to me, but instead kindly emails back, telling the sender I can’t focus on that right now.
Of course, like the impoverished kids in Charlie Trotter’s restaurant, you want exposure to new and higher ways of living. Growth and transformation require becoming conscious of things you’re currently unconscious of. Strategic ignorance is about purposefully ignoring or shielding yourself from what you already know is a distraction or an enemy to your future self. It’s your filter for ensuring that only the right new things reach you. And this filter will never be perfect, but your systems, as well as your own intuition, get better and faster at disregarding distractions.
In order to create an environment that shields you from the distractions in this world, you need to know what you want. You need to know what you stand for. You need to have rules and systems that stop you from finding yourself in a mire of filth or the daze of endless opportunity.
You need to make one decision that makes a million other decisions either easier, automatic, or irrelevant. This is how you remove decision fatigue. This is how you shield yourself from the onslaught of inputs and agendas seeking your time and attention.
If you’re serious about becoming your future self, you’ll need to create an environment for strategic ignorance. Think about all of the inputs you’re current getting that are sabotaging your future self.
The ability of the average man could be doubled if it were demanded. If the situation demanded.
—Will Durant
Christina Tosi was born in Ohio and raised in Springfield, Virginia. She graduated college with a degree in math but wasn’t sure if that’s what she wanted to do. Her mom had taught her to give her heart and soul to whatever she did, so she decided to give her soul to baking and making pastries.
Tosi moved to New York and enrolled in the French Culinary Institute’s pastry arts program. She began her culinary career at the fine dining restaurant Bouley, then advanced to the restaurant wd~50 in Manhattan, run by famed chef Wylie Dufresne.
Impressed by Tosi’s work ethic, Dufresne recommended David Chang, another famous New York chef, to hire her. Chang didn’t hire her to cook or bake but to write his food safety plans and help deal with the administrative requirements of the NYC Department of Health.
Tosi started bringing her homemade pastries into the restaurant and sharing them with the staff. Everyone was blown away, including Chang. There were no desserts on Chang’s menu, and he loved Tosi’s style. He insisted on several occasions to have one of her desserts served at the restaurant. But she was timid and shy and didn’t believe in herself.
Still, she kept making increasingly unique, clever, and delicious desserts for the restaurant staff. Recognizing that she would never do it on her own, one day Chang told her that she had three hours to create something. And whatever she created was going to be served that night.
He was serious. In his own words, “I had to push her off of a cliff. She wouldn’t do it herself.”
Tosi spent the next three hours creating a brilliant strawberry shortcake. The guests in the restaurant were surprised not only to have a dessert but something truly unique and fabulous.
From that moment forward, Tosi was making pastries at Momofuku Ssäm Bar. A few years later, in 2008, the adjoining store space next to Momofuku Ssäm Bar became available. By this point, Chang and others could see that Tosi had extreme passion, work ethic, and talent.
Chang also saw that she needed a push. Left to her own devices, she wouldn’t make the leap to living her dreams. He pushed her “off the cliff” again, challenging her to open her own shop, which she named Milk Bar. The bakery was an immediate success. By 2019, Milk Bar employed 381 people across North America, and Tosi had opened her sixteenth Milk Bar in Boston.
But none of this would have occurred if David Chang hadn’t forced her to follow her dream. Chang’s giving Tosi three hours to create something was a forcing function—he created a situation that forced her to rise up.
A forcing function is any situational element that forces you to take action and produce a result. Forcing functions put you in a situation where the only option is the desired option. You’ve designed the situation to force you in the direction you want.
That’s what happened to Tosi. Deep down, she wanted to make pastries for more people. Chang designed a situation that forced that out of her.
Forcing functions are done to weed out your former self or the distractions so prevalent in life. You’re creating a situation that suits your future self, forcing you to show up as that person here and now.
Implementing forcing functions into your life ensures that you’re constantly moving in a desired direction, often against your own resistance. Forcing functions require time restraints, which activate Parkinson’s law. This law dictates that work expands to fill the time available for its completion. You give yourself a date and you are forced to come up with something by that deadline. Otherwise, nothing gets done.
Embedding forcing functions into your life is done by creating faster feedback loops that are also high-stakes. You want the stakes for performance to be high, otherwise the forcing function isn’t powerful enough. For Tosi, her pride was on the line, as was the reputation of the restaurant. She had to perform not only for herself but also for her entire team and for the patrons.
In extreme sports, such as motocross or snowboarding, the inherent danger and immediacy of feedback are powerful forcing functions. If a motocross rider doing backflips over seventy feet doesn’t succeed, failure could mean their life. Forcing functions require the highest level of focus and engagement—the goal is psychological flow and high performance.
The situations of your life should be designed and engineered such that you are completely absorbed in what you’re doing. You want to be required to produce your absolute best work, because if you don’t, the consequences will be costly.
Are you serious about making the changes you want?
Are you willing to put forcing functions into play?
Forcing functions are serious, but they can also be fun. They are actually a way to gamify your life and radically upgrade your motivation to succeed.
One of the most useful and powerful forcing functions is financial investment. By investing money into something, you become more committed. Behavioral economists call this the “sunk cost bias.” You commit to what you’re invested in. This is usually described as a fallacy, or a mistake in reasoning that makes you throw good money after bad, or waste your time sitting through a show you hate just because you paid for the ticket.
But you can use this tendency to your advantage too. As an example, my friend Draye and I paid more than $800 to sign up for an Ironman Triathlon. I’d never done anything like that before. But we wanted to do something crazy and we knew the only way we’d be serious about it is if we paid to sign up for the race.
So we bit the bullet.
We created a forcing function.
Here’s what’s amazing, though. Investment is not only the initiation of a decision, it’s also the initiation of enhanced imagination. Before signing up for the Ironman, I had only passively considered such a thing. Some of my friends had done one, and I was curious, but not serious.
But once we made the investment, I began thinking about the Ironman a lot. I began seeing myself, in my mind, engaging in the Ironman—practice and completion. I was seeing myself as someone who could do an Ironman.
That initial investment began shaping my subsequent behaviors. I bought audiobooks about endurance sports and starting listening to them, fueling my input with new ideas. I pulled out my road bike, which I hadn’t dusted off in over six years.
I was thinking more and more about the Ironman. My imagination and behavior began shaping my identity. My behavior and other inputs were fueling that new identity. I changed my focus at the gym from weights to cardio.
It all started from a forcing function.
If we do not create and control our environment, our environment creates and controls us.
—Marshall Goldsmith
Environment is among the most powerful and important personality levers. If you’re serious about changing yourself and your life, you must change your environment.
You are the product of your culture and context. You’re the product of the information and inputs you consume. Everything that comes in—the food, information, people, experiences—shapes you. The first step is becoming mindful of your context and how it is having an impact on who you are. The next step is becoming strategic with your environment and situation.
Instead of having your environment and circumstances reflect your identity, you want to design your environment to reflect your future identity. You want your environment to be like a current pulling you forward, not holding you back.
When you change your environment, over time, everything about you will change. You’ll begin having new experiences. You’ll have new thoughts and emotions. You’ll be around new people. You’ll be engaging in new behaviors.
Your identity and personality will change.