Your Environment is Your Destiny

The Rule of 5 is more powerful than most people realize - and its applications extend further than they can ever imagine

December 14, 2022

“I tell my students one of the most important things they need to know is when they are their best, creatively. They need to ask themselves, What does the ideal room look like? Is there music? Is there silence? Is there chaos outside, or is there serenity outside? What do I need in order to release my imagination?”

-Toni Morrison

You've probably heard somewhere that you are the average of the 5 people you spend the most time with, but the real-world application of this idea extends far beyond just the people you surround yourself with.

It also includes the books you read, the podcasts you listen to, the foods you put into your body, and so much more.

Your environment is constantly influencing you - often beneath your conscious awareness - and the quality of your inputs matters. It matters a ton.  

The people you spend time with, and the concepts you allow to penetrate your consciousness - your life is too important to leave these variables up to chance.

Now, I'm a fairly big proponent of personal integrity and the responsibility of individuals to make their own choices (and face their own consequences). Still, even I recognize the fact that we often don't choose our environments.

We are born in specific places, to specific people, and exposed to specific ideas and customs. So the idea that you are completely responsible for everything that happens to you isn't exactly true.

And yet...

And yet it's extraordinarily important to understand that self-discipline and success aren't "either/or" when it comes to your environment.

"Control the controllable," as the Stoics say, but accept the fact that you take action within an environment, and that environment has a major impact on your ability to delay gratification and craft the kind of life you want for yourself.

You can influence your environment, and begin to shape it consciously, but I’m not going to sit here behind my laptop and pretend that any of this is easy and that the outside world will make it simple for you.

One author who understands this extremely well is Johann Hari, who wrote the book, Stolen Focus, where he says:

“The truth is that you are living in a system that is pouring acid on your attention every day, and then you are being told to blame yourself and to fiddle with your own habits while the world's attention burns."

Hari identifies 12 different causes of our fractured attention spans, including the collapse of sustained reading, the velocity of information coming at us all the time, the effect of toxic foods in our diets and in the air we breathe, not to mention the increased demands and stressors faced by all of us in our daily lives.

Who among us can successfully fight back against all that on our own and still find time to meditate every morning, journal for 10 minutes every evening, get to the gym 5 times a week, and not just snap at the person who forgot to hold the door open for you when he obviously saw you coming that one time? I mean, what was that guy even thinking?

Ahem.

Anyway, Hari goes on to write:

“We must understand that the modern world is conspiring against us, working to degrade our ability to endure even the slightest difficulty.”

What all this means for the development of our self-discipline is that we need to pay attention to the effects of our environment on our self-control, and we need to devote significant time to figure out how we can make our environment support our goals, rather than distract us from them.

Who we spend time with matters. What we spend time thinking about and engaging with matters. The books we read and the information we take in matter. 

But sometimes? Sometimes it's all just too much. Sometimes we need to reduce the inputs, slow down, and only let in the very best, and what will serve us the most.

Read only the best books. Spend time with only the best people. Fuel yourself with the best foods. You deserve nothing less.

Drinking from the firehose of the modern world just confuses and scatters your attention. Hari likens it to hackers threatening a computer system:

“Sometimes, hackers decide to attack a website in a very specific way. They get an enormous number of computers to try to connect to a website all at once - and by doing this, they 'overwhelm its capacity for managing traffic, to the point where it can't be accessed by anyone else, and it goes down.' It crashes. This is called a 'denial-of-service attack.' James thinks we are all living through something like a denial-of-service attack on our minds.

'We're that server, and there's all these things trying to grab our attention by throwing information at us...It undermines our capacity for responding to anything. It leaves us in a state of either distraction, or paralysis.' We are so inundated 'that it fills up your world, and you can't find a place to get a view on all of it and realize that you're so distracted and figure out what to do about it.'"

All this means that there is just so much coming at us all the time, and that it’s more important than it ever has been before to audit where we spend our attention, and consciously re-examine who/what we allow into our lives.

Who and what makes up our environment.

Who and what we allow to shape us.

Most people (and in this case, I’m comfortable with saying “most people) just have no idea how important this is or where to get started. What they even need to look at to make sure that everything in their environment is serving them, and taking them where they want to go.

But now, you have the awareness of how important it is, how many outside forces are conspiring against us all, and how we can begin to take our lives back from the chaos of modern life.

You and I now have a competitive advantage.

All the best,

Matt Karamazov

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