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It’s said that your habits eventually become your destiny, so if you want success in your life then you have to develop good habits. On that note, one of the better books I’ve read recently is Atomic Habits by James Clear. While I tend to stay away from titles that the bookstore seems to have bought too much of, I found out there was a pretty good reason why it’s recommended so much after reading it. It’s actually really good as there’s a lot of useful and important information inside.

Of course, reading alone is useless if you don’t apply what you learned so among the things I learned there I’m currently trying out habit stacking, the 2 minute rule, and setting up your environment. There are so many more lessons and examples inside, but for this article, we’re going to talk about that last one as it’s one of the easiest, and probably one of the most impactful.

Your habits change depending on the room you are in and the cues in front of you. Environment is the invisible hand that shapes human behavior.

James Clear

Your actions and choices are based on your environment

You stay quiet at a library, you drink and dance at clubs, you work while in the office, and you get wary when you’re on a dangerous street at night. Obviously, depending on where you are, you will act differently, and that’s one way that your actions and choices differ depending on your environment.

As for how else your environment affects your choices and habits, let’s have some other examples. Let’s say you want to be healthier, but the only food in your house is junk food. You want to have a stronger body, but you have no exercise equipment and there’s no gym in your area. You want to learn how to be a better person, how to invest money, or how to become a better leader, but you never bought any books about those things you want to learn.

Do you think you’d be successful in those things that you want to do? Of course not. Sadly that’s how most of our lives are built. Somehow, the environment we live in just ended up that way because it’s what’s easy or convenient. We also just copied what’s popular, what other people around us do, and we keep doing things that have always been done that way even though it’s no longer good for us.

Carl Jung, a famous psychologist, once said that unless we make the subconscious conscious, it will direct our lives and we shall call it fate. In other words, unless we pay attention to things we’ve been doing automatically, then those things will shape our future, for better or worse. Unfortunately, those include bad habits that ruin our lives.

So what can we do about it then? Building good habits is usually pretty hard. You’d need a lot of time and willpower, but most of us are just too tired and busy with our jobs and all of our responsibilities.

Fortunately there’s an easier way to build good habits which is the easier way to improve your life.

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