The Easier Way to Improve Your Life

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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.

We can shape our world for success

In one chapter of his book, James Clear talked about Anne Thorndike’s project in Massachusetts General Hospital. We’ve all heard about how drinking more water is healthy, right? Well Anne wanted more people to make that healthier choice. She was successful in that project, and she did it all without even talking to people, or posting signs or notices.

What did she do? Simple. She just increased the number of water bottle locations in the cafeteria. Water became available at all refrigerators, and baskets of water bottles were placed all over food locations. The result? Soda sales dropped by 11.4% and water bottle sales increased by 25.8%. People made healthier drink choices automatically, just by making the good choice more available.

What can we learn from that? By making some simple improvements to our environment, we can make better choices automatically. In short, we can actually shape our world for success.

If you want to make a habit a big part of your life, make the cue a big part of your environment.

James Clear

Make good choices more visible, and bad choices less accessible.

What good habit do you want to develop? Making a few small improvements to your environment will go a long way to helping you achieve whatever it is you want to achieve over time. Here are some examples on what you can do at home or the places you stay at.

If you want to eat healthier:

• Put healthier food (fruits, packs of nuts/trail mix, raisins, etc.) right in the middle of your dinner table or kitchen counter.
• Hide the junk food in hard to reach cabinets or some other inconvenient location.
• Put water bottles on the front area of your fridge, and shove the soda at the very back.

If you want to be wiser and more knowledgeable:

• Put the book you want to read right where you spend most of your day, like on top of your keyboard, your favorite spot on the house, your usually spot on the sofa, etc. You’ll find that you’ll start reading it more often (as long as you avoid distractions).
• Stack your favorite or most valuable books where you hang out, and remind yourself to read a couple of pages or to flip them open every time.

If you want to exercise more:

• Schedule your exercise days, and on those days instead of leaving your gear in the garage or closet, put your exercise clothes or equipment right in the middle of your room, side of the hallway, or somewhere prominent so you’ll see them and remember.
• Put exercise equipment near where you spend your day. You can do dumbbell curls while watching YouTube or TV, or use grip strength trainers while scrolling through the net.
  • (Note: I unknowingly did this myself. I remember to do practice swings as my exercise every other morning because my bokken/wooden swords are sticking out from behind my bed. I just pull them out before I go outside to stretch and begin my day.)

If you want to practice things you’ve recently learned (e.g. self-improvement or productivity tricks): 

• Write them on some index cards or sticky notes and stick them where you work.
• Put quote cards or reminders near your computer monitor.
• Stick checklists near your work desk.

The main principle is that if you want to build a good habit, put it where you will ALWAYS see it, and where you will use it automatically. As for bad habits, if you want to reduce them or stop them, then you hide them and make them less accessible.

This is the secret to self-control. Make the cues of your good habits obvious and the cues of your bad habits invisible.

James Clear

Depending on your goals and the things you want to achieve, if you want to make positive changes in life, one of the easiest ways to do it is to simply improve your environment. Think long and hard about the things you value in life, and THEN think about the changes and improvements that you can make to your home and workstation. Even small improvements (like putting exercise equipment in your bedside) can massively improve your quality of life in the near future. After all, if the good choice is always there, then over time you’ll get better results because of your constant good decisions.

Wouldn’t that be worth trying out?

In the long run, we become a product of the environment that we live in. To put it bluntly, I have never seen someone consistently stick to positive habits in a negative environment.

James Clear

Make the good choices easy and you will do them more often. Eventually, they will become automatic. They will become the good habits that shape your destiny for success.