Quick overview

To become successful you must set yourself up for success instead of relying on willpower.

This book does a great job at explaining something that other self-help/success books don’t focus on often, your environment and how it can impact you in positive or negative ways.

My notes

Why Willpower Doesn’t Work. According to psychological research, your willpower is like a muscle. It’s a finite resource that depletes with use. As a result, by the end of your strenuous days, your willpower muscles are exhausted, and you’re left to your naked and defenseless self— with zero control to stop the nighttime munchies and time wasters.

Your Environment Shapes You. Jim Rohn that we are the “the average of the five people you spend the most time with.”

Purposefully acting in ways you know will influence your psychology is what psychologists call “precognition.” The idea is quite simple: Something happens before, or “pre,” the cognitive and emotional state. In other words, you can purposefully trigger, manipulate, and predict your inner experience through the use of specific behaviors. If you want to feel motivated, for example, all you need to do is clap your hands intensely for a few seconds, sprint around your house, and take a cold shower. Ask someone on a date, and regardless of the outcome, you’ll see yourself as someone who takes risks. This shift in psychology will then alter future decisions.

Your environment and you are two indivisible parts of the same whole.

The expectations of those around you establish your own personal rules and expectations. Psychologists call this the Pygmalion effect.

Instead of trying to prequalify to be someone, create the environment that will qualify you to become that person now.

If you want to get stronger, your workouts need to be difficult. If you want to become world class at what you do, your work needs to be better and more challenging. You need to have high expectations to succeed. You need to be tasked with projects beyond your current capacity, forcing you to plant deeper roots as a person.

You may not have a full week to rest and recover . Instead, you could begin to schedule in “disconnected days,” where you take a day off work and give yourself the full day to simply rest and recover. During that time, it would be helpful to leave your regular environment, and perhaps drive at least thirty minutes away to get adequate space. During these disconnected days, you could spend a good amount of time thinking, relaxing, learning, and then writing in your journal. The reason you want to get out of your day-to-day routine and environment is so you can step out of the trees of your life and see the forest. You need some fresh air. You need to breathe and reset— just like fasting for your body— from the constant stress of going.

The core purpose for having a morning routine is to put yourself into a peak state in the morning— so you can then operate from that state for the rest of your day. Rather than being reactive, addicted, and unconscious in your morning, it’s far better to proactively put yourself in a peak state in a ritualistic manner.

Subtraction is Productivity

“Surround yourself with people who remind you more of your future than your past.” Dan Sullivan

Elimination is the fastest path to progress and forward momentum. In order to transcend your current environment, you’ll need to remove the excess baggage keeping you in your environment. It will take a little bit of work. But the payoff will far outweigh the cost. The key things to delete from your life include: Physical stuff; All distractions; Attractive but ultimately bad decisions; People who don’t make sense; Commitments you never should have made; and Working memory.

Make Positive Choices Automatic

How to Use Implementation Intentions An essential component of environmental design is outsourcing your working or short-term memory to your environment. You don’t want to have to consciously think about your behaviors and choices. Instead, you want to create environments that organically foster the behavior you want. You want to create environments that either force the best out of you, or allow you to fully recover, reset, and reconnect.

An effective way to optimize your environment is by structuring it with forcing functions, which are self-imposed situational factors that literally force you to act and achieve what you intend.

Research has found that when you have a “growth” mind-set, you are far more likely to persist when things aren’t going well. You don’t look at failures the same way most people do. Rather than as a negative, you view failures as feedback, something to learn from. Thus, highly committed and invested individuals with a growth mind-set are often viewed by others as ridiculous and risk-prone. With so much negative feedback and failure, the logical thing to do is quit. Yet, you continue to advance not solely because you are invested, but because internally you must continue forward. You don’t care how many times you fail. You don’t care what other people think about you. You are going to keep trying and trying until you succeed or can no longer keep trying. How can you invest more of yourself and your resources into your goals as a forcing function?

Is your routine the same every day? If so, how can you change things up? When things are new and different, even if it’s just moving your furniture around, it’s much easier to be present to the moment, rather than mindless and apathetic to routine and sameness.

You can create enriched environments through the use of forcing functions. The most powerful forcing functions are:

• high investment;
• social pressure;
• high consequence for poor performance;
• high difficulty;
• and novelty.

In what ways can you begin embedding these environmental components into your own life?

The core concepts involved in being an adaptive learner include the following: Having faith that you can adapt and change, or what psychologist Carol Dweck calls the “growth mind-set.” This runs contrary to having a “fixed mind-set” and involves being a flexible learner, which means you don’t get stuck in repetitious learning habits and using a select few learning styles. Committing 100 percent to the change you seek, which means you’re willing to change who you are to uphold or achieve your commitment. Learning how to develop tolerances to the things you fear most. Learning how to deal with and even embrace difficult and unpleasant emotions. This involves what psychologists call emotional regulation and requires you to directly expose yourself to your fears and resistances.

According to fifty years of research on learning theory, we all have a dominant learning style. We all also have several backup learning styles we rely on when we’re in a difficult situation. However, there are also several other learning styles that each of us neglect and avoid. Some of these learning styles include the following:

• Imagining: coming up with ideas
• Reflecting: learning about the ideas you come up with
• Analyzing: synthesizing what you’ve learned and making strategic plans about what to do with those ideas
• Deciding: making a decision on ONE WAY you will go with a specific idea
• Acting: DOING SOMETHING toward the attainment of your idea
• Experiencing: learning from multiple angles, whether that be with other people or by creating something, failing, or attempting

If you skip any of these learning styles, you’re not likely to get very far. But that’s exactly what we all do. We all have learning preferences. We all prefer to do things “our way.”

“It takes a certain type of person to want to surf big waves, when the horizon goes black and a huge wall of water is bearing down on you, you have to want that wave in order to make it! If you hesitate or aren’t fully committed you are going to get eaten!”In order to catch and ride a big wave, you must be 100 percent committed. If there is any hesitancy whatsoever, you will fail. You may even fail if you fully commit. But the only way you might succeed is if you’re dead set on seeing it to the end.

The question is, how do you become 100 percent committed ? That’s the very question I’ve been studying throughout my doctoral research as an organizational psychologist. Specifically, I’ve studied a concept I call “the Point of No Return,” which is the moment it becomes easier to move toward your goals than to avoid them. Actually , your point of no return is the instant that pursuing your highest ambitions becomes your only option. You’re fully committed to what you want to do, and this commitment creates a deep sense of confidence and congruence.

They offer the following things as valuable pieces of living a full and complete life:

• Delayed gratification
• Discomfort
• Frustration
• Dissatisfaction
• Pain
• Tragedy
• Awkwardness
• Embarrassment
• Uncertainty

These feelings aren’t necessarily enjoyable in the moment. However, these and other unpleasant emotional experiences often produce incredible outcomes. It is only by going through difficult and challenging experiences that you can evolve. If you constantly avoid pain and mask your emotions, you’ll never grow.

Being an adaptive learner is all about mastering your environment. The only way for you to master new and difficult environments is to force yourself out of your shell and habits. Yes, you have a learning preference, or way of doing things. But “your way”will keep you stuck. Instead, you should mindfully assess the situation at hand and do what is required. If you have plans of making rapid strides in your personal evolution and success, you’ll need to create scenarios with enormous challenge and responsibility. In order for you to rise up to the situations you put yourself in, you’ll need to be 100 percent committed, just as if you’re riding a big wave. The fastest path to this level of commitment is investing in yourself and your decision. You’ll also need to embrace uncertain situations, which will require you to actually seek and approach difficult emotions.

Outsource Your Motivation to High-Pressure Environments.

Learning something new is all about memory and how you use it. At first, your prefrontal cortex—which stores your working (or short-term) memory—is really busy figuring out how the task is done. But once you’re proficient, the prefrontal cortex gets a break. In fact, it’s freed up by as much as 90 percent. Once this happens, you can perform that skill automatically, leaving your conscious mind to focus on other things. This level of performance is called automaticity, and reaching it depends on what psychologists call overlearning or overtraining. The process of getting a skill to automaticity involves four steps, or stages:

• Repeated learning of a small set of information. If you’re playing basketball, for instance, that might mean shooting the same shot over and over. The key here is to go beyond the initial point of mastery.
• Make your training progressively more difficult. You want to make the task harder and harder until it’s too hard. Then you bring the difficulty back down slightly, in order to stay near the upper limit of your current ability.
• Add time constraints. For example, some math teachers ask students to work on difficult problems with increasingly shortened timelines. Adding the component of time challenges you in two ways. First, it forces you to work quickly, and second, it saps a portion of your working memory by forcing it to remain conscious of the ticking clock.
• Practice with increasing memory load—that is, trying to do a mental task with other things on your mind. Put simply, it’s purposefully adding distractions to your training regimen.

Essentially, you want your understanding of something to be fluid and flexible. You want to be able to apply your learning in different contexts and for different purposes. Thus, you learn your skill inside and out.

As you immediately apply, you’ll change. You’ll improve, and then you’ll want to expand your horizons. You’ll begin to see where the “cap” of your new environment is, and then you’ll discover how to transcend that cap. You don’t want to get stuck in a single environment for too long, just as you don’t want to get stuck with a single mentor too long. To quote Lao Tzu, “When the student is ready the teacher will appear. When the student is truly ready, the teacher will disappear.”

When you create enriched environments of positive stress and high demand, your motivation to succeed is sky-high without any conscious effort on your part. You are not in conflict with your environment but being pulled forward by it. The specific strategies for outsourcing your motivation to enriched environments include:

• Installing several layers of external pressure and accountability;
• Making your goals public;
• Setting high expectations for customers and fans; Investing up front on your projects and scheduling them in advance;
• Surrounding yourself with people who have higher personal standards than you have;
• Competing with people who have a much higher skill level than you do by viewing competition as a form of collaboration;
• Making a commitment and then practicing or performing these in public settings. The external pressure of performing for others only heightens your internal pressure to succeed;
• Getting enough clarity to move forward a few steps toward your goal;
• Hiring a mentor who is world-class at what you want to do; and
• Joining a mastermind group filled with role models and people who will help you elevate your life.

Increasing numbers of people are working on computers, yet doing a wide variety of tasks on those computers. Doing all of those different tasks in the same physical space is not the optimal approach. Instead, there should be different environments in which you work, which clearly link to the type of work you’re doing. Each environment should trigger the mental state needed to do each type of work.

Every environment and every industry operate under various rules. Those rules are not ironclad. Even physical laws, such as gravity, can be harnessed and manipulated. For centuries, the travel industry worked within the realm of gravity keeping people on the ground. The collaborations of scientists, innovators, and entrepreneurs have always shattered the “traditional” rules and replaced them with new and better ones. That’s how both innovation and evolution work : reframing the rules, structures, and norms of an environment.

When you believe you are the sole cause of your success, you commit what psychologists call the fundamental attribution error. You attribute your success to yourself.

Your success, in the way it happened, could not have happened without your environment. It was the situation and countless other people that made you. As entrepreneur Michael Fishman said, “Self-made is an illusion. There are many people who played divine roles in you having the life that you have today.

No Matter Where You Are, You Can Change

You can change. But you must change your environment. You must continually change your environment every time you’re ready to upgrade yourself, which I hope becomes a pattern throughout your life. Never stop evolving. Never stop being transformed through experience and relationships, whether that be with others or even with your higher power. You can do this.