External Environment: At home and on the road

We are the product of our environment so it would be foolish to neglect it!

What you might call a pleasent environment...

The external environment is the world around you. It has a huge influence on all of us - essentially we are the products of our environment.

😔 The bad news is that if we have shitty environments it can be really hard to succeed.

😁 The good news is that we often have at least SOME control over our environment - often a surprising amount - and by harnessing this we can improve our chances of winning.

Although I will talk about this in the context of health, this applies to all domains in life (consider trying to be productive in a noisy messy office for example).

📖 This is beautifully highlighted when I travel. Both in Portugal and Mexico, I have home bases with curated environments and it's easy to stay in shape effortlessly. When I went to the US for a few months, it wasn't long enough for me to bother setting up a base (I moved around a lot) but it was long enough for me to slide a little bit.

Now, in this case, I had zero issues with this because I knew it was temporary. I could have gotten stressed and tried to force the issue but I didn't want to waste bandwidth and I had systems in place for damage limitation (read below: Taking your external environment with you). This also wasn't my first rodeo - I know I would 'rebound' back to my baseline rapidly on returning to Europe, my home environment.

In this article I'm going to cover:

• Why the external environment is important

• Curating your environment

• Taking your external environment with you

• Templates Concept

• When your external environment fails (enter the internal environment)

• Isn't this all a bit extreme? (No)

• Key Takeaways

Sure enough, it didn't take long to 'bounce back'

Why this is important

If you spend most of your time in an environment that is not optimized for what you value then wtf are you doing??

Sure, it takes some upfront effort but the magnitude of the return is disproportional.

It's not even laziness I don't think. It's just a lack of appreciation for how powerful the environment can be.

If you want to win at life, manipulating your environment is one of the easiest and highest-leverage activities you can do.

Over time, it also compounds as you build your interval environment (mindset) and identity. It becomes a positive feedback loop - your external environment feeds into your mindset and identity which makes winning even easier.

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Internal vs external environments: I often use this concept in coaching. The external environment is everything around you as described - it is relatively easy to curate and very powerful. However, it does nothing if you're not in that environment. In contrast, your internal environment or mindset goes with you everywhere. It is harder to control but once you have mastery of it, success becomes effortless. Both are essential to win. 

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A well-curated environment will do 90% of the work needed to get you into shape with minimal willpower.

Don't believe me?

Imagine living in a villa with 9 trainers, health coaches, and nutritionists. There is a gym on-site and it's based in Thailand so the weather is perfect all the time. There is group exercise daily and one of the nutritionists cooks - in this scenario health would be effortless. This is an extreme example to prove the point -  anyone can at least start to move towards this.

The beauty of the external environment is that you put the effort in upfront when motivation is high. This makes it easy to do. Then, this carries you through when motivation is lower, which is inevitable. It always baffles me when people think they can power through with motivation alone. This is why most people fail on diets. If willpower or motivation lapses even briefly, then that can undo all your effort.

“You have to be lucky all the time. We only have to be lucky once.” ~ Your diet demons

Curating your environment

I am not a fan of prescriptions and you may read what I do and think "I can't do that" or "It's alright for him, it's his job."

First off, this is bullshit. Stop making excuses. You can either see all of the obstacles or you can see all of the opportunities. It's your choice.