Environment Beats Character

Motivation is usually looked for inside the person and its presence explained by strength of character. It is periodically absent there without explanation, while the surrounding environment votes daily for some actions and against others.

The environment is more reliable.

Reading is easier in a library than in a room with a television and a man discussing his cousin’s renovation on the phone. In a company where training is the norm, it is easier to start moving. Where alcohol accompanies every meeting, refusing takes a separate decision every time.

Surroundings work by more than persuasion. They set what counts as normal, available and worth attention.

If the people around you:

• complain constantly;
• mock effort;
• encourage a harmful habit;
• treat any success as a betrayal of the group;
• demand participation in endless conflicts,

personal discipline is spent every day on resisting the background.

It does not follow that you should surround yourself exclusively with successful people and end relations with everyone going through a hard time. People are not motivational instruments. Friendship is not obliged to pay for itself in higher productivity.

Still, it is worth noticing which environments support the behaviour you want and which require constant defence.

Sometimes the surroundings cannot be changed. Then you can build separate patches inside them: a particular place for work, time without contact, a group around an interest, a shared habit, an agreement about boundaries, a digital environment without constant provocation.

Willpower helps you swim against the current. Reason sometimes suggests getting out on the bank and walking part of the way.

So large changes are more sensibly built through conditions, repetitions and small preconditions, rather than through an order to become a different person immediately.

A person cannot choose a different temperament, past or nervous system in the morning. But he can change habits, skills, environment, ways of reacting and the decisions he makes in recurring situations.

That changes a person too — gradually and without a ceremonial announcement of a new personality.

Large changes are easier to build through preconditions:

• remove a step before a useful action;
• add an obstacle before a harmful one;
• fix the time and the place;
• prepare the environment;
• attach the new action to an existing one;
• track repetition;
• start at a volume you can sustain.

Instead of deciding to “become athletic,” you can put your clothes out in the evening and go out for twenty minutes in the morning. Instead of “become organised” — put things back in a particular place every day. Identity often arrives later and announces that all of this was its idea.

Rituals help reduce uncertainty. This is not a sign of being unable to think. Surgical preparation, the pre-flight check and the evening tidy-up exist precisely because the mind does not want to make dozens of identical decisions from scratch every time.

A ritual becomes a problem when:

• it cannot be changed after conditions change;
• breaking it causes disproportionate anxiety;
• the form becomes more important than the result;
• it takes more and more time;
• the person stops understanding its function.

Self-control remains useful, but it should not be spent on tests that can be removed from the environment in advance.

In practice self-control depends on sleep, stress, habit, environment, emotional state and the number of decisions. It is stronger at some times and weaker at others, but the idea of a single reserve that is literally spent like a battery charge is too simple.

The practical conclusion is sound anyway: do not create unnecessary tests.

If a person is trying to eat fewer crisps, having no crisps at home is more reliable than a daily victory over an open bag. If the phone gets in the way of work, putting it away is more useful than demonstrating character every two minutes.

Sensible management of desires does not consist of total war on them.

A desire reports a need, a pleasure, curiosity or a habit. It is not obliged to be satisfied immediately, and it does not become an enemy merely because it appeared.

Between impulse and action you can insert:

• a pause;
• a question about consequences;
• a limit;
• a substitute;
• a smaller dose;
• a postponement;
• a deliberate refusal.

A satisfied desire really does often clear space for the next one. A person gets used to a new car, house, clothes and income level. That does not make the pleasure false. It just rarely becomes a permanent state.

The trouble starts when every new acquisition is supposed to remove the unease for good. No object ever signed up for that job.

It shows clearly in people quitting smoking. Someone whose smoke break is the main way of talking to colleagues is fighting not nicotine but loneliness during the working day. As long as the choice is between a cigarette and character, he loses almost every time. The moment he starts going out for the same breaks without a cigarette, or finds another reason to stand around with people, the task turns from a test of will into rearranging furniture.

Hence a conclusion that wounds the ego: a successful change looks not like a feat but like an absence of events. The person who moved his desk, deleted an app and came to an agreement with his household cannot then tell a story of overcoming. Nothing interesting happened to him.