How a good environment contributes to your success
You must have heard “Human being is a machine”. Have you ever thought about how could it be? See! A machine is operational by the involvement of some intakes, and it produces results after facing some circumstances, right? The output is completely dependent upon the quality of input.
Similarly, the human mind also needs some intake to operate your complete body. The human brain is always in observation mode. It has layers upon layers just like a tissue roll.
And each layer has its task, but the ultimate goal of the brain is to learn and implement, learn from the past/present and implement in the future. Every habit of yours has something to do with what you have seen in your past.
The way you perceive things, the number of decisions you make per day, the way you examine what is best for you and what is not, the quality of your habits, and where you are standing today, all depend on your previous surroundings from where your brain learns and drives you accordingly.
What is an environment?
The term “Environment” is broad, it has several definitions and meanings. The basic terminology shall be defined as the surroundings of living and non-living objects that influence a human being and designs its lifestyle ethics.
However, there are some sorts of environments, such as;
1. Natural
2. Industrial
3. Social
The most influencing environment type is the social environment. That is a clear aspect of one’s life and this side of the environment completely drives a person.
“Show me your friends and I’ll show you your future”- Dan Pena
What is a social environment?
A social environment is a society surrounding your life, ethic codes by some cultures and traditions influence one person’s life accordingly. If you grind a little bit more.
Your social environment is your institution, family, friends, business partners, colleagues, and every group of people you spend a significant time with.
As we discussed earlier, your brain is always in seeking mode, and a few of the layers are always ready to implement things in your conditions and situations, things that it has learned through your environment.
This mechanism contributes to our regular decisions and in the long term tends to design our whole lifestyle and perspectives. So the question might be in thoughts, that if the environment is important for success or not.
How do you define success?
Before evaluating the amount of influence of the environment on success, you need to understand your definition of success.
Every single human being is living in its world, it is a one planet hall but everyone has their compartments, that is their world inside their head. See, the planet is one, but lives are different. And so every single human being has different approaches to success and risks.
Doesn’t matter how much time you spend with a significant person, perspectives and reasons to live would always differ at some point. Take a look at married couples, a husband and wife sleep together, and live together, but they both have different reasons to wake up every morning. They have different reasons for what they regularly do and what their daily objectives are.
Success is the same destination everyone wants to reach at, but routes and causes are different for anyone.
Success for a starving kid is just having enough food to survive, success for an uneducated is just getting a blue-collar job, and success for a successful person is to get more success.
Money & fame doesn’t matter to a blind person, he hasn’t seen the sunlight yet, success for him is light in his eyes, while an Instagram public figure might be unhappy because she skipped the golden hour and missed her “sun-kissed” picture for today.
You define your success by what you assume is missing and shall be achieved to experience the desired reward. There is not a single definition of success, because only you can answer what is success to you.
So if you are being hectically busy in your 9 to 5, take out a moment and ask yourself “Why” am I doing this, then continue this do it until you get the answer for your 5th “Why”.
Why is the environment important to success?
“Everyone is born a genius, but the process of living de-geniuses them.”- Buckminster Fuller
Above mentioned quote clears the question in a good manner. It isn’t something to be unaware that the environment contributes to your success in a much more crucial way than you may think. The beliefs and culture of your surroundings are absorbed by your personality and it drives you accordingly. The quality of your regular decisions and activities is dependent upon what you have learned, it is a journey from what you see to what you seek.
Behind this fact, there is a technical mechanism of the human brain. It tends to learn your environment and thus creates or re-designs your beliefs. If you ask yourself, were you the same person in school as you are now after joining college? The answer would be no, there must be some change in how you perceive things now.
You adapt cultures and ethics to the environment you spend a significant time in. An average human being experiences 3 sorts of environments in a regular life span, Work environment, home environment, and friend circle environment. These 3 types are settled under the umbrella of the Social Environment.
And it is not usual to have all three of them on the same page. You might be communicating with your colleagues in a different way than you do with your friends, especially at home.
And your environment tends to educate you when it gets inside you. Environment indirectly plays a huge part in your success, but a major role is played by you.
Success is dependent on you. If you have the right approaches to educate yourself, if you are seeking the right mindset that is required for success, then only you can perform your mindset onto a real page. But yes, the environment highly contributes to your success, and your failures as well.
How the habit loop is created by our environment?
The brain is completely adaptive. It actively observes everything around you and drives you on your forces accordingly. What is around in your environment. Your eyes, ears, hand senses, smell and taste sense, and an unseen mind observation are the key channels for your brain to seek your outer world and decide what are your routines that you shall stick to.
It observes activities around you, then what you observe and listen to frequent basis is then converted into a routine.
If you were hungry last night around 2:am, chances are you will be today as well, for a natural cause. However, doing it for around 4 days will give your brain a cue for consistency in this activity, now your brain will be designing a routine and converting it into a habit loop shortly. Once it becomes a habit, it becomes your representation of the entire day.
The habit loop consists of 3 major components, Cue, Routine, and Reward. Every single person on earth acquires habits based on rewards, that are followed up with routines, which are triggered by a cue.
Such as, feeling hungry at midnight was a Cue for you to eat, walking up to the kitchen, opening the fridge, and pulling out salmon slices and hotdogs becomes a routine, and the reward is the satisfaction of bingeing with Netflix.
It goes on, and your brain finds a specific cue and reward, then surround you with a routine, and it becomes a habit.
The same happens with your social circle, listening to more about hot girls with your friends will arouse your brain to make you fall into a routine to search porn, then a reward to release the spinning sperms.
The next day, the time when you watched it will become a cue, routine, and reward is already there. One habit could give birth to other habits as well.
Such as, after bingeing on hotdogs with Netflix, you might feel an urge for alcohol, it goes on and on until you end up in a bar every weekend, the time comes near when you begin overthinking about your fuel and drink expenses judging the problem is with the bar, however, the problem was with your midnight meal that gave birth to other habits.
Your brain hates to make effort, that is why it is always in learning mode to settle you into the automatic habit loop, so it could focus on other things.
