Jay Shetty

This was the practice of deliberately surrounding yourself with people whose presence pulled you toward your highest self.

Not just people you liked, people who by virtue of who they were and how they lived experienced

made it easier for you to be who you were trying to become.

The tradition understood that humans are profoundly inevitably influenced by their environment, especially their social environment.

And rather than fighting that influence through discipline, the wisdom was to design the environment so that the influence worked for you rather than against you.

Research by social psychologist Nicholas Christakis at Yale confirmed this at scale.

In a landmark study tracking thousands of people over decades, he found that behaviors, including happiness, obesity, smoking, and even loneliness, spread through social networks like contagion.

You're not just influenced by your friends.

You are influenced by your friends, friends, friends.

Three degrees of separation.

The environment is that powerful.

Here's the immediate application.

You don't have to quit on all your friends.

Three questions to ask about your current environment.

First, does your physical space make your most important behaviors easier or harder?

If you want to meditate, is there a clear, quiet space that invites it?

If you want to create, is your workspace organized around creation or is everything arranged around distraction?

Second, does your social environment, the five people you spend the most time with, make you more or less likely to become who you're trying to be?

Not whether you love them, whether their orbit is pulling you forward or holding you in place.

Third, what is the single easiest change you could make to your environment today, right now, that would make your most important goal more likely?