Jay Shetty

Not a dramatic thing, the smallest possible environmental adjustment that removes friction between you and who you're trying to become.

You don't rise to your goals.

As James Clear says, you fall to your environment.

So build an environment worth falling to.

Mindset six, the most dangerous story you tell is the one about yourself.

Every person walking the planet is a narrator of their own life.

And like all narrators, we're unreliable.

We edit, we emphasize certain chapters and minimize others.

We assign causation where there's only correlation.

We cast ourselves in roles, sometimes the hero, sometimes the victim, always the protagonist, and we mistake those roles for truth.

The story you tell about yourself is the most powerful force in your life.

More powerful than your circumstances, more powerful than your talent, more powerful than your opportunities.

Because the story decides which opportunities you seek

which risks you take, which relationships you believe you deserve, and which version of your future you allow yourself to move forward.

The psychologist Dan McAdams at Northwestern University has spent his career studying what he calls narrative identity, the story each person constructs about who they are and how they came to be that way, and his research has found something both obvious and profound.

The content of your self-narrative predicts your psychological well-being, your resilience and your capacity for growth more reliably than almost any other variable.

Not what happened to you, how you story what happened to you.

Two people can go through almost identical experiences – the difficult childhood, the professional failure, the painful relationship – and construct completely different narratives from the same raw material.

One person stories it as evidence of their damage, the other stories it as the origin of their depth.

The experiences were similar.