Jay Shetty

The person who wants to eat better but keeps their kitchen full of food that undermines that goal is not going to succeed through willpower.

The person who wants to read more but keeps their phone on their bedside table instead of a book is not going to succeed through discipline.

The person who wants to grow but surrounds themselves exclusively with people who are comfortable with stagnation

is not going to succeed through intention.

This is not pessimism.

This is power.

Because if the environment is the primary driver of behavior, then designing your environment is the most powerful thing you can do for your goals.

More powerful than motivation, more powerful than a vision board, more powerful than any amount of willpower.

The ancient Indian concept of Sangha understood this completely.

Sangha or Satsang literally means the company of truth.

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.