The Most Effective Way To Change Your Behavior and Improve Your Life

Changing your environment is the easiest and most powerful way to change your behavior.

Altering the things in your home and your office and carefully picking the people you spend time with will bring you greater and more effortless results than anything else.

But you’re an objective, self-determined, independent, unique snowflake, you say? No, you’re not.

The reason you’re often so good a predicting other people’s behavior and so bad at predicting your own is because when forecasting other people’s actions you always take context into consideration. With yourself, you assume you’re objective.

We are often lazy creatures of habit, strongly influenced by the world around us. We don’t even use our leisure time to do what we really enjoy, we do what’s easiest. And without a prod we don’t do the ethical thing, we do what’s convenient.

But the predictability of our reliance on context points to a remarkably effective method for improving one’s life:

Manipulate your environment so as to make what you should do easy and what you shouldn’t do hard.

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This piece originally appeared on Barking Up the Wrong Tree.

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