What are the requirements for pursuing a goal? Is it a matter of having motivation and drive? Have a weekly schedule that details your to-do list? Or perhaps there is still a missing element.

We prefer to believe that we have control over our actions, you see. that we can achieve our goals if we put our minds to doing anything. The truth is that outside influences have a simple time swaying our minds. Whether we like it or not, we are a result of our surroundings.

Let me give you an example of this by telling you a tale about a store that sells Rubik’s cubes.

The Rubik’s Cube Conundrum

If you ran a retail store, what section would you place a book on solving Rubik’s Cube?

A business owner purchased some Rubik’s Cubes and placed them in the store’s gaming area. The customers loved these brand-new toys. The entrepreneur soon came to the realisation that customers who purchased Rubik’s Cubes would be interested in reading how to solve them. Then, manuals for the Rubik’s Cube were ordered. These manuals were kept in the bookshelf. Sales were recorded on the revised guide many months later. They weren’t performing particularly well, and their sales were well behind those of the Rubik’s Cube.

The storeowner found the lack of book sales confusing, since he thought that a large percentage of people who bought the Cube would want to buy the book as well. Eventually, an employee at the store made a suggestion: it might be a better idea if the guide was moved from the book section into the gaming section, where it could be placed right next to the Rubik’s Cube.

At first, it made sense to place the instruction manuals in the books department. However, it made more sense from a business standpoint to place the Rubik’s Cubes and related manuals side by side. The employee proposed that placing the book next to the Rubik’s Cube would increase the likelihood that customers would buy it. The owner decided to give it a try after giving it some thought. The result was instantaneous; book sales skyrocketed as soon as the Rubik’s Cube instruction manuals were moved to a more accessible spot for buyers to purchase them.

Your Environment Influences You

Every day, we face tons of options. They bombard us, from when to get out of bed to what we should do next. Some of these choices are tough. Others require patience and dedication. Of course, there are also the tempting choices that we try to resist. They can creep up on us when we don’t realize it. By the time we do, it’s too late. But like any other cautionary tale, we end up falling prey to certain choices because of the environmental cues around us.

Environmental cues are the objects in our surroundings that trigger certain thoughts and desires, causing us to behave in certain ways.

Your decisions are largely influenced by what’s around you:

1. Your work is too far away from your desk, causing you to procrastinate on getting started.
2. The plates you use to eat dinner have a wide surface area, so you tend to fill up with more than you need.
3. You browse a website and see a suggested article or video, which you become curious about and click on.

So even if you set out to complete a task with the best of intentions, it’s no use if your environment dictates otherwise. It’s in our nature to get distracted easily. We look around ourselves, at other people, objects, and the way our environment is set up to determine how we should act.

This behaviour is caused by humans’ innate cognitive miserliness. Meaning that we seek for simpler ways to go through our reality because we value our capacity for mental processing. Before it exhausts, we only have a finite quantity of willpower left over to make decisions. Our minds then grow exhausted and overloaded. As a result, the majority of our everyday routines consist of the same routines.

We repeatedly practise some behaviours, such as locking the front door and brushing our teeth. It takes a lot of our willpower to act unconventionally or put in extra effort without seeing a direct benefit. We can only handle so much before our mental stamina wanes. Thus, we frequently select the route that presents the least amount of difficulty.

In other words, we enjoy looking for time and effort-saving shortcuts. And if a task we want to do is out of our reach, we’ll likely just put it on hold in favour of something more expedient for the moment (especially if it is difficult and needs a lot of effort).

Design Your Surroundings To Make Good Choices

We frequently believe that completing a task simply requires going out and doing it. We think that if we have the desire, we can achieve our goals. However, as opposed to what we desire to accomplish, our environment determines what we choose to do. It is more difficult to make the appropriate decisions when there are options nearby that are distracting or have unpleasant results.

On the other hand, if your environment only provides you with choices that are productive, you are free to act in your own best interests. So, if you want to focus on enhancing your habits, consider how you may make it more comfortable for you to do so by looking about you. You may, for instance, use the “Page-Turner Technique” to quickly pick up activities you had just started working on the day before.

You can use environmental cues to work towards an outcome faster and easier. This can be applied in different aspects of life:

1. To get work done, minimize distractions that take away from your focus.
2. If you want to eat better, put healthier foods and water within close reach.
3. When you try to persuade someone to perform a task, explain and set it up so that it’s convenient for the person to do so.

Wanting something done is not enough. If you want a certain outcome, you need an environment that gets you closer towards it.

Changing Yourself Begins With Changing Your Environment

Making changes to your environment makes it easier to do what’s right without having to think about staying motivated. If you can set up your surroundings to make better decisions easier, then you can set yourself up to practice better habits.

Often, we think that change comes from within. We believe that achieving a goal is about changing ourselves and what we think. But we discount the fact that optimizing our environment to make better choices significantly impacts our actions.

The adjustments we make can initially appear modest. Moving a book you wish to read from the shelf to your desk, for example, might not seem like a big deal. However, it becomes much simpler to act morally when you make small changes to your environment. These modifications may have a significant impact on your ability to accomplish your goals in the long run.