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To successfully complete today’s mission:

✅ XYZ.

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💡 More Info:

Will you spend 5 minutes of willpower at the shops deciding NOT to buy that slab of chocolate?

Or will you spend the next 5 hours at home trying to ignore it calling your name all the way from the kitchen?

Like it or not, your environment plays a much bigger role in your success than things like motivation, or willpower, or talent, or genetics, or luck.

Those things do matter, especially in key moments throughout life… But it is your environment that affects you every minute of every day, for better or for worse.

If you don’t put any attention into what kind of environment you design around yourself then you make achieving your goals so much harder than it needs to be.

We like to think that we make all of our own choices, but very often, our choices and decisions are actually driven by our environment:

🍫 If someone puts a chocolate on your desk, suddenly they’ve changed your environment and you’re now much more likely to “choose” to eat the chocolate, even if you weren’t thinking about chocolate until then.

🍎 If you walk into the kitchen and the first thing you see is a big bowl of fruit, you’re more likely to eat some than if you walked into the kitchen and there was a jar of rusks instead.

🏋️ If you wake up determined to go the gym, only to see that you have no clean gym clothes and first need to wash them, you’re more likely to give it a skip and jump back into bed.

🚬 If you grow up in a household full of smokers, you are much more likely to become a smoker yourself than if you grew up in a household where no one smoked.

This is NOT about how much willpower you have, whether you feel motivated or not, or what kind of genetics you were born with.

It’s ENVIRONMENT DESIGN and whether it sets you up for success or failure by default.

Work Once, Benefit Forever

If you can spend 5 minutes designing your environment, it means you can then use less willpower from there on out.

You should be trying to make the GOOD stuff in life (like healthy food, gym equipment, educational books, etc) MORE noticeable, visible, accessible, and convenient.

Likewise, you should be trying to make the NOT-SO-GOOD stuff in life (like junk food, social media, television shows, etc) LESS noticeable, visible, accessible, and inconvenient.

📐How to Design Your Kitchen Environment🌍:

For example, let’s look at the kitchen.

In an ideal world, we would all have squeaky-clean kitchens stocked full of healthy food and absolutely no tempting junk food around.

This would certainly make our lives simpler… But, life isn’t simple, is it?

We can’t always get rid of all the junk food because we have families, kids, and guests who we may need to provide for. Plus, there’s definitely a place for a little bit of unhealthy food in a generally healthy diet as long as it’s done within moderation and we accept the tradeoffs.

While it is up to you to fight to raise the quality and standards of what “food” is in your household, often a more agreeable first step among household members is to make small tweaks to your environment as opposed to taking giant leaps where you completely overhaul what everyone eats overnight.

To be more practical, we suggest designing your kitchen environment with these tips:

Put healthier foods at eye level. Make them noticeable.

Put healthier foods in transparent containers. Make them visible.

Put healthier foods at the front and within easy reach. Make them accessible.

Do the opposite for less healthy foods. Either get rid of as much of them as possible, or at least make them less noticeable, less visible, and less accessible.

Clean House Policy - Clean out and stock up

These kinds of steps ensure that your environment works with you rather than against you.

The end goal is to have a supportive environment that steps in to take care of you, even on your worst days. Those days when you lack time, lack energy, or lack willpower.

Maybe this weekend is a good time to do a Kitchen Makeover? Or maybe it’s a good time to remove some toxic Facebook (or real life) friends and reconnect with the ones who inspire you to be better? Or maybe it’s a good time to cancel Netflix for a bit and stock up on some interesting books?

Just know that the environments you design around yourself can make this journey easier or harder by default.

It’s up to you to decide which it will be.