What most people underestimate is that when you create your environment, your environment, in turn, creates you.

This gets overlooked in our culture obsessed with individuality. We love the hero’s journey. We think it’s because of inner grit, determination, or genius that people rise to greatness.

That’s only part of it. We are products of our environment.

Greatness isn’t born, it’s grown.

Standford Professor Brian Lowery in his book Selfless: The Social Creation of You, says we are created and shaped by communities.

Winston Churchill famously said, “We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us.”

Retired US Navy four-star admiral William Harry McRaven gave a commencement speech in 2014 and shared ten principles he learned during Navy Seal training that helped him overcome challenges in his training, his career and his life.

The first one was simple: make your bed.

Here’s a man who understands leadership, challenge and service at the very highest levels, in the most uncertain and dangerous circumstances. And the place he comes from is:

First you create your environment and then your environment creates you.

Two types of environments

If we take our cues from our early ancestors, the human life was comprised of moments of high stress and moments of rest and recovery.

You need to optimize your environment for both types of activity.

High stress environments

Stress doesn’t have to be negative. High stress environments are environments where we produce and create, where we work and make a contribution.

And there are ways you can create a high stress environment to grow your greatness.

1. Your physical surroundings matter. See above about making your bed. Create a beautiful and simple environment where you can do your best work. Make it inspiring.

2. The people you surround yourself with matter. There’s a reason artists gathered in Florence during the Renaissance and in Harlem in the 1920’s, and thinkers in French salons in the 1800’s and entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley. They surrounded themselves with a community of people who could spur them on in their creative pursuits. Dan Coyle says “Talent hotbeds are not built on identifying talent, but on constructing it, day by day.”

3. Your environment reduces or eliminates the need for willpower. According to the American Psychological Association’s annual Stress in America survey, a lack of willpower is frequently cited as people’s top reason they don’t achieve their goals. If you forget about willpower, and instead focus on removing everything in your environment that opposes your goals, your environment will become a supportive mechanism that enables you to be at your best.

Rest and Recovery Environments

In economics, there is a graphical depiction for the labor-leisure tradeoff. Up to a certain point, as an individual’s wage increases, she will decide to work more hours and have less leisure time.

As work has become enabled by technology and remote work possible, the ability to bring an end to the workday has been lost.

In effect, we have diluted our rest and recovery time and it is always under threat of another e-mail or text vying for our attention.

Go back to our ancestors for a moment. Imagine how absurd it would be if they maintained a high stress environment and were never able to rest and recover after a big hunt or escaping life threatening danger. Their systems would collapse.

So why do we think we can get by without establishing rest and recovery environments?

Because there is no more physical separation from work, we have to work at creating those boundaries.

It has never been more important.

Guarding your rest and recovery time enables you to grow your greatness.

Important connections and processing occur in your brain during rest and recovery.

Your creative genius relies on it.

Set up your rest and recovery environment to include parameters on phone use, as well as time in nature, time moving your body in physical activity, time connecting with other humans, and white space, or time to be creative.

When you’re up to something big, your environment can make or break your success.

What are you up to, and how will you create your environment to support you?

Love,

Audrey