Choices Are The Building Block Of Reality

I’m a behaviorist through and through. I believe that our life is created by the actions we take and the actions taken within the environment around us. Someone who consistently takes action to work out, practice portion control, and follow a nutrition plan will be healthier. Someone who invites more people to a party will have more people attend. Someone who takes more shots will score more goals.

It’s a matter of cause and effect. Actions are the inputs, and the results that manifest in our reality are the outputs. There is no other way for things to change. Thinking differently doesn’t influence an outcome, that only comes from interacting with the world through action.

Having said that, there’s something even more specific that governs what happens in our lives: Choices. It’s something you’ve heard before. In “The Compound Effect” Darren Hardy says “You make your choices and then your choices make you.”  The reason choices are so influential is because they determine what actions are taken. There’s a choice that precedes every action, making it the building block of our reality.

The reason we may feel like our destiny is out of our control is because we’re not aware of the choices we’re making that are shaping it. Unconsciously we’re constantly making choices that determine what to say, how to feel, what to value, how to act, and what to do. These choices are made on your behalf and shape reality accordingly.

The path to building a better life, through making better choices, happens in two ways. The first is to live more consciously. This means that you’re making your choices with a full understanding of their implications. You’re imposing what you decide to do in the world rather than passively doing whatever you’re programmed to do. Central to making better conscious choices is the idea of agency. You are in full control of your life and at any moment can choose to radically disrupt it should you want to. The size of the disruption determines the extent of how much your life will change.

The second path is to redesign your environment so that your unconscious choices are more aligned with the things that you consciously want. This is a form of taking action but instead of doing the thing itself, you work on the conditions and context around the thing. The ways you’ve chosen to intervene within your environment reshapes your unconscious path. And as your actions follow suit, without you realizing it, your reality goes with it.

For that reason, environmental design is my obsession. It determines the natural flow of your river. Even if you want to live more consciously, the way to do that is through intentional environmental design that generates more awareness. In my mind there’s nothing more influential, which is why it’s the topic of the book I’m writing right now.

At the end of the day, environmental design is all about making it as easy as possible for your choices to align with the reality you want to experience. There’s no greater investment you can make when it comes to changing your life, and changing the world!

‍