Environments of Formation

Last time, I left you with a metaphor (the garden) and a question: what is the equivalent of soil, water, and sunlight for an adult human being striving to flourish and live a life of excellence?

I promised you something more specific than a metaphor. So, let’s now explore.

I call these, “Environments of Formation”.

First, let’s be clear: an environment doesn’t sit around you neutrally while you go about your life inside it. It’s working on you constantly, along a small number of specific channels, whether anyone designed it to or not. I count six that really matter. Learn to see them, and you won’t look at a workplace, a friend group, or your own media feeds the same way again.

One: Attention. Every environment decides what gets shown to you again and again, until it starts to feel important whether or not it is. The conversation that keeps coming up at dinner. The post your feed keeps surfacing. What you pay attention to repeatedly starts to feel like reality, whether it’s representative of anything or not.

Two: Admiration. Every environment signals what deserves esteem, though, interestingly, praise and admiration aren’t the same thing. It’s worth watching and learning to tell them apart. A room can applaud someone loudly and mean almost nothing by it, the same way it can hang a value on the wall and never live near it. What a room admires, as opposed to what it merely claps for, shows up somewhere else: who are the ones people start quietly imitating once no one’s watching them do it. Not who gets the applause. Who gets copied.

Three: Action. Every environment makes certain behaviors easy, frequent, and consequential while making others effortful, rare, and invisible. For example, is it easier, where you spend your time, to cover a mistake or admit one? The answer to that question tells you more about that environment than any printed values statement ever could.

Four: Feedback. Every environment decides what information about reality reaches you at all, and whether you’re allowed to take the time to examine it or are instead pressured to explain it away. Does the room you’re in tell you the project is failing when it is, or does it try to flatter you with empty praise by saying something that is nicer but not true?

Five: Identity. Every environment establishes what “people like us” do, tolerate, and become. The unwritten rules of a friend group. What’s celebrated. What’s quietly mocked the moment someone leaves the table. You absorb these rules faster than you’d like to admit, and mostly without consciously deciding to.

Six: Possibility. Every environment expands or shrinks your sense of what you’re capable of creating, and what you’re responsible for. Some rooms make an ambitious undertaking feel plausible. Others make the same undertaking feel naïve before you’ve said a full sentence about it.

These six channels matter. Every environment you’re in is, implicitly or explicitly, running all six on you, right now, whether it meant to or not.

Most people don’t stop to audit this. Interestingly, they’ll spend real effort choosing a specific diet, workout routine, or reading list — but they’ll never once ask what their own daily environment is teaching them to notice, admire, do, believe, become, and attempt. Remember, an environment doesn’t wait for your permission to shape you. It’s already doing it. The only real choice is whether you’re paying attention to how.

This is exactly why the Worthy Excellence Institute builds its own practices around these same six channels on purpose, rather than assuming good intentions are enough to get the outcome right. Good intentions don’t design an environment. Attention to these six things does.

So here’s what I’d ask of you this week, and it isn’t that complicated. Pick one place you spend real time in (and this “place” could be physical or virtual) — a workplace, a group chat, an account you follow closely. Run it through the six. Ask: What is it making visible? What is it holding up as admirable (and what are people actually emulating)? What is it making easy versus hard? What information does it let you hear straight? What is it implying that people like you believe/think /do? Is it expanding or shrinking your sense of what’s possible?

You may not like everything you find. That’s okay, for now. Noticing it clearly IS the first step.

And, ultimately, you get to be a gardener. You get to cultivate environments. Even how you choose to show up in someone else’s room can start to change the room.