The Power of Environment and Role Models — Why Watching Others Teaches Us So Much

• Opening — The Six Months One Desk Neighbor Changed
• The Core Insight — We Learn More by Watching Than by Resolving
• Going Deeper 1 — The Physics of Level a Table Tennis Club Taught Me
  • One Conversation at the Club
  • You Can Design Your Environment Remotely and Online, Too
• Going Deeper 2 — The Critical Threshold the Ratio of Good Colleagues Creates
  • Drawing the Path by Which Environment Operates
  • Contagion Flows the Good Way Too
• Going Deeper 3 — Becoming Someone Worth Learning From (Reciprocity)
• The Difference Between Amateur and Professional Environments
  • A Growing Environment vs. a Stagnant Environment
  • Decomposing a Role Model — Imitate Behaviors, Not the Person
• How to Do It — Deliberately Designing Your Environment and Role Models
  • Step 1: Diagnose your current environment honestly
  • Step 2: Translate who you want to become into specific people
  • Step 3: Increase your exposure deliberately
  • Step 4: Build a bridge from observation to action
  • Step 5: Change the environment itself, or build one
  • Practice Checklist
• Traps and Balance — When You Lean on Environment and Role Models Too Hard
• Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
• The Difference in Environment, Seen Through Dialogue
• Three Filters for Raising the Quality of Your Inputs
• A Small Case Study — A Six-Month Experiment
• Signals I Check When Moving Environments
• I Become Someone's Environment
• Busting Common Myths
• Closing — Which Mirror Will You Stand In Front Of?
• A One-Paragraph Summary
• References

Opening — The Six Months One Desk Neighbor Changed

Back when I worked at LINE, a senior engineer sat next to me. He never officially mentored me, never set aside time to teach me anything. He simply did his work beside me. Yet six months later, the entire way I worked had changed.

It started with the comments he left on code reviews. "Does this function do just one thing?" "If this fails, how does it recover?" "Could someone seeing this variable for the first time misread it?" At first they annoyed me. I had written code that worked, so why all the prodding? But at some point, before I even started writing code, his voice was already asking those questions in my head.

The stranger part was not the code. He never panicked during an incident. When alerts flooded Slack, the first thing I looked at was his hands. He calmly pulled up the logs, wrote down a hypothesis, and crossed them off one by one. Until then I had thought of an incident as a fire to put out fast. To him, an incident was a signal that carried information. As I began imitating that attitude, my heart no longer dropped at the sound of an alert.

That was when I finally understood, in my body, a sentence I had only known in my head: environment shapes people. I had always heard it as a self-help slogan, roughly meaning "so use your willpower to find a good environment." But experiencing it firsthand, I saw that environment worked before willpower did. I did not change because I resolved to. The standard I saw every day changed, and I changed along with it without trying.

This essay starts from that experience. I want to write honestly about why "learning by watching" is so powerful, how we can deliberately choose and design our environment and role models, and what traps we fall into when we lean on that force too hard.

I should add that I did not learn this lesson from software work alone. When I studied English and Japanese, when I played table tennis, when I wrote, the same pattern repeated. My languages improved fastest when I was among people who used them well, my table tennis improved fastest among players stronger than me, and my writing improved fastest when I read good writers' sentences every day. The fields differed, but the principle was one. So the examples in this essay move between coding and table tennis, but the story underneath is a single one: whatever you are learning, environment comes first.

The Core Insight — We Learn More by Watching Than by Resolving

In the 1960s, the psychologist Albert Bandura ran the famous "Bobo doll" experiment. Children who watched an adult hit the doll went on to copy that behavior exactly, even though no one told them to. Children who watched an adult treat the doll gently showed almost no aggression. Out of this came Social Learning Theory, or observational learning.

The core idea is this. We do not learn only through direct experiences of reward and punishment. We learn simply by watching others act and seeing what happens to them. We do not have to burn our own hand. If we watch someone touch a hot pot and yell, we avoid that pot.

Why does this matter? Most of us look for the secret to growth in "stronger willpower" or "more effort." But willpower is a limited resource. Observation, by contrast, is free, runs twenty-four hours a day, and happens even when we are not aware of it. In other words, who you stand among matters more over the long run than how hard you grit your teeth.

The author Jim Rohn left us a famous line: "You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with." It sounds like an exaggerated maxim, but the sociologists Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler attached real data to that intuition in their book "Connected." Their research shows that obesity, smoking, happiness, even loneliness spread through social networks like contagion. If a friend of your friend is happy, your own probability of being happy rises by a statistically significant amount. We are colored by our surroundings far more than we think.

To summarize, growth is often a problem of exposure, not resolve. What we see and who we see every day shapes us more than what we decide.

Going Deeper 1 — The Physics of Level a Table Tennis Club Taught Me

The place where I felt this most sharply, oddly, was not the office but the table tennis hall.

For a while I played at an ordinary neighborhood club. There I was among the stronger players and won most days. It felt good, but my skill stayed flat for nearly a year. Then I happened to join a high-level club. On the first day I did not win a single game. The drives I was proud of were blocked away with ease, and all my serves were read.

The first month was humiliating. But from the second month, something strange happened. My skill rose quickly even though I had not greatly increased my practice volume. The reason was simple. Because my opponents were strong, the way my ball came back changed, and I had no choice but to adapt to that new ball. Against weak opponents I just repeated the weapons I already had. Against strong opponents I had to solve a new problem every rally.

Here I learned a principle. The environment sets the very range of "what I can practice." One of the key conditions of deliberate practice, described by the psychologist Anders Ericsson, is repeatedly attempting tasks slightly harder than your current ability. But creating that "slightly harder task" on your own is genuinely difficult. An environment stronger than you supplies it automatically and endlessly.

I learned one more thing at the table tennis hall. Among strong players, the very bar for "good" rises. At the neighborhood club I was a "good player," but that standard held only inside the neighborhood. At the high-level club I was "still far off but improving fast," and that coordinate was far more honest. A good environment gives you less praise and a more accurate mirror.

One Conversation at the Club

What raised my ceiling most at that club was a short conversation with a top player one day. As usual, I was frustrated that my drives kept getting blocked. After the game, he wiped down his racket and spoke up.

Top player: "Do you remember how many drives you hit today?"

Me: "I don't know, maybe twenty? Almost all got blocked."

Top player: "Getting blocked is not the problem. You hit all twenty along the same course. From the third one on, I knew it and was waiting."

Me: "Wait, you were watching for that?"

Top player: "Everyone here watches. Next time, split the course into two from the same form. Play that way for just a month, and let's talk again."

For that one month I practiced nothing but splitting the course in two. Strangely, by the second month my win rate rose noticeably. At the neighborhood club, no one told me anything like this even after a year. There, "nice playing again today" was the best feedback on offer. The higher environment did not praise me; instead it saw a pattern I could not see in myself and named it in a single sentence. That one sentence raised my entire ceiling.

From this experience I rewrote my definition of a "good environment." A good environment is not a place that makes you feel good, but a place that shows you the blind spots you could never see on your own. And you can only get that kind of feedback by stepping in among people far above you.

You Can Design Your Environment Remotely and Online, Too

Here I want to address a common misunderstanding. When we say "environment," we immediately picture physical proximity, like "the same office, the same table tennis hall." But being physically beside someone is not the only kind of environment. I have learned a great deal from people I have never met in person.

The method is surprisingly simple: find the channels where the thinking of people you want to resemble is visible, and deliberately insert them into your daily life. Well-written essays, public talks, public code and commit messages, long interviews, public retrospectives. Such material shows not "what they did" but "how they thought." For a while I used places like Will Larson's lethain.com as a "stand-in for the senior at the next desk." Reading repeatedly how he weighs which trade-offs in which order, the texture of the questions I raised in actual meetings changed.

Designing an online environment even has advantages that physical environments lack. First, it transcends the limits of region and company. Even if there is no top-level person in your organization, you can connect to the top level of the entire world. Second, because it is asynchronous, you can pause and rewind that person's thinking and chew it over. A colleague's words at the next desk are gone once they pass, but writing can be reread ten times. Third, it can be curated. A physical environment is given to you whole, but online inputs let you choose them one by one.

That said, the traps are clear too. Online, only "results" tend to flow to you in edited form. You see plenty of someone's impressive conclusions but not the process that got them there. So when I design an environment online, I prioritize material that reveals process over finished products. I cover this standard in more detail later, in "Three Filters for Raising the Quality of Your Inputs."

Going Deeper 2 — The Critical Threshold the Ratio of Good Colleagues Creates

When we talk about environment, we often try to find "one good person." Of course one person makes a big difference. But in my experience, what matters more is the ratio.

If a team has one outstanding colleague and the other nine coast along, that one person becomes a lonely island. Over time even that one person burns out or leaves. Conversely, if half the team shares a high standard, that standard stops being a personal trait and becomes "the way we work here." Even new hires naturally align with it. This is how culture operates.

This connects to research on social contagion. For a behavior to take hold in a network, the proportion of people doing it has to cross a certain threshold. When it is one or two people, they are treated as oddballs, but past a certain ratio it becomes "the normal thing." So when I choose an environment now, I look less at "is there an outstanding person in this organization" and more at "is the excellent way the default for the majority."

The software engineer and writer Will Larson repeatedly emphasizes in his writing that early in a career, "joining a good, fast-growing team" is greater leverage than almost anything else. A growing team keeps generating new problems, and people grow as they solve them. On a stagnant team, no matter how strong your will, there simply are not enough new problems to solve.

Drawing the Path by Which Environment Operates

[The standards of the people around you]
        |
        v
[The behavior/conversations/decisions you observe daily]   <- input regardless of will
        |
        v
[Your internal "obvious standard" is reset]
        |
        v
[Your choices change in the same situations]
        |
        v
[Outcomes change, and those outcomes reinforce the environment again]

The key to this diagram is the input at the very top. We usually try to exert effort only at the bottom, on "my choices." But if you change the input at the top, the bottom follows with far less force.

Contagion Flows the Good Way Too

The part of Christakis and Fowler's "Connected" research that comforted me most was that contagion does not flow only the bad way. Just as obesity and smoking spread through a network, so do quitting smoking, exercising, and happiness. When one person quits cigarettes, the probability that their friend quits rises, and the effect reaches even the friend's friend. This has a decisive implication for environment design. Plant one good standard in your surroundings, and that standard does not stay with you; it spreads to the person beside you, and the person beside them.

I saw this directly in a small team. One person simply started writing a paragraph of "why I did it this way" in every PR, and two months later the whole team's PR descriptions had grown longer and kinder. No one made it a rule. One person's standard had simply spread sideways. Designing an environment is often not about building grand systems, but about being the first to practice one small standard that spreads well.

Going Deeper 3 — Becoming Someone Worth Learning From (Reciprocity)

Here I have to confess one thing honestly. For a while I saw environment purely from the perspective of a "consumer." My thinking was that I just had to slip in among good people and absorb. But I never stayed long in the environments I entered that way. A relationship where you only take is uncomfortable for you, and the other side eventually keeps its distance.

A good environment is not a place to suck dry one-sidedly. It is a place of give and take. And paradoxically, you learn more from an environment when you have something to give. To teach, you have to organize your thoughts, and organizing them makes you understand more deeply. When someone asked me, "How did you do this?", I had to put my tacit knowledge into words for the first time, and often discovered in the process that I had not fully understood it after all.

So when I choose an environment now, I ask one more question: "What can I contribute here?" It is fine if it is small at first. Keeping careful meeting notes, answering a junior's questions sincerely, documenting the rabbit holes I fell into so the next person saves time. When these small contributions add up, I become not "the person who only takes" but "the person who is good to have around" in that environment. And someone who establishes themselves that way gets invited into better environments. Environments are either virtuous or vicious cycles. There is almost no neutral.

Reciprocity has another effect. The moment I am aware that I could be someone's role model, my behavior changes. If I think a junior is learning from my code review style, I write a little more kindly and clearly. Observation runs both ways. I learn while watching, and I refine myself while being watched.

One more thing: contribution is most powerful when it is not "a transaction to get something back." At first I calculated contribution like an entry fee for joining a good environment. But once calculation enters, the other side smells the deal in it. The contributions that actually changed my environment were small acts of trying to be helpful with no expectation of reward. When I kept careful retrospectives whether or not anyone was watching, and documented the rabbit holes I fell into for the next person, people ended up trusting me and inviting me to better seats. Paradoxically, the person who receives the most from an environment was the one who calculated the least and gave the most steadily.

The Difference Between Amateur and Professional Environments

For the same activity, what you learn changes completely depending on the "level of professionalism" of the environment. I have put the differences I felt at the table tennis hall and at work into a table.

What I want to stress in this table is the last two rows. A professional environment feels bad when you first enter. It confirms your shortcomings to you every day. An amateur environment, by contrast, feels good. It makes you feel like an impressive person. So many people, without realizing it, stay in the environment that feels good. Growth is often another name for discomfort.

A Growing Environment vs. a Stagnant Environment

If the professional/amateur split is about "skill level," another important axis is whether the environment is "moving." There are stagnant environments full of highly skilled people, and there are environments that grow fiercely even when the skill is still raw. Here is a second comparison table I put together across several teams.

Overlaying these two tables makes my criteria for choosing an environment clear. I look at both "is the level of this environment high" and "is this environment moving upward." Having both is best, but if I have to pick one, I choose the one that is moving. In a fast-growing environment whose level is a bit lower, I get pulled up along with it; in a high-level environment that has stopped, that high level quickly becomes my ceiling.

Decomposing a Role Model — Imitate Behaviors, Not the Person

As much as environment, many people get confused about role models. A common mistake is to admire one person wholesale and try to "become" that person. But copying a person whole is impossible, and even if it were possible, it would be dangerous. You would inherit not only their strengths but their weaknesses, biases, and luck along with them.

The method I use is to decompose a role model from a "person" into a "bundle of behaviors." The procedure goes like this.

1. Bring to mind someone you admire (e.g., that senior)
2. Break "what is good about them" into observable behaviors, not abstract impressions
   - Good impression: "they are good at their job"
   - Observable behavior: "during an incident they pull up logs first and write the hypothesis down"
   - Observable behavior: "they write a paragraph of 'why' in the PR description"
   - Observable behavior: "in meetings they check the premise before the conclusion"
3. Choose one of those behaviors you can imitate this week
4. Lift out only that behavior and run it in your own context
5. A week later, check whether the behavior fits you and decide to keep or drop it

The key is step 2. Impressions like "good at their job" or "impressive" cannot be imitated. The only thing you can imitate is specific, observable behavior. So when admiration arises, I immediately switch the question to "so what, exactly, does this person do?"

Decomposing this way has two benefits. First, you do not get buried in one person. A "mosaic role model" becomes possible, where you take calm from A, writing from B, and consistency from C, behavior by behavior. Second, you avoid blind imitation. Taking it behavior by behavior forces you to verify each behavior in your own context and to drop what does not fit. When you admire a person whole, everything about them looks right; when you decompose behaviors, the judgment "this fits them but not me" becomes possible.

Here is one decomposition table I actually made, as an example. Laid out on a single page like this, vague admiration turns into specific behavior you can do this week.

Quality      | From whom     | Observed concrete behavior          | My experiment this week
------------ | ------------- | ----------------------------------- | --------------------------------
Calm         | the senior    | logs first in an incident, hypothesis in writing | breathe one minute, then logs
Clear prose  | writer B      | one concrete example after a claim  | one example line in every PR
Consistency  | blogger C     | a short note same day each week     | one learning note every Friday
Power of asking | colleague D | check the premise before conclusion | ask "one premise" first in meetings

The last column of this table matters most. Admiration that does not translate into "my experiment this week" ends as mere awe. Each week I actually run one row of this table, and a week later decide to keep it or drop it. After a few months, the behaviors lifted from several people blend into mine and become "my style."

How to Do It — Deliberately Designing Your Environment and Role Models

So what should we do? "Go to a good environment" is true but empty. Here, step by step, are the methods I have actually used.

Step 1: Diagnose your current environment honestly

First, write on paper the five people you spend the most time with. Next to each, write a single line about "who I become when I am with this person." It becomes surprisingly clear who makes you more ambitious and honest, and who makes you more cynical and lazy. This is not about judging the person; it is about seeing the direction that relationship pulls you in.

Step 2: Translate who you want to become into specific people

"I want to be a great engineer" is too abstract. Instead, break it into specific qualities like "the person who calmly forms hypotheses during an incident," "the person who explains complex things simply," "the person who keeps a steady learning log." Then think of one person who is actually good at each quality. A role model does not have to be one perfect hero. A "mosaic role model," with several people across qualities, is far healthier.

Step 3: Increase your exposure deliberately

If you cannot be physically in the same space, find other channels that expose you to that person's thought process. Writing, talks, public code, interviews, even commit logs. Cal Newport emphasizes deep focus and deliberate management of inputs, and I took this as "curating my input channels." Instead of passively receiving whatever scrolls down a timeline, I deliberately insert the thinking of people I want to resemble into my daily life.

Step 4: Build a bridge from observation to action

Observation alone is not enough. Learning is completed only when you imitate, even in a small way, what you saw. I pick "one thing that person would have done this week" and actually try it. For example, that senior would have written "why I did it this way" in the PR description, so I add that one paragraph to every PR this week.

Step 5: Change the environment itself, or build one

In his book "Willpower Doesn't Work," Benjamin Hardy argues that you should design your environment rather than rely on willpower. If you cannot find a good environment, you can build one. Start a study group with two or three people who share a similar standard, or form a small circle that reviews each other's work regularly. The fastest-growing people I have seen did not leave their environment to chance; they assembled it themselves.

Practice Checklist

[ ] Wrote the 5 people I spend the most time with and rated, in one line each, which direction they pull me
[ ] Broke "who I want to become" into 3-5 specific qualities
[ ] Set at least one role model (a mosaic) per quality
[ ] Put a channel that exposes me to their thinking into my schedule at least once a week
[ ] Chose and carried out 1 specific behavior to imitate this week
[ ] Chose and carried out one small thing I can contribute to this environment
[ ] Set a date a month out to re-check how my "obvious standard" has shifted

Traps and Balance — When You Lean on Environment and Role Models Too Hard

Reading this far, it might sound like the conclusion is "always go to the stronger environment." But that is only half the truth. The power of environment and role models has clear traps.

First, the danger of blind imitation. The strength of observational learning becomes its weakness. We do not copy only good behavior; we also absorb a person's bad habits, biases, and mistaken certainties. What the Bobo doll experiment ultimately showed is that "we do what we see," and what we see is not always right. You need a conscious effort to learn not the role model's conclusion but the thought process by which they reached it. Ask not "they did it this way, so it is right," but "why did they judge it this way?"

Second, the danger of losing yourself. If you chase someone you want to resemble too deeply, you can erase your own particular strengths and context. There is no guarantee that the choice that fit them fits you. A role model is a map, not a destination. At some point you have to fold the map and walk your own road.

Third, burnout from comparison. I said a strong environment is an accurate mirror, but staring into that mirror every day can wear down your self-worth. Especially an environment like social media, where only others' "results" are shown in edited form, is not a mirror but a distorted lens. Comparison for growth should be against "yesterday's me," and comparison with others should be used only briefly, to set direction.

Fourth, the trap of blaming the environment. "I cannot grow because my environment is bad" is half true and half an excuse. Environment is powerful but not deterministic. Even in the same environment, some people build their own input channels and grow. Acknowledging the power of environment and using it as an excuse are two different things.

The balanced conclusion is this. Environment and role models are the most powerful levers for growth, but they are only levers; they do not live your life for you. Absorb but digest, resemble but do not copy, compare but do not collapse.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Q. What if I cannot change my environment right now? Physical relocation is not the only kind of environmental change. Changing your input channels alone makes a big difference. You can start by inserting the writing and conversation of people you want to resemble into your day, and by forming a small circle with one or two people who share a similar standard.

Q. No role model really comes to mind. That is because you are trying to find one perfect person. Break it into qualities and you will find surprisingly many. Learn calm from one person, writing from another, consistency from yet another. They do not even have to be people you know personally.

Q. I entered a strong environment but only feel intimidated. Initial intimidation is normal. The practice is to read that mirror not as "how inadequate I am" but as "what I can learn next." And if you quickly find a point where you can contribute, even a small one, the intimidation fades fast.

Q. I am afraid of losing my own color while imitating good people. That is a good sign. That fear guards against blind imitation. Do not copy conclusions; learn the thought process. And regularly ask yourself, "Is this a choice that fits them, or one that fits me?"

Q. I feel I have nothing to give, so joining a good environment feels burdensome. Contribution is not ranked by skill. Diligence, documentation, kindness, and honest answers to questions are things anyone can give. The very stance of refusing to only take is already the start of contribution.

Q. I chose someone to resemble online, but they feel too far away. They feel far because you see them as a "finished genius." Instead of finished products, look for their early writing, failure stories, and material that shows their trial and error. Once you confirm that everyone had a clumsy start, the distance shrinks, and "by what procedure did they get there" begins to show.

Q. Won't staying too long in a good environment make me complacent? This question asks about a good signal. In the same environment, if new problems keep appearing, that is not complacency but growth. But if at some point that environment's standard no longer makes you uncomfortable, that can be a signal that you have reached its ceiling. That is when it is your turn to find the next environment, or to raise the standard of this one.

The Difference in Environment, Seen Through Dialogue

Abstract talk may not land, so let me transcribe two kinds of conversation I actually had. Same situation, same question, but notice how the answer differs depending on the environment.

First, a conversation in a stagnant environment.

Me: "I wrote this feature like this. Could you take a look?"

Colleague A: "Hmm, it works, right? Just merge it."

Me: "I was wondering if there might be a better way."

Colleague A: "Everyone does it this way. Do not dig too deep. It will change anyway."

I learned nothing from this conversation. Worse, the standard of "do not dig too deep" slowly seeped into me.

Now the same conversation in a growing environment.

Me: "I wrote this feature like this. Could you take a look?"

Colleague B: "I confirmed it works. But this part might confuse someone reading it in six months. Could you add one line on why you did it this way?"

Me: "Honestly, I was a bit unsure there too."

Colleague B: "In that case I usually compare these two options. I struggled with something similar before. Want to look together?"

The answers to the same question are completely different. Colleague B did not evaluate my code; he opened up his thought process and showed it to me. From that one conversation I learned something far bigger than a line of code. A good environment is not a place that hands you the answer, but one that shows you the thinking that leads to the answer.

Three Filters for Raising the Quality of Your Inputs

If we see the environment as an "input channel," not all inputs carry equal value. When I choose what to let into my daily life, I run it through three filters.

First, is the process visible? Inputs that show only results give motivation but little learning. Material that reveals the trial and error and judgment behind a result is far more nutritious than someone's impressive finished product. So I prioritize well-organized retrospectives, failure stories, commit histories, and writing that exposes a thought process.

Second, is it reproducible? An input that ends with "that person is just a genius" leaves only admiration and disappears. An input that shows "I decided through this procedure, by this standard" translates into behavior I can copy. Choose inputs with high imitability.

Third, does it make me slightly uncomfortable? Inputs that are too easy are confirmation, not learning. An input that leaves a small discomfort like "I am a bit embarrassed by what I have done so far" is what actually moves me up a notch. The principle of deliberate practice applies to input selection too.

When you consciously increase only the inputs that pass these three filters, your growth speed changes markedly even with the same amount of time.

A Small Case Study — A Six-Month Experiment

Finally, let me leave a short record of running the methods in this essay for one quarter.

At the time I wanted to improve my writing, but there was no strong writer among the colleagues around me. Since I could not change my environment, I decided to change my input channels.

In step 1, I broke the writing qualities I wanted to resemble into three: "make complex things simple," "concrete examples," "honest first person." I picked one writer who was good at each.

In step 2, every week I read one of their pieces, not just reading but analyzing "why does this sentence read so well?" I left short notes from the analysis.

In step 3, I deliberately used one technique I had learned that week in my own writing. For example, I forced myself for a week to follow the rule "always one concrete example after an abstract claim."

In step 4, once a month I placed my old writing next to my current writing and compared them.

The result was not dramatic, but it was clear. Three months later my writing had more examples, shorter sentences, and a more alive voice. No one taught me, but by inserting people I wanted to resemble into my daily life, I had in effect built my own environment. The essay you are reading now sits on the extension of that experiment.

I applied a similar method to table tennis again. During a stretch when I could not switch clubs, I watched world-class players' match footage by "decomposing" it rather than "appreciating" it. I paused on a rally and wrote down "why did this player change the course here?" and "what is he setting up after this serve?" Video could not give feedback as immediate as the top player at the next table, but because I could replay that thought process repeatedly, it became an even more persistent teacher. I confirmed again that when you cannot change your physical environment, changing the "depth" of your inputs alone changes the quality of your learning.

The key is this. You do not have to stop just because there is no good environment. Changing your inputs is something you can always start right now.

Signals I Check When Moving Environments

As important as entering a good environment is noticing the signal that your current environment can no longer grow you. When several of the following signals turn on at once, I take it as time to move environments or change my inputs.

• Months have passed since I last learned a new word or concept in a meeting.
• It feels comfortable to be among the most skilled people here.
• Mistakes and failures are treated not as "data" but as "assigning blame."
• "That is just how it is here" is used like a magic spell that ends discussion.
• Bringing in a higher external standard draws the reaction "you are making a fuss."
• When I voice an ambitious plan, cynicism comes back before encouragement.

Conversely, if the following signals are on, it is a time to dig in deeper rather than leave.

• At least once a week there is a "I did not know that" moment.
• I feel inadequate, but at the same time it is clear what I should learn.
• When I ask a question, someone opens up and shows me their thought process.
• It is safe to talk about failure, and we all learn from that failure together.

Checking these signals regularly lets me change environments based on observation rather than luck. I judge when to stay and when to leave by data, not by gut.

I Become Someone's Environment

Until now this has mostly been about the receiving side, "which environment will I choose." But at some point I realized I was no longer the youngest. New hires began to sit beside me, and to them I was that "senior at the next desk." Only then did the true picture of environment come into view. Environment is not one-way traffic. I consume someone's environment and, at the same time, become someone else's environment.

Becoming aware of this changed my behavior. Thinking that a junior watches my code reviews and learns "ah, this is how you write a review," I started writing each line more kindly and clearly. Thinking that someone is watching how I handle an incident, I began to breathe deliberately more slowly when alerts pour in. The observational learning that Bandura's Bobo doll experiment showed runs both ways. While I look up and learn, someone below is watching and learning from me. Forget that, and I become a person who carelessly transmits bad standards.

There is a selfish gain here too. As I said in the reciprocity section, to show and teach someone I have to put my tacit knowledge into words. In that process my own understanding becomes firmer. In other words, "being a good environment for someone" is not pure giving; it is also the fastest way to refine myself. Remembering that, in Jim Rohn's "average of five people," I am one of someone else's five, changes the weight of my everyday behavior.

So I now check my environment in two directions at once: "who am I watching and learning from right now" and "who is watching me right now, and what are they learning." The fastest path to a good environment may be to become a good environment for someone else first. Because good people, in the end, gather around the person who is a good environment.

Busting Common Myths

Here is a short list of myths I once believed about environment and role models, and that broke.

• Myth: To change your environment, you have to switch jobs or move. Physical relocation is only one way. Changing your input channels, that is, whose writing and thinking you see every day, changes your environment all by itself.

• Myth: A role model has to be one person better than you in every way. No. A mosaic, taking behaviors quality by quality, is healthier. The single perfect hero is a fantasy, and that fantasy leads to blind imitation.

• Myth: If you enter a strong environment, you grow automatically. Entering is only the start. If you do not move observation into small actions and contribute something, you will float like an island inside even a strong environment and be pushed back out.

• Myth: Imitating skilled people makes you lose yourself. That happens if you copy conclusions. But if you learn the thought process and verify behaviors in your own context, your own color actually grows sharper.

• Myth: Environment is everything. Environment is the most powerful lever, but it is not deterministic. Even in the same environment, some people design their own inputs and grow. Acknowledging environment and using it as an excuse are different.

• Myth: I have nothing to give, so I cannot join a good environment. Contribution is not ranked by skill. Documentation, diligence, kindness, and honest answers are things anyone can give, and they alone make you "good to have around."

Closing — Which Mirror Will You Stand In Front Of?

Let me return to that senior at the next desk. Over time I moved to a different company, a different team. Yet when an incident happens, I still pull up the logs slowly and write down a hypothesis, the way he did. He is no longer beside me, but the "obvious standard" he built into me remains. This is the true power of environment and observation. A good environment shapes you not only while you are in it, but long after you have left.

So I now try not to leave my environment to chance. I want to consciously choose whom I sit beside, whose thinking I look into every day, and at the same time, what standard I show to someone else. We are all someone's environment. While I watch and learn, someone is watching and learning from me.

Which mirror are you standing in front of right now? And what kind of mirror are you being for someone else? I believe the answers to these two questions will all but determine who you are a year from now.

A One-Paragraph Summary

If this essay was too long, you can remember just the following paragraph. Environment shaping people is a matter of exposure, not willpower. We learn more by watching than by resolving (Bandura), we grow to resemble the five people closest to us (Jim Rohn), and good things and bad alike spread through the network (Christakis and Fowler). So put the person you want to become beside you, but instead of copying the person whole, decompose and lift their behaviors. If they are physically far, design your environment through writing and talks, and above all, become a good environment for someone yourself. Absorb but digest, resemble but do not copy, compare but do not collapse.

And if you want to do just one thing right now, try one of the following today.

1. Pick one essay or talk by someone you want to resemble, and read it for 30 minutes today, "decomposing" it.
2. Pick one of that person's behaviors and apply it once to your work this week.
3. Write a short document of one rabbit hole you fell into, for the next person.

All three can be started without changing your current environment and without relying on luck. An environment is built not from a grand resolution but from these small actions piling up.

References

• Bandura social learning theory (Social Learning Theory): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_learning_theory
• Bobo doll experiment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bobo_doll_experiment
• On environment design (James Clear): https://jamesclear.com/
• On teams and growth environments (Will Larson): https://lethain.com/
• On deep focus and managing inputs (Cal Newport): https://calnewport.com/
• Research on social contagion (Christakis and Fowler, Connected, book)
• Research on deliberate practice (Anders Ericsson and others) and peer-reviewed literature: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/
• The power of environment at work (Harvard Business Review): https://hbr.org/
• Environment design (Benjamin Hardy, Willpower Doesn't Work, book)
• Jim Rohn's "average of five people" concept (talks and quotations)