I’ve become increasingly convinced that people are less able to withstand their surroundings than they think.
That’s not a knock on willpower. Willpower simply isn’t built to hold out against an environment indefinitely. You can resist for a while, but if you spend every day wrestling with temptation, sooner or later you’ll give in. Not because you didn’t try hard enough, but because constant resistance takes a toll.
Warren Buffett has spent his life in Omaha. He knows that if he moved to New York, ate every day with Wall Street insiders, heard a steady stream of “must-buy” tips and went to one dinner after another, he might feel the urge to trade, too. It’s not that Buffett is immune to temptation. He has put himself somewhere it’s harder to reach him.
Li Lu has made a similar choice, staying in Seattle rather than joining the crowd in New York.
The same principle applies to ordinary habits. If my phone is within sight, I’m going to want to pick it up and scroll. The issue isn’t simply whether I have enough self-control. Why put a pocket-sized dopamine machine within arm’s reach, then tell myself I have to resist touching it?
That isn’t discipline. It’s making life harder for yourself.
The distraction didn’t look like a distraction
Here’s a personal example. Before bed, I used to leave my everyday phone far away and not touch it. I know what happens when I pick it up: I keep going. So I set up a second phone with no social media apps and no accounts signed in. It has only a reading app. I use it before bed, get through a few pages, start feeling sleepy and drift off.
Then last week, I dismantled that routine myself.
For several nights in a row, I lay in bed using my phone to work with my AI agents: assigning tasks, reviewing their output and planning the next day. The more we discussed, the more energized I felt. The more I planned, the more awake I became. I ended up going to sleep very late several nights running.
Temptation doesn’t always look tempting. Social media is easy to recognize as a trap, so I know to be wary of it. But what about “meaningful work”? My brain says, “This is important.” My body says, “I need to sleep.” My brain answers, “Just one more reply”—and suddenly another hour is gone.
That wasn’t a failure of willpower. It was a problem with the setup. When the phone is in my hand, it can pull me in whether it’s full of short videos or work tools.
Buffett didn’t avoid New York because everything there was bad. The point is that close exposure can shape your decisions, whether the influence is good or bad. I keep my phone away at bedtime not because everything on it is worthless—in fact, a lot of it is useful—but because useful things don’t belong in every moment. Something can be worthwhile and still be wrong for the time when you need to rest.
Choose your environment instead of trying to train your willpower. Rather than fight the same temptation a hundred times a day, make one change that puts less of it in your path. Step away from the endless feed, circles that leave you anxious, or an environment built around getting ahead at any cost.
The point of designing your environment isn’t to sort everything into good and bad. It’s to notice what belongs at what time.
Don’t overestimate yourself. The power of your surroundings is greater than you think. The smartest move isn’t to keep fighting an environment that wears you down. It’s to choose one that doesn’t require a fight.