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Designed to Thrive
Willpower is fickle; environments are faithful. Craft spaces that make the right choice the easy choice.
Seth Thomas
May 29, 2025
In partnership with
We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.
Good Morning. Look around your desk. Every object is either friction or fuel. A phone in arm’s reach is a frictionless distraction; a notepad in sight is an effortless prompt to capture ideas. Rearranging a room often changes behavior faster than pep talks ever could.
Environmental design also applies to the invisible. Calendar defaults, browser bookmarks, even who you follow online either nudge you toward your goals or away from them. Treat each cue as a silent teammate - upgrade the roster accordingly.
Tiny tweaks compound: water bottle on the counter → more hydration; guitar on a stand instead of a case → more practice. Success stops being about discipline and starts being about layout.
Today’s Challenge
Remove one visual cue that triggers an unwanted habit and place one cue that invites a habit you desire.
🧠 Fascinating Stimuli:
Book of the Week
 | Lynne Twist’s The Soul of Money flipped my lens on finance from “never enough” to “already sufficient.” Drawing on decades of global fundraising—from Mother Teresa’s orphanages to Amazonian tribes—Twist shows how the stories we tell about money shape our sense of possibility. Her core argument is that scarcity is a cultural myth; when we practice “sufficiency,” we unlock the energy and ingenuity we thought we lacked. |
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