Chapter 7. The Magic of Thinking Big (visualized)
Manage Your Environment: Go First Class
Key takeaway
You become what you surround yourself with. Success requires intentionally shaping your environment and choosing your influences.
Your environment shapes excellence even more than raw ability does. Your friends, activities, and what you feed your mind determines your trajectory.
This chapter makes three vital points:
Associate with people who make you think bigger. Seek out those who inspire growth rather than those who encourage mediocrity.
Take advice from successful people serious. People who haven't succeeded often give advice based on their fears and limitations rather than possibilities.
Choose growth environments in all areas of life. Where you live, what you read, and how you spend your free time should all push you toward excellence.
Bottom line: Go first class in everything you do – not to show off, but because excellence breeds excellence.
My thoughts
Early in the chapter, Schwartz notes that children are natural dreamers. They have this beautiful audacity, contrasting it with how adults become suppressed by "reality."
My twin four-year-olds live in this magical space.
One of them declared himself a master surfer without ever having done it before. No hesitation, no self-doubt - pure conviction.
The "growth mindset" that consultants charge thousands to instill in high-level executives?
It comes standard in every child. Yet somewhere between building sandcastles and building careers, we learn to temper our dreams.
Our environment - well-meaning parents, teachers, friends - slowly chips away at our sense of limitless possibility.
So the real question isn't why children think big, but why we adults forget how. It may not be wisdom we've gained, but courage we've lost.
Looking at my own life, this is why I enjoy hanging out with that entrepreneur friend who keeps starting ventures, the sixty-year-old who still dreams and the colleague who switched careers at forty.
I've also recently switched a lot of my reading to biographies of audacious achievers (this is one of my favorites).
The intended result?
To have ideas that would have seemed "unrealistic" before, gradually become like natural next steps.
Like my four-year-old surfer, I'm aiming to declare "I can" before the inner critic whispers "but..."
More visuals
I posted the visuals above on my Instagram account here and here.
I also wanted to share some work from
. Ash is churning out amazingly creative visuals for years and I’ve selected a few that speak towards this topic:The red line here is that if we make deliberate decisions about our environment, we really go “first-class”.
Useful quotes
Just as body diet makes the body, mind diet makes the mind.
Make your environment work for you, not against you.
Big men do not laugh at big ideas.
Never risk your future with freelance advisors who are living failures.
Reading status
We’re officially past the halfway mark!
If you’re new here, you can still follow along by getting the book by David J. Schwartz here1 or read back any of the previous visualized chapters using the links below.
Next week we dive into the chapter about Making Your Attitudes Your Allies.
✔ Ch 7. Manage Your Environment: Go First Class (this week)
Ch 8. Make Your Attitudes Your Allies
Ch 9. Think Right Toward People
Ch 10. Get the Action Habit
Ch 11. How to Turn Defeat into Victory
Ch 12. Use Goals to Help you Grow
Ch 13. How to Think like a Leader
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