how others may be holding you back

so we're heavily influenced by the environment that we're in if we're at a library and everyone around us is Whispering then we will also feel like Whispering if we're at a cafe and everyone around us is working then we will also feel like working and whil these are obvious examples the less obvious examples are like growing up in environment where you want to go to university and everyone around you thinks that University is a terrible financial decision and thrs you away from going to University or you might not even think so hard about whether it's the right decision for you and you end up not following through on that decision because of the people around you or like let's say you really want to start a business and you're surrounded by people who think like business owners or like greedy pigs or whatever who are exploiting the working class you are less likely to start a business in that environment but in a completely different environment you would be more likely to start a business so ultimately your environment dictates your performance and your actions and especially if you identify with that Environmental Group that's around you you'll be more willing to follow whatever they do instead of doing what you actually want to do and this kind of makes sense from like an evolutionary perspective because like hundreds or thousands of years ago when we were in like small villages and tribes if we were banished from the tribe or Village then we would likely die because we don't have resources to survive ourselves whereas in modern society if you're banished from like a tribe or a village or something you're not really going to die because of the way Society is now designed but we're still running on this like old software in our minds where we end up mimetically copying people around us whether we realize it or not and for me I personally felt this way at Cambridge when most people around me wanted to go into Finance and Consulting I was like hey maybe I should go into finance and Consulting as well so I kind of wasted a few months trying to apply for internships and stuff here and then I realized like wow this is not something I want to do and I kind of like took a step back and began to think like what I really wanted to do and I noticed many people never really take a step back and they live for years over their life just on autopilot of like copying the people around them and what they're doing so for example you may want to be a fiction writer in the future and if all your friends around you look down upon fiction and they don't read fiction at all you might feel less motivated to pursue that goal and then that goal will like slowly diminish and fall into and background and then something might happen like 10 20 years later whether that's like a death in the family or like a big life event that makes you realize like wow life is actually short and you should have been pursuing that goal for the last 10 20 years but you didn't because of the environment around you at that particular time and I think one way around this is that if you notice yourself feeling like one goal or one ambition it's helpful to find a group of people or like a group of friends you don't necessarily have to cut out your old friends but find a new group who resonate with that goal so for example you might want to find like a fiction writing Club in your local city or online that you can like regularly attend and that will help you make progress towards your like writing goals or something and you might not want to bring up those particular conversations with your old set of friends because you might feel discouraged or demotivated to pursue those goals and I think another part of this is that when you give yourself particular identities of like Oh I'm a physicist then you're more likely to pursue whatever actions or whatever people who also give themselves that IDE identity are pursuing so for example if you're like a student at X University and most people at X University going into do engineering and you keep referring to yourself as a student of that University then you will also be more likely to pursue engineering and I think like Paul gra kind of puts as well in his like blog post which is called keep your identity small where he basically argues like if you assign yourself like lots and lots of labels in life then it kind of like makes your life kind of confusing or this is like my understanding of the blog post so for example like if you say like I support like X political party then you might get really riled open in conversations with people who disagree with that political party or like you might have supported that party and then 5 10 years later they're now doing like crazy stuff and you no longer really support them but you haven't taken a chance to step back and be like oh do I still support them and you will feel like obligated to defend whatever crazy things they're doing now even though like you stopped supporting them subconsciously a long time ago I think there's a danger of like assigning yourself particular identities labels so for example like if you assign yourself a label of like oh I'm a startup founder and you notice of people who assign themselves at label are working like 14 15 16 hours a week and sacrificing time with their friends and family you may also feel obligated to do the same thing because you assigned yourself the same label that they've assigned themselves to so ultimately something that I personally do is that when I notice myself like wanting to pursue a certain goal whether that's like learning particular language then I try to find a group of people or like a group of friends who enjoy or like are pursuing that same goal and another thing I do is I try to not identify myself to too strongly with any group or political party or like anything else because if I assign myself with certain groups or labels or identities then I feel attached to that identity and I copy of people who also assign themselves that identity so yeah I encourage you to read the blog post if you have a chance and also think about the labels that you're assigning yourselves and the groups that you're surrounding yourselves with and whether you can assign yourself with different groups or different labels or something that will help you make more progress to whatever goals that you have in mind