A few years ago, I had coffee with someone who’d been talking about starting a business for as long as I’d known him. Smart guy. Good ideas. Plenty of resources. But every time he got close to making a move, someone in his circle would say something like, “Why risk it when you’ve got a stable job?” or “Most businesses fail, you know.”
He didn’t lack talent or ideas. He lacked an environment that supported what he was trying to do.
I’ve seen this pattern so many times across two decades of consulting that I’ve started treating it as a diagnostic tool. When someone tells me they’re stuck, the first thing I look at isn’t their business plan. It’s their surroundings — the people, the spaces, the habits, the inputs that shape their thinking every single day.
The Five Closest People Problem
You’ve probably heard some version of “you’re the average of the five people you spend the most time with.” It’s become a cliche, but cliches get repeated because they keep being true.
When I co-founded Vulpine Creations with Adam Wilber, one of the reasons it worked was that we were both surrounded by people who built things for a living. Our peers were creators, performers, product makers. The idea of launching twelve premium products and selling them worldwide didn’t seem crazy in that context. It seemed like Tuesday.
Contrast that with someone whose five closest people are all in stable corporate jobs, none of whom have ever started anything. There’s nothing wrong with those people individually. But collectively, they create a gravitational field that pulls you toward “safe.” Every dinner conversation reinforces the same assumptions: a good career means a steady paycheck. Risk is irresponsible. Why fix what isn’t broken?
The first step in your environment audit is honest. Write down the five people you talk to most. For each one, ask: Does this person encourage me to take calculated risks? Have they ever built something from scratch? When I share an ambitious idea, do they help me figure out how to make it work, or do they list reasons it won’t?
This isn’t about cutting people out of your life. It’s about recognizing where your default inputs are pushing you and compensating accordingly.
Your Information Diet Is Shaping Your Ambition
Beyond people, there’s the content you consume daily. Podcasts, newsletters, social media feeds, books — these are the background radiation of your mindset.
If your information diet is 80% news (which skews negative), 15% entertainment, and 5% anything related to building or creating, your mental default will be caution. Not because you’re a cautious person, but because that’s what your brain is being fed.
I’m not suggesting you need to binge entrepreneurship content. In fact, most of it is terrible — performative success stories and guru nonsense. But you do need some input that normalizes the act of building something. Case studies of real businesses. Practical frameworks. People who talk about shipping ugly first versions and figuring it out along the way.
When I was directing Startup Burgenland and working with 40+ startups, I noticed the founders who made fastest progress were voracious about specific, practical information. They weren’t watching motivational videos. They were reading about pricing strategies, studying how other founders solved distribution problems, and consuming content that directly applied to their next decision.
Your audit step: Track your information consumption for one week. Categorize it. How much of what you consume makes you think “I could build that” versus “the world is scary and uncertain”? Adjust the ratio deliberately.
Physical Space and Mental Space
This one is underrated. Where you spend your time physically affects how you think.
I work from Graz, Austria. It’s not Silicon Valley. It’s not Berlin. For a long time, I thought that mattered more than it does. What actually matters is whether your physical environment supports focused, creative work — or whether it constantly interrupts and defaults you back to consumption mode.
A kitchen table covered in unopened mail doesn’t put you in a building mindset. A desk with a clear surface and your working tools does. A co-working space where people are launching things creates different energy than a home office next to a TV that’s always on.
This isn’t about expensive setups. Some of the best work I’ve ever done happened at a plain desk with a laptop and a notebook. But the space was intentional. It was for building, not for scrolling.
If you’re trying to start something and you don’t have a dedicated space — even a corner of a room — where the only purpose is to work on your thing, that’s a friction point worth fixing.
Your audit step: Look at where you currently do your most important work. Is that space set up for creation or consumption? Make one physical change this week that signals to your brain: this is where I build.
The Conversation Test
Pay attention to what happens when you bring up your business idea or ambition in your regular social settings. The responses fall into predictable categories:
Supporters say things like: “What’s your next step?” or “How can I help?” or “Have you talked to [person who might be useful]?”
Protectors say things like: “Just be careful” or “Have you thought about what could go wrong?” or “Maybe wait until the economy improves.”
Deflectors say things like: “Anyway, did you see the game last night?” — they change the subject entirely because your ambition makes them uncomfortable about their own inaction.
None of these people are bad. But if your circle is 90% protectors and deflectors, you’re swimming upstream every time you try to move forward. The emotional cost of that resistance is enormous, even when it’s well-intentioned.
This is one reason I’m a big believer in finding at least one community — online or offline — where building things is the default activity, not the exception. When you’re surrounded by people who are also starting, your ambition stops feeling like a weird deviation and starts feeling like a normal thing humans do.
The Habit Audit: What Does Your Default Day Look Like?
Your environment isn’t just people and places. It’s the routines you’ve built, often without realizing it.
Look at your typical weekday evening or weekend morning. What’s the default activity? If it’s consumption — TV, social media, browsing — then your environment is optimized for passivity. That doesn’t mean you’re lazy. It means your habits are running on autopilot toward the path of least resistance.
The founders I’ve worked with who make consistent progress don’t rely on motivation. They rely on environmental design. They put systems in place that make building the default activity.
Some examples that actually work:
- The 30-minute morning block. Before checking email or social media, spend 30 minutes on your business. Not planning. Doing. Writing a landing page. Reaching out to a potential customer. Working on your Start Now Statement.
- The phone-in-another-room rule. During your building time, your phone is physically elsewhere. Not on silent. Elsewhere.
- The accountability partnership. One person who asks you every week: “What did you ship?” Not “what are you thinking about?” but “what did you actually do?”
These are small changes, but they restructure your environment so that building becomes the path of least resistance instead of the path of most resistance.
Running Your Full Environment Audit
Here’s the framework I use with the founders I advise. Score each area from 1 (actively working against you) to 5 (actively supporting your goals):
People (inner circle): Do your closest relationships encourage or discourage building? _Score: ___
People (extended network): Do you have access to other founders, builders, or people who’ve started things? _Score: ___
Information diet: Does what you consume daily normalize creation and building? _Score: ___
Physical space: Do you have a dedicated, distraction-minimized place to work on your thing? _Score: ___
Daily habits: Do your default routines include time for building, or is building something you have to fight for? _Score: ___
Conversation norms: When you talk about your ambitions, is the default response supportive or discouraging? _Score: ___
Add up your score. If you’re below 18 out of 30, your environment is actively working against your ambitions. That doesn’t make success impossible, but it makes it significantly harder — and it means you’ll burn willpower fighting your surroundings instead of spending it on building.
The good news is that every category can be improved without dramatic life changes. You don’t need to move cities. You don’t need new friends. You need deliberate adjustments that shift the balance.
The One Change That Matters Most
If I had to pick the single most impactful environmental change, it would be this: find one other person who is actively building something and talk to them regularly.
Not a mentor. Not a guru. Just someone who’s in the same stage as you, doing the work, and willing to have honest conversations about what’s working and what isn’t.
That one relationship changes the math on everything else. It makes building conviction before you have proof dramatically easier. It gives you someone to be accountable to. It normalizes the discomfort of starting.
The environment you need doesn’t have to be perfect. It just has to be slightly more supportive of building than it is of staying still.
Takeaways
- Audit your five closest people. Not to judge them, but to understand the gravitational pull they create on your decisions. Compensate if needed.
- Redesign your information diet. Cut one passive consumption habit and replace it with one practical input about building businesses.
- Create a physical space for building. Even a dedicated corner signals to your brain that creation is a priority, not an afterthought.
- Find one fellow builder. A single peer who is also starting something will do more for your momentum than any course or book.
- Score your environment honestly. Use the six-category audit above. If you’re below 18, make one change in your weakest category this week.
