Physical input affects our senses. Our physical memories affect how we react to similar items or events later in life.Mental or intellectual input affects our education. Formal schooling lasts for about 17 years, depending on personal, societal, and financial expectations or desires. Parents, teachers, friends, and strangers help expand our general knowledge. Emotional input affects our attitudes. From intimate relationships to exciting travels to frustrating computer apps, limitless experiences bring us the joys, sorrows, and thousands of other emotions that make life worth living.

The Three Types Of Environment

Our environment may surround us, and heredity may lie within us, but don’t forget that we also have initiative. We can make decisions if we wish to change. It’s not always easy — damned hard, sometimes.But we humans are too full of knowledge, dreams, and spirit to float through life, always at the whim of other forces.We begin life as products of our environment, but we grow and experience and become self-reliant, sometimes overcoming incredible odds.

Self-Reliance

While environment (external influence) is in our lives to varying degrees, heredity (internal influence) genetically provides physical traits or mental characteristics. If you inherit specific <a href="https://www.betterhealth.vic.gov.au/health/conditionsandtreatments/genes-and-genetics">genes</a> at birth (colorblindness, deafness, psoriasis, etc.), you experience the world from a particular unavoidable perspective through no fault of your own.So, we’ve got external and internal controllers, but we’re not entirely at their whim. Most of us have an ace in the hole.

Heredity

We begin life as products of our environment, but we grow and experience and become self-reliant, sometimes overcoming incredible odds. With some exceptions, we can safely and responsibly use our environment to improve our lives or those of our peers.

The Bottom Line

As children, our environments (parents, schools, friends) usually determine our actions, but later we might realize our family’s bloodline (natural skills or abilities) has already decided for us. Both sides of this coin are powerful motivators, but there’s a third option: self-reliance.You learn to make decisions independently when you grow older and wiser. You realize that destiny is perhaps more in your control. Such autonomy is important, even life-changing, no matter what driving forces have influenced your life to that point.

Nature Vs Nurture

Our daily physical, intellectual, and emotional changes can bring good or bad results. It’s up to us to react accordingly to create the best situations for ourselves.Not every situation is controllable, but we do our best to avoid or prepare for them. People make this decision every day, and it’s their choice.We each have internal forces to deal with as well.

Environmental Control

In the 1983 comedy Trading Places, the millionaire Duke brothers conduct an experiment that swaps the lives of commodities broker Louis and streetwise conman Billy Ray. All due to a bet on heredity…