I came across this sentence again today: **If you want to be somebody else, change your environment.**
The more I thought about it, the more I realized how much of my own life has been shaped by changes in environment.
I have moved between cities, countries, cultures, and fields of work. From Iran to Malaysia and later to the Netherlands. From philosophy to business, technology, and building new things.
Each move changed more than my location. It changed what I believed was possible. It changed the people around me, the questions I was asking, the opportunities I could see, and sometimes even the way I saw myself.
We often think personal change comes mainly from willpower. We tell ourselves that we need to become more confident, more disciplined, more creative, or more ambitious. We try to change our habits while everything around us stays the same.
But the environment around us has a powerful influence on who we become. It tells us what is normal. It shapes what we pay attention to. It affects who we meet, what we learn, what we fear, and what we imagine for our future.
Sometimes a different version of us cannot fully appear in the environment we are currently in.
You are not the same person everywhere
I was not exactly the same person in Iran, Malaysia, and the Netherlands.
Of course, there was always a continuous part of me. But different environments brought out different sides of my personality.
One environment made certain parts of life feel difficult or impossible. Another made those same things feel normal. One environment gave me stability. Another gave me freedom. One taught me how to adapt. Another pushed me to build.
Changing environments did not automatically make everything better. Every new place came with its own uncertainty, loss, and difficulty. But each transition interrupted the old version of my life.
It created space for something else to happen.
When you enter a new environment, people do not always know your old story. They do not have the same expectations of you. You are no longer surrounded by every routine, role, and assumption that helped create your previous identity.
That can be uncomfortable, but it can also be freeing. You get the chance to ask:
- Who am I here?
- What do I want to keep?
- What am I ready to leave behind?
- What kind of person could I become in this place?
Environment does not only mean geography
Changing your environment does not always mean moving to another country. It can mean changing your workplace, spending time with different people, moving from one professional field to another, starting a project that places you in contact with new ideas and new communities, or changing the information, conversations, and expectations you allow into your daily life.
Sometimes we try very hard to change ourselves when what we actually need is to change the system around us.
A different environment does not do the work for us. But it can make certain changes easier, more natural, and more sustainable. It can give a new version of us somewhere to grow.
Transition is not only practical
This idea is also deeply connected to why I started building Flux Forward. It's fundamentally about transition.
Today, much of its focus is on international people moving through life in the Netherlands: arriving, studying, finding work, building relationships, and trying to understand a new social environment.
From the outside, these transitions can look practical. You need a visa. A house. A job. A bank account. A registration number. A list of steps to follow. All of those things matter, but a transition is never only administrative.
When someone moves between countries, institutions, or stages of life, they are also moving between different social environments.
They are learning new rules, both written and unwritten, trying to understand where they belong, building a new network, a new sense of confidence, and sometimes a new version of themselves.
This is why information alone is often not enough. People also need context, connection, and a clearer sense of their place within the new environment.
They need to understand not only what to do next, but also how the world around them works and how they can take part in it.
That is one of the ideas behind Flux Forward: helping people move through transitions with more clarity, while also paying attention to the human and social experience underneath them.
Maybe you do not need to force the change
Looking back, many of the biggest changes in my life did not happen because I suddenly decided to become a completely different person. They happened because I entered a different environment.
The new environment challenged me, exposed me to different possibilities, and asked different things from me. It did not create a new person from nothing. It gave parts of me that were already there a chance to appear.
So perhaps the question is not always: How can I force myself to change?
Maybe sometimes the better question is: What kind of environment would allow the next version of me to exist?