8 ms·

A thing I go back to from the book “Unf*ck Yourself” is a firm identification with things that you have set out to do early on. Rather than saying “I need to ex

A thing I go back to from the book “Unf*ck Yourself” is a firm identification with things that you have set out to do early on. Rather than saying “I need to exercise.” instead “I exercise.” With that mindset adopted pretty quickly into your campaign any slacking is genuinely you no longer being yourself. A rejection of your identity is stronger activator than a spoken aspiration of a future self that does said thing. Identities are hard to shake.

sanderjd 28d ago
This is also central in the book Atomic Habits.
- 0xf8 28d ago
  The most productive feedback loop to cultivate deeper knowledge / intellect is to shatter any personal identity as a robust intellect, and actually internalize the limitations of one’s own knowledge and intellect to foster more growth. No one who thinks they know everything is inherently poised to learn much. On a social level it involves surrounding yourself with individual who constantly challenge you to grow intellectually which can literally feel like an attack on said identity.
order-matters 28d ago
identities spoken of in this way are tools and we often get very caught up in self reflection and the level of worthiness we feel we have earned certain labels. your true and actual identity is out of your control and not something you would ever think twice about. you arent someone who exercises or not. your identity is the part of you that believes exercising is good for you to begin with. thinking you need to and telling yourself you are someone who does it are both the same identity. If you believe it is good for you and you dont do it, then there is another part of your identity that is asserting you dont always need to good things for yourself. The part you really need to challenge, which will help in all areas of your life, is to settle the question: "to what extent do I believe I should do things that are good for me?". Every day you go without any plan or committed effort towards your health and exercising is a day you answered, "very little extent". for sake of text length im going to skip a lot of detail, but if you're like me then this eventually leads to a question of "how do I restore faith in myself?" a thought experiment that i read somewhere (and maybe tweaked) that i use is a "post body swap" mentality. If you are willing to accept accountability and responsibility for whatever is in your past, then you no longer need to identify with it, and can treat every single new day as if it is your first time in this body. A kind of "live every day like it's your first" mentality. It has helped me recover from a lot of tough spots where i had an overwhelming amount of 'backlog' to deal with. phrased differently, you look at your life as if you have just inherited it. you died, met God, and He said "i dont normally do this, but im sending you back for another shot in a random <yours> body". the point isnt to trick yourself, you dont need to, there is no trick. it is simply a reminder of the free will you had already possessed prior to the thought experiment. that this is always your life to live however you want moving forward. imagine you woke up in someones body who is more out of shape than you are currently, to the point you cant do things you currently enjoy doing. would you take the obvious path to start training to at least be able to do the things you were previously used to doing and see how far you get, or would you put in work to figure out how to change the way you live to better fit the new body? your life is the way it is right now largely due to momentum from your past, not your current identity. identity updates really are not necessary to improve your life, and you arent identified by your momentum - even if that momentum has labels people use to describe it
0xf8 28d ago
I find the failure mode for this to have been pretty insurmountable when you’re not genuinely on board with said identity. A trivial example: the behavior you could make into your identity is the result of socionormative expectations and pressure. Doctors say one should exercise, all my friends are athletic and expect me to be, society values fitness, to espouse the exercise lifestyle is seen as a moral virtue, etc.—but what if someone personally doesn’t give a fvck about exercise beyond these external forces? For some people it will never naturally become their identity, even if they “want” it to be, on account of the exogenous pressure to fit this norm. For some it will feel contrived or even forced. It is possible for the inherent motivation to act in accordance with your identity, and how you choose to orient yourself in the world, to be at odds with what you “want” to accomplish, do, or identify with on the surface. For that person, they have to genuinely value being the person who exercises for the “need” to become implicit. For me this manifested on the intellectual plane. At times in the past I wanted to intellectually be “into XYZ”, like mathematics, for example, or some other subject matter. I had the aptitude and certainly the capacity to focus, enough to develop genuine expertise over time. But then I found that, in truth, I did not genuinely enjoy the subject matter enough to delve so deeply. I liked the idea of being someone who had cultivated rigorous mathematical expertise, but not actually being that person in reality, so it could never be my identity naturally, it would remain maximum effort as long as that were true. It’s strange to me how we can convince ourselves to want something we don’t actually value intrinsically. But I suspect that’s a longstanding feedback loop in evolutionary psychology. On the converse side of the story, I posit you can also get pretty far in stagnation of actual personal growth / progress by simply convincing everyone around you deceptively of a specific identity, and have that be validating enough to preclude cultivating that identity in earnest. Another trivial example: the “smartest guy in the room” effect. If you are sufficiently smart, or surround yourself with individuals who won’t challenge you intellectually and default to being deferential, you can certainly feel pretty smart, and have that maladaptively/falsely validate your sense of identity as the smartest-in-the-room type of personality. TL;DR: I think the “make it your identity, then effort towards action comes naturally” is a powerful model for self-motivation, but it has meaningful failure modes—notably, it’s hard to force if you’re not genuinely into it, and sociodynamic feedback loops impacting personal sense of identity can collapse or even pervert the entire approach.
nonameiguess 28d ago
I benefit tremendously from the exercise example specifically, but I still agree with 0xf8 that this isn't something you can just will yourself into. I identity as an athlete because I am. I've played sports of some sort and exercised my entire life. It isn't "exercise" to me. I'm just an animal that has a body, wants that body to excel at being a body, and so I train it, just as I read and learn and practice various intellectual skills to keep my mind sharp, because it is also core to my identity that I'm a human, the apex of intelligence in the animal kingdom, and making my brain work as well as it possibly can is important to me. Making the rest of my body work well is also important to me. On the other hand, I buy all of the data suggesting religious people are happier than others. They have built-in community, friends, relationships, guidance on how to live a good life. I was religious as a teenager and it was terrific. I had a great time in bible study, met interesting people I loved, even met girls and had an outlet for my singing. But as I got older, I can't do it any more because I don't believe the doctrine. I can't force myself to believe something I don't believe. In spite of how much better I believe my life would be if I was religious, I can't be. I don't know that identity is really all that malleable. You either identity as something or you don't, and the reason is rarely if ever "I read a self help book and convinced myself this is who I am."

sanderjd 28d ago

This is also central in the book Atomic Habits.

0xf8 28d ago
The most productive feedback loop to cultivate deeper knowledge / intellect is to shatter any personal identity as a robust intellect, and actually internalize the limitations of one’s own knowledge and intellect to foster more growth. No one who thinks they know everything is inherently poised to learn much. On a social level it involves surrounding yourself with individual who constantly challenge you to grow intellectually which can literally feel like an attack on said identity.

order-matters 28d ago

identities spoken of in this way are tools and we often get very caught up in self reflection and the level of worthiness we feel we have earned certain labels. your true and actual identity is out of your control and not something you would ever think twice about. you arent someone who exercises or not. your identity is the part of you that believes exercising is good for you to begin with. thinking you need to and telling yourself you are someone who does it are both the same identity. If you believe it is good for you and you dont do it, then there is another part of your identity that is asserting you dont always need to good things for yourself. The part you really need to challenge, which will help in all areas of your life, is to settle the question: "to what extent do I believe I should do things that are good for me?". Every day you go without any plan or committed effort towards your health and exercising is a day you answered, "very little extent". for sake of text length im going to skip a lot of detail, but if you're like me then this eventually leads to a question of "how do I restore faith in myself?" a thought experiment that i read somewhere (and maybe tweaked) that i use is a "post body swap" mentality. If you are willing to accept accountability and responsibility for whatever is in your past, then you no longer need to identify with it, and can treat every single new day as if it is your first time in this body. A kind of "live every day like it's your first" mentality. It has helped me recover from a lot of tough spots where i had an overwhelming amount of 'backlog' to deal with. phrased differently, you look at your life as if you have just inherited it. you died, met God, and He said "i dont normally do this, but im sending you back for another shot in a random <yours> body". the point isnt to trick yourself, you dont need to, there is no trick. it is simply a reminder of the free will you had already possessed prior to the thought experiment. that this is always your life to live however you want moving forward. imagine you woke up in someones body who is more out of shape than you are currently, to the point you cant do things you currently enjoy doing. would you take the obvious path to start training to at least be able to do the things you were previously used to doing and see how far you get, or would you put in work to figure out how to change the way you live to better fit the new body? your life is the way it is right now largely due to momentum from your past, not your current identity. identity updates really are not necessary to improve your life, and you arent identified by your momentum - even if that momentum has labels people use to describe it

0xf8 28d ago

I find the failure mode for this to have been pretty insurmountable when you’re not genuinely on board with said identity. A trivial example: the behavior you could make into your identity is the result of socionormative expectations and pressure. Doctors say one should exercise, all my friends are athletic and expect me to be, society values fitness, to espouse the exercise lifestyle is seen as a moral virtue, etc.—but what if someone personally doesn’t give a fvck about exercise beyond these external forces? For some people it will never naturally become their identity, even if they “want” it to be, on account of the exogenous pressure to fit this norm. For some it will feel contrived or even forced. It is possible for the inherent motivation to act in accordance with your identity, and how you choose to orient yourself in the world, to be at odds with what you “want” to accomplish, do, or identify with on the surface. For that person, they have to genuinely value being the person who exercises for the “need” to become implicit. For me this manifested on the intellectual plane. At times in the past I wanted to intellectually be “into XYZ”, like mathematics, for example, or some other subject matter. I had the aptitude and certainly the capacity to focus, enough to develop genuine expertise over time. But then I found that, in truth, I did not genuinely enjoy the subject matter enough to delve so deeply. I liked the idea of being someone who had cultivated rigorous mathematical expertise, but not actually being that person in reality, so it could never be my identity naturally, it would remain maximum effort as long as that were true. It’s strange to me how we can convince ourselves to want something we don’t actually value intrinsically. But I suspect that’s a longstanding feedback loop in evolutionary psychology. On the converse side of the story, I posit you can also get pretty far in stagnation of actual personal growth / progress by simply convincing everyone around you deceptively of a specific identity, and have that be validating enough to preclude cultivating that identity in earnest. Another trivial example: the “smartest guy in the room” effect. If you are sufficiently smart, or surround yourself with individuals who won’t challenge you intellectually and default to being deferential, you can certainly feel pretty smart, and have that maladaptively/falsely validate your sense of identity as the smartest-in-the-room type of personality. TL;DR: I think the “make it your identity, then effort towards action comes naturally” is a powerful model for self-motivation, but it has meaningful failure modes—notably, it’s hard to force if you’re not genuinely into it, and sociodynamic feedback loops impacting personal sense of identity can collapse or even pervert the entire approach.

nonameiguess 28d ago

I benefit tremendously from the exercise example specifically, but I still agree with 0xf8 that this isn't something you can just will yourself into. I identity as an athlete because I am. I've played sports of some sort and exercised my entire life. It isn't "exercise" to me. I'm just an animal that has a body, wants that body to excel at being a body, and so I train it, just as I read and learn and practice various intellectual skills to keep my mind sharp, because it is also core to my identity that I'm a human, the apex of intelligence in the animal kingdom, and making my brain work as well as it possibly can is important to me. Making the rest of my body work well is also important to me. On the other hand, I buy all of the data suggesting religious people are happier than others. They have built-in community, friends, relationships, guidance on how to live a good life. I was religious as a teenager and it was terrific. I had a great time in bible study, met interesting people I loved, even met girls and had an outlet for my singing. But as I got older, I can't do it any more because I don't believe the doctrine. I can't force myself to believe something I don't believe. In spite of how much better I believe my life would be if I was religious, I can't be. I don't know that identity is really all that malleable. You either identity as something or you don't, and the reason is rarely if ever "I read a self help book and convinced myself this is who I am."