While sitting here on March 11, 2024, listening to Steeeam by Shelly, I was struck by this thought. It’s probably not the first time.
I was reading an article on quora about government surveillance and just imagining how much information they must collect now on citizens. I remember the fiasco with skype calls being revealed to have been recorded, back in the early 2010s. Of course, everyone probably forgot within a week and moved on. I forgot enough to not think about it more than a few times over the years.
We know they have access to our calls, texts, and probably emails as well. Everything is just a piece of data on someone’s service, and since we don’t really pay for most of these services anymore thanks to the internet, they are all just sitting on databases somewhere. Most of the time, if there is no need for storage space, they are not going to bother deleting old messages or accounts, no matter how old they are.
This is all sobering and a bit anxiety-inducing, especially for those of us who might find ourselves in sticky situations due to our heavy online presence, consumption of social media, and overall constant attachment to technology.
I found myself feeling more of a desire to take charge in my life before all of this. I wondered again then, shortly after, what would happen of my life if I seriously took charge of everything immediately? This would mean a swift deletion of apps, software, and people who I simply interact with out of habit.
What would really happen? I feel sure I have written something about this in the past. What would happen if I suddenly got my shit together with my work, and never looked back? I could actively work on being the new person from tomorrow morning. This new person would not be on those media apps, they would be moving toward their goal with 3 or 4 times the speed as right now. Maybe 10 times. Maybe 20. What if it’s 100 times faster?
What am I really losing by going down this path as slowly as I have been? I have enough time in the day to do it all, if I let go of these things. Don’t I?
My ego is also far too inflated now, for what I am and what I am currently doing. I have all this irrational confidence, which supports my drive, but does not need to be exuded in my speech as directly as it has been. I have a long way to go. I need to focus on humility. I had a thought about people discussing my business once I deleted certain apps and left certain communities. Would they really even care? Very few individuals would have any thoughts of me. It’s true that my presence is greater than average, but I have not been so invested in people’s lives that the average random member of a community would notice my absence.
Instead, I worry about people thinking and saying things of me, when they do nothing like that. And this stems from my ego being too big for who I am. Let me get a little closer to these goals, and then consider bringing back that ego. For now, it’s far too much, and might be off-putting without me realizing it.
What would it look like, if I did everything right immediately?
- Delete apps (snap?)
- Delete discord (cole?)
- Delete/reblock reddit (the muslim trader?)
- Write down a plan to be a better person around the house.
- Clean my room.
- Clean my desk.
Unsolicited Feedback – A Brilliant Point
If you are about to reinvent yourself, what’s the most important first step?
Don’t talk about it.
Why?
Unsolicited feedback.
Unsolicited feedback is priceless. Hands down, it’s the best way to gauge your progress. You know, without a doubt, exactly where you stand and where to focus.
But the moment you open your mouth, the spell is broken. That person will no longer be a meaningful source of feedback. You’ll be stuck in the dark until they forget. The last thing you need when reinventing yourself is an inaccurate view of your progress.
Family and friends will convince you that you’re a rock star who “is fine the way he is.” Your enemies will undermine you at every opportunity.
Even better, you get the awesome feeling of total surprise.
Imagine these three scenarios:
You’ve always wanted to learn to dance. But you suck. Suddenly you find yourself at a party. The DJ starts playing your favorite song.
You turn to the person next to you and say …
“Yeah, I’ve been thinking about taking dance lessons.” Your date takes a slow sip and stares across the room, “That’s cool.
“I’ve been taking dance lessons.” Well, shit. This scenario is the worst of the three. One of two bad things will happen:
- You will feel inclined to show everyone your terrible moves and totally underwhelm everyone.
- Or, everyone will chant, “Ah, come on!” to see your moves and you still underwhelm everyone.
OR
You’ve been dancing for a year or two and nobody knows. Suddenly, you bust a move all over Bille Jean and everyone’s calling you Michael for the rest of the night.
You can use this same “keep your mouth shut” strategy for lots of things and let the feedback come on it’s own, like:
- Dressing well: “Hey, where’d you get that shirt?”
- Building social skills: “I had no idea how funny he was.”
- Getting fit: “Damn, baby. Get your ass over here.”
- Playing guitar: “Uhhh, I’ve known you for twelve years. You play guitar?”
Whatever your first step is for your reinvention, make it the two rules of Fight Club.
“One, you don’t talk about fight club. Two, you don’t talk about fight club.”
What does it look like to reinvent?
What is the best way to reinvent yourself?
Unlearn who you are.
It’s a simple idea, but it’s not an easy task to accomplish, since it requires true commitment.
You’re all made of all your past experiences, education, memories…
Everything that happened during your life up to now, and how you reacted to it, has forged your current mindset and personality.
That doesn’t mean that’s the only way you can be, it just means that all your choices have taken you there, just where you are now.
How can you change that?
Well, you need to stop assuming that’s who you are and the only way there is to for you to exist, and start understanding that it’s just one way to be and to live your life and that there are infinite ways of doing it.
That’s going to take time, since you’ve been carving inside of you all those emotions, thoughts, actions, interests, preferences all your life, so they have stuck in your mind and your neural pathways so much that most of who you are is absolutely automated and driven by your autonomous nervous system.
You don’t even need to make a conscious decision when doing something you do everyday, it just comes natural.
To make a real change in all that you need to really commit and start directing your actions first to different things than those you’re used to. Then, your emotions will change, then your thoughts will do the same, and you’ll be creating new neural pathways that will ultimately lead to a different personality and mindset.
For instance, if you don’t really work out much and you want to be the kind of person that does, you need to start working out every single day. At first, you’ll force yourself to do it, but with time and consistency that will become a new habit in your life that will change how you feel about yourself and your self-perception.
That can be applied to anything in your life that you want to do differently. Work, relationships, hobbies, sports… anything can be trained and changed by making a consistent conscious change.
The key here is to realise that life can be lived in many ways that consist in a bunch of different habits and routines that end up making up who we are.
So the moment you want to change your life, it’s as simple (not easy) as starting new routines that will lead to a very different version of yourself you didn’t know existed.
Do not overthink it, really, it’s simple.
Just change what you do and how you do it and your mindset, emotions and thoughts will follow to match that behaviour. And you’ll be a completely different person.
You know those people that leave everything and go on a world trip and they come back a very different person? Well, they’ve changed their daily routines and their priorities and perceptions have shifted so much that they really have become different.
What do you want to do?
Who do you want to be?
It’s up to you to make that choice, and you’re really free to do it.
The only thing stopping you from changing your life is really your current self that’s conditioned by all your past and that always looks for the comfort zone when making choices.
Break that.
You need to be able to experience discomfort to really change yourself.
You need to forget all you know, everything you find familiar and go into the unknown.
It’s a great adventure if you’re up for it.
Enjoy the ride, my friend! 😉
Insulted about intelligence
Why does this type of insult sting differently than insults about other things? Is it just me, or is it like this for others too? It’s like disqualifying your status as one of the examples of advanced consciousness on Earth, to be so stupid that you must be labeled separately from your peers about it.
Becoming the Best Version of Yourself
I identified 21 actions that could help you become the best version of yourself.
#19 is the most actionable of them all.
1. Just show up. Say you want to run a marathon, but have no prior experience. The first step is lacing up you shoes and hitting the pavement. Even if you only make it half a mile on your first training run, you’ll be about 2% closer to your ultimate goal than if you didn’t put in any work at all.
2. Start from the beginning. You don’t just happen to stumble upon the best version of yourself. You need to start from the beginning and take a high number of small steps in order to become what you envision.
3. Recognize that the best version of yourself should be your vision, not anybody else’s. Don’t waste energy trying to live up to what somebody else wants you to be.
4. Stop looking for a secret trick. There is no miraculous shortcut to the better version of yourself.
5. Use Twitter to network. It’s never been easier to get in touch with influential and powerful people. Earlier in my career, I reached out a high-level executive of a company I was interested in. He was hosting an AMA session on Twitter. I asked him for advice about how to get hired for his company, and not only did he reply with some helpful tips, he also connected me with specific people at the company about an open position.
6. Don’t sweat the details. Just make sure that you’re moving in the right general direction. You probably don’t have the knowledge you need today to know the shortest path to your happiness 5 years from today. But you probably have some idea about how to move in the right direction. Take those steps.
7. Recognize the opportunity at hand. The Internet has fundamentally changed everything. Previously, knowledge was locked away in the minds of industry experts and in the pages of books that you needed to buy or check out from a library. But now, it’s easier than ever to learn new skills. This is essential to becoming the best version of yourself.
8. Write on Medium. Translating your thoughts into written narratives pushes you to think about the ideas in your head at a much deeper level.
9. Don’t count the hours. They don’t matter. Think about the last time you ran on a treadmill. If you looked down at the timer every few seconds, you probably didn’t enjoy your run. In turn, this made it far more difficult to run far.
But what if you took the opposite approach? You plugged in your headphones, lost yourself in the music, and took it one stride at a time….while resisting any temptation to look at the timer at all. If you did this, you probably discovered that you enjoyed the run and made it pretty far. Counting hours just slows you down from reaching your goal.
10. Accept help from other people. Don’t let your pride get in the way. Most successful people needed help along the way, too.
11. Launch a personal website. Maintaining an online presence of yourself pushes you to become the best possible version of you.
12. Write answers on Quora. Quora is an amazing place to help and inspire people at scale.
13. Ignore the social media scoreboard. People depict an extremely exaggerated version of life on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and other social platforms. We only share the good things, not the bad. So when you compare yourself to what you see on social media, you’re just hurting yourself.
14. Celebrate the small wins. Appreciating what you’re doing in the present gives you the motivation to keep making strides towards your ultimate goal.
15. Stop pretending to know things you don’t know. You’ll never learn anything if you pretend to already know everything.
16. Embrace failure. You can’t become the best version of yourself by playing it safe. Heck, getting fired could even be the best thing that ever happened to you, just look at Noah Kagan (employee 30 at Facebook).
17. Call your family. This is just the decent thing to do. But you can also learn lessons from your family that aren’t available through any Google search and aren’t accessible to pretty much anyone else in the world.
18. Exercise in the morning. Once I started doing this in the morning, I became far more focused and relaxed throughout the day. Science backs that up, too.
19. Create a side project. Doing something productive outside of work that makes you happy helps you become a better version of yourself. So, whatever it is…an app, film, album, whatever….start doing it on your nights and weekends. And who knows? It might just turn into a full-time job that you love.
20. Help other people become the best version of themselves. Pay it forward. Doing so keep you motivated on your own path, and you’ll find that the lasting connections you build from helping others will greatly benefit you moving forward.
21. Launch your MVP early. If you’re not satisfied with the current version of yourself, then the quickest way to solve the problem is to begin working towards the better version today. There is no “right time” to get started.
It can be tempting to think about the best version of yourself as some intangible point in the future. You know, the one where you are:
- More successful
- Doing what you love
- Existing as an overall happier person
You see your current self as the regular season, and you’re just waiting for the playoffs to start before giving it your all.
But if all you do is wait for the best version of yourself to happen, you’re forever going to be stuck with the current version.