If I asked you: “Who are you?”

You would probably pause for a second or two and tell me:

“I’m *insert your name* ”

But if I challenged you to go deeper….“Who are you at your core?”

“It’s simple, I’m me… like I’m my brain and my body. What do you want me to say?”

To which I would answer: WRONG!

Why?

Because if I changed parts of your body or do some modification to your brain, then maybe it would change how you look, or how you behave.

But the essential feeling of you being you would remain intact.

See…all of your life, you’re walking around, trying to define yourself based on your likes and dislikes.

You define yourself by the people you surround yourself with, as well as people you don’t want to be associated with.

You define yourself as a smart person or a dumb person, introvert or extrovert, and so on.

Over time, you end up with this seemingly fully defined character.

A bundle of traits, preferences, and characteristics that seem to be carved in stone.

Great, but is this little bundle of opinions, habits, and biology mushed together all there is to you?

Some would argue yes….. They believe that you’re just born into this world, and life just happens to you.

I can see why it might be tempting to believe that. After all most of what you considered as “yourself” happened by accident.

1: The Creation of Your Identity – Explained

Starting from the ages 0-7 you were just a walking sponge, downloading all the data you needed to survive in this world.

With no critical judgment of your own, you just vacuumed all the information you were given in your immediate environment.

You could be born into a family of alcoholics that only need you when they run out of beer… Or you can be born into a nice family that looks after you and wants nothing but the best for you.

The thing to realize is, you don’t make that choice.

Then school came along – not much of a choice there either. You were thrown into a class together with a bunch of kids, some of which you became friends with and some of which were bullies.

Your sense of self, an ego starts to take shape from there.

Oblivious to your own development you started to try on new identities with only one purpose in mind – being liked and looking cool AF.

I know what you are thinking, “Wait a minute… I wasn’t trying to be cool! I was just being me!”

Well you can believe that all you want, but according to research:

“Fitting in”, or gaining peer acceptance, is a primary objective of youth in the high school context and, for many adolescents, maybe more important than academic goals (Crosnoe, 2011 ; Eccles & Roeser, 2011 )

In other words, as you are developing your character in those formative years, your prime directive is:

• Being accepted and fitting in – GOOD 
• Rejected and ridiculed – BAD
  

2: Deep Identity Level Change

I hope you can start to see where I’m going with this:

1. What you consider yourself as “yourself” is in constant motion and “under construction ”
2. In your early (and most formative) years, you had absolutely no control over how you turn out – you were at the mercy of the environment and had to roll with the punches
3. Now you are in the driver’s seat of your life and should carefully reexamine the parts of yourself that get in a way of living a fulfilling life. You are now able to consciously choose to be one way and reject being some other way.

That’s definitely good news!

Think about it…

Any part of what you think of as your character can be changed and sculpted to your liking.

What does it mean for you?

That means that if you are shy, you can be confident.

If you are fat and lazy you can be fit and healthy.

If you think you are a bad person who doesn’t deserve love you can enhance your self-esteem.

I know it may sound too good to be true, but for now, please suspend your disbelief and let me tell you the whole story.

To make it easier to visualize, think of yourself as a character in The Sims. In that game, you can pick and choose how and what you want your character to be, the same can be done to your real-life character.

If you had a choice, what would be your perfect game avatar? What traits would you like to cultivate? What traits would you like to get rid of?

Here is how Gandhi put it:

“Your beliefs become your thoughts, Your thoughts become your words, Your words become your actions, your actions become your habits, your habits become your values, your values become your destiny.” — Gandhi

So essentially what you can understand from this quote by Gandhi is, your thoughts and your words all the way down to your values will eventually define your destiny.

Personally, I would add to this quote “…and your destiny becomes your beliefs”, and complete the ontological feedback loop out of which your particular predicament is derived from.

All of those elements (thoughts, words, etc.) are an interconnected feedback loop that feeds on itself. If you think about it in another way, if you intentionally change your thoughts, your habits, etc, you will in turn change as a person.

Let’s put it another way because I want you to be completely clear on this.

Your destiny can be whatever you want it to be, it’s completely up to you.

Basically, your personality can be narrowed down to a specific set of thought patterns, behaviors, and opinions that you’ve taken from your external environment — from the outside in.

This is what you eventually start to identify as your static image.

Even though the image you have of yourself is static since the only thing about life is the constant change you have to take on a more dynamic identity that you can shape and define from the inside out.

Bear with me here, I want you to really contemplate and think of the importance of this.

The question is, are you going to partake in this evolution consciously? Or are you going to let the tidal wave of happenstance take you over?

The problem with static identity is that if you believe that your current self is a fixed unchanging entity, then you can’t do anything about it.

You’re stuck with what you have – the optimization machine of who you could become is jammed.

But if you take on a more dynamic, ever-changing identity that can be sculpted improved upon continuously, then there is no end to how good your life can be.

3: The Mortal Enemy of Your Personal Growth

Through the power of “neuroplasticity” (the brain’s ability to rewire itself), you can untrain yourself from being one way and become something completely new.

All you have to do is to design that new character on a piece of paper and slowly start aligning yourself with that new version.

I swear it’s that simple, although there is a catch.

“Ok I hear what you are saying, why isn’t everyone evolving into the best versions of themselves if it’s so easy? ”

The reason why it’s easy in theory and hard in practice is because of one word: “homeostasis”.

This is a very important concept you need to understand prior to any of your personal development attempts. It’s so important in fact that I will let George Leonard, an author of an excellent book “Mastery” to do the explanation.

“Backsliding is a universal experience. Every one of us resists significant change, no matter whether it’s for the worse or for the better.

Our body, brain, and behavior have a built-in tendency to stay the same within rather narrow limits, and to snap back when changed—and it’s a very good thing they do.

Just think about it: if your body temperature moved up or down by 10 percent, you’d be in big trouble.

The same thing applies to your blood sugar level and to any number of other functions of your body.

This condition of equilibrium, this resistance to change, is called homeostasis. It characterizes all self-regulating systems, from a bacterium to a frog to a human individual to a family to an organization to an entire culture—and it applies to psychological states and behavior as well as to physical functioning.”

So the reason why any major change in your life is hard is that your “old self” is an entity that doesn’t give up easily.

Homeostasis will fight back and resist the change – your mind will give you feelings, thoughts, and ways of seeing things to get you back to the way things used to be.

This is why the vast majority of people attempting to improve any part of their life will always and a way back to their old patterns and behaviors.

That’s why most lottery winners can never hold on to the money they won.

Homeostasis seems to be the rule when it comes to any systems in nature. Yet we forget that our bodies and minds themselves are subjects to the same laws.

It’s important to not see homeostasis as something bad – in fact it is the very thing that keeps you alive.

Your body and mind would not work without it.

Can you imagine what would happen if every time you got drunk you just stayed that way and had no other means to regulate your mental wellbeing back to its original set point?

That would be a disaster, right?

The problem is that homeostasis doesn’t differentiate between beneficial or unproductive patterns of behavior. It’s the only goal is to preserve what worked in the past, even if what worked is dysfunctional in the long term.

The art of successfully implementing any major changes in your life is to skillfully sidestep the alarm bells of homeostasis.

For example:

If you’ve been living a sedentary lifestyle for most of your life, homeostasis will let you have some wiggle room if you decide to join the gym. It will probably be quite exciting to go there for 2-3 weeks – but before you know it your motivation dwindles.

We will look into how to deal with homeostasis in the next phases, for now, this is all you need to know.

4: Who You Are On The Inside = Who You Are On The Outside

It’s all about adaptation, if you want different outcomes in your life, you must engage in different behaviors. But the person capable of acting differently in the long term is literally a different person.

Hence you can’t just improve – a whole personal transformation is required. You have to change from a caterpillar to a buttery.

If you take it apart and simplify the equation, it looks something like this:

Habits + mindsets + beliefs + environment = girlfriend, how much money you have, your level of coolness

To put it differently:

WHO YOU ARE BEING = WHAT YOU GET OUT OF LIFE

Everything external reacts to who you truly are on the inside.

That’s the true meaning of the law of attraction. You don’t attract what you want, but you attract what you are being on the inside.

If you don’t change the left side of the equation, the right side won’t move.

If what you’re getting right now from life is crap, that’s because the left part of the equation is messed up.

And if that’s the case, you can’t just passively binge-watch Netflix, eat Cheetos, and hope to one day stumble into becoming the next Elon Musk.

You need to embody the mindsets and habits of a million-dollar man TODAY and acting from that place way before you make your first dollar or meet a girl of your dreams.

It starts by planting those seeds today, to see the fruits of tomorrow.

“Ok, I see where you’re going with this Artur. So if I want to be rich, I just need to have the right habits, mindsets, etc.?”

Not so fast!

Change is a multi-phase process – that’s why magic pill solutions will never work.

But if you want a quick and dirty guide on how to do it here is the gist of it…

Putting it all together

• Your identity is like a computer program – if you were conditioned one way, you can shift it if you want
• If you want the finest things in life, you first have to develop into a man who resonates with those things.
• Homeostasis will keep you stuck until you learn how to circumvent it

Hey man, thanks for reading – I hope you found this information valuable.

Let me know your thought in the comments below.

Do you think your identity can be changed?

Share it with a friend that may find that life-changing information to be of value.

Coming Up Next…

In the next articles we will look into how to dig even deeper:

• What is your purpose?
• What are your current habits?
• What are your current mindsets?
• What are your beliefs?
• What motivates you?
• What are your weaknesses?
• What are your strengths?

We will dive deeper into those in future articles but I wanted to draw your attention to how important this part is first.

Most people seem to get too distracted with tips, tricks, and techniques to pay attention to the fundamental principles that make all these things work.

This is why you can get a real edge by getting this part right.

You need to run a self-diagnostics on where you currently stand and get to know yourself on a deeper level.

Without knowing yourself and where you currently stand you will be shooting in the dark.

No amount of advice will ever feel like it’s enough to solve your problems.

You need to know what is your current life trajectory if you continue doing what you are doing for the next 3, 5 or 10 years before you can shift it.

It takes guts to look deep within yourself and admit to yourself the reality of the situation. All the lies to cover up and take away the responsibility are just too convenient.

Truth hurts. It will kick you in the balls and leave you on the floor curled up in a ball. Like it or not, truth is your only savior.

There are no shortcuts or magic pill solutions.

What is the cost of skipping that step?

Years of wasted time, dabbling around self-improvement information.

Never truly committing to change. Never making any significant improvements in your life.

Gaining motivation and some momentum, only to lose it two to three weeks later.

You will be like a dude who tries to lose weight, but never even bothers to step on the scales to nd out what his current weight is.

Not making this step a priority is a sure way of getting addicted to self-help material while never really making any significant changes.

You will know a lot, but nothing in your life will fundamentally change.

Taking a really good look at yourself is how you know where to put the sniper rifle of improvement and headshot the exact right issues at a precise time.

Ready, Aim, Fire! 

PS. Hey man, thanks for reading – I hope you found this information valuable.

Let me know your thoughts in the comments below.

Also,  share it with a friend that may find that life-changing information to be of value.

Speak soon, man!