You are what you choose, but only if you're actually choosing
Action precedes clarity. You find out who you are by doing things and seeing what happens.
A couple of months ago I wrote an essay called “You Are What You Choose,” and the premise couldn’t have been more simple: identity isn’t something you discover buried inside yourself, it’s something you build through accumulated choices, most of them so small you don’t notice you’re making them. You’re not digging down to “find” who you are, rather you’re constructing who you are, brick by brick, decision by decision, in moments so minor they don’t feel like moments at all.
The essay resonated in a way I wasn’t expecting. There were some negative interpretations of it, but for the most part, people seemed genuinely happy and empowered to hear something so simple. We are… what we choose.
But one question kept coming up: how?
How do you actually choose differently? How do you live from this insight instead of just having it once and then drifting back to baseline?
I didn’t have a good answer at first, because the honest truth is that most people don’t live from their insights. They have them, feel briefly transformed, and then slowly return to whatever they were doing before while the realization fades into something they technically still believe but no longer feel in their bones.
The problem is that insight and behavior operate on different timescales and different mechanisms entirely. You can know something is true and still not act on it, not because you’re weak or undisciplined but because knowing and doing are genuinely different processes that don’t automatically connect.