Keep Your Identity Malleable
Footnote to "Cron for the Mind"
This is a long footnote to the sections in "Cron for the Mind" on using spaced repetition for fuzzy tasks and habits, but can mostly be read on its own. See the intro section of the first part for some more context. The title of this post is inspired by Paul Graham’s Keep Your Identity Small, although the content of that essay is only tangentially related.
I give you permission to change the way you see yourself
The way you see yourself matters a ton.1
In a positive way, readers read, coders code, and guitarists play guitar. You don’t need to worry as much about setting daily/weekly habits when doing the thing is part of who you are.
In a negative way, it’s really easy to construct a narrow and harmful self-identity that you stick to because it just feels like a part of you. It’s easy to feel like you have to be “the kind of person that's socially awkward”, “the kind of person that doesn’t eat healthily”, “the kind of person that's unwilling to take risks”, “the kind of person that's unproductive”, “just not hard-working.” “Trust me, I’m not a math/physics/etc person. It’s just not who I am.”
As concrete and ossified as it probably feels, your identity is incredibly fluid and it’s constantly evolving. Think about how you saw yourself 5 years ago, and compare that to now. If there isn't much difference, stretch back further. Your identity can change, and it can change radically.
Most of your identity changes have probably been a product of changing circumstances. Maybe your friend group changed and you started hanging around more athletic people. Gradually, you started seeing yourself as someone who exercises daily and you go to the gym daily by default. Maybe over the summer you binge-watched a couple of good shows in a row and started seeing yourself as a serial binge-watcher. Now, it takes extra effort not to binge-watch by default after coming home from school.
Once you realize how malleable your identity is, you can start intentionally changing it. Truly understanding this has been one of the most empowering realizations of my life.2 You can become a reader, a math person, nerdier, sparklier, more hard-working, and more caring once you decide that you want to.
Identity change
This all sounds great, but intentional identity change is hard. The only way is to just go and do the actions that you would do if you had the desired identity until you convince yourself.3 You want to do the things that an X does until it feels authentic to call yourself one.
There are two main ways I use memory systems for identity change.
As a task manager to make sure I do the things that an X does.
Directly priming myself to think more like an X. I would recommend checking out the Alexey Guzey’s post I linked to in the last part and this Andy Matuschak note.
Examples:
Q: You want to be the kind of person who does what when you have long stretches of time to yourself but don’t feel like doing anything “productive”? A: Watch game theory lectures.
Q: When you encounter any complex information system, what lens will you use to think about it? A: Memetics
Q: Whenever you decide to do an activity very seriously, what mindset should you adopt? A: Pursue virtuosity
Cloze: 95%-ile [isn’t that good.]
From Dan Luu.
Q: What’s a helpful mental model for thinking about tech companies (really all companies but tech in particular)? A: Aggregation Theory
Cloze: Whenever you look at junk food, you feel [repulsed].
Q: What should you do once you wake up on a weekend? A: Go biking and running instead of grabbing your phone and staying in bed.
This isn’t the best system for identity change by any means, but the fact that I have a reliable, low-friction, and general systems at all to start towards any desired identity makes it much easier for me to get over the initial activation energy. I used to say things like “Yeah, I’m the kind of person who just can’t get up out of bed” and feel bad about myself without trying to change anything. Now, when I notice thought patterns and habits I want to change, I can just chuck them into Anki and start working on them.4
That said, cards in a siloed app often miss out on a lot of tacit stuff. There are ways to program your attention in richer contexts.
Make friends with people that have your desired identity.
Use things like Curius, Twitter, Reddit, and Discord to find people that you think are interesting and want to think more like.
Subscribe to blogs and newsletters by people you want to think more like.
This is something I first started thinking about while reading Atomic Habits, and I thought it was the most valuable part of the book, although I wish there was a higher emphasis on it. I’ve seen many others talk about ideas adjacent to these, but they tend to be in specific contexts (working out, getting off social media, etc). At least for me, this is the kind of thing that’s extremely obvious once you start thinking about it but still incredibly hard to truly internalize in daily life.
While editing this section, I was trying to find quotes from the book and discovered that James Clear has written 2 articles (one, two) that have good advice on this. I base a good chunk of my advice here from Atomic Habits and those posts.
And also a reason I’ve found to have more empathy and grace towards people with identities and beliefs very different from mine.
Sidenote prompted by the bed example: You’ve probably already heard this advice a million times, but willpower should be a last resort for bad habits. In the bed example, just cards in Anki probably wouldn’t do much at all. In general, do your best to notice when you have a bad habit* and make it as hard as possible to do.
As an example, over the summer, I noticed that I tended to lose a lot of sleep because I would go on my phone and check my email or respond to texts after dinner and would fall down some rabbit hole until I realized that it was 2:00 AM. I beat myself up about this internally for a month before I realized that I’d literally read multiple books on habit change. Now I’ve set my phone to lock me out of all apps at about 10:00 PM, and the only way to get through is to ask my sister (who’s usually asleep by then).
*At least for me, this by itself is surprisingly hard to do. It’s easy to feel guilty in the moment and then forget by the end of the day. This is where knowing to chuck everything into Anki helps.