Who are you? What are you like? What do you like? What do you do? Simple questions to ask, but complex ones to answer.

There are many reasons why it’s difficult to quit smoking. There’s the chemical high, which is addictive, and the social element, which is perhaps even more so. It’s very habit-forming, something you develop a taste for and grow to rely on.

Smokers tend to return to their cigarettes. Obese people tend to return to their former states even after going through a rigorous diet and exercise program. Handing a financially irresponsible person a stash of money almost never solves his woes. Here’s a hypothesis: The common element in all of those situations is the persistence of identity.

The smoker may claim that he wants to stop smoking, and he may even believe that he does- but if he’s been smoking long enough, smoking may very well have become a part of his identity. It’s what makes him, him. Smoking is what he does. Take it away from him and he’s lost, frightened. He’s not himself any more, he’s a stranger in his own body.

“It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.” – Albus Dumbledore

We all develop ideas about who or what we are, and these ideas influence our perception of reality, which we can’t really distinguish from reality itself. (There isn’t really such a thing as reality “itself”- our perception, or rather, our simulation of it IS our reality.) That influences our decision-making, our choices. (Or perceived lack of choice- because if you don’t think you have a choice, then you don’t.) And we are defined by our choices.

So if we look at that chain in its entirety: We are defined by our ideas about who we are. Because they define our reality, and consequently, our choices.

Ideas are contagious; we get most of them from outside of ourselves- from other people, and from circumstances. If you’re not interested in evaluating the ideas you transmit- (we are all vessels, mediums through which ideas are transmitted) then you will inevitably receive, transmit and embody ideas that aren’t really your own. (Ideas don’t actually belong to anybody, but let’s avoid that for now.)

That means that you become what others make of you, what others decide for you. You become a victim of circumstances, a statistic of history.

“You can have no dominion greater or less than that over yourself.” – Leonardo da Vinci

“He who cannot obey himself will be commanded.” – Friedrich Nietzsche

If you’re lucky, and many successful people are- you’ll be fed ideas that are positive and empowering. But is that necessarily a good thing? Is that really what we all need to get by? There’s a phenomenon poker players like to describe as “The bad luck of getting a good hand.” Being dealt a good hand, or receiving praise and ideal circumstances tends to inflate a person’s self-esteem. Relying on circumstances and other people to decide who or what you are is risky business, because it’s fickle. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the realm of celebrities- today you’re a heroic messiah who can do no wrong, tomorrow you’re a scourge, the manifestation of all that is wrong with the world.

A precious few don’t let either praise or criticism get to them, and have developed immunity against the negative effects that both favourable and unfavourable circumstances can have on a person’s sense of self-worth. (Johnny Depp comes to mind.) Your self-worth is unconditional, and should not be tied to the esteem of others, or even yourself. (Especially yourself!) By that I mean to say that you shouldn’t base your self-worth on your abilities and accomplishments- because then you become obsessed with delivering results, with avoiding failure- and that’s when you deny yourself the opportunity to truly utilize your potential. That seems to run kinda contrary to most of the typical Western, individualistic, capitalist sort of world-view that has become the general norm in the world. And necessarily so.

“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it’s time to pause and reflect.” – Mark Twain

You have to learn not to accept any idea as valid (even this one!) without testing it rigorously and acknowledging it’s inevitable limitations.

Let’s backtrack a little. There are two kinds of successful people- the robust and the fleeting. A fleeting successful person is like a poker player with a good hand in the right place at the right time. He wins a monster pot, everyone cheers, and it all seems wonderful. A robust successful person, on the other hand, learns to make the most of such opportunities, but doesn’t rely on them. He knows that he’s not entitled to them, that they come and go. He focuses instead on making the most of every moment, on being a good player, even with the bad hands everybody inevitably gets.

It’s nice to get good hands in life, but we’re not going to get them all the time. When we do get them, it’s dangerous to think that we somehow deserved them, or that it means anything at all about our worth as a player, as a person. That’s what utterly destroys fleeting successful people, who are built up only to be knocked down. Robust successful people are the ones really worth studying. (Well, everyone’s worth studying, but these are the ones you should learn from. You know what I mean.)

Robust successful people do not tie their identities and sense of self-worth to their success. They’re successful precisely because they’ve learnt not to worry too much about what others think about them, or what the present circumstances might imply about them. They embrace failure rather than fear it, and are comfortable with uncertainty, with discomfort. All of this is fairly common knowledge, the stuff of cliches.

But the implications of these statements, I feel, lead to a consequential realization which may not be immediately obvious or familiar, which is perhaps the crux of this post: Robust successful people have non-static identities. They don’t allow their identities to be imposed upon them by others, or by circumstances- they create their identities as they see fit. They are able to decouple and disengage from their peers, circumstances, culture and history. In poker, this would mean being able to play each hand independently, without being influenced by the wins and losses of the preceding hands, the reputations of the other players, everything. This is incredibly hard to do- and there are many pop-psychology/sociology books that explain why.

Robust successfuls are capable of discarding elements of their identity that do not serve their purpose- an act which some of us lesser mortals shy away from, regarding it as almost criminal. It’s kind of like murdering a person, isn’t it? Whether it’s the smoker, the underachiever, the anorexic or the abusive- every single one of those identities feels like an entire complex being with a life of its own, with a right to live. There’s a certain Machiavellian ethic about it- destroying undesirable elements for the greater good of all. It’s ruthlessly utilitarian- these people really mean business when it comes to integrity and consistency, even when it hurts!

Folklore has it that Lee Kuan Yew quit a 30-cigarette-a-day habit overnight, because he decided that it was doing him more harm than good- it was affecting his health and oratory capabilities, hindering him from fulfilling his purpose. He discarded the smoker from the rolodex of his personality- calmly and mercilessly.

That’s not to say such people are chameleons with no values, morals, culture or belief system. Such people do exist, but they go nowhere fast. Absolute chaos is easy to comprehend, and people who are like that are frivolous, flitting from one thing to another indecisively, avoiding commitment and responsibility. Absolute chaos isn’t nearly as random as it makes itself out to be- it follows a fairly predictable statistical pattern. Each subsequent random act solidifies the chaotic nature of your choices, which makes you predictable, and hence kinda non-random. Robust successful people are complex rather than chaotic- there is a method to their madness. Every time you discard an undesirable element of your identity (or tune it out such that it becomes negligible, or turn it into something useful), you reinforce another- that you are pragmatic, utilitarian, that you will do what is necessary. It seems to me that this is only ever possible when you serve a purpose that is greater than yourself. For Lee Kuan Yew, this was Singapore.

“Learn to identify and separate your scared self from your real self, then fix one and feature the other.” – Neil Strauss

The hard question that arises is- how do you do justice to your heritage, culture and history, if everything can be discarded, if nothing is sacred? There’s a flaw in the question- it’s a false dichotomy. You don’t have to pretend to be someone you’re not, and you shouldn’t try- that’s outright insincere, and it will show through. People are highly attuned to this sort of thing by nature. The truth is, the fear of losing your identity by discarding what is undesirable is largely unfounded. We are all practically infinite- there is far more to any of us than any of us can ever possibly know ourselves. You are still you even if you lose all of your possessions, all your relationships, all your limbs- everything that you consider critical to who you are, even your name. (There’s a black hole in this universe, though- what happens when you lose your mind? I can’t answer that question- but I imagine that should it ever happen to you or me, we’d cease to be interested in the answer.)

Live in the now. Plan for your future, honour and acknowledge your past- whether it built you up or broke you down- but life in the now.

“For yesterday is simply what I was, and tomorrow even that will be gone.” – Stacyann Chin

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After all that theoretical, idealistic philosophy talk- let’s get pragmatic and real. I can only speak for myself, so let’s talk about me, my identity. Who am I, what do I do, what do I believe about myself? What am I really thinking, underneath all I have been saying? What do I want?

I want to be physically fit, I want to be comfortably strong and muscular, to look and feel good. Yet I am skinny and somewhat weak- I always have been. There’s no point denying it. I have not yet been able to relinquish this aspect of my identity- I’m so used to being who I am that I struggle to truly visualise myself as a fit alpha male. It’s a physical sort of psychology- all my mannerisms, my posture, the way I walk and talk is comfortably calibrated to the status quo. All of that will have to change, and I need a better reason than “because I’d like it to be that way” to be truly convinced. It needs to be a part of a larger purpose for it to truly resonate with me.

I want to be a prolific writer and hustler/entrepreneur. I have grand ambitions and ideas, but I have gotten dangerously comfortable and familiar with being in the middle-zone I’m in- knowing where I am, where I want to go, and what I have to do to get there- yet unable to move forward. Staying in this position has become a part of my identity, it’s where I’m comfortable. This is a recurrent theme in many parts of my life- my music, my fitness, my writing, my relationships, my finances. Progress is glacially slow, because I am so afraid and unwilling to let go of who I think I am.

So clearly, I need to get more comfortable with who I want to be. I used to have a list of things I believed that I had to figure out- I have since figured out pretty much all of them. I have reflected, meditated, studied and analysed all sorts of things, from myself to others. I have internalized many success stories and have abstracted them well- by that I mean to say I have a pretty good idea of what success looks like. The only thing I have not done is visualized my own success.

And Tony Robbins is my saviour here. (Which is terribly ironic for me, because I used to see his pictures in the papers, and think- what a conman! But he won me over in less than a couple of minutes the first time I watched one of his videos.) I have always hesitated to do any sort of real visualization for myself- rather, it never really occurred to me to do so. It always seemed a bit gimmicky, something that only sportsmen can justify doing. But here’s how I see it now- a large part of effectiveness has to do with your state. Your mental state, emotional state, physical state. And visualization is the most direct and effective way to influence our states. (There’s some neurological evidence that the neural activity that happens while we’re vividly imagining doing an activity is practically indistinguishable from when we’re actually doing that activity.) Actually, we all use visualization all the time already- we visualise failure, difficulty. I do this all the time to discourage myself from most of the hustling I’d like to do. Guys do it all the time when approaching girls. And when you influence your state, you influence your outcome. Lately, my state has been defeatist- I do not visualise completing my articles, I do not visualize my body growing in size and strength. I visualise myself having difficulties communicating with my girlfriend. And it happens.

(I have to interject here to squeeze in an analogy I hadn’t earlier planned for- I’ve always believed that people ought to speak out, loudly and firmly- and that merely going through the motions will never cut it. 50% effort will not deliver 50% of the benefits- you have to go big, or go home. At least, when it comes to reading, writing and speaking. I’m good at that, and I’m fairly certain about how it works. So surely the same should apply to visualisation. I would be frustrated with someone giving me a half-hearted speech- similarly, I should be frustrated with myself for my half-hearted visualizations. I’ve been doing the equivalent of handing in essays with barely a couple of lines of writing. That just won’t do, not anymore, not with what’s at stake.)

Of course, it doesn’t mean that visualising something is enough to make it happen. But how we visualise things influences how we approach them, and how we approach things makes a huge difference in the outcome. You have to have a plan of action, of course, and you have to visualise it being carried out in excruciating detail, to the point where it provides you with confidence that is indistinguishable from the confidence you’d feel if you actually got it right. When we don’t do this (guilty!), we have a subconscious preference for maintaining the status quo– which is inevitably what happens.

Real, powerful change is difficult. It’s a serious commitment, essentially a lifestyle choice. I’ve been studying this (intermittently, I must admit) for over a year, and I’ve made some progress, but still not enough to get to where I want to be. It still feels like there’s a threshold just up ahead somewhere, which will yield unexpectedly disproportionate returns once I cross it. I will not settle, and I will not give up.

I hope that I will be able to prove that it’s really possible for ordinary people- underachievers- to make something of themselves without impractically drastic action, without gimmicks, and without superhuman initiative and effort beyond our ordinary capabilities. I know it won’t be easy, but I believe it doesn’t have to be as hard as we make it out to be. I believe that being accomplished and fulfilled shouldn’t be something which only a small minority of people ever get to experience.

I’m an ordinary man, an underachiever with some plans, but I’m going to achieve them and share my findings with everyone in an effort to make the world a better place. Now, excuse me while I take some time to visualise that future and assimilate it into a part of my identity.

(I’d love to ask Lee Kuan Yew about his own experiences with self-affirmation and visualization. What made him believe he could do it? Then and again, he was so brilliant and capable, he could have probably run on conditional self-esteem. But I’d like to know anyway.)