Anchor your identity to why you do the things you do rather than what you do. This creates a more durable and reliable relationship with your identity, making it resilient to change and loss by allowing you to find your core drivers elsewhere.
Adopt a flexible way of thinking about yourself, recognizing that there might not be immutable ’essential qualities.’ This prevents harmful self-narratives and allows for a growth mindset, enabling continuous change and improvement.
Pride yourself on a willingness to update opinions, belief systems, and strategies based on new information, rather than being stubbornly resolute in convictions. This allows for growth, better decision-making, and is a virtuous quality in various aspects of life.
When experiencing significant life changes, constantly audit yourself to understand how you have changed, not just the specific area of alteration. Change in one area can have unpredictable spillover effects on all other parts of life, altering preferences, choices, and identity.
Foster genuine curiosity about what’s next or around the corner, without strong emotional attachment to specific outcomes. Curiosity is self-amplifying, provides endless energy for learning, and makes the journey enjoyable, as surprises can be more exciting than predictions.
When experiencing awe, actively look for a ‘place for yourself’ within that experience, where you can enact something or engage with it. This transforms passive inspiration into delight and a sense of possibility, fostering deeper connection and new identity aspects.
When desired opportunities do not exist, use ‘imaginative courage’ to create a path, such as making a ‘cold call’ or pitching a new position. The worst outcome is often rejection, but the aftermath can be amazing, leading to new roles and experiences.
Focus on relishing the process of an endeavor (e.g., making a podcast episode) rather than solely the external outcome (e.g., audience reaction). This provides a sturdy foundation, feeds curiosity, and offers protection from external noise and uncontrollable results.
Frame your goals in terms of an ‘approach orientation’ (e.g., ‘I want to eat healthier foods’) rather than an ‘avoidance orientation’ (e.g., ‘I want to avoid unhealthy foods’). Approach goals are generally more motivating, lead to feelings of pride and accomplishment upon success, and are easier to measure.
Actively build choice and ownership into your goal pursuit, even when working with coaches or mentors (e.g., choosing targets, asking for options). Feeling in the driver’s seat and having agency is a powerful intrinsic motivator, leading to greater satisfaction and commitment.
Shorten the time duration of your goals (e.g., weekly instead of annual) to minimize the ‘middle problem.’ Motivation tends to dip in the middle of goal pursuit; shorter durations mean a shorter ‘middle’ phase, helping sustain motivation.
Pair an unpleasant activity (e.g., folding laundry, hard cardio) with an immediately rewarding, enjoyable activity (e.g., favorite podcast, music). Crucially, only indulge in the rewarding activity during the unpleasant task to maintain its potency.
Incorporate an ’emergency reserve’ or ‘slack’ into your goals, allowing for a few permissible misses without derailing the entire pursuit. This prevents frustration and complete abandonment of goals due to minor setbacks, allowing you to stay on track.
Leverage big milestone moments (new job, moving) or arbitrary fresh starts (New Year, first day of week/month/season) to introduce new habits. These moments provide a psychological break from the past and often involve environmental changes that make it easier to establish new patterns.
When engaging in an unpleasant but necessary activity, make the last few minutes slightly less unpleasant than the rest, even if it extends the overall duration. Our memory of an experience is heavily influenced by its peak and end, leading to a more positive overall impression and increasing the likelihood of returning to the activity.
Understand and cultivate all three types of empathy: emotional, cognitive (diagnosing distress and solutions), and empathic concern (desire to help), valuing them equally. This broadens your capacity for empathy, allows for different expressions of care, and can protect against burnout by shifting focus from purely emotional burden.
Surround yourself with a diverse set of people, including those you wouldn’t naturally gravitate towards or vehemently disagree with. This helps fill gaps in self-knowledge, breeds more self-awareness, and allows you to see how you come across to others.
Be willing to integrate how you impact others into your understanding of self, rather than solely focusing on internal authenticity. We are social creatures, and how we come off to others matters; external feedback can be a valuable barometer for self-improvement.
When facing a problem or seeking to reframe something, think about it from a third-person perspective (e.g., ‘What advice would I give a friend in this situation?’). This promotes objectivity, emotional distance, and can decrease neural activity associated with hostility and aggression.
When venting to a friend about a challenge, explicitly ask them to act as a ‘cognitive advisor’ by finding holes in your narrative and challenging your thinking, rather than just offering emotional support. This helps reframe situations, identify blind spots, and move towards solutions.
Take active steps to overcome biases or limitations experienced as a young person due to projected beliefs or roles (identity foreclosure). This can help you break free from imposed structures and expand your mindset regarding what you want to achieve and are capable of achieving.
Engage in experiences that evoke awe, characterized by perceived vastness (physical, conceptual, temporal) and a need for accommodation (integrating new information into your mental model). Awe can lead to more open minds, help define new identities, and confer benefits to well-being.
To challenge your own viewpoints and avoid echo chambers, imagine how your belief system might differ if you were born in a different time period, family, or cultural landscape. This helps detach beliefs from identity, revealing their non-precious nature and making you more open to changing your mind.
When engaging in disagreement, ask the other person, ‘What in theory could change your mind about X, Y, or Z?’ This presupposes a willingness to update beliefs, opens an entry point for discussion, and helps determine if a productive conversation is possible.
Set goals when you are in the same psychological and physiological state as the one you’ll be in when actually pursuing the goal. This bridges ’empathy gaps’ between present and future selves, leading to more realistic and achievable goals.
When communicating benefits or opportunities, use language that emphasizes what someone has ’earned’ rather than merely what they are ’eligible’ for. This taps into the endowment effect, where people value things more when they feel ownership or have earned them, significantly increasing engagement.
Dissolve one packet of Element in 16 to 32 ounces of water first thing in the morning and during any physical exercise. This ensures adequate hydration and electrolytes (sodium, magnesium, potassium) for optimal brain and body function, as even slight dehydration diminishes performance.
Use a meditation app like Waking Up for meditation programs, mindfulness trainings, yoga nidra sessions, and non-sleep deep rest (NSDR) protocols. These practices can place the brain and body into different states, explore consciousness, and restore cognitive/physical energy, even with short sessions.