Introduction

After discussing with a friend, I noticed that there are some details about effectively creating an identity that I left out, of which I will expand on in a future post. As for this post, I really think this is life-changing stuff, as it really helped center me, and I hope that you find it beneficial. I’d love to hear your thoughts if you’ve tried this, and how it’s worked for you.

The first thing you’ll notice is that its Monday. Somehow, my definition of a week is different from yours, tacking on an extra 3 days. Maybe Friday posts are in the past. Khair, here we go.

This past week, I’ve been trying to outline what my purpose is. I have the habit of jumping straight into projects or roles without clearly outlining to myself why I’m there, and I had sort of a wake-up call. A friend of mine in an organization we’re in called me out for slacking, and I knew it. I was fully aware that I had hit a wall, a sort of ‘slump’ if you will, where I lost the motivation to maintain the routine I had built over the past couple of months. I was no longer waking up early, I wasn’t sticking to my daily to-do setup in Notion (shoutout August Bradley), and the task list began to aggregate quickly. Seeing this plethora of overdue tasks just fed my laziness more and I quickly found myself wasting days away watching Peaky Blinders (I’m now caught up, smh) and avoiding any work. I was officially off track, I was fully aware of it, and every day made it feel worse. The irony, that my last episode of Thinking Aloud was about the 2-day rule, is so real. I won’t claim the feeling was to the extent of hopelessness, however, I still couldn’t figure out what the root cause was.

I’m sure we’re all familiar with this to a degree. Our day to day procrastinations, from our addictions to social media that slowly chips off moments from our day to phases like this that keep us away from our goals for weeks or months on end. There are multiple aspects of this phenomenon that deserve to be addressed, but let’s just get to the main factor. A lack of Purpose.

Identifying the Problem

For a couple of weeks, I felt lost. I felt as if I was going through the motions, unsure as to what the point of it all was. Sure, writing this now makes it feel like I’m over-exaggerating, but for a lot of us, that’s how it feels. To get up and start back on the habits I had tried to keep pace with wasn’t an appealing idea. I felt like if I had just jumped back into it, I would’ve burned out again and found myself in the same spot later on. It felt like I was just working hard until the next period of slacking, to see how long I could go before falling back down, delaying the inevitable. A constant level of consistency was something I didn’t believe was achievable.

After a lot of introspection, being called out by my friends, and an unnerving level of self-loathing, I began to realize that I didn’t have answers to a lot of basic questions, something as simple as why did I begin a habit in the first place. The root cause was my lack of purpose. I noticed that I hadn’t ever sat down to identify WHY I was involved in the organizations I was in. I hadn’t ever written down WHY I chose to do the daily podcasts that I eventually stopped. I had no grounds for reference to remind myself of the reasons I started, and so it was almost inevitable for me to eventually burn out and stop.

Initially, I was under the impression that these things are intuitive, that writing it down is redundant and doesn’t add any value. Why should I make it that deep? I know these things already, don’t I? It’s easy to spew out surface-level answers to these questions, but that doesn’t do us any good. We tend to assume we know a lot more than we do, and just move on with our lives, brushing it off as a nonissue. We rarely sit down to reflect on our motives and intentions, and then when we’re met with the decision to keep going or throw in the towel, the latter seems a lot more appealing.

Step 1: Shaping your Identity

The conversation of molding your identity deserves a much deeper analysis than what we’ll discuss today, but it’s necessary to touch upon this fundamental topic which is the key to becoming who we innately desire to be.

“Where do you see yourself in 5 years?” This question, a seemingly overused cliché, is one that I never gave much thought to, especially with all the self-proclaimed philosophers running self-help Instagram pages. But when you break this thought experiment down to its fundamentals, it’s clear to see its the answer to almost all of our issues with motivation. Our first instinct in answering this question defaults to a dream job we want to have, a location of the world we want to live, or a group of people we want to surround ourselves with. These are all well and good to consider, and we’ll talk about this aspect of the question in a future post, but for now, consider the question in this way. **Instead of thinking of the tangible materialistic things we want to achieve or get in X amount of years, imagine the PERSON you want to be. **The character traits that the 2.0 version of yourself embodies. What is their moral code? What is their attitude towards business, success, or consistency? What are the fundamental attributes that make up that version of yourself?

Yasin Arshad, a friend of mine who runs his own business as well as a life coaching service, taught me this mental model and it’s truly shifted the way I approach things. We actually have a podcast together where we discuss some of these topics, and he runs his own as well, so definitely check out his content for a more in-depth analysis of Identity shifting. This is something that I gave a shot at this week, writing down in a notes app what a Sohail 2.0 would look like. The idea is to create 2 lists, the first of which we discuss here in Step 1, and the next in Step 2. For Step 1, you want to list out the qualities or traits that the ideal version of yourself embodies. Two of mine, for example, are ‘master of balance’ and ‘mindful of friends and family’. I know that I lack a sense of balance when it comes to school, my fraternity, and my side projects, as well as the time I give to the loved ones around me. So success to me is getting past these struggles and becoming a person who views these things as a non-issue. Don’t worry if your list is too long, that’s good. It means you’re breaking down the nitty-gritty aspects of your ideal character.

Now, doing this may seem pretentious at first, but it’s important that we remember that this is just for us. I only gave these examples as a potential starting point for others in their attempts, but you’re the only one who’s going to be referencing this list. And when it comes to your identity, you have to be honest and true to yourself. Who do you really want to become? The overarching goal is to progressively convince yourself and believe that this version of yourself that you’re creating IS going to be you in 5 years. Therefore, you have to really think about what it is you want and don’t hold back. Regardless of how practical or realistic you think it is, write it down. Quality over quantity is definitely valuable, as you want to make sure each trait embodies an aspect of your life, but don’t let that hold you back from writing an essay. This requires a lot of pontificating about what you truly enjoy and desire, but it’s well worth the effort.

Here are some guiding questions/tips to help create your 2.0 Identity List:

What is something that I struggle with today? What kind of person wouldn’t have an issue with these things?
What do I really love to do? What brings me pure happiness in my day to day? What kind of person would make time for these things?
In the various areas of my life (social, spiritual, emotional, physical, mental), am I not where I want to be? What can change? What kind of a person wouldn’t worry about these things?
For the above questions, think about the underlying character traits, and how that would be phrased in the sentence “I am __” or “I am a __ person”.

James Clear, in his popular book Atomic Habits, outlines how the key to effective habit formation isn’t setting goals but creating systems that feed into your identity. Here, we’re defining what we want ourselves to look like in the future on a fundamental, characteristic level so that we can lay the groundwork for further analysis. And you now have a list that defines the ideal 2.0 version of yourself. Let’s figure out how we’re going to practically implement this list on a day to day basis.

Step 2: Defining your Purpose

Now that you have a list of who your 2.0 self looks like (whether it’s physically or characteristically), we can start honing into the specific things we do on a frequent basis. For Step 2, you want to start by listing all of the commitments in your life. This may consist of a set of habits you’re trying to pick up, such as working out, sticking to a diet, waking up early, drinking more water, and so on. It may consist of projects that you’re involved in, such as an extracurricular activity, non-profit organization, or even a self-paced coding project. Anything that you do on a recurring basis that started for a reason, write it down. I’ll use a personal project as an example for us to see how this step works: my daily podcast.

A couple of weeks ago, I started a daily podcast where I would upload a 5-7 minute episode talking about random things, ranging from my feelings about a specific topic to productivity tips I’ve picked up over the months. I stuck to it for a solid week or so before dropping the endeavor and brushing it off as another lost cause, whisked away by the River Styx (I started rereading Percy Jackson).

Our next step is to identify how this project or habit will help us become the 2.0 version of ourselves we’ve outlined. At the end of the day, everything we do should be pushing us towards our long term goals which in this case is our goal identity (Step 1). On a daily, weekly, or monthly basis, we should be slowly approaching this ideal outcome for ourselves, and our projects and habits are the practical means by which we do so. We all understand that change takes time and immediate gratification isn’t going to land us where we want to be. So the confidence in knowing that each of these habits or projects will help me get to my end goal is a level of motivation that is truly unmatched.

Now back to the podcast example. A characteristic that I outlined for Sohail 2.0 was to be articulate. I have a fondness for people who have a way with words, and it’s something that I really want to achieve. Therefore, a purpose that I can put down for sticking to the podcasts is that it will help me to get better at how I word things in a non-scripted environment and force me out of being repetitive or redundant. This is rambly, I know, but the length isn’t important. As long as its something that identifies how that project or habit links back to your ideal self, you’re set. For every commitment that you have written down so far, write a sentence that clearly defines how that project is helping you towards one (or more) of the traits you outlined in Step 1. This doesn’t have to stop at one sentence. List as many purposes as you like, using as many characteristics from your 2.0 Identity list as you see fit. Similarly to how I pointed out that the podcast helps me to improve in a non-scripted environment, figure out the nuances of your commitments. This process might even work both ways, leading you to add more traits to your list from Step 1.

Here are some guiding questions/tips to help create your 2.0 Purpose List:

Why was I attracted to this activity/project/habit in the first place? What was my initial reason for starting? How does that feed into the identity I want to adopt?
What about this activity/project/habit is helping me transform into the person I want to become? Am I being specific enough? Try to get down to the root and be as specific as possible. What component of it is actually helping you?
Don’t be afraid to make changes to your 2.0 Identity List throughout this process.

As new projects come up or novel habits that you want to adopt become appealing, you’ll inevitably make changes to your initial list. And that’s totally fine. It’s SUPPOSED to be fluid, changing and shifting based on what seems like the ideal version of yourself, to yourself. But the key here is that anytime something new comes up, you create a new heading for the project, and figure out how it links back to who you want to become. This is what will keep you motivated to keep pushing when the option to throw in the towel arises.

Refer back to this list on a weekly basis. Remind yourself why you chose to start, what you absolutely love about each project/habit, and how it’ll help you become your ideal self. These constant reminders will help to keep you on track and act as a preventative measure for phases of demotivation.

Recap/tl;dr

Step 1: Create a 2.0 Identity List that outlines key characteristics and qualities that the ideal version of yourself embodies
Step 2: Create a 2.0 Purpose List that identifies the main commitments in your life (personal, professional, social) and distinguishes how each one feeds into the traits you outlined in Step 1
Step Rest Of Your Life: Iterate over these 2 lists on a weekly basis, making sure you’re still on track and that you haven’t lost sight of why you’re doing what you’re doing. Make modifications to either list as you need, and if you’re losing reason to maintain a specific project/habit, don’t be afraid of shaving your list thin. Remember, if it’s not helping you become the person you want to be, is it worth it?

You now have a physical list of reasons as to why you chose to do the things in your life in the first place, as well as a long term identity to keep you accountable in ensuring you put in all your effort on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. Change is incremental and it’s very demotivating sometimes to not be able to see the overarching progress. But doing this 2 step process can be a means towards bringing you back up when you feel uncertain and pulling you out of your mental pit to restore your efforts. Give this a shot, so you have a way to always remember that if you keep on pushing, you’ll surely become the 2.0 version of yourself that you really want to be.

How These 2 Practical Steps Will Transform You Into The 2.0 Version Of Yourself

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