You Have a Choice, page 11
It is common to keep going with a previous behavior, even if the current costs outweigh the benefits, because of the previously invested time and effort; economists call this the Sunk Cost Fallacy (Arkes and Blumer 1985). However, the previous effort has already been spent, so a decision to keep investing should be made only based on the situation as of today—would investing more in this path lead to a positive return?
Similarly, you should evaluate your current situation to decide whether the behaviors of Past You are still serving you, regardless of how much time and effort you spent developing those skills and habits. Even if there’s comfort in “the devil you know,” becoming more aware of how your current behaviors cause you stress and anxiety will provide the motivation to try something different. This can be as simple as tuning in to experience what you are feeling in your current situation, as you might be trying to avoid or numb those feelings through productive distractions like overworking and sacrificing for others, or through less useful outlets like social media or alcohol.
Past Me, the physicist
I once let Past Me keep me stuck for seven years.
I read Richard Feynman’s book, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman (1985) in middle school, and decided that I wanted to be a particle physicist, just like him. MIT was where he went, so I devoted myself to getting admitted there, and applied early because it was my first choice.
I struggled during my freshman year at MIT. I particularly struggled in my physics classes, to the point where I was nearly failing. Meanwhile, I was excelling in the Introduction to Computer Science class with little effort.
At the end of the year, my freshman advisor said, “You’re majoring in computer science, right?” I said, “No, I’m majoring in physics.” He looked at me like I was an idiot. In fact, he was so concerned that he wrote a letter to my parents telling them to talk me out of my unrealistic expectation that I could successfully major in physics. That annoyed me so much that I committed to be a physics major, no matter what.
Indeed, I was able to recover from that rocky beginning, and I graduated from MIT with a physics degree. I even got accepted into the PhD physics program at Stanford. I wasn’t quite ready to go to grad school, so I deferred going to Stanford for a year, and my physics advisor pulled strings to get me an internship at CERN, the European particle accelerator. I would be surrounded by Nobel Prize–winning physicists and doing the work to which I had dedicated my life.
However, I was absolutely miserable at CERN. That was partially because I was a shy introvert who had no idea how to make friends, but I also didn’t enjoy the work. My professor spent 40+ hours a week in meetings, and sometimes snuck into the lab late at night so he could do some “real” science. I saw the path laid out ahead for me: 6 to 8 years in a PhD program, 2 to 4 years in a postdoc position to get an associate professorship, 5 to 10 years publishing papers to earn tenure…and at the end of those 15 to 20 years, I’d be going to meetings like this guy? What was I even doing with my life if that was the future I had to look forward to?!
So what did I do? I stayed on the physicist path that my middle-school self had chosen, and I went to Stanford. I was miserable, as expected. I tried to make it work for three years because this was Past Me’s plan, and I was not going to quit just because it was hard. In my third year, I didn’t study enough for my qualifying exams in what I now realize was an unconscious attempt to get kicked out. Yet I still didn’t fail; instead, I earned a “conditional pass” that required me to retake a couple classes.
Fortunately, an MIT friend offered me a programming job that summer. This was 1998 at the height of the dot-com boom when it seemed like every programmer in the Bay Area was making millions of dollars, so I finally accepted that I could make a different choice. I took a leave of absence from Stanford to try the new job, and realized I was much happier once I let go of my previous commitment to be a physicist no matter what.
I sometimes wonder what my life would have looked like if I had just listened to my freshman advisor and given up my dream of being a physicist then, rather than spending seven more years going down that path because I refused to admit I might be wrong. Who knows?
Yet I don’t consider that time to have been wasted. While I may not remember any physics, I did learn to consistently think from first principles, and I have applied that skill effectively across multiple domains. You may also have noticed that I use the framework of experiments throughout this book, another remnant of my physics training. I also learned to hold my plans less tightly, admit when Past Me was wrong, and accept reality more quickly. Even the “wrong” path can be a learning and growth experience.
A practical example of evaluating your current situation while letting go of the attachment to a previous investment might be when deciding whether to leave a job. If you are looking at job descriptions and deciding whether to apply, it can be difficult to tell whether you’d really want to leave your job for a new job. One way to evaluate that is to imagine how your current job would be described—if you saw that description among the other options, would it be your top choice? If not, it might be time to consider other options.
Create a New You
You will find it easier to change and let go of Past You if you remind yourself of the benefits of your new identity (New You). One way to do that is to use mantras to remind yourself of who you want to be, e.g., “I am a person who...”
I had a friend who suggested that these mantras were like the operating system of a computer (Andersen 2017), such that swapping them out required low-level intentional programming. She recommends writing a new set of commitments that represent who you want to be and posting them somewhere visible where you can reflect on them multiple times a day (she suggested the bathroom mirror so you could do so while brushing your teeth). I loved that approach and implemented it for myself with mantras including:
• I am generous to myself and others.
• I am curious and look for surprises.
• I look for opportunities to show gratitude and appreciation.
• If something scares me, I try it.
I also found it helpful to regularly journal about how I was doing with regard to these prompts. I would reflect on each mantra and ask myself:
• When did I embody that mantra, even in a small way?
• I would then celebrate those steps forward because celebration helps rewire the brain.4 The happy feelings reinforce whatever behavior we just did to build that new identity.5
• When did I miss an opportunity to act on that mantra? By thinking back on what happened, I could examine what got in the way, which was often a previous rule, e.g., “Don’t do things that scare you because they might be unsafe.” I would reflect on what I could do differently to act in alignment with the mantra in the future.
The journal also allowed me to track my progress over time. I tend to only look at what I haven’t done yet, constantly moving my criteria for success; once I reach one milestone, I immediately reset to the next one, so that I never reach my goals. But looking back at my journal helped me see when I had made significant progress, such that I was no longer facing the issues I had struggled with a year earlier. Without looking at my journal, I felt as if I had spent the year in a constant struggle with my issues, but looking back helped me realize that I was taking on new issues as the old ones were resolved.
My journal occasionally helped me realize I was still struggling with the same issues, so I had a choice: Did I want to accept Past Me, and learn to work around those issues? Or did I want to commit to a New Me and address those issues more intentionally, perhaps by discussing them with my coach or therapist to identify what was blocking my progress?
If you are similarly struggling to change your behavior, I suggest that you journal to better understand these dynamics. By reflecting daily on missed opportunities to act as New You, you will grow more aware of the circumstances that trigger the emergence of Past You. You will start noticing the signals that indicate Past You is taking over, e.g., the anxiety and stress you feel when there’s something that you could do to help, and you’re not doing it.
As you practice noticing those signals, you will start to recognize them faster. Instead of only noticing that Past You took over when you journal about it several hours later, you will eventually be able to consciously notice Past You taking over as it happens. And then you can make a different, intentional choice in that moment, one where you ask Past You to step back so you can take action consistent with the New You that you want to be.
Exercise 6.1
Pick something you want to change about yourself, preferably something you have struggled with changing in the past.
1. Describe the habits or rules of Past You that have made it difficult to make this change. What resistance do you feel when you consider the change? Is there a part of yourself that feels at risk? What might you have to let go of to embrace the new possibility?
2. Develop a mantra for how New You would show up, preferably something starting with “I am…”
3. Start each day by reflecting on the intention represented by the New You mantra.
4. Journal at the end of the day on the following questions:
a) When today did I embody the mantra of New You? What circumstances enabled that embodiment?
b) When today did I fall back into the patterns of Past You? What circumstances activated the parts that embody Past You? How did it feel when Past You activated in that moment?
c) What will I do differently tomorrow based on what I learned from answering the above questions?
As you start to practice the behaviors of New You and give up the behaviors of Past You, you may discover that the cost is too high for you to make the change you thought you wanted. That’s great! That means you learned something from the experiment: you had a hypothesis that you wanted to change from Past You to New You, you tried it out, and you discovered that the benefits of New You are not enough to compensate for what you lose by giving up Past You.
This can happen when you want the results of New You but don’t want to put in the work to get those results. To give a silly example, I used to joke that I wanted to have run a marathon, but I didn’t want to do the necessary training to run that far.6 Similarly, when you try acting as New You, you may learn that you’re not willing to give up what you gained from being Past You to get the benefits of New You. This is why running these experiments is necessary to map your way forward and learn more about what works for you.
And it’s not a binary choice where you either pick a New You or stick with Past You. Your experiments may reveal layers and nuances that weren’t visible before you tried something new. You may realize the New You that you aimed for isn’t quite what you wanted, but this realization may help you clarify what is important to you; you can adjust your aim to come up with another hypothesis for New You, and try another experiment with what you learned. You might also realize that there are aspects of Past You that still serve you well, and you want to hold onto them. As usual, I want you to realize that “You have a choice” as to who to be, and that the previous choices that led to Past You don’t have to constrain you for the rest of your life.
Capacity
Past You has made commitments to various people, and Present You may not have the capacity to deliver on those commitments while also taking on the new experiments and behaviors we have been discussing. That is why the first two experiments in the previous chapter focused on time management and budgeting—until you know where your time is going and you consciously choose new priorities, you might not have the capacity to invest in change.
Energy is another component of capacity. If your situation drains you on a daily basis, it’s difficult to generate the activation energy to start something new and overcome the resistance to change. Like managing and budgeting your time, a first step toward change might be reviewing your weekly energy profile to understand which activities energize you and which ones drain you, as you did in exercise 1.3. With that assessment, you can experiment with ways to do fewer of the draining activities and more of the energizing activities so you can generate more energy to invest in change.
I regularly talk to people who want to change their life, but who also say they can’t because they are already overwhelmed. But exploring something new doesn’t necessarily mean uprooting your whole life to do the new thing.
A good place to start is this: if you’re not sure what to do next, what could you do in 30 minutes this week to learn more about the path? This is a small enough commitment that you will find time to do it if it is important to you. You may doubt that 30 minutes can make any difference, but creating the capacity to take that first step is critical as a commitment to New You. Each incremental step you take will generate new possibilities that are not visible from your current vantage point, and those steps can compound and create the new life you seek.
Here are a few examples of things you can do in 30 minutes:
• Read articles or blog posts in your desired area to find out more about what it’s like to follow that path.
• Research classes and programs that teach the new things to see if there’s an option that fits your budget and timeline.
• Find somebody in your network who is already on your desired path, and ask for a 30-minute call or coffee meeting to inquire about what their life is like on a day-to-day basis, and what they wish they had known when they started. At the end of the conversation, ask “Who else should I talk to?” to continue the momentum.
• Ask your network about opportunities for trying the new thing in a low-pressure way. Volunteering at a community or non-profit organization can be a good way to do that, because free help is often appreciated.
My personal example is my journey into coaching. After deciding that I didn’t want my life to be defined by a role where my primary responsibility was increasing Google’s revenue, I started exploring my values and how I wanted to define my life. But I didn’t do anything about it for months, much like Margaret in the story at the start of this chapter.
I did take one step, though, which was to go to a retreat of similarly minded seekers, where I met somebody else who also wanted to change their life. We committed to weekly accountability calls, where we asked each other if we had taken even one action to investigate new options. Answering that question each week helped me identify small, concrete actions I could take to gather more information (e.g., researching a class or talking to somebody who was already a coach) and experiments I could try to learn more about what I wanted (e.g., I started coaching friends and volunteered for a peer-coaching program at work).
Rather than ruminating in anxiety about what could go wrong with changing, I took actions and tried experiments that created forward progress. Within six months, I had identified coaching as my new direction and enrolled in a training program, and my accountability partner had landed an internship at their dream company. Those small initial steps led to dramatic career shifts faster than either of us imagined was possible when we started.
Calling back to my days as a physics student, I think of this in terms of inertia. Newton’s first law of motion says that an object at rest stays at rest, and an object in motion stays in motion unless acted upon by an external force. Simply put: if you’re stuck, you’re likely to stay stuck until you start moving. The first step is to get moving and get inertia working for you, and then use experiments to figure out which way to go.
Exercise 6.2
Let’s get you moving!
1. Block off 30 minutes on your calendar each week to focus on your new direction. What current commitment can you relax to create time to explore new possibilities?
2. In the first week, review your “dream options” from exercise 1.2, and pick one of them to explore further. Brainstorm a few different actions you could take in 30 minutes that would allow you to learn more about that option. Use the examples above (research, classes, conversations, volunteering) as a starting point.
3. Each week, do one action on the list. Afterward, reflect on your experience by writing down what you learned and how you feel about the option now. It may help to find an accountability partner so you have somebody to debrief with each week.
4. Each week during your calendar block from step 1, ask yourself whether you want to keep exploring the option you chose in step 2, and if so, repeat step 3. If you instead feel that you’ve learned what you need to about that option, you can restart with step 2 by choosing a new option and brainstorming ways to explore that option. This habit will help build the skill of exploring new options to help you create more choices for yourself. By starting small, the commitment each week is consistently attainable (Fogg, 2020), and you can invest more time when you feel inspired to do so.
Environment
Even if you create the capacity for change, the physical and social environment around you generally reinforces your current identity, because we default to what our environment makes easy. To change your identity and your actions, it can help to change your environment.
There’s a saying, “You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with,” so changing who you spend time with can change your sense of what’s possible. If you see somebody you know do something, you are more likely to believe that you can do it, too. The famous example is the four-minute mile. Running a four-minute mile was thought to be impossible until Roger Bannister did it—and then several other people did it within a year.
I experienced this myself when I got into cycling. In the spring of 2014, I thought that doing a 40-mile bike ride on flat ground was a major effort. A year later, I was doing 100+ mile rides such as the California Death Ride, which included 15,000 feet of climbing over five mountain passes, and the Leadville Trail 100 Mountain Bike Race, where I spent 11 hours cycling on dirt roads along the top of the Rocky Mountains.7
