Be The Person You Want To Be
It sounds obvious, but stay with me
I have like a handful of ideas, and I’ve managed to say the same thing in different ways for hundreds of blogs over the years. Today, I’m rolling out yet another classic. Some call it the growth mindset, some call it “luck is an attitude”, some just call it confidence. Today, I’m calling it “Be The Person You Want To Be”.
I’ll start with a quick story which is going to come across as very braggy but I don’t really care because it makes my point quite nicely.
Back in 2020 just after COVID hit, on June 1st I started exercising regularly for the first time in an honestly embarrassing number of years. However because I’m not very good at making things stick (how many times have I re-started blogging regularly?!), so I pulled out the reliable trick to making me do something regularly: Committing to other people that I’m going to do it daily.
And when it came to running, I figured I’d run 5km every single day and see how long I could go for. Now, they weren’t all fast or pretty (some of them were very hungover…) but they are happened and I actually ended up doing 100 runs in 100 days without missing a single day.
I wanted to be the sort of person that exercises regularly and suddenly 100 days later I was quite literally in the shape of my life and suddenly I would tell people what I had done and they would stare at me the same way I used to stare at people who found the motivation to exercise a lot.
I then took a break over the autumn/winter of 202, but then I made the decision again one day in 2021 and managed to run 5km for 125 days straight.
I don’t tell this story to brag (well, not entirely at least), I tell it as just one example of me recognizing something in my life that I wanted to change and just changing it. I didn’t wait to make it a new years resolution. I just put my running shoes on and started running and now I’ve ran over 1000km in the last 18 months. Now I am the exact person that I wanted to be.
So what sort of person do i aspire to be now? Well, someone who wakes up early and attacks the day, someone who blogs more often, someone who has a couple of certifications under his belt in coding/project management. So you know what? I’m doing to start doing those things. Daily.
The difference between someone who reads zero books a year and an “avid reader” who reads 12 books a year is that the avid reader manages to find 20 minutes a day to read. consistently. The person that doesn’t read could easily find 20 minutes however they don’t because they haven’t decided to become an avid reader.
I want to become an avid reader.
Granted, I think I only have to do things daily because I’m weak willed and without constant accountability I am destined to fail. I can’t form habits by doing something “2 or 3 times a week”. For me it’s all or nothing. no exercise at all, or 5km a day for months. Either zero blogging or a regular schedule of daily (or now weekly!) blogging.
15th May 2022
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