You Are What You Choose To Do
You are not who you think you are. You are who everyone else thinks you are.
A few months ago, I was having a conversation with a friend about confidence. He was pursuing a new path in his life, something he believed in deeply, but was having a hard time talking to others about it. When he talked to me, he lit up, his words tumbling out one after the other. But as he approached the idea of publicizing his new passion, he stalled, his eyes shifting down to his desk. As he and I were exploring why he felt reservations about sharing, he said “I just don’t know why I am the guy they should be listening to ... like, why me? Why not someone else more qualified?”
I said the first thing that came to my mind: “Do you know why Mother Teresa was Mother Teresa? Because she did it. Was she the most qualified person to become Mother Teresa? Who knows. It doesn’t matter, because she was the one that did it.”
For a week after that conversation, I kept coming back to that sudden insight, dragging it around with me everywhere I went. We are what we choose to do. Each day. Each hour. Each minute. Each moment. The thought of the present is gone in the next moment. Our belief in what we should’ve said or who we could’ve been are meaningless. What we do in each moment is what matters - what has impact, what impacts others, what defines who we are.
On January 2, 2007, 50-year-old construction worker Wesley Autry stood with his two young daughters, waiting for the subway in Harlem when he noticed 20-year-old Cameron Hollopeter having a seizure and falling off the platform and onto the tracks. As the inbound 1 train’s horn blared, Autry jumped into the splash of its headlights to move Hollopeter off the tracks. Realizing they were both out of time, Autry jumped on top of Hollopeter and held him down in the gap beneath the train. The brakes squealing, the train barreled over the top of them, coming to a stop over the two men, both alive. Wesley Autry was celebrated for his heroism. After the incident, Autry told a media outlet, “I just want them to know that any New Yorker could have done what I done.” But of the 75 people on the platform that day, Wesley Autry was the one that did it. Was he the most qualified? We don’t know that answer, but we do know that he’s the one who acted.
When asked about what he thought in that moment, he said he didn’t - he just moved.
In her book The Top Five Regrets of the Dying, Bronnie Ware catalogues the experience of her hospice patients and reflects, “Of all of the regrets and lessons shared with me as I sat beside their beds, the regret of not having lived a life true to themselves was the most common of all.” Psychologist Tom Gilovich in his research “The Ideal Road Not Taken” found that we fear embarrassment more than regret. After the fact, Gilovich found that in the short term we regret our actions but that over time it is our inactions that haunt us most. “When we evaluate our lives, we think about whether we’re heading toward our ideal selves, becoming the person we’d like to be. Those are the regrets that are going to stick with you, because they are what you look at through the windshield of life.”, Gilovich told the Cornell Chronicle. Moments pass us by and get analyzed in the rearview mirror. Hindsight knows what foresight cannot.
The beliefs we have about ourselves don’t really matter on their own. They are meaningless unless they are expressed in action. They are the unsaid words, undone deeds, untaken risks. They are the excuses after the fact, the what-I-meant-was and the I-did-not-mean-that and If-you-really-knew-me. They are the love that I wish I’d expressed to a dear friend before his death, the misspent words that I wish I’d never said, and the selfishness that defined me when I was too weak to be better. We all have a crafted narrative around who we are, but what’s real is what is done.
We trade in the triumphal declaration that if you believe it, you can be it. We have built an entire industry on positive self-worth and internal validation being the secret to success. Vision boards. Law of attraction. Speaking it into existence. We lost the part where action was involved. Belief isn’t magic. Manifestation isn’t wishing it so. It’s action. Instead, we spend our time tending to our wounds and swapping justifications for our inaction.
Moments are screaming by us while we stand frozen in indecision. We are afraid. We fear what others might think. We fear the risk we might take. We might even fear being the person we know we are.
How big is the gap between who you tell yourself you are and who you are actually becoming?
Believing in yourself is not actually enough. Being yourself is.