Re-Building Your Brain & Becoming The Person You Want To Be

We are buildable and re-buildable. Our minds did not just appear fully formed, they were assembled through endless experiences and inputs, whether we realized we were doing so or not. External forces shaped us, most of which were forces we permitted and enabled. Personal decisions shaped us. Our routines have shaped us.

What we believe, the story we tell ourselves about our own identity and the world around us, is what we accept as reality. And it is a story — a manufactured, fabricated story that can go in any number of directions. Manufactured and fabricated does not mean false, everything we know to be real has been manufactured and fabricated. But not everything is accepted as real.

Becoming the Person You Want to be

To believe something, to really accept it as truth, we need evidence. What we see and experience every day is interpreted as proof. If I want to be a creator, but I rarely sit down and create, I will not see myself as a creator regardless of how much I wish it. But if I create in my chosen medium every day, even just a little, the evidence will grow quickly and my self-identity as a creator will form. I will have manufactured it, and it will be real.

Everything we do and experience is laying a single brick in the larger structure of our belief system — and it's our beliefs that we perceive as reality. Our habits, since they're performed so often, are rapid-fire bricklaying machines constructing our beliefs and therefore our reality. If you want to change your reality, change the bricks you're building with every day. And the sooner the better, before you construct an even larger wall to dismantle.

Your actions and your behaviors will re-program your mind. Through this approach, you can design yourself deliberately. You can rebuild yourself into whatever you want to be, whoever you need to be to achieve what you want to achieve.

My Reinvention

I have radically redesigned and re-programmed myself many times — not through willpower or determination, but by changing my self-perceived identity through brick-laying. I’ve lost 40 lbs, built a new mission-based business (Year Zero Life Design), and created a vehicle to meet the most fascinating people in the world (Mind & Machine Podcast). I have largely overcome my massive weakness of obsessing and hyper-fixating on perfectionist details and a paralyzing fear of sharing anything that might be imperfect, faulty, or vulnerable to criticism — a tendency that has undermined the quality as well as the quantity of my work output. I’m now excited to share ideas bubbling up, and unleash them letting the chips fall where they may — even if I may be hiding under my desk, peering up at the screen to see the fallout.

But it all starts with designing myself to be the kind of person I want to be, who is capable of executing on the mission that gives me the greatest sense of meaning and purpose. You can too.

Reinvent Yourself

What do you want to achieve? Are you the person who can achieve it, or who do you need to become to be the person able to do it? What would that person look like? What actions would that person be performing daily?

Don’t worry about the results, just be the kind of person who does the necessary actions, daily.

Then you will believe, and it will be so.