Oreos, iPads, and the One Sentence That Controls Your Life

I was recently in a hot tub with my friend Gabe.

(It wasn't weird. Stop making it weird.)

Gabe is probably the most in-shape guy I know. He's ripped. He has beaten a push-up world record.

I looked... very different from Gabe. I look like a guy who works out sometimes, and then also eats an Oreo cookie every time he's offered one. (And he's offered one a lot!)

I asked how he resists Oreos at parties. He laughed: "That's not a temptation. It doesn't even cross my mind."

That's identity, not willpower. He's not somebody who eats Oreos, so there's nothing to resist.

So — what is identity?

Identity is just a sentence that begins with "I am..." or "I am not..."

It is the story, in a sentence, you believe about who you are, and from which your actions naturally flow.

You can earn that sentence through repetition, or choose it first and let the actions catch up. Either direction works. What doesn't work is attacking the behavior and skipping the sentence.

I saw this with my six-year-old, Wilder. iPad-obsessed — getting him outside used to be a fight. One day in the woods I told him, almost offhand: "Wilder, you're definitely an outdoor kid. It comes naturally to you." He looked up. "Really?"

Since then, he asks to go outside.

Days later, unprompted: "Dad, I really am an outdoor kid."

One sentence rewired his behavior. Kids are identity in wet cement — the words we hand them, by accident or on purpose, become who they decide to be.

Which is why it's so important that we guard the words we say to them.

• "You're so lazy" said in a moment of frustration can become a lifetime of sloth.
• "You're always late" will lead to a lifetime of people waiting on them to show up.
• "You are so bad at math" solidifies they'll never try.

But we can craft different identities for them:

• You're so kind to other kids!
• You work so hard on projects!
• You really give all your effort on the court!

But here's the thing that should hit you today like a ton of bricks:

The same mechanism works on you.

Whether you like it or not, you're constantly giving yourself identities and then reinforcing them with action. So we must be equally careful about the way we speak about ourselves in our own head.

Here's my thesis statement in a tweet today:

Success in anything is just the right actions, repeated for a long time. And the right actions get 100x easier to repeat when your identity already agrees with them. Change your identity — change your life.

Which is exactly why the next five minutes matter.