Last week, I read a piece in the WSJ about “How to Avoid Being Boring at 60.” The surefire way to be boring is to stop having new experiences and keep banging on about stuff from decades ago, otherwise known as self-fossilization. We can get caught in essentially being bullied by our own history, especially if that history was positive, and unable to see that we can be and do much more than what we may feel is possible. We can be addicted to an identity from our past, and keep returning there to the detriment of our future selves and our bored-silly dinner companions. The red-flag moment is when we hear ourselves say, “It is just who I am,” or, “I am a [fill-in-the-blank].” We have autonomy of choice to be who we want to be, which may be a very hard thing to visualize. As in the WSJ piece, the man decided he wanted to make the crew announcement on a flight, and they let him do so. It was a small adventure, but it required him breaking out of the image he had of himself . Think of the freedom from who he thought he was when he experienced what for him was radically novel.
We have the power to narrate a new trajectory for ourselves pretty much any time we wish. Pattern interruption of this kind can be huge, but it can also be something smallish — just imagining we are the sort of person who can do whatever small move outside of who we have been telling ourselves we are. Because we are all wired with negativity bias, we tend to be constantly telling ourselves, “I could not do that, I could not go there, I could not learn this, I could not be with those people…” But what if we are entirely self-deluded and we actually could do these things and, shockingly, they may be easy and enjoyable? I believed in my bones that as a photographer, that was it, that was all I could do. The market had validated me, I was successful, and that was the extent of what I could do or be. I had been told for years that there were all these other things I was good at, all of which I dismissed as well-meaning but useless. Then I survived that first TEDx talk in front of thousands, a door opened, and my life and my identity blossomed in ways unimaginable.
You may be a business owner, an employee, a parent, a child, or a billionaire celebrity-these are all narrative limits that we, or others, place on us, which, although perhaps true, are just a small part of the enormous self that we are. As we get older, the impulse to remain static becomes an inertia that we need to energetically push against. It is can be seriously difficult to get from zero to one. The good news is that once we take that first step, the doors of self-identity more easily widen and getting to ten becomes an adventure in seeing how far we can go. As Laura Veldkamp has suggested, every week do one small and one big adventure. Pro tip: every time you do something new and scary, no matter how small, physically pat yourself on the back and say to yourself, “Good job. I knew you could do it.” It works.
Onward and upward,
David