Mark Manson

I wouldn't have.

Yeah, absolutely wouldn't have.

You definitely wouldn't have.

Yeah.

And it's, you know, there's the cliches around you're the average of the five people closest to you.

And there's a lot of truth to that.

There's some reason.

Yeah, there's a lot of truth and research behind that.

Generally speaking, your social relationships kind of set the standard by which you measure yourself.

So when it comes to changing your identity or changing how you see yourself, one thing

effective way to do that is to change the people you associate with and to surround yourself by people that you want to become.

And then that will recalibrate how you judge yourself and what sort of actions and behaviors you judge as normal and expected and which ones you don't.

The other aspect that I think can make willpower way more effective.

So without getting way inside baseball, which I know you and I could do,

there, there was a school of thought for many years that believed that willpower was fundamentally limited.

It was a theory called ego depletion.

It was very popular for about 10 or 20 years.

Um, it is since not replicated.

And so it's kind of fallen out of fashion.

Um, but whether willpower is objectively limited or not, um, let's just all agree that willpower is fucking hard.