Mark Manson

You don't think about waking up 30 minutes earlier tomorrow and maybe like having a smoothie instead of a bagel.

What you think about is like having a six pack at a beach and like a super hot girlfriend.

And that's just, that's step 10,000.

You're not even paying attention to step one through five, right?

So the goal is to narrow our focus to that first step, generate the momentum, start accumulating evidence of a new identity by accumulating new behaviors.

Those new behaviors give you the momentum to continue.

And then as you continue, you start generating new emotional patterns, new experiences, new ways of seeing the world and seeing your life.

Do 10 things simultaneously.

You want to disown half your friends, become a vegan, fly to Timbuktu.

Right, right, right.

Everything.

Without building the behavioral foundation underneath that new identity.

You know, the same way,

We talked about how a personality trait is like a center of gravity that you kind of return to naturally.

I think your identity is an emotional center of gravity.

It's your default state, right?

So if you've spent 20 years being a couch potato, playing video games all day,

you're gonna have to fight a lot of gravity to escape that basin, that emotional basin.

The idea that you can just wake up one day and decide you're a new person and like go be a new person, it's extremely unlikely.

And interestingly,