Last week, I was feeling low after a professional set-back. I called up my friend Nuno.
“Do you want me to listen to your ramblings, or do you want to solve the problem?”
30 minutes later, we turned to solving the problem.
“You must stop self-pitying.”
After the call, I gave myself evidence that I was the kind of person who was on the path to achieving my goals. I started wearing nice clothes, made bold professional asks, and tried to be lively at social events. And so it was. I had memed myself into not self-pitying.
I’ve done more profound versions of this before. Examples include:
- Enjoying soccer. When I was a kid I thought that sports were dumb. Then, aged ~12, I decided that I wanted more guy friends, surveyed the things that guys did, and settled on soccer. I ended this period with a 300,000-strong audience for my soccer takes, and a co-owned statistics consultancy advising professional teams.
- Working hard.
- Loving America. I grew up thinking that the US seemed almost barbaric, moved there, changed my mind, made loving the US a significant part of my personality. I think this gave me the force-of-will required for self-sponsoring the O-1.
- Being athletic. After I fell off the exercise train in 2022-23, I wrote about weightlifting, in order to give myself evidence that I was the kind of person who exercised. I’ve since hit some all-time personal bests.
A remaining curiosity: what are the limits here?