🚀 The Power of Your Identity

The Sunday Night Review #145

Hey everyone,

For the last 5 weeks, I’ve been writing another weekly newsletter called How to YouTube.

On Sunday last week, my boss Ali kindly plugged it in his newsletter (with a mere 440,000 subscribers), which is where a lot of you have also now found this newsletter, The Sunday Night Review.

Today, I want to tell you about how a profound realisation a few months ago led me to starting that YouTube newsletter, and to now having almost 1,000 of you reading this one (only marginally less than Ali).

So a few months ago I decided to commit to a cold shower experiment for 7 days.

I know, it’s super cliché of me to admit I take cold showers. So cliché it’s almost worth an unsubscribe. Almost.

Anyway, I’d found some fresh inspiration from a YouTube video about the benefits, and I’d never tried 100% cold showers for that long before.

I’d only ever tried turning it cold at the end of a hot shower (like a loser, let’s be real). But I like experimenting with new things, so I decided to give the fully cold shower a go.

The 7 day experiment turned into 14 days.

14 into 30.

And here we are 71 days later, and I’ve cold showered every single one of those days.

But how I hear you ask? How have I become so brave and heroic?

Because my identity has changed.

As I started cold showering, I realised that it was hard. I didn’t like doing it. But I was committed to the experiment, so I had to find a way to continue.

The method I landed on was to say to myself “this is supposed to be hard, I am supposed to be scared, but I want to be someone who embraces challenges, is able to do hard things and I know I’ll be grateful afterwards.”

This became condensed into a phrase I remembered from years ago, “easy choices, hard life” (credit to Naval) which I now say to myself every time as I’m getting in.

Suddenly, I didn’t want to stop cold showering, because I now valued the reinforcement it gave me each day that I was in fact someone who was able to do hard things, and delayed rewards to after doing something hard.

It’s still really difficult, but afterwards I feel mentally stronger and more alive.

This led me to a realisation, which bestselling author James Clear has already written about in his book Atomic Habits to the 15 million people who bought it.

Your identity drives everything you do.

By starting to say to myself “I am someone who does hard things” and I wanted to reinforce that identity with some kind of action.

If I stopped cold showering, I’d have to come to terms with the fact that I am in fact not someone who does hard things.

Obviously cold showers aren’t the only hard thing in the world, but this specific task has come to mean something to me about who I am, and turning away from it would mean turning away from that identity.

And I didn’t want to do that, so I’ve had to keep going.

And now, this identity then started creeping into other areas of my life, and I’d make hard choices more easily, because I feel that identity more deeply and know that I want to live into that identity.

This was when I had my profound realisation.

Sometimes, I kid myself by thinking I’m the type of person who does something, but actually my actions don’t back it up.

I think I’m someone who uses their time intentionally, but I spend many regrettable hours scrolling on my phone.

I think I’m someone who looks after my money, but I don’t regularly put away savings each month.

I think I’m a writer, but I only spend 1 hour a week sending a short email (this one).

There was a lack of alignment between my feelings about myself, and my actions.

So now I have a dilemma.

I either have to actually change my behaviour, or accept that I am not someone who does not do these things, and is not that type of person.

I either have to start using my money well, or accept that I am not the type of person who is fully in control of their finances (I wrote what I now do with my money last week if you’re interested).

When it came to writing, I wanted to write every day to be able to say “I am someone who writes.”

I decided that I would start writing 300 words a day. I didn’t care about what. I just wanted to start small, which is what James Clear advises when starting a new habit and building a new habit.

I wrote about this writing experiment in this email on the 9th October. I started just by journalling each day, but as I was journalling, I realised that now I am writing more, I could start that YouTube newsletter that I’d been thinking about starting for ages but hadn’t gotten round to.

So on the 19th October I sent my first issue of the How to YouTube newsletter.

A few weeks after starting, I asked Ali if he’d plug it in his newsletter and he kindly did so, and now here we are.

So if I’d never started cold showering, maybe we wouldn’t be here at all.

Hopefully this is somewhat helpful to read. The main takeaway is to think about what identities you have that are driving positive behaviour in your life, and what identities you have that are holding you back from doing and achieving more in your life. Can you change them?

But also maybe this will all blow up in my face and I’ll be crying about having to do cold showers for the rest of my life, which is genuinely something I’m concerned about at this point 😭.

Like seriously, when can I stop?

Anyway, have an epic week!

Tintin 👨‍💻

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