What you do is who you are.
Not immediately, but eventually. Your actions change and shape your identity. If you consistently go for a run, you become a runner. If you regularly attend church and follow what is taught there, you become a Baptist or Methodist. If you spend a lot of time playing video games, you are a gamer.
This is one of the inescapable truths of life. Our actions shape us.
The ones we repeatedly do become our identity.
And that’s why I harp on habits so much.
Building habits is about building yourself.
If you look at any part of your identity, you can find habits that back it up, even if you might not call them habits: going to work each day, dinner with your family, listening to talk radio, catching up on certain subreddits.
And if you dig deeper and still don’t find any habits, it’s likely that part of your identity is fading or already gone.
This is why I harp on daily planning so much. It’s a habit that can become part of your identity. I’m not sure I even have the right words yet to describe the identity that gets built from that habit. It’s something like “I am self actualizing”. I have an identity as someone who self-actualizes. I am a self actualizer.
In other words. I am someone who fulfills and then extends my potential.
Or I am someone who builds my own identity. Daily planning lets you build other habits. Which become part of your identity. So the daily planning habit is the foundation for becoming anything you want to be.
That sounds crazy lofty.
But I’ve seen it play out, in admittedly small ways, in my own life.