Finding Yourself is Great, Losing Yourself is Better

Identity is a funny thing.

As a small child you probably never worried about it. As long as you had a good home with good parents, your identity flowed completely from being loved by them.

Sometime during your schooling days you started to crave the approval of others besides your parents. By middle school, this was so extreme that you might have even begun to push your parents away (“mom, don’t come in with me, that’s so embarrassing.”)

This phase of your life likely lasted through college, and so between middle school, high school, and college, you probably had three shots at establishing yourself among your peers.

Chances are around this time you started looking to lots of external things to forge your identity. Listening to certain kinds of music, wearing certain clothes, decorating your room with certain types of posters.

We can all look back and clearly see what was happening. It’s so obvious that every move we made was staged to influence the opinions of other people.

Of course, many of our decisions still have similar motivations, but we are less obvious about it than when we were in high school.

There’s a subtle shift that happens as you transition into adulthood. You still want to establish an identity, but the old ways of declaring which bands you like through the clothes you wear and the stickers on your notebook doesn’t work anymore.

Many people keep their eyes on physical things during this time, trying to establish their identity through the accumulation of stuff. A big house, a fancy car, designer clothes, an expensive watch.

These things do actually impress people…for about five minutes.

And of course, it’s worth mentioning that even in the rare moment that you do produce envy in your fellow man, they usually aren’t actually admiring you, they’re just imagining themselves with your stuff.

Some people start to realize that money, status, and possessions are a very poor place to derive your identity and so they rightly begin to look inward in an attempt to find themselves.

This is a pretty good move to start with.

We’re all wonderfully different, and figuring out what makes you tick is an important step in figuring out the good life, but it’s just the first step.

Self-awareness can set you up for success, but success alone isn’t enough to live a meaningful life.

Art and Friendship

Finding yourself is important, but ironically it doesn’t really become complete until you lose yourself.

The end goal of self-improvement isn’t to improve yourself.

The end goal of self-improvement is to become the kind of person that can make the world a better place.

You do that by the work that you create and the people you invest in.

Flow

In one sense, art is about expressing yourself.

In another — very real — sense, art is about losing yourself.

When I talk about “art” here, I don’t just mean paintings and sculptures. I’m using Seth Godin’s definition of creating something new that matters to someone. The important work that you do is art.

In his book Flow, the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi argues that true well-being comes from an ability to order your consciousness in the present. By engaging in activities that are challenging enough to not be boring, but close enough to your abilities to not be stressful, you can enter into a state of optimal experience called flow.

One of the best ways to identify a state of flow is the fact that concern for time seems to vanish. Have you ever been so wrapped up in your work that when you finally looked up at the clock it was much later than you thought?

But crucially, the state of flow also removes your self-consciousness. The focus comes off of yourself and your worries and concerns and onto the activity. Your attention is limited, and every bit of it that you possess is directed on the activity, meaning you have none left to focus on yourself.

You temporarily forget yourself.

Ironically, this act of forgetting yourself leads to a stronger sense of self and a stronger identity when you are finished. You become a more complex and capable person, one who has successfully organized their consciousness into creating something that didn’t exist before.

Giving it Away

The other selfless aspect of art is that it represents a little piece of your creative energy that you give away.

The art is always “yours,” but once you put it out into the world and people start interacting with it, it becomes theirs too.

Creators like George Lucas and J.K. Rowling have no doubt learned this lesson, creating worlds that are beloved by millions. When George Lucas edits Star Wars so that it appears that Greedo tried to shoot Han first, people freak out.

How frustrating must that be, to have other people think they can weigh in on what you do with the thing that you created? But they can. You let them in. It’s not just yours anymore.

Friendship

Friendship is a magical thing.

Nothing dignifies another human being more than saying I choose to give my time and attention to you with no designs of receiving any benefits but the pleasure of your company.

There’s something special about considering the needs and interests of others.

When you are focused on others, you aren’t focused on yourself, and it’s amazing what not being focused on yourself can do for your psyche.

One of the best things that you can do for your mental health is to develop a sincere interest in helping other people.

Find yourself, like yourself, forget yourself

If I had to lay out a gameplan, this is it in just six words: find yourself, like yourself, forget yourself.

By finding yourself I mean conducting little experiments to see what makes you tick. Do you really like working with numbers? Leading people? Writing?

What are you good at? What do you really want to get better at? What do you really want?

This kind of self-awareness helps give you direction and set reasonable goals. Once you start setting goals however, you introduce the possibility (or, more accurately, the probability) of failure.

To deal with failure, you need to like yourself. If you get down on yourself you will have a hard time persevering in the face of adversity.

My favorite method for making sure I feel good about myself is my practice of daily affirmations.

Every morning I write down three positive statements about myself that start with “I am”:

• I am likeable
• I am resourceful
• I am learning
• I am growing
• I am going to succeed
• I am content
• I am ambitious
• I am a good writer
• etc.

Some of these probably sound cheesy and some of them have a certain amount of tension and are close to being contradictory (e.g. content and ambitious). Some of them I really believe as I’m writing them, and some I hope are in the process of becoming true.

The cumulative effect of doing this over time is noticeable. It becomes very hard to get down on yourself when you are constantly re-affirming your value.

But finding yourself and liking yourself are just the tip of the iceberg. The real magic happens when you start to forget yourself.

The best way to forget yourself is not through little psychological hacks like daily affirmations, but through investing your energy into creating meaningful work and building meaningful relationships.

Conclusion

Find yourself. Like Yourself. Lose yourself.

That’s the best path that I’ve found.

This is the fourteenth in a series based on my article 30 Lessons About Life You Should Learn Before Turning 30. Shoutout to Dr. Christine Bradstreet 🌴 for the idea to turn the post into an in-depth series.