Here is an example:
To me the extent to which our identity is represented by our work is not so much about the work itself but about HOW we do the work. ... Cheri Huber wrote a book called "How you do anything is how you do everything." I think there's a lot of truth in that. We bring our identities to our work and, if we're invested, our work shows it.
Love it. How we do the work seems like a far superior way of constructing one’s identity than what we do. But for the average person, floating through life as we do, identity seems to be stuck on the what.
That’s not to say that the what doesn’t tell you anything interesting. Greg Linster, who writes a nice blog called Coffee Theory, asks this:
Which question reveals more about a person?
1) What do you do?
2) What do you do for fun?
Our behaviors, and especially those things we do in our “free time” (as much as I despise the concept), tell us a lot about ourselves. They probably tell us much more about ourselves than our intentions. Here is a paraphrased idea from Sheena Iyengar that I shared awhile ago:
With deep introspection, you might be able to get a glimpse of your intentions, but who we really are is not our intentions but the choices we've made. The choices we make in the future will be influenced by the choices we’ve made in the past, and who we will be in life is the sum of our choices. So to find out who “you” are, focus not on your intentions but on how to interpret your behaviors.
The question that has been bugging me is, how do people determine the extent to which all the different things they do construct their identity? Or conversely, how does identity affect the extent to which people do all the different things they do? How is it that a person, without consciously considering it, comes to see themselves as mostly an accountant, or as mostly a blogger, or as mostly a Bieber fanboy?
I found an answer that satisfies me, which of course says nothing about its truth value. It is inspired by an innocent-seeming but profound idea from Harvard psychologist Tal Ben-Sahar (which I encountered in this excellent article by Oliver Burkeman). He says that the most dependable sources of happiness are those that lie at the intersection of pleasure and meaning. My speculation is that the same is true for our identity: Those activities that give us the highest pleasure + meaning quotient are also those activities that, by default, constitute the largest part of our identity.
It may be that the causality goes mostly in the other direction – maybe our identity determines which activities we find most pleasurable and meaningful – but I doubt it.
And as a final reminder from Paul Graham, keep your identity small—that is, if the outcome you care about is the accuracy of your beliefs. (And I'm not convinced that's an outcome deserving of high priority.)
