Author: Amit Gupta

I’ve been trying to answer that question for myself for the past few years.

1. You should always be changing:

As you learn about the world and yourself, you change. You find that an old method isn’t reliable. You discover a new mindset that you want to adopt. You meet someone who changes your trajectory.

As you learn more about reality, you change as a person (and you should change). Your self should be an ever-evolving entity that responds to the environment. If you don’t adapt, you’ll fall to the wayside. Ray Dalio explains this dynamic in his Principles:

The world is littered with once-great things that deteriorated and failed; only a rare few have kept reinventing themselves to go on to new heights of greatness. All machines eventually break down, decompose, and have their parts recycled to create new machines. That includes us.

If you aren’t reinventing yourself, if you aren’t adapting in response to discovery, you’ll fail. And this is the problem that I’ve always had with goals. You should change — a stable identity is either a sign of ignorance or enlightenment (and it’s probably the former). Goals don’t change. When you set a goal a year or even a few months down the line, you are taking a bet on what your future self would want based on what you currently want.

Identity drives Everything:

Identity is built from your habits. What you do each and every day decides who you are. And it’s these habits that yield results.

Most people fail not because they don’t have the ability to work hard to achieve their goals. They fail because they set new goals. Their identity has changed since the first time they set a goal, and so they choose a new goal.

Thus, we return to the unresolvable problem: goals are inspired by identities. Identities are forever changing, but goals aren’t. Once you choose the right goal, you’ll stick with it. It no longer becomes a question of your evolving identity and now becomes a question of whether or not you can put in the work.