You are not...

You are not your identity

We inherit an initial identity from our parents: American. Scottish-German. Catholic. Jewish. Later on, the expectations, ideals, and roles implanted in us by others become part of our identity: Jock. Nerd. Troublemaker.

Our choice of career adds another layer: Marketer. Accountant. Lawyer.

Our self-perceived traits add still more layers: “I’m a perfectionist.” “I don’t display my emotions.” “I’m awkward in social settings.”

Brick by brick, we build an identity for ourselves that defines what we can do, what we can believe, and what we can achieve in our lives. We then expend an extraordinary amount of energy defending and maintaining these identities.

“What hurts a lot of people, particularly famous people,” Kobe Bryant once said, “is they start valuing themselves for ‘what’ they are, the way the world sees them: writer, speaker, basketball player. And you start believing that what you are is who you are.”

Our identity is a construct. It’s a story we tell ourselves, a narrative we craft to make sense of our selves and our place in the world. We then become a prisoner to this narrative, constricting our thinking and adjusting our behavior to fit our identity. Our language often reflects this inflexible posture. I’m a Democrat. I’m a Republican. I’m vegan. I’m Paleo.

We confuse identity with self, but identity obscures the self. Identity tricks you into believing that it is you when identity prevents you from becoming you. You are not your diet. You are not your political party. You are not your résumé or your LinkedIn profile. You are not the house you own or the car you drive. To describe yourself with a single, fixed identity is to insult your vastness and conceal and suppress the multitudes within you.

We end up serving our identity rather than changing our identity to serve us. Our narratives become self-fulfilling prophecies. If you tell yourself you’re awkward in social settings, you’ll avoid social settings, which will weaken your socialization muscles and make you even more awkward. If you tell yourself you don’t display your emotions, you’ll choose to live a guarded life and build even higher walls. If you call yourself a perfectionist, you’ll change your reality to live up to that label by constantly aiming for some unachievable mirage of perfect.

Identity also makes it easier for the powers that be to slice and dice us into categories and subcategories. If you have a fixed identity, it’s easier for an algorithm to show you the gadget you’re guaranteed to buy, for a politician to craft messaging to get you riled up, and for a media company to narrowcast ideas that will appeal to you. To refuse to be typecast in this way shifts the power of choice back to you.

The fewer labels that follow “I am…,” the more freedom you have to step into who you are. This is what Buddhists call unbeing—dropping the veil of identity so that your true self can emerge. “To become no one and anyone, to shake off shackles that remind you who you are, who others think you are,” as Rebecca Solnit writes.5 If you can confuse the algorithm or the market researcher—if there’s no checkbox that captures your multitudes—you’ll know you’re on the right path.

To give birth to yourself—to the person you were meant to be—you must forget who you are.

You are not your beliefs

You’re going to find that many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view.

I experienced the truth of this saying firsthand. In my early years as a professor, I upset several prominent scholars by writing a series of articles that bucked conventional wisdom in my field.

During one particularly memorable conference dinner, a senior scholar was so offended by my work that he hurled a series of insults in my direction across the dinner table while bits of spaghetti alfredo flew out of his mouth. (I will exercise the good taste not to share what he said, though it’s tempting.)

It was hard not to take attacks like these personally. My heart rate would increase, my blood pressure would skyrocket, and I would get defensive, clinging to my arguments as if they were a life raft protecting me from impending doom.

My academic beliefs got wrapped up in my identity—and became my biggest weakness. This was my article, my argument, my idea. This was me.

Once we form an opinion—our own very clever idea—we tend to fall in love with it. Doctors fall in love with their diagnoses, politicians religiously toe the party line, and scientists ignore competing hypotheses. What we think becomes who we are. Our beliefs, expressed consistently over time, rigidify. It becomes impossible to determine where our beliefs end and where we begin.

Facts don’t drive our beliefs. Our beliefs drive the facts we choose to accept—and the facts we choose to ignore. We assume that facts and logic are on our side and that our opponents have blinded themselves to the truth —even though we’re in the same position more often than we realize.

When our beliefs and our identity merge, we embrace a belief system simply to preserve our identity. Any attempt to change our minds—whether by ourselves or, worse, someone else—strikes us as a threat. When someone says, “I don’t like your idea,” we hear, “I don’t like you.” Criticism turns into verbal violence, and simple disagreements become existential death matches.

My experience at the academic conference reminded me of a parable. A group of blind men come across an elephant for the very first time in their lives.6 Each man inspects this strange animal by touching a different part of its body. One man touches the trunk and says that the animal is like a thick snake. Another feels its side and describes it as a wall. Another touches its tail and says it’s like a rope. In one version of the parable, the disagreements reach a fever pitch. The men accuse each other of lying and come to blows. “It’s a snake, you idiot!” “No, moron, it’s a wall!”

The moral of the story is simple: Perception shapes reality. We don’t see things as they are. We see things as we are.

Although our experience might be accurate, it’s limited and subjective. It’s not the whole truth. We’re not seeing the elephant in the room. We’re feeling only one piece of it.

The senior scholar and I were acting like the blind men in the parable. We were too blinded by our beliefs to see each other’s perspective.

Now when I disagree with someone, I try to take a different approach. Instead of immediately assuming they’re wrong and I’m right, I ask, What would have to be true for their perspective to be accurate? What are they seeing that I’m not seeing? What part of the elephant am I missing?

When you engage with others, the goal isn’t to judge them or berate them—not even in your own mind. The goal isn’t to persuade them or to win the argument either. Research shows that the more we try to convince others, the more we convince ourselves—and the more rigid our beliefs become. Instead, the goal should be to understand and get curious about the other person’s view of the elephant—to try to figure out what they are seeing and why. “Tell me more” instead of “You’re wrong and here’s why.”

Here’s an unusual way to implement this curiosity-over-victory mindset. When you’re about to disagree with someone, don’t say anything until after you’ve restated what the other person has said to that person’s satisfaction. 8 And that person, in turn, can’t respond to you until they restate what you said to your satisfaction. This rule disrupts the typical social dynamic where you’re so focused on crafting your own clever retort that you stop paying attention to the other person. Try it out in your next work meeting or contentious conversation. And remember Haruki Murakami’s advice: “To argue, and win, is to break down the reality of the person you are arguing against. It is painful to lose your reality, so be kind, even if you are right.”

Every time you spot a new perspective, you change how you see the world. The world itself hasn’t changed. But your perception of it has. If I’m stuck over here only able to touch the elephant’s ear, the only way for me to understand the tusk is through another human being.

This doesn’t require you to change your own mind. It simply requires you to see someone else’s point of view. “It is the mark of an educated mind,” Aristotle once said, “to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.”

The trick is to separate your identity from your beliefs to see them clearly, evaluate them honestly, and discard them if necessary. Once you take off the blinders composed of your beliefs, you can see the world—and yourself—more clearly.

Here are three ways you can put this mindset into practice:

1. Don’t blend ideas into your identity.

Write your opinions in temporary ink so they can be revised. Instead of saying, “This is what I believe,” say, “This is how I currently understand this issue.” This wording makes it clear that our ideas and opinions—just like ourselves—are works in progress, continually changing and improving. “‘What I believe’ is a process rather than a finality,” as Emma Goldman put it.

2. Ease the blow on your ego.

The hardest part about thinking differently is admitting that what you once believed is now wrong. That’s an admission that most egos are unwilling to make.

So tell your ego it wasn’t wrong. To ease the blow, tell yourself that you were right given what you knew—given your partial view of the elephant. But now that new information has come to light about other parts of the elephant you couldn’t see before, your beliefs should change. This way, you’re not canceling your past self. You’re simply updating it.

3. Ask yourself a simple question.

Take one of your firmly held beliefs. Ask yourself, What fact would change my opinion on this subject? If the answer is, No fact would change my opinion, you don’t have an opinion. You are the opinion.

The beauty in complexity （ Two things are true）

There’s no such thing as a universal remedy. Even a “good” thing isn’t good for all people under all circumstances.

Independent thinkers act like Janus and can consider multiple perspectives at the same time. The goal isn’t to reconcile the contradictions or resolve the oppositions. It’s to embrace them. It’s to live with them. It’s to realize that light can be a wave and a particle. It’s to understand that a meditation practice that works wonders for one person can cause problems for another.

“The test of a first-rate intelligence,” F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote, “is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”13 Reality begins to emerge only when we set aside our tendency to think in clean categories and realize that almost all things exist on a continuum. Along that continuum, answers change depending on time and context. An answer that’s closer to right today could be closer to wrong tomorrow.

Instead of committing ourselves to a single opinion, we can entertain multiple views and reduce our attachment to any one of them. Instead of singing a single melody, we can add a countermelody. Instead of marching to a consistent beat, we can dance our dance, delighting in surprising rhythms.

If you can let contradictory thoughts dance with each other without your head exploding, they’ll produce a symphony brimming with additional music—in the form of new ideas—far superior to the original.

When you adopt this mindset, you gain the magic of perspective and see through the smoke and mirrors created by one-dimensional stories.

In the end, there’s so much beauty in complexity. A world of multitudes is far more interesting—and accurate—than a world of certitudes.

You are not your tribe

Tribes are at the core of the human experience. Thousands of years ago, loyalty to our tribe was vital to our survival. If you didn’t conform, you’d be ostracized, rejected, or worse, left for dead.

Tribes endure in modern society in different ways. Modern tribes organize themselves around different identities—Democrats and Republicans, Yankees fans and Red Sox fans, nerds and bros, Crossfitters and Pelotoners, Dead Heads and Little Monsters.

Once we’re in a tribe, we tend to identify with that tribe. We become part of the tribe, and the tribe becomes part of us.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with tribes. They connect us to a like[1]minded community and create opportunities for connection. But tribalism becomes dangerous when it turns rivals into enemies, when it suppresses diverse thinking, and when it pushes individuals to do things they wouldn’t do on their own.

This type of dangerous tribalism thrives in a sea of disconnected people looking for belonging. And who doesn’t crave belonging these days? We are disconnected from our neighbors, disconnected from nature, disconnected from animals, disconnected from the universe, and disconnected from most things that make us human.

Tribes are the magnet that attracts the metal of our craving to belong. They assure us that we’re right and morally superior. They force us into a different reality where it becomes impossible to see—let alone comprehend —another worldview. We become “the Few, the Proud, the More or Less Constantly Appalled at Everyone Else,” as David Foster Wallace put it.

Over time, the tribal identity becomes our identity. Once identity and tribe fuse, we let our tribe determine what’s appropriate for us to read, watch, say, and think. We pick up social-media cues about what our tribe is thinking, and we toe the line. If our tribe hates Joe Rogan, we hate him too. If our tribe believes that immigrants are destroying our country, we believe it too. We forfeit our voice. We forfeit our choice. That warm, fuzzy, satisfying feeling of belonging trumps everything else—including thinking for ourselves.

We follow narratives, not evidence. We judge the message by the tribal affiliation of the speaker. We accept information endorsed by our tribe without investigating it or thinking it through for ourselves. Conversely, we reject information from competing sources regardless of its quality.

Any sign of detribalization—any deviance from the expected code of conduct—threatens tribal groupthink. It introduces uncertainty into tribal certainty. It raises the danger that others might follow suit. So if you disobey or disagree—if you push back against your own tribe or add nuance to categorical thinking—you are shamed, canceled, and shown the door.

A frequently prescribed remedy for tribalism is empathy. But research shows that people are biased in their expression of empathy. The members of our own tribes get empathy. Others get a punch to the gut. We belittle them (I told you so). We ostracize them (If you’re not with us, you’re against us). We ridicule them (What an idiot). We see others, not as people trying to make sense of the same elephant from different angles, but as morally corrupt or unintelligent.

We reject people who don’t follow our norms.

We reject people who have a different perspective.

We then reject people who don’t reject the right people.

Intelligence isn’t a defense against this tendency. In fact, research shows that people with higher cognitive abilities are more susceptible to stereotypes because they’re better at detecting patterns.

Although technology has torn down some barriers, it has erected others. We’ve been algorithmically sorted into echo chambers, where we’re bombarded with ideas that reiterate our own. When we see our own ideas repeatedly mirrored in others, our confidence levels skyrocket and our views become even more extreme.20 Opposing beliefs are nowhere to be seen, so we assume that they don’t exist or that those who adopt them must be out of their minds. Even on the rare occasions that other perspectives appear on our feeds, it’s easy to disconnect from them. Simply unsubscribe, unfollow, or unfriend—until all our acquaintances are winnowed down to those who parrot our worldview.

Shouting matches have replaced reasoned engagement. The ideology of different tribes is varied, but the argument style is disturbingly similar: My position is based on facts and logic, but my opponents are immoral, biased, and downright ignorant. If only they’d open their minds—if only they’d read such-and-such a book or listen to so-and-so’s take—they’d totally get it.

We engage with others, not to understand them, but to convince our own group that we belong. Arguments have turned into membership cards that we wave on social media and beyond to make sure that everyone knows what team we play for. We gain acceptance for what we say and what we believe—not for who we are.

These debates aren’t between right and wrong. They’re one wrong pitted against another wrong. And the truth isn’t in the middle. The truth isn’t even in the room. It’s nowhere to be seen.

Be careful if you find yourself in a place where only acceptable truths are allowed. Taboos are a sign of insecurity. Only fragile castles need to be protected by the highest of walls. The best answers are discovered not by eliminating competing answers, but by engaging with them. And engagement happens in groups built, not on taboos and dogma, but on a foundation that celebrates diverse thinking.

When we preach, when we lecture, when we blindly attempt to impose our truth on others, when we pour the kerosene and light the fuse, when we allow our tribes to determine what’s acceptable and what’s not, we can’t see others or ourselves clearly. And we endanger the future of humanity.

To engage with competing perspectives is to betray your tribe. By asking another group how they see a particular issue, you’re seeing them. By trying to understand them, you’re humanizing them. By questioning the tribal narrative—its core weapon—you’re reducing the tribe’s power.

To engage with competing perspectives is to betray your tribe. By asking another group how they see a particular issue, you’re seeing them. By trying to understand them, you’re humanizing them. By questioning the tribal narrative—its core weapon—you’re reducing the tribe’s power.

When you’re not identified with any one side—when you’re not on the team holding the tusk or the trunk—you can be the observer who steps back and sees the entire elephant in all its glory.

I see you

Sawubona literally means “I see you.” It refers to seeing in a more meaningful sense than the simple act of sight. Sawubona means, “I see your personality. I see your humanity. I see your dignity.

Sawubona says you’re not an object to me. You’re not a transaction. You’re not a title. You’re not just another person standing in line between my Starbucks macchiato and me. You’re not the jersey you’re wearing or who you voted for in the last election.

You exist. You matter. You can’t be reduced to a label, an identity, or a tribe. You’re a memory to someone. You’re a living, breathing, imperfect human being who has experienced joy and suffering, triumph and despair, and love and grief.

The traditional response to sawubona is ngikhona. It means “I am here,” but its meaning also goes deeper: “It tells the observer that you feel you have been seen and understood and that your personal dignity has been recognized.

When we feel understood in this way, we vibrate on each other’s frequency and see each other’s perspective, instead of moving past it.

This is an exceedingly rare quality in a world where we refuse to make eye contact with our opponents, let alone see the world through their eyes.

Sawubona doesn’t involve any grand gestures. It means becoming curious about someone else’s view without trying to convert them to our own. It means engaging with others even when we don’t endorse all their actions. It means resisting attempts to slice and dice us into groups and subgroups. It means reminding ourselves that beauty thrives in diversity—including diversity of thought. It means seeing difference as a curious delight to learn from instead of a problem to be fixed. It means remembering our common humanity even when we disagree. It means choosing to see in a world that has stopped seeing.

Take a shot of awe

At one point during the mission, Lovell lifted his thumb to the spacecraft window and covered the entire Earth with it. Behind his thumb lived over five billion people and everything he had ever known. The Earth was a “mere speck in our Milky Way galaxy and lost to oblivion in the universe,” he wrote. Lovell began to question his own existence. He had hoped to go to heaven when he died. But he realized he had gone to heaven when he was born.

Distance provided clarity. “From out there on the moon, international politics looks so petty,” Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell explained. “You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch.

Whether it’s to the Moon, or to a foreign land here on Earth, we travel “initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next, to find ourselves,” as Pico Iyer writes. Stay too long in your home and you get jaded and lose all perspective. The breath of foreign air jolts you out of your entrenched ways and opens you up to new ways of being.

The French call this dépaysement, the disorientation you feel when you travel to a strange land. Your world becomes topsy-turvy. Your sense of proper and improper flips. You learn to laugh at things that would anger you at home. The majority becomes the minority. Surrounded by the echoes of a language you don’t know, you return to infancy when your mother tongue was foreign to you. You become a young fool again.

These conditions are ideal for discarding your old skin. Our beliefs, perspectives, and habits are tied to our environment. Change your environment, and it becomes easier to dislodge what’s no longer serving you. This is why many smokers find it easier to quit when they’re traveling. Their new environment doesn’t have the same smoking associations as their home

There’s another reason why the Earthrise photo is so powerful. It triggers an emotional response to see our blue home rise above the gray lunar surface. It’s the same emotion that captivates us when we lose ourselves in nature, experience the birth of our child, or ponder the vastness of the universe.

That emotion—awe—is sorely lacking in our lives. There are problems at work, stress at home, and anxiety in the news. We’re starving for awe, deprived of one of the most fundamental emotions that connects us to others and makes us more humble in our thinking.

Awe doesn’t just give you goose bumps. It wakes you up. It quiets the ego and loosens your attachment to your old skin. In a series of studies, participants who watched awe-inspiring videos of the night sky expressed less conviction about their beliefs on capital punishment and more willingness to engage with others who held different views on immigration. Another study found that awe increases people’s awareness of the gaps in their knowledge.

If you’re in a rut and feeling stuck in your old skin, take a shot of awe. Get lost in a foreign land. Go outside on a cloudless night and consume one of the most potent mind-altering substances—the night sky.

When you return home, your home won’t have changed. But you will have. “We shall not cease from exploration,” T. S. Eliot wrote, “and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.