Who’s the Guy in the Mirror?

I was working on this website, putting a selfie into the big image at the top of the home page. And at some point I stopped working and just looked at it.

I looked into the eyes of the guy in the picture. My eyes. And an old question came back:

Who is this person? How much do I actually know him?

It wasn’t a new question. I have an AI-generated picture of my family as Simpsons characters, plus a couple of portraits in the same style. One of them is a cartoon of just me, and it’s a hilariously accurate version of the original photo. But it’s a cartoon. And when I look into its eyes, I still feel like it’s me looking back at me. The same question came up then: who is that, really?

I’ve turned that question over again and again. Over almost 50 years on this planet, I’ve learned that the better you know that person, the better life gets. You know your real boundaries, your real desires, your real goals. You stop importing them from everybody else.

What’s different this time is that I finally sat down and put it into words. This is that attempt.

Knowing yourself is a hack on life. Once you know who you are, life starts adjusting to you.

Whose expectations are these?

I’ve always been allergic to being told, “Take it, it’s fine for you.” And more than once in my life, people have tried to talk me into settling. Lower your expectations. Be realistic. This is what a guy like you should expect.

I’m not saying aim for the impossible. I’m asking a different question: what are your expectations based on?

Because it cuts both ways. Maybe your expectations are low because people told you to think low and you believed them. Or maybe they’re high because people told you to think high and you believed that. Either way, you’re running on somebody else’s story.

I’m talking about setting the bar based on you. And you can’t do that if you don’t know who you are.

The strings

When you don’t know yourself, a lot of what drives you is happening below the surface. You get pulled around like a puppet by your desires, your emotions, and most of all your fears. Fear of loss. Fear of missing out. All of them.

And every one of those strings is attached to something.

Take the burger on the billboard. That picture isn’t selling food. It’s tied straight to your craving for a quick hit of feeling good. And one of the easiest ways to feel good is to hit your taste buds with something delicious.

So we use food to put a manhole cover on whatever we’re feeling. It works for a while. But it’s like painting over a crack with sludge. The sludge builds up, and whatever was under there comes out some other way. It always does.

You are a boundary

Here’s what I’ve come to believe: you are a boundary. Knowing yourself means finding out where your edges really are.

Once you know that, you can move through the world at the size you’re meant to be. Most of us don’t. We move through the world small, and most of that smallness is fear compression.

Most of the smallness we live with isn’t who we are. It’s fear compression.

And here’s the crazy part. It’s almost never fear of real danger. Nobody’s going to die. It’s fear for the ego: of looking stupid, of being rejected, of feeling shame in front of other people.

These days I don’t spend much energy on whether people accept me. I like me. I genuinely do. Do I think I’m the best person in the world? No. Do I have room to improve? Absolutely. And honestly, that’s the exciting part.

So how do you find your edges? You can’t think your way there. You find them by pushing on them. You challenge yourself, and you see what holds.

The story you tell yourself becomes the starting line

Try this. Say you’ve told yourself you’re dumb a few times. You went along with the story, and now it’s settled: “Yeah, turns out I’m dumb.” What do you think the next time a challenge shows up? I’m dumb, man. You’ve lost before you start.

Now say you’ve proven to yourself, again and again, that you can learn things. You pick things up, find your bearings and get going. Then you fail at something. You get fired, or you get hurt because you miscalculated.

Does that make you dumb now? No. You do what smart people do. You learn from it and adjust the protocol.

Same failure, completely different outcome. The difference is what you know about yourself, and you only know it because you collected the proof.

277

A moment I’ll never forget: facing that reflection the morning I clocked 277.

I looked at the number, I looked in the mirror, and my first thought was: oh man, this is going to be a lot of work.

Not I give up. Not I’m a failure. Just: this is going to be a lot of work.

I’d been there before, more than once. So I knew what the work looked like and what it felt like. I knew it was going to suck. And part of that work is hunger.

Hunger used to run me. When my stomach growled, it came loaded with beliefs. It meant I was hurting my body. It meant something bad was happening. I can’t even remember all the beliefs now, but I remember that I couldn’t just let it be.

Here’s what I know now. Hunger is a feeling. And feelings are just that: feelings. They don’t require you to act on them, and they don’t require you to spiral into fear.

Most of the time it’s ghrelin yelling at me: hey, our routine says we normally eat about now. Something made it spike, so it yells. If eating isn’t part of my plan right then, I let it yell. I’m not going to die. If I ignore it, it goes away. And when I do eat, it’s going to be delicious anyway.

So why worry about a temporary “hunger pain”?

You don’t get stuck on “what am I made of?” You know what you’re made of. So you move on to the next question.

That’s what knowing yourself buys you. You skip the question “can I do this?” because you’ve done it before. You go straight to “what’s next?”

And when you’re dodging it, being lazy or chasing comfort, you know that too. You can deny it or pretend it isn’t happening. But it doesn’t bend reality. It’s still real.

Friction is where the real stuff lives

A lot of what I believe I picked up from books. But none of it stuck until I did it. Every theory sounds good until you put reality up against it. Then the friction starts, and the friction is where the real stuff lives.

So, a few ways to start finding your edges:

• Go inside. Sit quietly for even 10 minutes and just live in there. Notice what comes up.
• Check where your expectations came from. If someone else set the bar, high or low, reset it from what you actually know about yourself.
• Pick one hard thing and do it. Then write down what you learned. That’s proof, and proof is what identity is built from.
• Treat feelings as information, not orders. Ask what the feeling means before you obey it.

Back to the mirror

When I look in the mirror today, the thought is different. It’s not this is going to be a lot of work anymore. It’s that work paid off. Keep going.

That’s a big shift. But you don’t get to it without that first look, the one where you see exactly where you are and don’t look away.

If you have 30 pounds to lose, you have 30 pounds of road to walk. That’s a lot of journey. So go walk it. You’ll pick things up along the way, meet people, get stronger. And you’ll come out the other end knowing more about who you are.

I still don’t fully know the guy in the mirror. I think that’s going to be my forever journey. But I know he’s been down this road before, and he knows how to walk it.