Who are you becoming?

We take many tests — personality tests, IQ tests, ability tests,… all offering to tell us who we are and in which group we belong.

“You’re a Gryffindor too, how wonderful, we are in the same house!”

It makes for an easy conversation starter and gives us clues to what a person is like.

While these tests are useful in some ways, they create an illusion.

They work with the implicit assumption that we are someone.

But we never really are. Our personality is never fixed.

Billions of electrical signals travel through our brain everyday, strengthening our neural connections and forging new ones. By reading this, you are altering your brain. You are changing it and thereby creating an all-new self. In all your existence, your brain has never been the same at two moments. It’s always changing.

When we are children, this simple truth is reflected in everyday life. We learn new facts. We try new activities. We experiment in thousands of ways.

Regrettably, this way of living is subdued when we’re adults.

We fall for a sense of being someone. We pick labels for ourselves. And we start to lose sight of how we can fundamentally change who we are. We can change how we eat, exercise, think, communicate…

The belief in that our self is fixed, that we are someones and somethings, can become an excuse to not exert any effort to change ourselves. It’s a path to complacency and decline.

So the question is: who are you becoming?

What do you do with your time? Are you using it to become more healthy, playful, generous, warm, skillful, curious,…?

We are born human, everything else we become.

Who are you becoming?