How to change your life with Seinfeld—do everything the opposite
A Seinfeld aficionado’s guide to smashing limiting beliefs, achieving growth, and becoming the person you want to be by embracing the opposite of your instincts
What if every decision you’ve ever made in life has been wrong? What if every instinct you’ve acted on has led you astray, and every motive you’ve had drove you in the complete opposite direction of where you’d hoped to be?
You’d be in good company.
Fortunately, there’s a way to change the course of your life, and it comes from a charming fellow named George Costanza.
George Costanza’s Opposite Principle
I’m a huge Seinfeld fan. Some will tell you it’s a show about nothing, but I believe it’s packed with truths about life and how we relate to each other.
Characters on Seinfeld are perfect examples of exactly how not to behave in common situations, with some exceptions.
If you’ve never seen the show, picture Friends if all your friends were loathsome, offensive brutes. Let’s meet the hero of this article, George.
Meet George
George Costanza is a stocky, balding man and the group's misguided, unlucky, lazy character. His short-sightedness, self-loathing and obsession with sex drive him to make the wrong decisions consistently.
It’s a common theme in Seinfeld: characters make selfish choices that usually backfire.
They hatch elaborate schemes at work or in relationships to avoid uncomfortable conversations or awkward encounters. Because who has the time or maturity to talk like adults? George is a master of such schemes.
My favorite episode is “The Opposite.” It proves the power of defying instinct. Sitting with his friends at their usual coffee shop, Costanza realizes that every decision he’s ever made, every instinct he’s ever had, has been wrong. His life turned out the complete opposite of everything he wanted it to be.
Before we go further down a Seinfeld rabbit hole, let’s get back to reality and look at how you could end up in this situation. It’s a lot easier than you think.
The biggest deathbed regrets
We sabotage our own happiness and success when we play it safe. We don’t take chances. It’s too risky. Sticking to the norm is easier than trying something completely out of character.
One of my biggest fears is lying on my deathbed and regretting everything I was too afraid to do and say.
Palliative care nurse Bronnie Ware wrote a memoir about people's most common regrets while waiting for the end. And the most popular responses are all the cliche shit you’d expect. I’m struggling with these right now.
Here are the top 5 regrets of the dying:
- Wishing they’d had the courage to live a life true to themselves, not the life others expected of them —this one is so common.
- Wishing they hadn’t worked so hard — capitalism, not even once.
- Wishing they’d had the courage to express their feelings — nothing, really. It’s fine.
- Wishing they stayed in touch with friends — I’m sorry to everyone I didn’t reply to because I felt guilty about not responding, so I put it off even longer until it’s been six months. I still love you.
- Wishing they let themselves be happier — imagine having all that intelligence and being too dumb to enjoy it.
Dying people are the only ones you should ever take life advice from. In their final moments, they treat every moment as precious, cutting out the bullshit of life that doesn’t matter. When facing the inevitable end, what matters is a lot clearer.
How do you avoid regretting every decision you’ve ever made? Let’s get into it.
The origin of the opposite
Every man has two lives, and the second starts when he realizes he has just one.
— Confucius
Back to Seinfeld.
In the episode, Jerry Seinfeld convinces George that the answer to his problems is to do the complete opposite of everything he would do from that moment on. After all, if every instinct you’ve ever had has been wrong, then the opposite must be right, right? He tests this theory.
Sitting at a booth with friends at their usual restaurant spot, George decides that instead of ordering his usual cup of coffee tuna-on-toast, he’ll have the complete opposite: chicken salad on rye, untoasted, with a side of potato salad and a cup of tea.
Soon after ordering, his friend Elaine catches an attractive woman having lunch at the bar looking at George. She tells him to go talk to her.
Bald men, with no jobs and no money, who live with their parents, don’t approach strange women.
— George Costanza
Normally, he would never dream of going up to a woman he didn’t know who showed interest in him, but his new resolve to do the opposite causes him to move.
He walks up to the woman at the bar and says my favorite line, “I’m George, I’m unemployed, and I live with my parents.”
Her eyes light up as she extends her hand and introduces herself as Victoria. She admitted to checking him out because he ordered the exact same meal as her.
After embracing the opposite, George’slife takes a dramatic U-turn
- He dates a woman he never would have dreamed of being with
- Gets a dream job with the New York Yankees after criticizing the owner’s management practices in a job interview
- Moves out of his parent’s house
So, why doesn’t playing it safe work?
Authenticity is attractive
Like most Seinfeld episodes, the premise is ridiculous but full of human insights like “the opposite.”
Think of it this way, how do you expect your life to be drastically different if you always do the same thing, read the same books, listen to the same perspectives over and over, and talk to the same people about the same crap all the time?
When George goes up to Victoria at the bar, he tells her exactly who he is very matter-of-factly — the total opposite of what he usually does. Normally he prefers to lie to women he’s interested in so they become interested in him because, deep down, he believes his true self isn’t worthy. His life turns around when he stops trying to impress.
You need to let go of what you think you should do and do what you want to. Almost everyone can become more outgoing, kinder, mindful, spontaneous, or whatever trait you desire to embody.
Be completely honest with yourself — is that trait really so far from your nature, or does it just feel that way because you don’t believe you could ever possibly become someone who does that sort of thing effortlessly?
Here’s an exercise, no, a challenge, to start living the way you want to today.
Make one decision that’s the complete opposite of what you normally do every single day
Do you endlessly scroll mind-numbing TikToks and Reels while your life slowly ebbs away, feeling like every day is a carbon copy of the last? You may be in a rut.
Routine is a beautiful thing, but if you’ve got a lead-paint stare and your eyes are bloodshot after your fifth Zoom meeting of the day that could’ve been an email instead, you could probably use a change.
When you think the same things constantly and do the same routine day in and out, of course, you’ll feel comfortably numb. Sometimes, you need to see the dark side of the moon.
So, why is it so easy to keep doing the same thing, even when you desperately want to change? The answer is your brain.
You are what you repeat
Psychologists at MIT made a breakthrough discovery in how habits are formed in 1999. They discovered a feedback circuit later called the “habit loop” by journalist Charles Duhigg in his book The Power of Habit.
This is how the habit loop works:
- Cue — you respond to a stimulus in your environment before the urge to repeat the habit strikes, like feeling bored and opening your fridge.
- Routine — the behavior you want to change, like stuffing your face with cake whenever you’re bored.
- Reward — anything that satisfies a craving, like eating an entire fucking cake.
When the woman at the restaurant was eyeing Costanza, his friends pushed him to talk to her. Unemployed and living with his parents, with his self-esteem in the gutter, George said that men like him don’t talk to strange women.
He experiences a cue — an attractive stranger giving him a glance — then his usual routine — not talking to that stranger — and his reward? He gets to hold onto his identity as a loser.
See, his biggest problem is he doesn’t believe he’s not good enough to be loved, so he molds himself into what he thinks will make other people like him.
His limiting beliefs and reluctance to act are habits he built and nurtured over time and in response to life experiences. Just like you have unhealthy habits you developed as defense mechanisms in childhood, they’re not intrinsic aspects of your personality.
In other words, your brain wants you to survive; whether you thrive is secondary. Somewhere, George learned that it wasn’t safe to be himself, to be honest about what he wanted, and to go for it. These neural pathways were reinforced over time, and those habits formed his personality.
It’s possible to break the cycle, though.
Kick your assumptions in the ass
Your instincts are often shaped by previous assumptions you carry about yourself and the world. Your assumptions form the bedrock of your interpretation of events and can limit your potential by preventing you from exploring new possibilities.
Just like Costanza had a moment of clarity where he challenged his previous assumptions, you too can play devil’s advocate and find out you might have been wrong this whole time.
As my eighth-grade gym teacher said, “Whether you can or can’t, you’re right.” I say fuck that and be wrong. To break free from self-imposed barriers, you can start by challenging your assumptions. Let yourself be wrong.
Ask yourself, what if
- your initial reaction or instinct is wrong, and
- there’s another way to approach this situation?
By asking these, you open yourself to the possibility and likelihood of being wrong and create space to grow.
The problem with George and his friends is that they don’t question their instincts and end up making the same selfish choices over and over. Of course, it’s TV and wouldn’t be funny if it wasn’t exaggerated, but art imitates life.
You don’t think you have to become a completely different person. That’s just self-loathing with extra steps. What you’re striving for is to stretch the bounds of your personality and expand the variance of your traits. Push the upper and lower bounds of your character traits.
Expand the bounds of your personality
Let’s use the Big Five scale. Say you’re low on openness and want to broaden your horizons. So, you buy a ticket to Burning Man even though you’ve never been to a concert by yourself and decide to hitchhike your way to the festival.
When you get there, some grey-bearded hippy fuck offers you a tiny square piece of paper with colorful cartoon bears printed on it. Bottoms up. You slip it under your tongue.
Later in the afternoon, you come to and find yourself in a 7-way in the back of a school bus converted into a triage center, squeezed between a greasy tatted-up psytrance DJ with dreadlocks and a steampunk dominatrix whose piercings haven’t left a single orifice behind.
If you’re a homebody who likes routine, this would be so far out of your comfort zone that you might be talking about it with your therapist for years.
But it could also become a defining moment in your life. You wouldn’t fundamentally change who you are, but you’d come out of the experience with a fresh perspective and proof that you can be open-minded and maybe a handful of STIs, even if you never do anything like it again.
You can pair this with looking at your thought patterns and reframing beliefs that aren’t serving you. Here’s an easy exercise you can do.
The Opposite belief exercise
Grab a sheet of paper or open a page in your favorite word processor and split the page down the middle into two columns.
In the first column, write everything you don’t like about yourself that you believe is true.
- I don’t make friends easily.
- I’m too shy to talk to strangers.
- I could never approach someone I’m attracted to out of the blue.
- I can’t quit my job to freelance and travel the world.
- I’m too damaged to recover.
In the second, write the opposite of the statement in the first column. These statements are now who you are. Incredible, right? Like that, you’ve transformed your traits into the opposite of who you were a minute ago.
It’s related to a CBT exercise from Dr. David Burns’s Feeling Good, a must-read for anyone who wants to be mentally healthier, so pretty much everyone.
I’ll give you an example that happened to me a year ago.
Feel the fear and say fuck it
I had tickets to see techno DJ Chris Liebing at a warehouse party with my sister, but she had to bail at the last minute. It sucked because I wanted to party with her and now faced the possibility of going there alone. Immediately, my brain started making up stories triggered by toxic shame and unhealthy beliefs:
- I’m a loser because I don’t have any friends to go out with. That weird kid with the eye patch in 3rd grade was right about me.
- If I go to a rave alone, I’ll look stupid, and everyone will notice.
- I won’t have a good time alone.
I wanted to go but felt a ton of resistance. I challenged those limiting beliefs and did the opposite of my instincts. I almost didn’t go, but I ended up having an incredible time dancing on my own, feeling the music completely without worrying if my friends were having fun, and I ended up running into someone I knew anyway.
George Costanza’s dream job
George gets a job interview with the New York Yankees. It’s been his lifelong dream. He walks into the interviewer’s orderly office wearing his street clothes and leans back casually while answering the interviewer’s questions like he was talking to an old friend.
When asked about his work experience, George says he last worked in publishing and was fired for having sex with the cleaning woman in his office. The interviewer says, go on.
Before that, he was in real estate and quit because his boss wouldn’t let him use his private bathroom. Curiously, the man interviewing George asks if he talks to everyone that way, to which he replies, “Of course.”
Impressed by his nonchalant air, the interviewer introduces him to the team’s manager. George tells him frankly that he’s disappointed with what he’s done over the past 20 years to his beloved Yankees. He gets the job.
There are so many pleasantries to follow in social life that often, we hide how we really feel to avoid trouble. The problem is your instincts around a situation are often right, and when you don’t share your true feelings, you sacrifice your needs for someone else’s.
Think about that guy during the Cold War who saw a radar blip and trusted his intuition not to retaliate by launching all the nukes. Candor is rare and refreshing.
What beliefs are holding you back that you could turn on their head? What behaviors or habits do you want to change?
It’s easier to shed smaller, less insidious beliefs like being afraid to look stupid alone at a concert than it is for bigger childhood wounds like feeling unlovable, fearing abandonment, and being afraid of disappointing your parents. Like training wheels, these moments are little wins that build your confidence and make dealing with those deeper ingrained wounds easier.
Truth is, life is lived fully in the space just outside of your comfort zone. Those who boldly venture out into the ocean of uncertainty come back with the prizes. They find the treasure.
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood;”
— Theodore Roosevelt
Fake it till you make it (who you are)
You’ve probably heard advice about acting more confident than you really feel to become more confident, and there’s real psychology backing this up.
Hebb’s law says that when you do one action together with another, at a neuronal level, these neurons become linked — they fire together and wire together — deepening those pathways, making it easier and more likely for them to fire together again.
If you wake up and the first thing you do is grab your phone and scroll through neverending cat videos on TikTok, you’ll probably do it the next morning, too.
Research from the 1970 British Cohort Study showed that men, on average, tended to be overconfident in their abilities compared to women and that 24% of men versus 16% of women held top jobs by age 42. They found overconfident people tended to be in top jobs by 42 compared to people who don’t overrate their talents.
Overconfidence explains up to 11% of the significant gender gap in top jobs at age 42. So, the simple answer to the gender gap is for women to be as delusional as men are in their abilities.
I think, therefore I am.
— Rene Descartes
It makes sense. By acting confident, you’ll inspire confidence in people you work with, which makes them more likely to support your ideas and treat you like a leader, reinforcing your beliefs and making you more confident. All because you played pretend.
It’s better to err on the side of too much confidence than not enough. You'll become more confident by acting more confident. Too much confidence, and you might have your coworkers bash your head in. Or, in George’s case, get hired by the New York Yankees.
The Costanza method revisited
When George Costanza decided to shed his old beliefs and let go of all his assumptions about how he was supposed to act, for a brief moment, his life turned upside down for the better.
The lesson here is that any objective truths about who you are and what you’re capable of are determined by you. Don’t let your identity become a prison. When you cling too hard to your assumptions, they become the default, and you don’t even think of other possibilities.
If you perceive yourself as smart and identify deeply with that self-image, you’ll avoid situations where you could look stupid. And there are many situations where you could look stupid. You play it safe and only try when you’re guaranteed to succeed. That’s a recipe for a boring life.
It’s insane to expect to do the same thing you’ve always done and get drastically different results. Want to meet new and interesting people? Next time you meet somebody, don’t try and impress them, but say the first thing that comes to mind. Speak from the heart. Sure, they could find you absolutely insufferable and run in the opposite direction.
More often, though, the person you’re talking to will appreciate speaking with someone who doesn’t have an ulterior motive and confidence to be real.
Hopefully, I’ve convinced you that you can become the person you truly are by doing things differently. Aiming at the extreme end of the spectrum will shift your average in the right direction. That’s the power of the opposite. And if you haven’t seen “The Opposite” episode of Seinfeld yet, do yourself a favor and watch it.
