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You Win or Lose the Minute You Set Your Identity
If your identity in the present is a “wanna-be creative” . . . that’s not going to change unless you do something about it.
I met a man last week who called himself a writer.
We were in a bar. It was late; the lights were dim. It was an intimate setting, the kind that begs the deep questions, so I asked him what being a writer was like.
He said he wakes up every morning and sits down and writes. He never misses a day. He didn’t add the embellishment, but I heard it just the same — like Hemingway.
Like Fitzgerald and Vonnegut and all the others who made it.
He wakes up every morning and writes because he tells himself he’s a writer, and that’s what writers do.
And that makes all the difference.
I’d give this man a fair 10x advantage — at least — over everybody I’ve ever met who said they “want to be a writer.”
Because they’re stuck thinking about wanting, while he’s busy being. He might not be very good yet. He might not have anybody reading his work. But that doesn’t matter. He thinks of himself as a writer, and that’s the most important part.
