Hey there! 👋

There is a story social scientists like to tell. It is probably apocryphal in its specifics. The shape of it is still exactly right. Five monkeys in a room. A ladder in the middle. Bananas at the top. A sprinkler on the ceiling, rigged to turn on and soak the whole room in freezing water the moment any monkey climbs the ladder. The first monkey tries. Freezing water hits everyone. Chaos....

Here is the uncomfortable thing about a limiting belief about yourself. Once it is installed, the world will keep handing you evidence that it is true. For years. For decades. Not because the world is unkind or the people in it are mean. Because of a specific loop that, once you can see it, is one of the most useful things to see. The loop has four stages. It runs in a circle, forever, until you deliberately interrupt it....

Everyone knows the four seasons. Spring, summer, autumn, winter. But between every pair of them, there is a quieter fifth one that nobody puts in the calendar. Transition. It’s the stretch where the mornings are still frosty but the afternoons feel like spring. The weeks where it’s officially autumn but you’re still in a T-shirt. The light is doing something it didn’t do last month. The old season is clearly over....

A kid walks into his dad’s bedroom. Dad is lying in bed, as usual. Dad is tired, as usual. The kid asks dad to go to the park and play football. Dad farts, laughs, and tells the kid to go away. A few years later the same kid, now about seven, saves up his pocket money and buys the girl he likes a Valentine’s card and a Mars bar. He gets down on one knee at school (he saw it on a TV ad)....

There is a line I keep coming back to: There is no changing. There is only changed, or hasn’t changed. Thinking about becoming more patient is not patience. Reading about forgiveness is not forgiving. Resolving to be more honest tomorrow is not honesty. The actual test of whether you’ve changed is boring and specific: are you behaving differently or not? Which means you can’t measure the person you’re becoming by what you believe about yourself....