Chapter 6: Change Who You Are

The importance of your character

Who you are is the key to everything important and meaningful in life, including:

• How you feel.¹
• Your ability to obtain, retain, and accomplish what you desire in life.
• Your resiliency against challenges.
• The good you are willing and able do for others.

Your character is what you think, how you feel, and what you do, the running sequence of choices you have made until now. However, your past decisions do not determine your future so much as they form the basis from which you will build it. No matter who you have been until now, you have the power to choose who you will be in the future. While your present identity is determined by your past, your future identity is defined by what you think, feel, and do today.

The quality of your life is determined by the quality of your character. With such high stakes, it is worth any cost to become the best person you can be.

People lie in order to feel better without becoming better

All human motives can be split into two competing objectives: feeling better right now or becoming better right now. These are almost always mutually exclusive because feeling better in the shortterm tends to come at the expense of feeling best in the long-term. Feeling best in the long-term requires doing whatever you need to in the present to become the best you can be in the future.

Humans are naturally opposed to what is actually best in the longterm² at a fundamental, unconscious level.³ Almost all people are almost always motivated by the desire to feel better right now at the expense of feeling best long-term. Dishonesty is used as a tool to this end.

People lie in order to feel better in the present than they otherwise would. People will warp or ignore their thoughts, their feelings, and their actions in order to feel good right now. Dishonest people seek to maximize present pleasure regardless of how much they diminish future pleasure. They will ignore, distort, or deny any aspect of themselves or the world around them as they see it to feel better right now, even if it guarantees feeling worse later. A much more honesty approach is to face the truth in all things and change what you wish was better.

Recognize signals indicating the need for change

Honesty requires you to notice and respond to signals indicating the need for improvement. Your experiences provide evidence that shows how correct and complete your beliefs, desires, or actions are, exposing the need for improvement in one or more of these areas.⁴

As more of reality is revealed to you, and the more honest you become, the more you will notice limitations in the beliefs, actions, and feelings of yourself or others.⁵ You will notice problems you and others face that you did not notice before,⁶ and you will be more likely to find solutions to them than you were before. You will also notice potential improvements that you and others could make that you did not notice before, and better reasons for making them.

Pay attention to what bothers you in life. While some simply ignore what they don’t like, it is common to complain about undesirable situations. Much rarer than either approach is to actually search out a way to improve undesirable situations. Begin with those you find most unpleasant.

It is dishonest to fail to respond to signals from your life that indicate needed change.⁷ How do you react to what you do not like in your life? Do you fix it, or do you ignore it? Do you seek out new actions and reconsider alternatives you were previously aware of ?

When you live dishonestly, it becomes more difficult to notice and triangulate the signals that boost your confidence or indicate a need for improvement. Reality can’t teach you until you act as you really are. Creation is designed to reveal to you every single way that you could be better, but just as sunlight can only cure what is exposed to it, it can only do this to the extent that you honestly live as you really are.

Most people learn early that they can draw a curtain over the mirror of life experience by ignoring the evidence it provides. Change your beliefs, feelings, and actions whenever given sufficient reason to. Any denial of what you see will lead to greater difficulty in seeing anything else. The more evidence you ignore, the less of the mirror you see. You can’t ignore your faults without also losing sight of your strength and potential, leaving you less willing to recognize or live up to what you could be and do if you were more honest about yourself.

Be honest about what life reveals about your limitations. Honesty is to your character as cancer detection is to your body. It is your mechanism to sort out what benefits you from what harms you.⁸ When you are dishonest with yourself, you willingly give away the mechanism God has given you to lead you to the most joy and happiness by turning off your ability to see what harms you. The more dishonest someone is, and the longer they remain so, the less they notice what should be very obvious about themselves, others, and the world.

Take account of what you want but don’t have

Unmet needs or wants are a great resource in discovering hidden flaws. It is sometimes the case that people think they already have what they seek when they don’t. This causes an obvious problem, because you will never pay any additional price to obtain what you already assume you have, and whatever you don’t already have carries a price beyond what you have already paid.

In most cases, people are well aware of their unmet needs or wants. However, few people realize what the root cause of their unmet needs or wants is: What you lack in life stems from what you lack in character. The common assumption is that all outcomes can be reached from whatever arbitrary path you happen to be on. This is, of course, not true. Outcomes always result from the path chosen. The path includes your character. Deficiencies of certain qualities in your character will always prevent the outcomes that require them. If you are lazy, you will not obtain the outcomes of the diligent; if you are greedy, you will not obtain the outcomes of the generous; if you are short-tempered, you will not obtain the outcomes of the patient, and so on.

If you lack something that you want, it is possible and probable that one of the character qualities you are missing is knowledge— specifically, the knowledge of how to obtain what you want but do not have. It’s common for people to pretend to know much more than they do, to be more confident about what they believe than they should, and to be less receptive to new ideas than they should.⁹ If you don’t know how to obtain what you want, find someone who already has it, and ask them for their advice on how to obtain the same. It’s dishonest to do any less.

Intentionally design who you want to be

It’s a rare oddity for a person to have a written plan for their lives, though most at least have some vague wishes. You will never achieve your potential without making and executing a plan to do so. Are you less important or less complicated than a building? In both buildings and people, a written plan is essential in order to maximize what can be accomplished. It is impossible to make optimal decisions or work efficiently without the ability to prioritize competing options of action. It’s impossible to prioritize well without considering expected impact. You can’t achieve a large goal without decomposing desired outcomes into the steps required to obtain them. No substantial construction project is ever undertaken without a detailed plan. Why should you expect to have a successful life if you aren’t willing to pay at least as much attention to it as any architect would a construction project?

What is your purpose in life? What kind of person do you want to be? What is important to you, why, and by how much? What goals do you want to achieve? What do you have to do and not do in the short and long-term to achieve them? The answer to these questions is your plan for life.

A life plan shows where you are right now and where you are going. With a life plan, you can constructively map the motivation provided by large, long-term goals into each and every moment, empowering you to do more and feel better in every moment of every day.

A life plan frees your character from the gravity of your past, defining what you need to do today to become what you want to be. Instead of being trapped by your self-image, you actively engineer it, task by task. You can embody any character you choose through building a life plan that describes it. From paper, you can instantiate it into a real person.

If you want help in designing a plan for your life, read the author’s book Joy on Purpose.

Making deep change

It is possible to spend great effort in what you think is making you a better person, but in reality is only changing surface-level behaviors. Much of what people think of as deep changes are really just cosmetic changes to your exterior.

Too many people invest energy into making outward changes that aren’t reflected in their inward selves. These are they “which glory in appearance, and not in heart.” (2 Corinthians 5:12) When you only make superficial changes, you will find that your unchanged core values repeatedly resurface,¹⁰ usually in times of duress or pressure, but sometimes in quite normal situations.

A person who pretends to have changed will expect those around them to treat them as if they’ve changed, while those same people are the ones who will have to suffer as the person repeatedly reveals that they haven’t.

The correct order of change is from within, not from without. In the tabernacle of Moses, sacrifices increased in sacred importance the closer they occurred to the Holy of Holies: first in the outer courtyard, then on the altar of incense before the veil, and last on the mercy seat of the Ark itself. This pattern of sacrifices increasing in importance as they become more internal is something that we all ought to learn from and live by. In your life, the outward sacrifices that you make through the actions you take should lead to ever-more-internal shifts in your thoughts, motives, and feelings. While this sort of inward improvement is triggered by outward change, the goal is to propagate the light within you so that it flows into outward improvement.¹¹ The goal is to increase the light without by first increasing and then propagating outward the light within.

It does not please God when you attempt to fix yourself from the outside in:

Do ye suppose that God will look upon you as guiltless while ye sit still and behold these things? Behold I say unto you, Nay. Now I would that ye should remember that God has said that the inward vessel shall be cleansed first, and then shall the outer vessel be cleansed also. (Alma 60:23)

No amount of outward zeal will correct or excuse persistent inward misalignment. There is a prominent lie in both secular and religious life that as long as you publicly obey certain external standards, you can be free of the guilt of being less than the best you know you could be. This is not true, and the prevalence of misery, lack of confidence, and lack of meaning attest to this fact.

It is honesty in the deep and hidden parts of ourselves where meaningful progress is made:

6 Behold, thou desirest truth in the inward parts: and in the hidden part thou shalt make me to know wisdom.
8 Make me to hear joy and gladness; that the bones which thou hast broken may rejoice.
16 For thou desirest not sacrifice; else would I give it: thou delightest not in burnt offering.
17 The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise. (Psalm 51)

Changes limited to the surface always leave obvious clues. When deep changes occur, the change propagates through all connected surface-level behaviors. When shallow changes occur, related surfacelevel behaviors do not change. For example, Jesus pointed out that the pretentious Pharisees cared much about their outward appearances, but regularly practiced behaviors that showed how corrupt their hearts still were:

37 And as he spake, a certain Pharisee besought him to dine with him: and he went in, and sat down to meat.
38 And when the Pharisee saw it, he marvelled that he had not first washed before dinner.
39 And the Lord said unto him, Now do ye Pharisees make clean the outside of the cup and the platter; but your inward part is full of ravening and wickedness.
40 Ye fools, did not he that made that which is without make that which is within also? (Luke 11)

Ordering some parts of how you are is not the same as ordering all parts of how you are. You truly have to subject your deepest self to the light of your own ability to reason. You have to intently examine and improve your core values and your fundamental understanding of the world and of yourself. When you do this, “...all things are clean unto you,” (Luke 11:41) and you have a clear conscience that empowers you to 1) confidently do hard things, 2) accept and cherish compliments, 3) appreciate and enjoy the good you do in the world, and 4) appreciate and enjoy the good in others.

Changing what you believe

Honesty doesn’t just require adherence to your beliefs, but also dictates how you form and modify them.

Beliefs should not be unthinkingly adopted or received dogmatically. Most beliefs are inherited from family or adopted from friends. There is no reason to block beliefs from these sources, but in order to be honest and to gain the kind of confidence required to live a set of beliefs to their full benefit, you need to know what other alternative beliefs exist and choose the ones that have the strongest evidence. Are your beliefs the best in outcome and evidence compared to available alternatives?

The set of available beliefs will be found in other people.¹² While we can try to generate our own beliefs, it’s unlikely we will even begin to replicate the set of beliefs already possessed by others. Are you aware of what other people believe and why? Where conflicts exist between your beliefs and theirs, have you thoroughly and honestly compared the strength of each side’s argument, and do you hold the stronger of the two? When you meet a credible person who disagrees with you, do you respond by launching into an argument, or do you carefully and open-mindedly listen to their reasons?

Beliefs should be compared using reason. It is dishonest to believe something without sufficient reasons. As Paul counseled, “...Let every man be fully persuaded in his own mind.” (Romans 14:5). Belief is not an alternative to understanding, even in religion, where it is frequently treated as such. You should be able to explain why you believe what you do, and your reasons should make your belief better supported than any alternative of which you are aware.¹³ If you do not understand an idea—whether secular or spiritual—you should ask God,¹⁴ do all you can to use the earthly resources available to you to learn more,¹⁵ and try to understand it.¹⁶

Honesty requires you to live up to your present beliefs, but only until and unless you’re given sufficient reason to let them go. Honesty creates an interesting dynamic, because on the one hand it requires tenacious fidelity to your beliefs as they presently stand, but it also requires instant change to your thoughts, feelings, or actions the moment you encounter sufficient reason to! The Lord instructed that we accumulate and use wisdom by becoming wise as serpents but harmless as doves.¹⁷ In a similar fashion, we must be as tenacious as a cat who digs its claws into the lap from which it does not wish to be removed while being as quick to change as a dove who is startled.

Is your confidence in a particular belief based on actual evidence or is it arbitrary? When your belief is strengthened by new information, honesty compels you to sacrifice more to adhere to it and do more to share it with others.¹⁸ The stronger the evidence you have for your belief, the greater the burden of proof becomes for any alternative. When your belief is weakened by new information, honesty compels you to reduce your confidence in it.¹⁹ This means being less willing to sacrifice to adhere to it, less likely to argue in favor of it with others, more open-minded to alternatives, and doing more to find them. When your belief is destroyed by new information, honesty compels you to abandon it. Beliefs can be contradicted through reason or evidence. For example, if you act according to a belief, but fail to obtain the outcome it promises, you have every reason to abandon it. As another example, if you continue to practice a religion whose core doctrines have been refuted, you are being dishonest. It is dishonest to persist in a belief after it has been contradicted, even if you have nothing to replace it with yet.

Do you change your beliefs when given sufficient reason to? One test of your honesty is to ask how long it has been since you have changed your mind on what you would consider a core belief, changed your behavior in what you would consider an engrained habit, or changed to feel differently about something you’ve seen the same way for a long time. The most foundational beliefs, the most habitual actions, and the most sincere feelings can all change, and are likely to as you learn who you are and live up to who you could be. One may squirm at the realization that absolutely nothing is certain—but this is neither nihilist nor does it imply weak positions. In actuality, this kind of complete intellectual humility is the only way to come to the strongest confidence and the most complete and correct perceptions of reality.

Life will provide you with feedback about your beliefs as you live them. New information can either strengthen, weaken, or destroy a belief. As you gain experience and understanding, you either have to replace your beliefs, actions, and feelings with new and better ones, or hold to them with less confidence, sincerity, and honesty than you had before. If you want to be honest, you have to change your mind when confronted with sufficient reasons to. The Lord lamented that so few people were willing to believe the sufficient evidence he provided for the new ideas he taught:

45 And it is because I speak the truth that you do not believe me.
46 None of you have proven me wrong in anything I have said. If I speak the truth, why do you not believe me? (John 8, Author’s Reflection)

Don’t fall prey to the same temptation. If sufficient evidence exists to support an idea, believe it. Throw out every belief whose cost is greater than its benefit, whose sufficient reasons have eroded, or that has been superseded by something better.²⁰ Learning requires you to change how you think, feel, and act. If you aren’t changing, you aren’t learning.

Change how you feel

Your suffering is a composite of the effects of the choices of others and your own. While there is only so much you can do to change other people, you have full control over the component of your feelings that is due to your own choices in life.

Our society tells people suffering from miserable feelings that they can’t help it, they are victims, and they are just as valuable as if they were not experiencing these feelings. These false beliefs cause many to miss the cue for improvement that misery provides. As long as you think that you can’t help how you feel, you are a victim, and there is nothing you can do to change your situation. If you believe this, you will prove it true by failing to make any of the changes that would prove it false.

Most suffering comes from resisting newly revealed misalignment of your thoughts, feelings, and actions from reality. For example, unwanted feelings can come in response to the revelation of lower selfvalue than you previously thought, or a greater cost or benefit than you assumed for something or someone you desire. The alleviation of all such suffering is fully within your power through changing what you expect, what you want, and what you do to realign yourself with your updated view of reality.

Modern culture teaches that your feelings are something that happens to you. The truth is that how you feel in any moment is primarily the net result of your choices up to that point. Your feelings don’t happen to you—you generate them through your choices. If you experience depression, it’s because you are making choices that generate depression. If you experience anxiety, it’s because you are making choices that generate anxiety. If you lack meaning, it’s because you choices generate meaningless activities.

Seeking to resolve miserable feelings without making changes to the choices you make is an impossible endeavor. If you can’t address the cause of the problem, the best you will accomplish is masking the symptoms through distracting drugs or experience—all of which will cause their own problems, most of which are much worse than the symptoms they mask.

Changing your feelings is always a question of changing your choices. Seek choices that generate the feelings you desire. You will almost always find that the future feelings you seek to experience are generated through a willingness to endure feelings you don’t want in the present. For example, to increase meaning long-term requires you to complete many seemingly meaningless tasks on a daily basis, as great accomplishments always require discipline over time.

Society tells you that you are no less of a person for struggling with these unwanted feelings and, increasingly, that miserable feelings are actually virtues. As long as you believe this, you will not do what it takes to resolve them, and you will not accept the solutions to these problems even if they were offered to you. Even if you are not willingly making these decisions, they are still primarily a result of your choices. Until you exercise your full ability to track down which decisions are causing them—including seeking and accepting the help of those who might seem them more clearly than you—their persistence does make you a worse person than you would otherwise be, both in terms of your quality of life and your quality of character.

Change what you do

Honest living requires change anytime there is reason to believe that the present path doesn’t lead to the desired outcome. Recognize the parts of your life that are less than what you want, and find something better. If you aren’t getting the results you want, you need to either make a change to the recipe you are following or find a better recipe.

If you wish to improve your situation, you must improve yourself, and the place to start is by asking what you could do differently to obtain a better outcome. Whenever you find yourself in a situation you don’t like, ask these simple questions:

• What actions can you take to change the outcome?
• Are there changes needed inward that precede those outward changes?
• How many of these possible actions have you taken?

Some situations are easier to see and understand than others. Don’t suffer continuously for faults you have the power to see and fix.²¹ If you aren’t sure what you can do to change your situation, the best thing you can do is find someone who might be able to see more about it than you do, especially if they have succeeded in the change you are attempting. Short of this, you can also experiment with changing different parts of your life to see which might be causing the problem.

Whatever you do, don’t get stuck in analyses paralysis. Don’t become one of many people who get stuck endlessly planning for what they never end up doing. When overdone, planning can actually cause more harm than good.

In life, recognize situations where you need to shoot in order to aim. Such cases are a lot like firing the MK-19 grenade launcher, a large automatic weapon where the delay between shot and explosion requires aiming adjustments to be made as you shoot. In like manner, upgrade any action that fails to deliver the intended results:

5 Now therefore thus saith the Lord of hosts; Consider your ways.
6 Ye have sown much, and bring in little; ye eat, but ye have not enough; ye drink, but ye are not filled with drink; ye clothe you, but there is none warm; and he that earneth wages earneth wages to put it into a bag with holes.
7 Thus saith the Lord of hosts; Consider your ways. (Haggai 1)

Feedback comes through action. Action generates information. The bolder and more enduring the action, the stronger the signal of whether to continue. Make moves as bold as reasons suggest to be necessary, and adjust just as boldly for just as solid reasons.

Change what you want

Although our natural ignorance ensures that what we initially believe to be best will be less than what is actually best, there is no reason to remain so ignorant and certainly no reason to ignore what would be abundantly obvious if we were more honest.

What you want is based on your understanding. When you learn more about the world or yourself, what you want will change. Too frequently, people persist in pursuing their old desires even after their desires have changed.

If what you want changes, change what you want. What you want is not some inexorable edict carved in stone. Rather, it’s the flexible interpretation of your accumulated experiences and beliefs. What you want should be as flexible as your experiences—which will continue to grow—and your beliefs—which ought to be improving in accuracy²² and coverage²³ over time.

The following tactic, employed early and often, can help you discover when your actions are out of alignment with your actual desires. Ask yourself:

1. What do you want?
2. Why do you want it?
3. Is there is anything better? If there is, pursue it instead.

As you pursue what you want, you will discover that both what you pursue and the cost to obtain it are different than what you believed. Discontinue pursuit of what is revealed to cost more than you believe it to be worth.²⁴ When you discover that what you seek is worth less than you thought, find something better to take its place.

Change your people, places, and situations

Your surroundings affect your long-term outcomes and short-term feelings much more than most realize. The people,²⁵ places,²⁶ and situations²⁷ around you can boost or attenuate the good in your life to a shocking extent.

Find people, places, and situations that provide you with opportunities to improve, reasons to improve, and examples of improvement to follow. Avoid people, places, and situations that tune out, diminish, or obstruct your ability to discover and become more than you are and to do better than you do.

Aim for the best

Intentionally seek what is best in life. Thinking, feeling, and acting the best you know now will increase your ability to think, feel, and act even better in the future. Dedicate your whole soul to the best purpose you can think of and do the absolute best you can imagine doing. If you consistently pursue the best path you imagine, you will quickly become a person of higher quality than you ever considered possible, adorned with outcomes far greater than anything you had before.²⁸

Intentionally choose decisions that yield the greatest long-term outcomes, not just what feels good right now. You will never become who you could be by merely doing what you feel like doing right now. Those who direct their life based on how they feel in the moment will find a constant influence guiding them to make worse decisions than they otherwise would. Those who regularly betray their potential for what is easy, quick, or popular will find their potential eroded into chains that severely reduce their remaining possibilities in life. As you make the best decisions you can presently, you will grow in your ability to make better decisions in the future.

As you more consistently live up to the best you know, you will either gain courage in or find the limits of your present beliefs, actions, and feelings. There is no other way of finding out who you really are, who you really could be, how to become that way, or why you should try than by always feeling, thinking, and acting as you really are all the time.

Change happens when staying the same is painful

It is normal to oppose changes, even when they have a clear net benefit. Ideally, you will develop sufficient faith to make all changes that result in increased net benefit, as long as they don’t displace something with even greater net benefit. While you are developing that faith, you can increase your willingness to make improvements by increasing the accuracy of your cost / benefit calculations.

It is exceedingly common that apparent improvements will yield long-term net benefit far greater than initially expected. More time spent in analysis can make the best choices more obvious:

• Detail what you will change, as humans tend to inflate the cost of ambiguous or undefined actions.
• Compose a detailed, plausible plan to achieve the change. A single step is much less overwhelming than an entire process.
• Define the outcomes of the proposed improvement. Humans tend to fixate on the cost of change outside of the context of the benefits brought by the change.
• Enumerate the short- and long-term costs of remaining the same. What opportunities will you miss? What problems might occur?

The time commitment for this process suggests you use it for particularly confusing or important improvements, but you will find that the more you do, the faster you can complete it and the more broadly you can use it.

As important as it is to learn to take the time necessary to make important decisions wisely, some people get caught in the trap of taking more time than they should to make decisions. In these situations, never-ending analysis provides a synthetic but unhealthy substitute for action. A very simple but powerful tool to prevent analysis paralysis is to stop when there is no new information to consider.