Who Do You Think You Are?

EXERCISE 1: Who Do You Think You Are?

Take a blank sheet of paper (blank paper is the staff of life).

In a few sentences to half a page, answer the question: “Who do you think you are?” I am genuinely interested in the answer. What do you consider the four or five most important characteristics that define your identity?

There are no right or wrong answers, and there’s only one rule: don’t think too long or hard. Put down the first and surest things that come to mind: “This is me.”

Now take a look at your answer. There’s a better than 50 percent chance that you said something like this:

“I’m 28, Catholic, single, a secretary in an electronics firm, live in Buffalo.” Or:

“I’m 5'10”, 175 pounds, black hair, brown eyes, Italian, former running back, vote Democratic, Vietnam veteran, appliance salesman." Or:

“I’m a former teacher, married to a man I love, an M.D. in internal medicine, and I’m the mother of three terrific kids: Marty, 13, Jimmy, 8, and Elise, 5 1/2.” Or:

“I’m black, born in Detroit, oldest of five kids. My father worked for GM. B.A. from Wayne State. Computer programmer. Marrying my high school sweetheart next summer.”

All variants of “This is what I do for a living, here’s where I live, I’m married, not married, I make money, I don’t, I’m so-and-so’s mother, I’m Episcopalian, I’m in school”—the kinds of things we usually tell each other when we meet. When we’ve exchanged these vital statistics, geographical and occupational details, we feel we’ve declared our identities and begun to gut to know each other.

Well, we’re wrong.

There’s no question that these things have been important in our lives. In fact, they have usually shaped our lives. They are experience, history, role, relationship, livelihood, skill, survival. Some of them are choices. Some, including many we’d call choices, are compromises. Some are accidents.

None of them is your identity.

This my surprise you, but if I were sitting down with you to help you choose a goal and design a life individually tailored for you, I would not ask you for any of this information. I would not want to know what you do for a living, unless you were really excited by your job. I would not want to know any of the things you put in a resume—your background, your experience, your skills. All too often we are skilled in things we never really chose, things we have had to do—like typing or scrubbing floors (those were my skills)—not things we love.

When it comes to picking out what you’ll do with energy and joy, what you can be a smashing success at, your skills are not only unimportant—they can get in the way, unless you assign them to a strictly secondary role. For the moment, I’d like you just to forget about them.

What?

That’s right. And just for now, I’d like you to forget your job (unless you love it), your family (even though you love them), your responsibilities, your education, all the things that make up your “reality” and your “identity.” Don’t worry. They won’t go away. I know they are important to you. Some of them are necessary and dear to you. But they are not you. And right now the focus is on you.

What I’m interested in is what you love.

You may or may not be able to say what that is. If you can, it may be your work, or a hobby, or a sport, or a pastime like going to the movies, or something you’ve always loved reading about, or a subject you wish you had studied in school, or just something that gives off a special whiff of fascination for you whenever it goes by, even though you know very little about it.

There may very well be several things you feel that way about. Whatever they are—guitar music, bridges, bird-watching, sewing, the stock market, the history of India—there is a very, very good reason why you love them. Each one is a clue to something inside you: a talent, an ability, a way of seeing the world that is uniquely yours.

You may not know you have it. You may have a case of amnesia about it. That amnesia can be so total that you’re not even sure any more what you love. And yet, that is you!

That is your identity, your core.

It is something more. Because “who you are” isn’t passive or static or unchanging. It is a vital design, as one philosopher put it, that needs to unfold and express itself through the medium of your whole life. And so that unique pattern of talents and gifts that lie hidden in the things you love is also the map to your own life path.

Did you ever go on a treasure hunt when you were a child, or read Poe’s “The Gold Bug”? Then you know that the first thing you have to do before you can find the treasure is find the map. It may be hidden, it may be torn in half, or in a million pieces, but your first job is to find it and put the fragments back together, like a jigsaw puzzle. That’s what we’re going to be doing for you in the first section of this book.

The clues to your life path are not lost. They are just scattered and hidden—some of them right under your nose, in plain sight. They need to be gathered together and carefully examined before you can begin to know how to design a life that truly fits you, a life that will make you feel like jumping out of bed in the morning to meet the world, a little scared at times, maybe, but fully alive.

If you are low on energy, if you need a lot of sleep and feel like you’re always dragging yourself around at half throttle, it may not be because you need vitamins or have low blood sugar. It may be because you have not found your purpose in life. You will recognize your own path when you come upon it, because you will suddenly have all the energy and imagination you will ever need.

This is part of the secret of all genuinely successful people: they have found their paths. They also happen to have some very special skills for making their visions come true in reality. That is very important, and it’s the purpose of the second part of this book to teach you those skills. But first you must liberate your own ingenuity and drive, and the only way to do that is to discover your own path. It is the only path that will ever truly absorb you. And the treasure at the end is SUCCESS.

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Right now I’d like you to do something symbolic. Take that piece of paper on which you answered the question, “Who do you think you are?” Glance through it one more time. Now crumple it up and throw it in the wastebasket.

This is the only piece of paper I’m going to ask you to do that with, and as I said, you’ll have don to write on quite a few sheets of paper as we go along. Alternatively, you might want to save this one as a souvenir. It will serve nicely as the first in a pair of “Before and After” pictures. Call it the souvenir of a misconception. Because if you’re like most of us, you are not who you think you are.

Who are you really?

You’ve forgotten—but you knew once—when you were a very small child. So that’s the place to start our search for the lost treasure map of your taftents: in the first five precious and mysterious years of your life—the greatest learning period you ever had.

I’ll tell you one thing about who you were then.

You were a genius.

YOUR ORIGINAL GENIUS

Now you’re probably laughing, but I’m serious. I don’t care what you’ve accomplished in your life or what your I.Q. is – you were born with your own unique kind of genius. And I mean that in the fullest sense of the word. Not genius with a small “g” as opposed to Albert Einstein. Big “G” genius, like Albert Einstein.

We confer the honorific title “genius” only on those very rare people who we believe were born with a mysterious something extra: great brilliance, original vision, incredible determination. And we believe that “something extra” cannot help but express itself with such force that it overpowers the most difficult circumstances. Look at Mozart. Born overflowing with music. Look at Picasso—another genius, the sculptor Louise Nevelson, says Picasso was “drawing like an angel in the crib.” Those are geniuses, not you and I. Or so the standard reasoning goes.

OK, let’s take the three characteristics I named as defining genius—great brilliance, original vision, incredible determination—and see whether you had them when you were 2 years old.

“Great brilliance” is a little hard to define. We’ve found out now that we can’t test I.Q. very reliably after all. But even if we could, it only measures one very narrow range of knowing and doing. So we’d better call “great brilliance” a special case of “original vision”: intellectual vision, as opposed to the artistic or musical kind, or a dozen other kinds of vision we have or haven’t discovered yet: political, emotional, athletic, humanitarian . . . you name it.

You had original vision when you were 2 years old. You may not remember, but that’s because it’s always difficult to remember things we don’t have words for. The fact is, in those early years you were seeing the world in such an original way that no one around you could give you the words for it. And if you found the words for it, usually no one could understand them!

If you’ve ever listened to a very small child—if you’re a mother, for instance—you know that they say some pretty strange and amazing things. That is because they are trying to tell us what the world looks like, seen for the first time, from a point of view that has never existed before! Great poets are people who have held on to that ability to see things new and say what they see, but we all had it once. You had it, when you were 2. You were very busy when you were 2. You were not only reinventing the English language for your own purposes, you were, as a physicist friend of mine told me, doing original research into the nature of the universe.

So you had that: original vision. A new way of seeing the world that was all your own.

You also had “incredible determination.”

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You knew perfectly well what you loved and what you wanted. And you went after it without the slightest hesitation or self-doubt. If you saw a cookie on the table, you didn’t think “Can I get it? Do I deserve it? Will I make a fool of myself? Am I procrastinating again?” You climbed, you piled boxes up on the floor, you did everything you could think of to get that cookie. If you didn’t get it, you made a fuss, took a nap, and changed the subject. And it didn’t stop you in the least from going right for the next wonderful thing you saw.

Notice that you don’t need “self-confidence” when you’re like that. The word has no meaning. You’re not even aware of yourself. You’re completely focused on the thing you’re after.

Those “rare” and “special” qualities we think distinguishes geniuses from all the rest of us? You had them. I had them.

Where did they go?

As long as you were too young to listen to reason or to be trained to do anything “useful,” you had a marvelous freedom to be who you were. By the time you were 5 or 6, if not even sooner, the precious right to make choices based on your own wishes began to be taken away. As soon as you were old enough to control yourself and sit still in school, the honeymoon was over.

You have probably forgotten what it was like to walk into the first grade. You’d just had five years of solid experience – seeing things, knowing things, feeling, hating, and loving things. But schools are not designed to learn from you; they are designed to teach you. Inadvertently, they probably gave the impression that your knowledge, tastes, opinions were of zero value.

Just by ignoring who you were, they cancelled the whole rich inner world you had brought in with you. All they saw was a blank board that they were going to fill up with everything worth knowing. If it was important to you to talk to your best friend, or daydream, or draw, and they were doing multiplication tables, you got punished. If you happened to know how to talk to plants and plants talked back to you, they didn’t ask you, “Do you want to learn how to spell, or did you have something else in mind?” They said, “Get away from the plants and let’s see how fast you can learn the alphabet.”

If you talked to plants, or if you talked to dogs, or if you made sculptures out of mud, or if you were going to be a movie star or ice skate to Eskimo land, you understood very quickly that that didn’t count for much. And so, little by little, you forgot it. You developed amnesia about it. Now if you walked out into the world and somebody

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