When I was 17, I had not yet closed the door on becoming a footballer, an actor, a comedian, a writer, an investment banker, an entrepreneur, a journalist, a monk, and a dozen other things.
Now at 23, all but 3 or 4 of those ambitions have fallen away[i]. When I’m 29, the list will probably be even shorter.
This is something we do as we grow older. We steadily narrow the domain of what we expect of ourselves.
And much of this narrowing is well-founded. As we experience life and test ourselves in different situations, we learn more about what we can do. And this often makes clear that some paths are not for us.
This can be a good thing. We become better at accepting who we are.
But do we also become better at closing the door on possibility?
Put another way: if I think I’m an introvert, is that self-knowledge or a limiting belief?
It’s self-knowledge if, after years of torturing myself in social situations, I accept that I’m introverted and start saying no to the parties.
But if I keep saying no to new experiences, I may never give myself the chance to discover that I’m an introvert who also loves being on stage. That would be a limiting belief.
Here’s the tough part: It’s nearly impossible to know the difference in real-time.
Any self-identification is likely to be a combination of the two, and we are famously powerful self-deceivers.
There’s also the fact that there are infinite things we haven’t tried yet. And any of those could give us something vital about our identities that we simply don’t have yet.
And so, because it’s so difficult to know ourselves, we must continue to have some random experimentation in our lives. We must continue to experiment long after we think we know everything.
This is a necessary consequence of the fact that we are born foolish and get wiser with age. We must be open to new experiences so they can teach us how we are currently wrong.
Let’s start now. Bring to mind one fact about yourself that you’ve chosen to accept as true in recent years.
How much of that is self-knowledge, and how much is limiting belief?
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ENDNOTES:
[i] For me, two new ambitions have joined the pile at 23: musician and philosopher.