For about four years I would have told you I’m a person who writes.
Ask me at a party, that’s the answer you get. It felt true every time I said it.
Here’s what was on my hard drive across the same four years:
17 half-finished newsletters
A course outline from 2022
A book manuscript that stops at chapter 4
Three business plans
A YouTube channel with 2 videos
Both of those things were true, at once. A person who writes, and a person with a drawer full of things he stopped writing.
I never sat down and looked at the gap between them.
Two records of who you are
Your identity is the choices you are making.
What you eat, where you go, what you do at 21:37 on a Tuesday when nobody assigned you anything and nobody is checking.
Which means you’re carrying two records of who you are. The one you say out loud, and the one your evenings have been keeping.
When they disagree, people reach for hypocrisy or weakness, then change the subject. Both are uncomfortable and neither one asks anything of you on Wednesday.
The gap is information. Specific information about yourself, sitting unread in a folder you walk past.
Failure teaches you nothing on its own
The line everybody knows is “you learn from your failures”. It’s true, partly.
A failure teaches you when you go back and read it. Otherwise, it’s just a bad memory, tied with anxiety and fear of trying again.
I did the avoidings. Every dead project got the quick verdict on the way past: I don’t finish things.
That’s when I would start another one, hoping (though deep down I knew it wasn’t true) that this time would be different, without learning anything from the previous ones.
Think of a mechanic who never lifts the hood. Hears a noise, decides the car is bad, buys another one. Five cars later, dumbass still doesn’t know what the noise was, and he’s poorer.
That was me with projects. Five cars, no idea about the noise.
Sake of comfort
As for the mechanic, when I said “doesn’t know”, what I really meant is not: wasn’t aware or had no information that would indicate something is wrong. He heard the noise for weeks. He knew what it was before he opened the hood.
I meant: Ignored for the sake of comfort.
Ignoring apparent problems for the sake of just not facing them is idiotic - when someone else does them. Car broke down?
Get it to a workshop. The fix is clear as day. Ego detached.
When you face a problem, say the exact same one, the fix is a very foggy day all of sudden.
Because you won’t make it to work today. You will have to cancel weekend plans. You will have to pay for the fix, God knows how much. Ego attached
New here? AchievR is one post a week for people with a real job and a project they refuse to give up on.
Identity, systems, consistency, output, money: things you can use the same night.
The welcome email comes with the Pathfinder Template: a free starting point for picking a project worth your hours.
Your graveyard is a transcript
5 dead projects is a record. 5 separate weeks where you chose something else, with dates attached to each.
A record that long repeats.
1 quit is an anecdote, you can explain it away with a bad month. 5 quits with the same line running through them is a pattern, and a pattern has a name.
The name is the sentence you said to yourself every time, and it sounded reasonable every time, which is why it kept working.
Excuse good enough for yourself
An irrational excuse is exposed. You hear yourself say, “I don’t feel like doing that,” and something inside you objects.
A rational excuse is accepted without issue and treated as a statement of fact.
The sentences that end projects are the second kind.
Mine was about the weekend. I’d tell myself I’d catch up on Saturday, and I believed it every time, across seventeen newsletters and a lot of Saturdays.
The weekend never catches anything.
Knowing it doesn’t fix it
Worth being straight with you.
At 21:37, after nine hours of work, you can’t argue with anything. Being too depleted to argue is the actual problem, so a sentence you worked out on a Sunday afternoon does very little for you on a Tuesday night.
What it gives you is a target. Something specific enough to answer in advance, while you’re rested, so tired you has something to say instead of having to think of it.
That’s a separate piece of work and it’s most of what I’ve been building this month.
Two records
You’ve been keeping both for years. One you update by talking.
The other updates itself by doing, and by doing again, and again.
The way to overwrite the old identity is habit. And how you overwrite habits? And identity as a whole?
That’s what I’ve been building. It’s called the Builder Identity Install, a tool that takes you from the sentence to a record that says something different.
It walks you through the autopsy, then through overwriting the old identity with the one you want, until the actions come from who you are and there’s nothing left to force.
It ships this month, and before it does I want a handful of people to break it for me. Paid subscribers get first look. Reply with “autopsy” if you want the first 7 days. I’ll send them this weekend so you can test early for free.
I reply to every email but if I don’t, dm me here, on Substack.
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