Would you like to glean some insight into your daily behavior?
If you’d like to do something every day, collect data on something you do often, or just regularly record the status of some area of your life, you can take care of it with a simple Google Form.
Google Forms are free, easy to set up, quick to fill out, and infinitely flexible—you can track virtually anything in as much or as little detail as you like:
Are you a different person around your grandma than you are around your best friend?
Probably. Hopefully!
So which one is the real you? Impossible to say. The fact is, there is no “real you” independent of your environment. Your behavior and identity depend on who you’re with, both moment-to-moment and generally speaking.
Jim Rohn is my favorite personal development thinker, bar none. His ideas are simple, timeless, and completely free of woo-woo nonsense. Of Jim’s many pithy sayings, his most well-known is likely this one:
It’s not the writing part that’s hard. What’s hard is sitting down to write. Steven Pressfield, The War of Art
Think about a time you moved a heavy piece of furniture, like a solid oak dresser. Do you remember noticing that the hard part isn’t pushing the dresser across the floor, but getting it moving in the first place?
That’s due to static friction—the force two motionless objects exert against one another. Once the dresser is moving, it experiences kinetic friction—the force two moving objects exert against one another. I’m going to stop talking about physics now, because I’m quickly getting out of my depth, but here’s what’s interesting:
In late 2011, my wife and I were $48,000 in debt. All student loans.
Were we doctors, you ask? Or lawyers? Engineers?
Nope. I was a freelance musician, and Sarah ran an after-school program for elementary school kids.
And when I say we were $48,000 in debt, I really mean me. Every penny of the debt was mine, and it was 100% student loans. In college and graduate school, I’d always borrowed as much money as the government would lend me. When I finished my Master’s degree in 2011, I came face-to-face with the enormity of what I’d done. For the first time, it really sunk in that I was going to have to pay all that money back.
No mathematician should ever allow himself to forget that mathematics, more than any other art or science, is a young man’s game. —G.H. Hardy, A Mathematician’s Apology
In 2013, a 58-year-old part-time lecturer at the University of New Hampshire solved a math problem that had stumped top mathematicians for decades.1
Yitang Zhang was a total unknown when he published a mathematical proof relating to gaps between prime numbers in the prestigious journal Annals of Mathematics. To say that Zhang came out of nowhere is an understatement—he’d published only one other paper, in 2001. The dude had even worked at a friend’s Subway franchise in his late 30s. I’m no expert when it comes to the lives of famous mathematicians, but I’d wager than most of them don’t work at Subway past the age of, say, 20.