A Brief Introduction to Step 4: Determine Your Public Identity
When you rebuild yourself to be the type of person you want to be, there are two versions of you that must be constructed:
- The “you” that exists within your own mind
- The “you” that exists in the minds of other people
The act of building yourself is akin to the act of building a house. A guide to building houses that focused only on interior design would look silly. Likewise, someone who paid to have a house built for them would be pretty upset if, upon their arrival, their architect explained to them that no work had been done on the outside of the house because “that’s not the part you see.”
You may be asking: “I want people to see me for who I really am. Why can’t I just show people my internal character?” The fact is, even if they could read your mind, it wouldn’t help them build a picture of who you are as a person.
Stop and think for a moment: if someone spent five hours yesterday from noon to 5:00pm reading your mind, would they have a good picture of who you really are? Probably not. Now consider how many people in the last six months have spent over five hours trying to get to know you without the ability to read your mind. Getting to know “who you really are” is a treat reserved for only your closest and longest friends who make up the vast minority of individuals you will ever interact with.
Asking why you can’t just force people to see you the way you see yourself is akin to the developers of a video game asking why they can’t just put the game’s code on the box, because that is what the game “really is” after all. If game developers just slapped source code on product boxes, most game box covers would look boring, overly complicated, and nearly identical.
This section explores the systems individuals use to process, store, and sort information about people they meet. Using this information, you will be guided through the process of building a public persona—the marketing box art of your chosen internal character—that harnesses these systems in order to help you achieve your objective function.
Always remember that everyone is the protagonist of their own story. This means that you, dear reader, are a supporting character in the eyes of every human being you will meet. In the story of your life, you are magnificent protagonist, but to play a meaningful role in others’ narratives, you are best suited if you paint yourself as a compelling supporting character. Writing yourself as a supporting character in your own narrative is depressingly belittling to your potential while attempting to cast yourself as a protagonist in the life of someone else is psychotically narcissistic.
In short, when building yourself, it is important to both build who you want to be in your own eyes and who you want to be in the eyes of others.