Episode 106. Know Thyself

What in life deserves our time and attention and what things don't. I hope that as we consider that question along with other topics on this show, that we can all learn to live our lives just a little more intentionally. This is Seth Roberts. Thanks for joining me on Skipping Stones - “Know Thyself.”

Inscribed on the Temple of Apollo in Delphi is the aphorism Know thyself. There are a lot of things worth knowing in this world, but knowing ourselves may be one of the most helpful of them all. It sounds so easy to figure yourself out from the time we are children. We're proud to announce our preferences and our strengths to each other.

We all seem to think we know who we are, but in my experience, who we are is never so simple as saying. I like X, Y, Z, or I'm good at yada yada. Who we are is a complex mess of experiences and the things that we've learned, and at the core of it all, I think who we really are may have far less to do with the things we think it does.

There's a good reason we gravitate towards personality tests and why we wanna know what Hogwarts house we'd be sorted into, or what our astrology sign is. The idea of being assigned a personality type is so attractive, I think, because it takes the pressure off of us to figure it out ourselves. The reality for most people is that they are nuanced and nothing like anyone else, but sometimes it's just easier to lump yourself into a box or an identity and call it good.

I see people trying to define themselves by building a personality around a sports team, a political ideology, their religion, their hometown. I think those are all lazy shortcuts, though we're all just too nuanced to fit into a little box, but it's a heck of a lot easier than doing the work to really understand ourselves.

So, we lump ourselves in with random things we all seem to recognize. It's important to understand ourselves. And so, we try to do it by adopting these identities and looking for other people to tell us to understand ourselves is such a treasure. Because when you know yourself, you know your future to some degree.

On a really basic level, I know when I see spaghetti, I'm going to have a bad experience if I put it into my mouth. When we know ourselves, we gain power in our world. Learning about ourselves teaches us where we can thrive and where we won't. Understanding ourselves makes it easier to figure out our bad habits and how to stop them.

Learning more about ourselves can help us understand our limits. So, my goal at first when I began writing this episode was to create a step-by-step guide to finding yourself. When I started drafting it, I figured out that there was no way I could create an easy step-by-step guide to help a person definitively know themselves.

When I began writing out all the individual things a person could know about themselves, the list just kept getting longer and longer, and I had to give up on the idea that a person could just figure it out in a few easy steps. For example, to know yourself completely, you need to know yourself across all circumstances and situations.

You would need to know your limits, which can't really be known without testing them, and what your limits are today may not be what they are tomorrow. You would need to know the values you profess to believe versus the values you actually act on. You would need to know what you're good at and what you're bad.

Which can't be known without investing real effort in the first place. Learning yourself is more like trying to map out an unending maze no matter where you go. Eventually you'll come to another fork that goes somewhere that you've never been before.  Something that complicates things is that in order to learn what you're capable of requires experimenting, and the experimenting in and of itself can change you.

You may be terrible at baseball the first time you try it. But you may have had potential to be one of the greats, had you committed to it long enough to get good. Maybe you wanna test your limits, but by reaching those limits, you find that you've increased them. You are not a static object. You change, you adapt, you grow.

You are not the same today as you were yesterday. Every new thing we learn and every experience we have, changes us a little more. When I was in my twenties, I despised writing, journaling, and most anything that required me to sit down and look at a screen. But now I love it. I also used to tell myself that I didn't like sports, and maybe it was true at the time, but something changed along the way and now I kind of do the same.

People that like to tell you that people never change would probably also tell you how different they are from how they used to be. Even though people don't really stay the same, knowing who you are now opens up your world. Past behavior is typically the greatest predictor of future behavior and simply understanding who you were yesterday can shape who you are today in an intentional way if you pay attention to it.

The whole world really benefits from a person that truly takes the time to know themselves. Without taking the time to play the observer in life, we simply get carried away by our whims. We waste time on things that make us happy in a moment at the expense of feeling joy or contentment overall. When we're ignorant to ourselves, we're also ignorant to how we affect other people, and the whole world suffers for it.

Everything gets better simply from understanding yourself. If you fly off the handle every time somebody starts talking about politics, maybe recognizing that you do that because you're threatened in some way will lead you to being able to have a more authentic conversation that doesn't devolve into mudslinging.

So I may not be able to give you a step-by-step guide to finding yourself, but I can tell you that the process of understanding yourself is a lifetime pursuit. It takes reflection, it takes some risk, and it takes other people. It also requires us to test our limits. One of the greatest things we can do may be to simply take some time every day to sit down without any of our usual distractions and self-reflect for the sake of yourself and for the sake of the people around you.

Turn your focus inward for a time. Don't bother relying on a sorting hat, a personality quiz or an astrology chart to tell you what you should be. I would ask yourself what motivates you? Ask yourself what pisses you off. Question what drives your worst behaviors and ask yourself what holds you back from doing more in life.

At the end of the day, it's up to you to figure out who you are, and it's up to you to decide how you want to change it. In one way or another. This is Skipping Stones - “Know Thyself.”

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